Category Archives: Communist Party of Australia (Marxist-Leninist)

A response to “The legacy of 1968”

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Platypus Review 165 | April 2024

On June 24, 2023 at Trades Hall in Melbourne, Australia, the Platypus Affiliated Society hosted a panel on the legacy of 1968.[1] The speakers included Andy Blunden, Alison Thorne, and Arthur Dent. Barry York provides his response to the panel.

HERE ARE MY RESPONSES to the questions put to the panelists.

How were you aware that what you were doing was something new compared to that of the Old Left of the 1930s and 40s?

We were developing in rebellion against the Old Left, i.e., the old Communist Party revisionists who consistently tried to block our anti-imperialist “red” politics on the grounds that they would alienate people and lose support for the Australian Labor Party whose election they said we needed to support.

The generational aspect to the rebellion was also in play. The Old Left were elderly people, whom we could respect for their past sacrifices and struggles, but they were culturally different, compared to the permissive values of most of the young rebels.

It was not that simple, though, as there were communist leaders like E. F. (Ted) Hill who, for all appearances was an “Old Left,” short-haired “suit,” yet he and his Communist Party of Australia (Marxist-Leninist) (CPA (ML)) keenly supported and encouraged our rebellion and revolutionary politics. This made him and his party all the more attractive.

We were aware that we were doing something new because the Old Left leaders usually opposed us, ostensibly on tactical grounds but essentially because they opposed revolutionary politics. This became clearer through debate with them during practical struggles and campaigns.

How was this task transmitted and transformed?

In a couple of words: by direct confrontation with the Old Left revisionists and developing our own positive policies and strategies that bypassed them. There is such a thing as the spirit of the times, a Zeitgeist, and we helped create it, along with all the other rebels around the world. We developed ways of doing mass work and promoting actions that were based on our own self-reliant organizations, with our own printing machines, etc.

On the campus where I was active, we often bypassed the official Students Representative Council (SRC) and held unofficial mass meetings. These were usually larger in attendance than the official SRC general meetings and the SRC general meetings might just have a quorum of about 300 and that meeting would supposedly speak for all students. Yet our unofficial meetings made no claim to speak for anyone other than those who attended and voted. Our biggest unofficial general meeting was more than a thousand students, at a time when the campus student population was 2,500.

Which forms of theory and practice did you reach for and why?

Most of us embraced Marxism, but there was a smorgasbord of groups offering different takes on it. In Melbourne, the most influential for a few years was an orthodox Marxism that had been developed through China’s revolutionary experience and leadership into a Maoist position.

The notion of “cultural revolution” and “bombarding the headquarters” resonated with those of us who came to understand the dead-end that was revisionism and who felt the “deadening conformity and alienation” of life under capitalism, as panelist Alison Thorne described it.

There were academic Marxists who had done heaps of reading but they tended to be disconnected from actual struggle. We understood that “If you want knowledge, you must take part in the practice of changing reality.”[2] The forms of our practice were varied — street theater, leaflets, banners, graffiti, general meetings, fund-raising for bail funds, and, of course, constant arguing with those in the movement with whom we disagreed. We spent a lot of time organizing and participating in rallies and street marches.

For those who identified with Maoism, such as myself, the notion of mass work was important. We wanted to be integrated with everyday life and people while also being revolutionaries. We wanted to learn from the people who weren’t like us, and we felt that we could better convey our politics and views to them. The theory and practice of mass work differentiated us from the counter-culturalists who, while sharing our alienation from capitalism, sought to opt out by building communes in the bush or smoking dope and, in my experience, they tended to regard the working class people with disdain.

Did the following decades vindicate your choices or were you proven to be mistaken?

A favorite quote of mine from Karl Marx is “Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past.”[3]

Those who understood the dialectical materialist approach were able to come to terms with new circumstances arising from the decline of the movement, which happened around 1972 in Australia (see below). I was one of those who could not understand the new circumstances; indeed I was completely tossed by them. This reflected both my weakness in Marxist theory, my dogmatism, and my disconnect from social life beyond university and Left circles. The balance for nearly all of us had been toward practice, daily action, and organizing. It was all intense and activism-based. I describe it as living and breathing political activism.

For those who did have a stronger theoretical understanding, and who were much better at undertaking investigation of reality, some progress was made. The publications of the Red Eureka Movement (REM) in the late 1970s and early 80s stand up well today and are in the spirit of the 1968 rebels. I was opposed to REM, not due to their politics but because of an obedience and blind loyalty to the leaders of the CPA (ML) who assured us, among other things, that one of the REM leaders was a CIA agent. (I regret going along with that, but the bigger problem was that I had stopped thinking. I wasn’t alone, unfortunately.)

We weren’t entirely “mistaken” but there must be a reason as to why 1968 Marxism has not led to anything in the same spirit for about 50 years. It’s not just about the spirit but also the Marxist approach and politics. Postmodernism and “identity politics” seem to have won the day quite easily — for now.

How are today’s Left still tasked by the unfinished work or the new work handed on by the New Left?

The question assumes that there is a Left today. One of the things that attracted me to the Platypus Affiliated Society was an early item I received that declared: “The Left is dead! Long live the Left!” That’s spot on.

There are people calling themselves Marxists all over the place but few who are consistent with Marx’s enthusiasm for expanding human potentialities, for unleashing the productive forces from the constraints of capitalism, and for reaching for the stars. I read something by David Harvey some years ago, and he shocked me by claiming, on one hand, to be a Marxist, yet, on the other, advocating for “zero growth.” What a strange Marxism. No wonder Marx said, in 1862, that he was not a Marxist.

A Marxism that does not support material progress is hardly Marxist; so too with a Marxism that fails to unequivocally take the side of people who are fighting fascist regimes and imperialist aggression. In 1968, we celebrated the Vietnamese victory of the Tet Offensive. Today, Leftists support the Ukrainian resistance to Russian imperialism, and we support the Russian people in their struggle to overthrow the Putin regime. There is no need for “mental gymnastics” that on one hand support the Ukrainian people but on the other hand demand that NATO, their most effective military ally, gets out of Europe. This is not “nuance” or dialectical thinking. It’s bizarre and reactionary. It effectively allies with Putin, with the Russian fascist regime, who would love to see NATO withdraw from Europe.

Perhaps a real Left will be built from the solidarity with Ukraine around the world and through the struggle against those who claim to be Left but cannot bring themselves to support Ukraine’s democratic revolution and the only military force that can effectively assist the Ukrainians to victory.

The Ukrainian people are fighting for democracy — bourgeois democracy. They are not fighting for socialism. I refer again to the terrific point made by Marx about how people don’t make history according to their wishes. The Left is unequivocal in its support for democratic struggle against fascist and autocratic regimes. It always has been and always will be.

Does the task of social emancipation today appear more or less obscure as it did in the 1960s and 1970s?

I don’t know what is meant by “social emancipation.”

Politics generally is depressing today, but I find hope in the amazing scientific and technological advances that are being made. They transform the way we live and help create preconditions for something better. Arthur Dent mentioned how the internet was created on the basis of a communist mode of production.

Another strange quality to what passes for Left-wing today is the caution and concern about new technologies. Apparently, like the women in the communist party who were told they’d have to wait until after the Revolution, humanity is supposed to wait until after the Revolution before encouraging further research and development in technology.

Marx said that “the hand-mill gives you society with the feudal lord; the steam-mill, society with the industrial capitalist.”[4] What does the internet bring? Or, for that matter, AI?!

In the “Critique of the Gotha Program,” Marx described the organizing principle of the communist society of the future: “From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs.”[5] That was in 1875. We are now in 2024. We need to add “and dreams and fantasies” after “needs.”

There is much more I could say, especially about the period of decline in the mid and late 1970s and 80s, but I will leave it there. My thoughts on the legacy of 1968 are below.

On 1968

Thanks to the Platypus group for organizing the discussion of the legacy of 1968. Good to have different perspectives and a debate that was structured in such a way as to ensure that each person had a fair say and could respond to one another, with time for questions from the floor too. The latter is especially important.

A similar thing was attempted in 2010 and 11, initiated by a few “unreconstructed Maoists” in Melbourne. It was called “The Monthly Argument.” The best exponents of opposing sides to an issue were brought together to argue their case, respond to one another, and then face the floor. The debates ranged from free speech to Syria and nuclear energy.[6]

The masthead for The Monthly Argument website has a quote from Christopher Hitchens: “The progress that’s made in any argument or in any discussion is by confrontation.”

It’s important to have a culture in which confrontation, debate, and argument can happen freely and without persecution. An expression of how the culture has changed since 1968 struck me when, during the 80s, people became more interested in consensus than in argument. Fundamental disagreement was seen negatively, something to smooth over, rather than a healthy way of challenging ideas and having one’s ideas challenged. This was a profound change, and, in Australia, it was represented well by the Labor government headed by Bob Hawke whose main objective was “to bring everyone together” in a type of corporate state.

Back in 68, at our best, it was different: lots of debate and argument between us and the overt reactionaries or within and among the broad Left and the communists. This dynamic pushed things forward, and, in Melbourne where I was active, allowed for good revolutionary politics to be heard and to exert significant influence at a critical time.

***

I agree with Andy Blunden’s skepticism about vanguard parties. This is largely born of my own experience in one of them — the CPA (ML). I roll my eyes when I hear people talk today about how their particular small group — or sect? — is building a new party, linking internationally with other small sects, but it will all work out because of “our Marxism.” It is delusional, dogmatic (non-dialectical) twaddle. Sorry, but “committees for revolutionary international regroupment” strike me as Monty Pythonesque. We need fresher thinking than that.

I am aware of how the comrades at Monash University in Melbourne operated, and they were an inspiration to those of us making revolution on the campus I attended, La Trobe University. We were not as good at it — we lacked the deep theoretical understanding and the charismatic leaders — but things moved forward, for a few years, because our party organization, our cell, encouraged argument and wider debate in the Labour Club, which was the main Left organization. We never took militant action without the endorsement of a general meeting of all students, where further debate occurred outside the club. And, most importantly, like the Monash comrades, we put forward demands that were winnable. We were out to win, not just protest.

It all went wrong when dogma set in and we stopped thinking and became followers of the Party leaders, the old veterans like Ted Hill and Ted Bull. The worst part was that some of us, myself included, started to ingratiate ourselves with the leaders, as happens in a religious organization with members of the inner sanctum of the congregation wanting the reward of a blessing for obedience and good works. It was the opposite of a Maoist approach.

Another example of the quasi-religious nature of the Party was its insistence on collective study of Marxist classics. I agree with Arthur that it needs to start with individual reading/study, but this isn’t what happened in my party branch, at least not during the second half of the 1970s. Rather, we would sit around with the selected text and go around the room with each person reading a few paragraphs, sharing the reading. We could discuss it afterwards, which was a saving grace, but I regret to say that there were some works that I never read for myself, and I learned very little from “collective study.” (I don’t recall how we collectively studied in the late 60s / early 70s, but I do recall doing a lot of my own reading and then discussing with comrades informally).

***

The comfort of dogmatism started, I think, around 1972 when key demands of the movement were being met and the movement declined: the Australian government withdrew its ground troops from Vietnam at the end of 71 (following the process of U.S. withdrawal under Nixon) and, for those of us on campuses, universities had agreed to demands for things like greater student representation on governing bodies. Moreover, the remnants of the old “Victorian Era” culture were being overtaken by a new, permissive, youth-consumerist one. Nonetheless, for many of us who embraced revolutionary politics, the new situation was incomprehensible. How could it be that after such an exciting and rapid building of a movement, of such intense, always-upward activism, it all suddenly changed? The spirit of the times transformed, it seemed, from one where revolutionary politics were taken seriously to one in which people were pinning all their hopes on the election of a Labor government.

Most of us were frustrated and confused, but the ready-made dogma, the formula-thinking, brought comfort and allowed us to pretend otherwise. On the front page of Vanguard, the newspaper of the CPA (ML), for each year of the 70s, the headline assured us that “Revolutionary struggle reaches new heights,” or words to that effect. But the frustration was still there. This disconnect from reality grew worse, though there were notable individuals who did seem to understand the change and its process. By the late 70s, some of these people had grouped together as the REM.

Another terrible outcome of this dogmatism and obedience was that we became cynical. It was the opposite of our genuine commitment, our investigation of reality, our arguments, and optimism of 68. It’s what happens when you stop thinking critically, stop thinking dialectically, drop the willingness to “bombard the headquarters” and just go along with what the leaders tell you. Its consequences are not pretty. It’s easy to keep identifying as being Left-wing, or Marxist, or Maoist, or whatever, but I learned that it is also easy to slip into a type of Left-fascism.

There’s an excellent article “Fascism and the Left” (1980) by Arthur that I shared at the C21st Left blog.[7] I’m embarrassed to admit that I can identify with what he describes; at least where I had ended up by the mid-1970s. Some of my old comrades, who were so good in the late 60s / early 1970s, today openly take the side of the Assads and Putins and, of course, Xi Jinping, just as they took the side of the fascist Saddam Hussein regime in Iraq.

When women rose up recently in Iran, an old former comrade shared a post on Facebook pointing out that U.S. imperialism was behind the “uprising” – with “uprising” in inverted commas. The reason for this, he said, was because Iran has joined the Shanghai Cooperative Organisation, thus challenging “U.S. hegemony.” Conspiracy theories flow naturally from formula-thinking, because such dogmatism tries to force the world into an ideological schema. When the world doesn’t cooperate with the schema, there must be a conspiracy involved.

So, it wasn’t a case of the “1968” leaders being “tamed” by cushy jobs, though Alison makes a valid point that what were previously voluntary movements became professionalized as NGOs. This too is not straightforward, though, as some of the NGOs allowed for good work to continue and for some of the leaders / activists to earn a living for doing good stuff.

The late Jim Bacon was a comrade of mine. We went to China as part of an Australian delegation in May 1971. He was a very effective Maoist leader. He then became an official in the Builders Labourers Federation and moved from Melbourne to Tasmania, where he became prominent in the Australian Labor Party. In 1998, he was elected Premier of Tasmania. Some old comrades regarded this as selling-out, but Jim never reneged on his past, and simply pointed out that he became sick and tired of waiting for the revolution. He did some good things as Premier and showed that “we” can govern.

***

Andy Blunden says, “The unfinished work of the New Left is to learn how to practice solidarity,” but “Marxists still say ‘Follow us.’” My only disagreement is this: people who say that are not Marxists, and I am more comfortable with those who say, “Question everything!” That is the Marxism that appealed to me back in the late 60s / early 70s, and that needs to be revived.

***

I put “68” in inverted commas because, even though that year was the highlight for the Left internationally and is yet to be matched, the period we’re talking about is roughly 66 to the early 70s. In other words, in Australia and the U.S., the period when Vietnam was the central issue. The system of compulsory military service made Vietnam a life-and-death question for every young man who had to register with the Department of Labour and National Service when they turned 18. While conscription only applied to men, the issue obviously also closely affected women who were mothers, sisters, wives, girlfriends. It was no coincidence that “Save our Sons” was the most prominent women’s group opposing the U.S. war at the time.

“Vietnam” quickly became the number-one issue for the Left and no other issue at the time mobilized such large numbers. The secondary issue was probably apartheid in South Africa, around which another mass-based campaign was launched and grew into a mass movement.

The Indigenous Australians’ struggle was perhaps third on the list, and I remember one “black nationalist” being upset with all the activity around South Africa, arguing that we should focus more on what was “happening in our own backyard.” But apartheid took up much more of our time and energy than the Aboriginal issues. It’s interesting that the main issues were internationalist ones, in which we acted in solidarity with people fighting injustice and tyranny a very long way from Australia’s shores.

I’d like to mention, as an aside, that the first Australian history book to offer a nation-wide overview of Aboriginal resistance to the European invasion and settlement of Australia was the work of individuals who identified as or with Maoists. The book, The Black Resistance: An Introduction to the History of the Aborigines’ Struggle against British Colonialism, was published by Widescope International in 1977 and was co-edited by Fergus Robinson and yours truly, with chapters by Fergus, me, and four others. Prior to our book, the widely accepted view was that Indigenous Australians had been passive recipients of the changes wrought by dispossession and massacres.

Another example is the solidarity we showed with the rebellions in the “Eastern bloc” or Soviet satellite countries, especially Czechoslovakia in 68 and Poland in 70. There were pro-Soviet remnants who identified as being on the Left but, in the main, they were marginal and persuaded no one but themselves that they were right. Few young people identified with that line — they were mostly fuddy-duddies, out of touch with the Zeitgeist and with the politics that helped define it.

Of course, the uprisings in Paris in May of 68 were inspirational. I loved the graffiti — “Society is a carnivorous flower,” “It is forbidden to forbid.” My favorite remains “Sous les pavés, la plage” (“Beneath the pavement, the beach”). It was the spirit and style that moved me, and millions of other young people around the world. The Paris uprising indicated that workers and students could unite in struggle. It defined the May rebellion. In Australia, a Worker-Student Alliance was organized in 69. Some of us — “Maoists” — went to work in factories over the three-month university vacation period in order to learn from the workers — and to earn a bit of money! A few even became full-time factory workers (or builders laborers) after graduating from university.

***

The other significant event that had a big influence on the “1968” movement was the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution (GPCR) in China. The mainstream media reported on it negatively, emphasizing chaos and destruction — much the same as today’s supporters of the dictatorship of the billionaires in China do.

Ted Hill gave a speech about the GPCR at La Trobe University in 69. It was easy for those of us who were rebellious to identify with what was happening — the youthful challenge to old authority and traditional ways that kept people in their place. That this was happening against the bourgeois elements within the Communist Party of China was also something we could grasp. But what really “blew our minds” was that China had a leader who was encouraging rebellion, including against the “new emperor” mindsets and behaviors within the governing party. No other world leader had declared “It is right to rebel.” On the contrary, the others, like the Australian Prime Minister John Gorton, were saying, “We shall tolerate dissent so long as it remains ineffective.”

Today, there is a consistency in the attitudes of some of my old former comrades who once supported the GPCR to identify with the social-fascist regime and other dictatorial and autocratic regimes around the world. They now advocate the line that the GPCR was erroneous and held back China’s progress. There are, however, scholarly books that provide a different view, such as William Hinton’s The Great Reversal: The Privatization of China 1978–1989 (1990), Mobo Gao’s The Battle for China’s Past: Mao and the Cultural Revolution (2008) and Dongping Han’s The Unknown Cultural Revolution (2008). I wonder if these make it to the reading lists in universities today.

The Tiananmen Square protests and massacre in 1989 should have left little doubt in anyone’s mind as to the nature of the post-Mao regime but, again, among some of my old former comrades, it was attributable to “foreign agents” who were behind the protests. More recently, they tell me that “errors were made on both sides.” I have no idea how anyone can regard this as “Left-wing.”

***

It puzzled me, given our correct understanding of the Soviet and Eastern bloc satellite regimes as social-fascist back then, that when the “Wall” came down in November 1989, some of my old comrades who had got it right in the late 60s /early 70s were now expressing doubt — or outright angst — about the collapse. Most said they still didn’t like the regimes — but U.S. imperialism would benefit in its quest for world hegemony, and that those social-fascist states, like them or loathe them, were a force against that hegemony. It was weird because we had always been anti-fascists first and anti-imperialist second. After all, the Left supported the anti-working-class, “war monger” (as the Mosleyites[8] described him) Winston Churchill — a representative of the world’s worst imperialism at that time, namely British imperialism — against the Nazi appeasers like Neville Chamberlain. An anti-imperialism that serves fascist regimes is hardly worth having.

***

None of the speakers mentioned the fact that the Australian economy was doing well in the 1960s. There was economic growth, real wage increases, expansion of infrastructure, plenty of jobs, and big demand, after the War, for Australia’s agricultural produce and mineral resources. We were not rebelling against economic crisis, so it is remarkable that we were questioning and challenging capitalism. We were a product of alienation, an understanding of how capitalism was exploitative, and an awareness of suffering elsewhere in the world, rather than direct economic hardship arising from crisis; though those of us who studied Marx understood the nature of crises as periodic — until the “big one” would come. But we’ve been waiting a long time for the big one. Certainly things are bad at the moment, and most projections by mainstream economists say things will worsen, so maybe the big one really is imminent now.

What would happen if it did come?! Where is the economic understanding, not just of what is happening, but of how to build the new social system? Arthur pointed out that the Left wasn’t interested in economics. That tallies with my experience and, unlike him, I am one of those who had little interest in the subject. Like many of my comrades, I was the “arts” type, interested in ideas, political philosophy, and polemics. I tried reading Capital and I think I waded through Volume 1 (1867), but couldn’t proceed to the other volumes. What I knew about Marxist economics, I really had learned from the lectures we all read such as Value, Price and Profit (1865). In a letter to Engels, Marx had said “You cannot compress a course in political economy into one hour but we shall have to do our best”[9] — I don’t think he expected so many of us to be satisfied with going no further.

***

Environmental issues were rarely taken up in a significant way. I recall the far-Right League of Rights going on about “the despoilation of Australia’s environment by foreign companies,” but it was rare for the Left to give much priority to those issues. Vietnam, and apartheid were the main issues. The “green” movement didn’t so much arise from the 60s movement as emerge after its decline; though it’s true that many of the activists who, as Alison pointed out, were now becoming “co-opted,” supported the new green movement. Perhaps it’s a case of political philosophy abhorring a vacuum, just as Nature does. By the early 80s, when Graham Richardson, of the Labor government’s Right faction, started to promote a major national green issue to oppose the building of a dam in Tasmania, it was clear that the new, growing, green movement’s leaders were not the people who had put their heads on the line during the Vietnam solidarity period. This was a different leadership and a different kind of politics and political philosophy. The campaign to save the Franklin Dam in 1983 was the birth of the green organizational movement.

It goes without saying that Leftists opposed air pollution, which was a significant environmental issue in the 70s. I recall being involved in a campaign against lead content in petrol. The campaign was successful but did little, if anything, to promote socialism, let alone communism. And lead was removed from petrol by legislative mandate — under capitalism. It’s strange to me — a disconnect from reality — when individuals who identify as Leftists say that something is a product of capitalism, that capitalism needs a particular injustice, but then don’t seem to draw any lesson when the issue or injustice is remedied within the framework of capitalism.

The Left’s problem with green political philosophy was based on the Marxists’ historic and traditional commitment to unleashing the productive forces. “Nature worship” — the idea that humanity should live in harmony, or sustainably, with Nature rather than “conquer” or “decouple” from Nature — was where the line was drawn. Indeed, it was a line of demarcation between a progressive and a reactionary outlook. The Nature worship outlook was, and still is, openly advocated by the princes and popes who have a better understanding of its content and purpose than those who believe one can be a Marxist, in support of progress, while at the same time believing that the planet has already exceeded its capacity for further growth and development.

***

A great progressive movement that can be said to have emerged from the “60s” movement was the women’s liberation movement. It was most notable in the early 70s in Australia, and, indeed, some of its activist women were pissed off with the male chauvinism in organizations of the Left and of being told by men, as Alison points out, that their liberation is something for after the Revolution. It was understandable that women established their own organizations and consciousness-raising groups. However, they had much bigger problems than male chauvinism on the Left, given that our society was still so backward when it came to women.

Helen Reddy’s anthemic song “I am Woman” (1971) sums up all that was great about the spirit of the old women’s lib movement: its rebelliousness, which was very much in keeping with “68,” determination to win, and the absence of any ideology of victimhood. Had anyone dared to tell those women that they were “victims,” the response would have been “Not any more!,” possibly followed by “Go jump in the lake!” Victimized — yes — but victims — no!

Over time, new generations of feminist activists emerged and, it seems, there has been fragmentation, and today it is rare to see or hear the spirit of the 70s women’s lib people. “Identity politics” has taken over, with the support of the institutions of the state (including the universities), and socialist feminists are usually of the older generation, who were steeled in the struggles of the women’s lib period. A worrying aspect of a current significant faction of feminists is what Camille Paglia called “sex-negative feminism.” This is the puritanical streak that wants to ban pornography. The late Right-wing English morality-crusader, Mary Whitehouse, would applaud them but she was a target of much ridicule by “pro-sex” feminists and Leftists generally — those in the 68 tradition, that is.

***

I was lucky to be 17 in 1968; I was able to be a conscious part of the chaos, the dangers, the fun, and the politics that believed in a better, winnable future and that, at its best, questioned everything. It was exhilarating being part of a mass movement that was gaining support, that went beyond reformism and asked why the issues existed in the first place. There was something joyous about challenging nasty authorities, pointing out their hypocrisies and their perpetuation of injustices. When I look back on that period, 1966–1972, I think that while we didn’t overthrow the ruling class, we certainly gave their most reactionary members and representatives a very hard time. That in itself justifies the movement, I reckon.

I was fairly conservative socially but not politically. At the age of 15, in 1966, I’d cycle from my home in Brunswick, Melbourne, to the large front roller-door at the entrance of Pentridge Prison in the adjoining suburb of Coburg, to protest against the death penalty and the hanging of Ronald Ryan. On one occasion, the protest turned violent, and I remember men running at the huge roller-door, leaping up and kicking at it. (Any wrestling fans will be familiar with the flying dropkick maneuver.)

In speaking with other activists of my generation, I’m surprised at how many others also became active as teenagers because of the issue of capital punishment. I’m sure I joined an organization opposed to capital punishment but I don’t recall its name. At this time, I learned how to give out leaflets. I also learned how to argue about an issue. There were key debating points and, on one occasion, I wore a badge that displayed the words “I am against capital punishment. Please talk to me about it.” I nervously wore it on one of my tram rides into the city and was extremely relieved that nobody wanted to talk about it.

***

The counterculture was a significant part of all this questioning. Its members were treated far more sympathetically by the media and the Establishment than we — activists with a political direction and understanding — were. I didn’t agree with the notion of setting up communes in the bush under capitalism, nor with drug taking, but I loved and still love the music of the time: the rock pop songs that we could embrace as anthems, songs like Thunderclap Newman’s “Something in the Air” (1969), Nina Simone’s revolutionary version (1969) of The Beatles’ reactionary “Revolution” (1968), and The Animals’ “We Gotta Get Out of This Place” (1965). The latter was hugely popular with the U.S. and allied soldiers in Vietnam but the lyrics are metaphorical: “this place” can be capitalism, an alienating system that in the advanced industrial societies, in the main, had long outlived any former progressive qualities. In a later version of “We Gotta Get Out of This Place,” the singer ad-libs with “Out of the factory, out of this place, out of the kitchen, out of this place.” Love it. The good music brought “hippies” and Marxists together; though the Old Left was associated more with folk music. I never related to folk music. It seemed too whingey, always complaining, gently melodic without a back beat driving it relentlessly forward.

Like others who identified with, and as, Maoists, I was critical of the counterculture, even though some of its members had proven to be reliable comrades in action on the campus of La Trobe University in Melbourne where I was enrolled in 69. So, I concur with the speakers who point to the diverse nature of the “60s movement.” You name it — it was there! The reactionaries were threatened by it and sometimes resorted to state violence to try to curb it and intimidate its leaders, especially those who were effective in encouraging militancy, an anti-imperialist perspective and solidarity with the Vietnamese (rather than an “anti-war” position). The movement’s spirit was vital and summed up by our belief that it was right to rebel; to us, harmony was a reactionary value. The state and its institutions, ranging from churches to universities and prisons, were out to crush that spirit. But, they failed — for a brief few years, at least — and each of those institutions experienced their own internal rebellions.

***

In 1968, I was in my final year of high school in Melbourne and was by that time politically aware and interested in communism. I was a bit of a wannabe communist. After school, still in my school uniform, I made my way to the big demonstration against the U.S. war in Vietnam on July 4 that year. The police rioted. They removed their identification badges and used batons, fists, and boots against us. It was scary. The demonstration included workers and students. The next day at school, one of the teachers claimed to have seen me on TV at the demo, and admonished me in front of the class. I felt embarrassed but also angry and determined to attend the next demo. The teacher’s admonition did not deter my classmates from electing me as class captain, and I was chuffed to see, on reading my old school magazine from 68, that I was described as “the rebel leader.”

Most of the school rebellion was about dress codes and hair length for boys, but there were also a couple of more political actions, such as when three of us decided to stand up and raise our clenched fists at morning assembly in solidarity with the two black American athletes, Tommie Smith and Juan Carlos, who had made the same gesture at the 1968 Olympics in Mexico. They were supported by the third-place getter, an Australian named Peter Norman. On another occasion, I distributed a pamphlet around the school which, from memory, was called “American Atrocities in Vietnam” and had been banned under Victoria’s Obscene Publications Act. I was not part of any high school “underground” or organization but was influenced heavily by my father, Loreto, who had developed strong Left-wing views during his military service in World War II. He was Maltese. Born in Malta in 1918, he had volunteered in 1940 when it was clear that Mussolini’s Italia irredenta[10] meant that fascism was part of a global threat.

My dad’s influence on my political development means that I can’t really agree with Arthur’s exclamation that “We told our parents to fuck off!” Of course, if by “parents” is meant the older generation, I can see the point. There was much in the culture that had been carried on by the older generation that we objected to, which is why the 68 rebellion was disproportionately a youth rebellion with the “oldies” in the revisionist communist parties trying to curb what they called the “excesses” (but really trying to curb the militancy and revolutionary perspectives).

But, for me, the rebellion was not against my parents because my father, a factory worker, was on the side of the rebels. He was in the Labor Party but identified strongly with communist union leaders such as Clarrie O’Shea and Ted Bull (both of whom were leaders in the CPA (ML), which identified with Maoism). He was skeptical about Labor opportunists, and attended some of the militant Vietnam solidarity demonstrations.

My mother was a sweet, gentle, woman who used to say that she wished she had been born later because she then would have had the advantages of “women’s lib.” She was born in Hackney, London’s East End, in 1916. She was not particularly political but, like most people who had had a poor and very hard life, she understood what Andy Blunden called “solidarity” — the importance of “helping others on their own terms.” She also understood how society was changing for the better, especially for women, and that the “protestors” were helping drive that process as were new technologies like washing machines and vacuum cleaners. For working-class women like my mother, technology was nothing to fear. It was definitely not something to wait for until “after the Revolution.”

***

Growing up in an industrial, migrant, working-class place like Brunswick, from the age of 3 (in 1954) to my early 30s, and with my kind of parents, made it easy for me to develop a socialistic outlook. There were a dozen ethnicities in my street but we all got on well, notwithstanding occasional nastiness. Paying the bills was more important than picking on one another for being different. We were united by two things: our class position and the English language. I grew up immersed in this low-income, working-class milieu.

Television was important in my awareness of world and national affairs. After my parents bought a television set in 1960, the world came into our loungeroom — including, the horror of apartheid in South Africa and the disgraceful treatment of Australia’s Aborigines. Like a lot of my generation, we were frightened when a showdown seemed imminent between the two superpowers in 1962. I still remember the grainy black-and-white imagery on television of the warships which we were told were heading toward one another in confrontation. To this day, I recall vividly the scene on television of the Democrat Police Chief of Alabama setting vicious Alsatian dogs onto black American protestors. It made me angry — and still does.

These images stood in stark contrast to the series like Father Knows Best (1954–60) and Leave It to Beaver (1957–63) that portrayed an unrealistic, idealized, version of American life in which everyone was happy and prosperous. These series rarely featured black Americans, other than in the roles of musicians or servants. But the contrast between the reality shown on news broadcasts and the idealized family series was not lost on me, even though I was young.

I was a big fan of science fiction. This was prompted by exciting “space” adventures in the real world such as the Sputnik satellite in 1957, the first man-made object to orbit the Earth. Four years later, the Soviet Union again led the “space race,” and Yuri Gagarin became the first human to travel into outer space. It was so thrilling and set my young mind racing.

I read sci-fi books, usually collections of short stories, but movies on television and at the cinema showed just how far human beings might go thanks to our ingenuity and engineering skills. I was enthralled by movies that showed spaceships and exploration of other planets. These 1950s films seem a bit naïve today, when we have an actual spacecraft, Voyager 11, traveling beyond our solar system, now into the constellation of Pavo, and still sending the occasional “beep” more than 23 billion (Billion, not million) kilometers back to Earth.

I’m sure, on reflection, that this enthusiasm for space travel and sci-fi helped put me on the path of interest in the political philosophy that advocated for unleashing human potential. And this certainly informed the spirit of “1968.”

***

I’ll leave it there and hope my ramblings are of some use in understanding “1968.”

The period of decline from the early or mid-1970s is just as important in terms of lessons, but I’ll have to leave that for another time. |P

[1] See the transcript in this issue. Video of the panel is available online at <https://www.youtube.com/live/8KD9AhyUYLU&gt;.

[2] Mao Tse-tung, “On Practice: On the Relation Between Knowledge and Practice, Between Knowing and Doing” (1937), available online at <https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/mao/selected-works/volume-1/mswv1_16.htm&gt;.

[3] Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (1851–52), available online at <https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1852/18th-brumaire/&gt;.

[4] Karl Marx, “The Metaphysics of Political Economy,” in The Poverty of Philosophy (1847), available online at <https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1847/poverty-philosophy/&gt;.

[5] Karl Marx, “Part I,” in “Critique of the Gotha Program” (1875), available online at <https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1875/gotha/&gt;.

[6] The arguments were documented, and are available online at <https://themonthlyargument.wordpress.com/past-debates/&gt;.

[7] See <https://c21stleft.com/2021/03/31/fascism-and-the-left-how-do-left-wing-individuals-end-up-fascists/&gt;.

[8] After Oswald Mosley (1896–1980).

[9] Karl Marx to Friedrich Engels (May 20, 1865), quoted in “Introduction,” in Karl Marx, Value, Price and Profit (New York: International Co., Inc, 1969), available online at <https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1865/value-price-profit/introduction.htm&gt;.

[10] [Italian] Unredeemed Italy.

Fifty years ago – gaolings, resistance and a win

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Barry York (republished from ‘Overland’ literary journal )

Fifty years ago, on 4 August 1972, three La Trobe University students—Fergus Robinson, Brian Pola and myself—were released from Pentridge Prison after serving, respectively, four months, three months and six weeks. Hardly any other political prisoners of that period in Australia had served such lengthy terms, with the exception of some of the draft resisters. This was an extraordinary and unprecedented case of political repression.

The ‘La Trobe Three’ had been imprisoned in a maximum-security prison without trial, without rights to bail or appeal, and without sentencing. Formally speaking, we were jailed for contempt of the Supreme Court of Victoria for violating an injunction restraining us from ‘entering the premises known as La Trobe University’. The injunction had been issued by the university governing body, the Council, because of the students’ leading roles in what academics refer to as ‘the La Trobe Troubles’. A fourth student, Rodney Taylor, was also singled out and named in the injunction. However, he was never captured by police.

The ‘Troubles’ on the campus were part of the broader student and youth rebellion of the late 1960s and early 1970s, with core issues the Vietnam War, apartheid in South Africa and demands for greater ‘student power’ in university decision-making. Monash University had been the bête noir of the establishment due to its campus militancy and the capable leadership of Maoists like Albert Langer and Mike Hyde.

The immediate background to the La Trobe incarcerations dates to 19 April 1971, when a meeting of a thousand students—the largest ever held on campus—voted nearly unanimously in favour of a motion calling for the resignation of the Chancellor, Sir Archibald Glenn. Glenn was managing director of Imperial Chemicals Industries (ANZ) and sat on the board of its UK-based parent company. His presence as head of the University Council was intolerable to the great majority of students because ICI(ANZ) had been awarded a contract by the Department of Supply for Australian troops in Vietnam and the parent company was involved in the apartheid-based economy of South Africa.

The popular demand for Glenn’s resignation allowed the militant left-wing Labour Club (not to be confused with the Labor Party) and the Communist Club to connect the campus issue to the wider question of capitalism and whose class interests the universities served. The Communist Club leader, Dave Muller (1946–2021), had undertaken the initial research into Glenn and ICI, and this provided a firm basis for the campaign.

As with Monash, the communist leadership at La Trobe—which was also predominantly Maoist—posed a special challenge to the authorities. The leadership emerged through struggle within the Labour Club, while the revisionist Communist Party supporters split and either went with the Maoists or removed themselves from the practical struggle. Other factions went ‘every which way’, though basically supporting militant action.

There were other campus issues, too, such as an ‘exclusion clause’ introduced by the authorities to exclude anyone under suspension from a university from being admitted to La Trobe. This was clearly a political move designed to stop left-wing students who had been suspended from Monash being admitted to La Trobe.

The militancy at La Trobe went back further than 1971, most notably with the forced removal of Defence Department recruiters from the campus in June 1970 and later that year, in September, with the Vietnam solidarity marches from the campus along Waterdale Road in West Heidelberg. The first of these peaceful marches was savagely suppressed by police, as was the second march in defiance of the repression. Nineteen students were arrested, two at gunpoint. A third march attracted 800 people, including trade unionists, and marched defiantly along the street to the campus. At this time, the Maoist group was ascendant as leader of the campus left.

Robinson, Pola and myself were recognised as prominent among the leaders on the campus in 1971 when the campaign for Glenn’s resignation gathered momentum. As a matter of principle, no actions were initiated by the Maoist-led Labour Club without first convening a general meeting of students, either through the auspices of the Students Representative Council, or through unofficial general meetings. The latter were often larger than the former and, in July 1971, a meeting resolved to blockade members of the University Council until such time as the Chancellor resigned. A couple of hundred students blocked the doors of the Council room, where Council was in session, and police were called onto the campus that evening. 

As a result of this action, eight students were suspended by the university disciplinary body—the farcical ‘Proctorial Board’. Five of them were also arrested by police. Occupations of the administration building, endorsed by general meetings, took place in protest against the repression, which in turn resulted in greater repression. On 30 September, the authorities called in the police to evict students who had occupied the Administration building. This was a first on an Australian campus. In October, twenty-four students were hauled before the Proctorial Board, of whom twenty-three were suspended and/or fined. (The late John Cummins was one of them).

Hundreds of students took part in occupations of the Admin building on 30 September and 1 October. When the police were called on 30 September, students escaped via the windows of the ground floor. In response, the Vice Chancellor arranged for heavy-gauge wire gratings to be rivetted over the windows. A student general meeting on 11 October voted to remove them and marched to the building, where a group attached ropes to the gratings and proceeded to tug on them until they broke from the rivets. This was done in broad daylight—a sign that intimidation would not work. It was later revealed that the authorities had collected evidence against the student leaders over this action, but no charges were ever laid.

The struggle and sacrifices proved worthwhile. In early December 1971, prior to the end of his term, Glenn announced his decision to resign as Chancellor, and the University rescinded its ‘exclusion clause’. By the end of 1971, the students had won significant victories. However, the campus struggle continued, bringing to mind Marx’s saying about people making history not as they wish but rather as circumstances dictate.

A characteristic of the La Trobe struggle in 1970 and 1971 had been the willingness to bypass official structures of student representation as part of building a revolutionary socialist movement. In early November 1971, the official representative student body—the SRC—resolved to pay the fines imposed by the Proctorial Board, subject to approval by a general meeting of students to be convened early the following year (which, as expected, supported the move). The University Council objected and threatened legal action against the SRC and against any suspended students who remained on the campus. The latter group included Brian Pola, who was the elected SRC President.

The slogan ‘Student control of student funds’ was popular but created a struggle that refocused the campus left onto official SRC politics rather than the previous revolutionary politics that challenged the role of the universities under capitalism. Had this shift not occurred over the issue of payment of the fines, the left would have raised the money from the rank-and-file student body instead. This would have been the ‘Maoist’ way of doing it—relying on the people—and it would have been effective.

With our victory over Glenn and the ‘exclusions clause’ achieved by the end of 1971, Fergus, Brian and I were among the few of the 1970-1971 militant activist generation to return to campus the following year when the continuing, unresolved, issue was ‘student control of student funds’.

Our consistent revolutionary perspective on politics and struggle, challenging the role of the universities under capitalism and supporting unity between students and workers, was as much of a threat to the authorities as the actions we supported. The use of Supreme Court injunctions to stop us entering the campus grounds was a clear attempt to stop us expressing our views at general meetings.

It is pertinent to note that in the three other cases of university authorities applying for injunctive relief against student radicals—at Sydney and Monash in 1970 and Queensland in 1971—the restraining orders were narrowly focused and specifically prohibited the named students from participating in disruptive activity. The exception was an ancillary injunction taken out by Queensland University on 30 July 1971 against an individual leader, Mitch Thompson, who was prohibited from entering the campus. This served as the model for the La Trobe injunctions, which sought to stop us from entering the university grounds—that is, to stop us expressing our views on campus.  This left us no choice but to be defiant, as a matter of principle. And, of course, we were aware that the injunctions were designed to intimidate other leaders and developing leaders.

The indeterminate nature of the ‘sentence’ for contempt could only be resolved if and when the ‘La Trobe Three’ agreed to purge our contempt before the Supreme Court and promise not to enter the campus grounds if released. This we were not prepared to do. Rather, we sought to continue to exercise our right to participate in the political life of the campus, including helping to organise, initiate and address rallies and general meetings of students, and take part in protest actions on the campus.

It was very hard doing time without knowing when we would be released. We could not count down the days and we were in ‘A’ Division, which had a lot of long-term prisoners doing time for armed robbery or murder. The fact that we were placed with so many long-termers was an ominous sign. However, a campaign for our release was underway at the La Trobe campus, building strong support from other campuses and trade unions and, notably, within the legal profession.

I remember being told that Amnesty International was about to take up our case in London but we were released before that became necessary.

All our mass actions on the campus had been endorsed by general meetings of students. Therefore, after the capture of Fergus on 12 April and Brian on 1 May, the left leadership called for the holding of an official referendum on the campus to allow students to resolve the issue. The left called on the Vice Chancellor and Council to agree to abide by the referendum’s results. The main issue—the release of Fergus and Brian—carried the day in the referendum which was held from 10 to 12 May 1972. Of the 1667 students who voted, 1005 voted for the withdrawal of the injunctions.

I was captured and lodged at Pentridge in June, which added further pressure on the University authorities to abide by the referendum results and highlighted their refusal to do so. The Council was encouraged in its hard line by a ‘pro-violence minority’ among some senior academic staff and students aligned with the National Civic Council who consistently refused to support democratic means of resolving the conflict.

We never apologised to the Court nor did we purge our contempt before it. So, how were we released?

On the 20th and 22nd July, Vice Chancellor David Myers visited us in Pentridge with a view to persuading us to purge our contempt. We still weren’t prepared to do that, as it would mean agreeing to not enter the university premises, but we were certainly willing to discuss any offer he would make on behalf of the Council. He wanted us to sign a statement repudiating violence on the campus. We were not prepared to do this either. Although the far right ironically described us as a pro-violence minority, we knew that the real pro-violence minority were those who relied on police violence and intimidation, not to mention those who sent troops to prop up a fascist regime in South Vietnam and ‘bomb back to the Stone Age’ those who were fighting it.

One of our legal advisors, communist lawyer Ted Hill, also visited us and advised us to sign the statement only on condition that Myers also sign the repudiation of violence on behalf of the Council. In this way, the terms for the disbandment of the injunction and for our release were neutralized and we felt we could sign. So, on 31 July, we joined with the University Council in repudiating violence on the campus.

Our release on 4 August 1972 was a victory because the University authorities bowed to mass pressure and it was the Vice Chancellor who applied to the court for an end to the injunctions and for our freedom. We never apologised to the Court and we promptly returned to the campus where, still under suspension for specified periods, we continued to take an active part in campus politics.

My book, Student Revolt, published in 1989, provides greater detail and contextualisation about the La Trobe student movement from 1967 to 1973. It is available for free on-line: https://c21stleft.com/2015/09/05/student-revolt-la-trobe-university-1967-to-1973/

‘An alien association’: Master of Arts thesis on Maoism and the Communist Party of China 1971-1977

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The late John Herouvim wrote a Master of Arts thesis at La Trobe University in 1983, drawing on wide and meticulous research and interviews with Communist Party of Australia (ML) members and former members. The former members included veterans of the working class struggle such as Clarrie O’Shea, Bill Wilson and Marj Broadbent. Most of the interviewees were still members and requested anonymity but they wanted to speak because of their growing disillusionment with that party.

I only recently came upon a copy of the completed thesis. It hasn’t previously been scanned, to the best of my knowledge.

I am yet to read it properly but recall having a few differences with John, such as his use of the term ‘ultra left’ too loosely. At the time he was researching it, there were a few social-fascist types who tried to stop his progress. John purchased a large steel safe, like a fridge, in which he kept his notes and drafts. He told me once that the safe would even survive a bomb blast. Thank heavens, it was never put to that test.

Ted Hill, the party chairman, wasn’t happy about John’s research and declined to cooperate with him but I remember John telling me that Hill offered him unrestricted access to the archives of a small trade union should he drop the project and focus on a history of that union instead. Presumably, the party had strong influence in that union, whose name I forget.

The thesis is now an historical document about a party and period that, in my view today, represented the decline of the left. I didn’t articulate my frustrations in that way at the time but quit organisationally in late 1980 or early 1981 and had no problems with being interviewed by John for his thesis. I was in the esteemed company of Clarrie O’Shea, after all.

Nearly four decades on, I have scanned the thesis and share it here (in four parts).

****

1-herouvim-john_ma-thesis-1983_first-halfDownload
2-herouvim-john_ma-thesis-1983_second-halfDownload
3-herouvim-john_ma-thesis-1983_appendicesDownload
4-herouvim-john_ma-thesis-1983_bibliographyDownload

Fascism and the Left… how do left-wing individuals end up fascists?

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I am republishing this from 1980 as it remains so pertinent.

Barely a week goes by without me receiving a post on facebook from individuals who were once good comrades but who now promote all manner of right-wing conspiratorial theory and who openly take the side of fascist, autocratic and theocratic regimes against the masses who are trying to overthrow them and establish basic democracy, or what Marxists call ‘bourgeois democracy’. The chest-beaters are the worst.

Anyhow, I feel that this analysis, originally from the Red Eureka Movement in Melbourne, explains a lot and offers a rare but exceptionally important, cogent, analysis. (I was not with the REM people back then but rather stayed with the Blue Eureka nationalists – and had stopped thinking quite a few years earlier).

* * * * * * * *

Written: November 1980.
Transcription, Editing and Markup: Paul Saba
Copyright: This work is in the Public Domain under the Creative Commons Common Deed. You can freely copy, distribute and display this work; as well as make derivative and commercial works. Please credit the Encyclopedia of Anti-Revisionism On-Line as your source, include the url to this work, and note any of the transcribers, editors & proofreaders above.

EROL Note: This was a document that was circulated within the Red Eureka Movement in late 1980.

* * *

A major theme in left wing propaganda is opposition to fascism. Quite often relatively moderate opponents of the left are described as “fascists”.

Yet scratch a “Communist” and one quite often finds a fascist underneath.

The regime that began with the October Revolution is now a fascist dictatorship. In China too, since the defeat of the Cultural Revolution many revolutionaries have been executed and the right to speak out freely, hold great debates, put up big character posters and so on has been officially and formally repudiated.

The degeneration of Communist Parties in power is a separate problem calling for a separate analysis. But what about the degeneration of parties holding no power?

THE CPA (ML)

Our experiences with the “Communist Party of Australia (Marxist-Leninist)” were sufficiently frightening to require some deep analysis. Almost any split is accompanied by outraged cries of “unfair” or “undemocratic” from the losing side, so it seemed undesirable to distract attention from the fundamental issues at stake by going into details of who done what to who. But another reason why we never got around to it was probably embarrassment at ever having been involved with such a sick group.

The bankruptcy of Australian nationalism as an ideology for communists is now pretty apparent, while the question of whether China has gone revisionist has been settled by open proclamations from the Chinese leadership themselves. Although Vanguard keeps coming out each week, the people behind it seem pretty discredited and there is little need to discredit them further.

In Adelaide the “Worker Student Alliance for Australian Independence” has disintegrated, along with its newspaper People’s Voice. In Melbourne the entire editorial collective of Independence Voice quit some time ago, there was no “Independence platform” at Mayday, the “Australian Independence Movement” is virtually defunct and supporters of this line have been completely routed in “Community Radio” 3CR. The Australia China Society is unable to defend the new regime in China and little has been heard from the CPA(ML) in the trade union movement either.

As a complete expression of E.F. Hill’s bankruptcy we have the suggestion in “Australian Communist”, that they want unity with us (previously described as “Soviet agents”). Hill has even signed an article proposing reunification with the CPA in “one Communist Party” (presumably because the Chinese revisionists, having recently re-united with their Italian and Yugoslav colleagues, also wish to re-establish relations with the CPA, leaving Hill out in the cold).

The thuggish behaviour of the CPA(ML) supporters in attempting to intimidate their opponents is well known. Both intellectual and physical thuggery, in 3CR and elsewhere, has become so notorious that the only “broad united front” they have been able to create has been that directed against themselves. They have also become notorious for openly preferring to ally themselves with various Nazis and other fascists against the Soviet Union rather than trying to unite the people, and especially the left, against Soviet imperialism on the basis of progressive principles. Their main political theme these days is the united front they claim to have with Malcolm Fraser, who nevertheless remains quite unaware of their existence. As for China, they openly say they would rather not talk about it, even though China was, and is, central to their whole political outlook.

These facts are mentioned, not to kick a dead horse, but to emphasise that the horse really is dead and to confirm that the additional facts about it cited below are genuine observations and not just part of some ongoing sectarian faction fight.

OTHERS TOO

The more or less open fascism of the CPA (ML) has resulted in that group being simply dismissed as “crazies”. But in fact they are only a more extreme expression of problems that exist, less overtly, throughout the left. Indeed it has been noticeable in 3CR for example, that the excuse of “keeping out the crazies”, has been used to justify appallingly manipulative and undemocratic behaviour (e.g. elected listener sponsor representatives voting against explicit directives from a large general meeting of listener sponsors). People who would be shocked and indignant about that in other contexts have made excuses for it when their own friends are doing it. Really how far is it from making excuses to acting in the same way?  And how far from there to ending up just like the “crazies” themselves?

Also the fact that China and the Chinese parrots are anti-Soviet (and Reagan, Thatcher, Fraser etc) has become an excuse to actually apologise for Soviet actions that would be called “fascist” if American was doing it.  Indeed many quite non-crazy “left liberals” have been prepared to go through the most amazing mental contortions to justify the Vietnamese occupation of Kampuchea or to minimise the significance of Soviet aggression elsewhere.  Rather than agree with “right-wingers” (like Churchill), they prefer to apologise for fascists (like Hitler).

Where was the left wing outrage (as distinct from concern) when Polish workers were being denied the elementary right to form free trade unions?  Why do “militants” in “left-wing” unions take delight in the same bureaucratic manoeuvres their opponents use to stay in power?  Why are splits in left wing groups so common and so nasty?

In Australia many other groups supposedly on the left have exhibited a personal intolerance comparable to the Chinese parrots, and also a comparable willingness to apologise for reactionary regimes in other countries, provided those regimes pay lip service to “anti-imperialist” principles. (Vietnam, Cuba, Iran, Libya… name a country that is suppressing some other country or trying to impose some medieval religion on its people and you will find a “left” group wildly enthusiastic about it.)  Scanning overseas “left” newspapers one gets the impression that narrow minded religious bigotry is pretty common, and even where it is not taken to extremes, it is still present.  No wonder so many on the “left” thought a fellow zealot like Khomeiny would be progressive for Iran.

The undemocratic tendencies of “Leninists” is a common theme in anti-Communist propaganda – from open representatives of the bourgeoisie, from Social Democrats, from Anarchists, from “Left” or “Council” Communists and what have you.  Nevertheless, attacks from our opponents should be taken seriously, and indeed have been taken seriously by the classic exponents of Marxism.

CHINESE FASCISM

This question was especially taken seriously in China and some of the material from the Chinese Cultural Revolution is very valuable for understanding the emergence of fascist tendencies among alleged “Communists”.

For example Mao Tsetung’s unpublished works, and the material criticizing Lin Piao (the “successor” who turned out to be a fascist). The Cultural Revolution was after all a direct struggle between revolutionaries and counter-revolutionaries who both purported to be part of the “left”. The concept of fighting bourgeois ideas disguised as “left” ideas was crucial to unleashing the 1960s upsurge and will be crucial again. It was necessary to challenge the “peace” ideas that were dominant in the left in the 1960s and it will be necessary to challenge the views that are dominant now – many of which are again crystallised in the eclectic mishmash of the “CPA”.

In the “gang of four’s” Peking University Journal of September 1, 1976 there is an important article on “The Bureaucrat Class and the Dictatorship of the Proletariat”:

…We must further recognise the high concentration of political and economic powers under the dictatorship of the proletariat. If the bureaucrat class succeeded in usurping power and in its restorationist conspiracies throughout the country, then it would continue to flaunt the banner of socialism, take advantage of this high concentration of political and economic powers and turn the democratic centralism of the proletariat into the fascist centralism of the bureaucrat class.

In controlling and manipulating the means of production and the product of Labor, these bureaucrats will be far more powerful than any previous exploiting classes and their political representatives, than the slave owners and feudal rulers who claimed that “all land under the sun is my territory and all people on earth are my subjects”, and than the bureaucrats and financiers in capitalist countries…In a similar vein, the present day new tsars behave much worse than the old tsars… (Translation from Selections from People’s Republic of China Magazines No 895, American Consulate General, Hong Kong. Reprinted in Study Notes No 6, Red Eureka Movement, August 1978)

This article also goes into the question of the transformation of authority into capital and capital into authority, which is relevant to an understanding of imperialism in the West as well as in the Soviet Union and China.

Western bourgeois democratic society is heading towards an acute crisis and upheaval as another Great Depression and a Third World War develop. The outcome can be Communist Revolution or some form of fascism or social-fascism. We could face a new ruling class more powerful than the present one. It largely depends on how clear the left is on what we are fighting for and what we are fighting against and how sharply we can draw the line against perpetuating the old system of exploitation in our own practice. If the left continues to whinge about capitalism, and even oppose it from a reactionary perspective then it cannot hope to inspire people to fight for something fundamentally different.

Indeed, just as one would have to defend the national independence that Western and Third World countries have already achieved, from Soviet “socialist” imperialism, one would also have to defend the achievements already won by the bourgeois democratic revolution from attack by alleged “socialists” who want to go backwards to a more oppressive society.

DEMOCRATIC CENTRALISM

If the democratic centralism of the proletarian dictatorship can be easily transformed into the fascist centralism of the bureaucrat class in a developing socialist country, then what about democratic centralism in Leninist parties out of power? Is this an argument against democratic centralism and proletarian dictatorship, as anarchists and others insist?

The answer to this argument is that there never can be a guarantee against proletarian dictatorship turning into its opposite, and Communists in power must always be prepared for transition to underground life as Communists in opposition to capitalist roaders in power. Likewise in Communist Parties generally – one must be prepared to rebel and to be expelled for rebelling.

But if there was no democratic centralism and proletarian dictatorship then it would be quite impossible for the revolutionary ideas held only by a minority in capitalist and socialist society to be centralised and dominant and in that case the bourgeoisie holds power anyway. So weakening democratic centralism is not the answer. On the contrary, it needs to be strengthened to keep fascists out, on the same argument that the left cannot afford to be pacifist and must learn the use of arms if it doesn’t want warmongers to hold power.

Proletarian dictatorship means just that. It does not mean dictatorship over the proletariat by some bureaucrats. It means a political system in which the working class can really wield political power – something that can be achieved by workers councils led by a revolutionary party and cannot be achieved by parliamentary institutions or by milling around in confusion.

Democratic centralism also means just that. It does not mean the leadership imposing decisions on a reluctant membership. It means that the abstract “parliamentary” right which almost all organisations give their members to ultimately take decisions, is made real by conscious leadership of the decision making process to make it “from the masses, to the masses” and so make it actually work without manipulation or obstruction.

This article is not a plea for everybody to be more tolerant of everybody else. It is a call for sharper defence of our basic principles and less tolerance of attempts to undermine them. One cannot be a Communist if one is not first a democrat. The democratic revolutionaries of England, France and so on in earlier centuries had no hesitation about chopping off the heads of their aristocratic opponents and neither should we.

Fear of strengthening democratic centralism is really fear of struggle. Such fear is fully understandable in the present situation, and a lot better than blinkered complacency. But it must be overcome.

The quote from Orwell’s “Road to Wigan Pier” in “the Personal is Political” (Discussion Bulletin No 9) rang a few bells and is worth repeating:–

…..“Socialism” is pictured as a state of affairs in which our more vocal Socialists would feel thoroughly at home. This does great harm to the cause. The ordinary man may not flinch from a dictatorship of the proletariat, if you offer it tactfully; offer him a dictatorship of the prigs, and he gets ready to fight.

We should be ready to fight against the dictatorship of the prigs and to do this it is necessary to understand the transformation of Communists into prigs.

ARE WE DIFFERENT?

If we take Lin Piao for example, there is no doubt that he did make contributions to the Chinese revolution before emerging as an outright fascist. The superstitious Mao cult he built up in opposition to Mao had definite roots in China’s feudal past, but also struck a chord among Western “Maoists”.

Ted Hill now appears to be nothing more than a follower of Liu Shao-chi, then Lin Piao (as a major cult advocate) then Liu Shao-chi again, or whoever may hold power in China at any given moment. But some of his analyses of revisionism, parliamentarism and trade union politics in publications like “Looking Backward; Looking Forward” are still valuable and he once made a point of opposing sacred cows and stereotypes and supporting rebellion.

Things were drastically wrong with the CPA(ML) long before we parted company and people are entitled to ask how we got mixed up with them and why we should be regarded as any different. If we are to be any different then we must analyse the thin dividing line that appears to exist between being a Marxist-Leninist or “Maoist” on the one hand, and being a lunatic or a fascist on the other.

There is little need to “expose” the CPA(ML) leadership now in view of its obvious degeneration. But the roots of current fascist attitudes do need study, so the following facts are placed on the record for our own benefit rather than for the benefit of anyone still taken in by Hill.

SOME FACTS

1. There never was anything remotely resembling democracy within the CPA(ML). This became obvious when concrete disagreements made it necessary to have a proper discussion and take a decision. But it should have been obvious even when people thought they were in agreement.
2. As soon as a disagreement in principle was announced “through the proper channels” etcetera, the immediate response was to launch vituperative attacks on individuals – at first surreptitiously behind their backs and then openly in Vanguard.
3. The very idea of discussing the differences was repudiated and “security” was abused to tell people that there had been a full democratic discussion, which they just didn’t happen to be part of.
4. As a matter of fact it turned out that no Central Committee actually existed. One member of the Red Eureka Movement discovered that he was supposed to be a CC member after wanting to express his views to the CC. This must be some sort of record in the international communist movement!
5. Other members of the Red Eureka Movement who were both on the Central Committee and knew it, were able to expose the lie that there had been some kind of Central Committee discussion about China and that documents expressing opposition had been circulated to the Central Committee etc.
6. Individual party members had to go outside the “channels” to get any kind of discussion and then discovered that the “channels” didn’t really exist. Now others who accepted this are finding the same situation.
7. It was not a case of discussion being suppressed arbitrarily and decisions usurped, but of there being no provision whatever for seriously discussing and reversing a policy disagreed with.
8. This situation which existed long before it came to a head was put up with by people who would rebel strongly against similar fascist practices in any other social institution.
9. Many people on becoming aware of it, and seeing people branded as Soviet agents etcetera, took a cynical attitude that this was wrong but not a major question of principle requiring them to take a stand.
10. Our initial reaction to all this shit was not to launch a public struggle as in the Cultural Revolution or in accord with our own experiences in the 1960s. Instead we had great hangups about “the party” and organised semi-conspiratorially.
11. Despite being a very small group, since breaking with the CPA(ML) leadership we have not been able to resolve internal disagreements in a civilised, let alone comradely manner, but have had two further splits. While nowhere near as bad as Hill’s, these have also involved strange behaviour that would not be tolerated in most community organisations and should not be tolerated on the left. Moreover they have occurred in a situation where we are not leading any great revolutionary struggle and no pressing life or death decision was at stake.

LIFE WASN’T MEANT TO BE EASY!

We did not fully realise it at the time, but there was little alternative to the apparent extremism of Hill’s stand because there really wasn’t any possibility of a discussion. If he had agreed to a discussion, what could he possibly have said? And if the CPA(ML) did not follow China religiously, what else could it do? We cannot blame Hill for our own naivety.

We only realised how difficult most people find it to rebel and think for themselves once we had broken with Hill and company. “Stalinists without a country” was the contemptuous Trotskyist label, and there is something in it. It really is enormously easier to at least think you know what you’re doing when there is some “socialist motherland” backing you up. (Or a “Fourth International”, a “great leader” or some other crutch).

For non-revolutionaries it’s fairly easy to maintain a political position sustained by one or other of the reformist currents in mainstream bourgeois society. But in a non-revolutionary society and with no back up from a revolutionary society, it requires real effort to develop a revolutionary program. How much easer it would have been if we could have forgotten that we didn’t have such a program by simply pretending to ourselves that China, or Albania or somewhere was revolutionary and that supporting them would somehow produce a revolution here. Or by pretending that if we were all more dedicated, we would figure out where we were going while getting there.

Its interesting to note how even people with no attachment to Russia, China or Albania have managed to persuade themselves that Vietnam is still worth supporting and feel a deep and personal threat to their whole ideology when this is questioned. Or how people leaving REM because it hasn’t been getting anywhere who know perfectly well what’s wrong with the political line of the Revolutionary Communist Party (USA), are nevertheless attracted by the reassuring certainty of that group’s proclamations.

Idealism and metaphysics are the easiest things in the world, because people can talk as much nonsense as they like without basing it on objective reality or having it tested against reality. Materialism and dialectics, on the other hand, need effort. They must be based on and tested by objective reality. Unless one makes the effort, one is liable to slip into idealism and metaphysics. (Mao Tsetung)

PRIESTS AND HORSES

Judging from overseas literature, the temptation of closed minded religious fanaticism is very strong in this situation. It provides a certainty that would otherwise be lacking and puts an end to all confusion, doubt, cynicism, liberalism and so on.

But this way out is the way out of the movement. It means joining the innumerable sects that are much better organised and disciplined than we are, and are able to get more done precisely because they do not have the “burden” of really having to think out a revolutionary line.

We did not hesitate to reject the “security” of blindly following China, Albania or anybody else so we should not regret the consequences.

One consequence is that we are in some respects more vulnerable to confusion, doubt, liberalism, cynicism and so on than other left groups that feel more confident about their (manifestly wrong!) lines. The reason horses are given blinkers is that it keeps them working away steadily without getting distracted by things they might see. Groups that have attached themselves to a foreign state, or that merely reflect a reformist current  in mainstream bourgeois ideology, have a secure basis for their activity and can work away at it for years after it has ceased to have any social relevance or has become purely reactionary.

The same can easily be true of “revolutionary” groups that feel secure, or pretend to feel secure in their “correct line”. They can whip up a great frenzy of activity, full of sound and fury, but signifying nothing. Take a look at the Communist Workers Party or the Revolutionary Communist Party (USA). On many points we would be in full agreement. They have a similar analysis of China and Albania to ours and they certainly do make a clear distinction between communist revolution and the bourgeois reformism advocated by most “revolutionaries”.

On international questions of very great significance they appear to have a fundamentally wrong analysis, But even more important, their whole approach to “correct line” politics seems alien. They are certainly not paralysed by liberalism like we are – but so what?

While confusion, doubt, liberalism, cynicism and so on persist we will remain unable to accomplish very much, including theoretical work:

We must have faith in the masses and we must have faith in the Party. These are two cardinal principles. If we doubt these principles, we shall accomplish nothing. (Mao Tsetung)

But the only basis for faith in the Party is confidence in the soundness of its analysis and line. Once we have grounds for such faith we will be able to accomplish something, but not before. (And of course once we do, we will again have the problem of blind faith and the potential for people to continue following a leadership that has proved itself worthy of confidence, long after it has ceased to play a progressive or revolutionary role. But then it would be at a higher stage of the spiral).

Demands that people pull themselves together, combat liberalism or what have you, will not solve the problem of lack of faith. This is an atheistic age and real communists are atheistic people. Our only God is the masses and the only basis for our faith is scientific analysis of reality.

The situation we are in calls urgently for working out where we are and where we are going. Without that, calls to press on more resolutely and with greater vigour will only result in people getting more lost.

CHIN UP, BACK STRAIGHT, EYES SHUT!

It is conservative, not revolutionary to promote “leadership”, “organisation”, “doing things”, “collective life” and so on without a clear perspective for liberating people from oppression. Defenders of the status quo habitually make such appeals and every organisation, revolutionary or not, naturally wants to be as effectively organised as possible (and most sewing circles and amateur theatrical societies are probably a lot better organised than REM). But it is quite wrong to see the organisational reflection of our confusion as the central problem instead of dealing with the confusion itself. (As for any who are not confused, they would have an even greater problem. Take off the blinkers!)

Communism is not the only ideology opposed to liberalism. Fascism opposes liberalism too. It is one thing to want to widen and deepen and ultimately transcend democracy by going beyond such mere forms as majority voting. It is quite another thing to declare that ones policies have proved their own correctness and deliberately exclude others from even a vote, let alone a real say, on the matter. Yet we have repeatedly experienced this kind of behaviour not just from enemies, but from comrades who probably really do want to be revolutionaries.

The fact that people like Lin Piao or Ted Hill could turn out to be fascists and that we could go along with a load of shit for a long time should alert us to the dangers. When people on the left start acting like people on the extreme right they must be pulled up sharply and told “You’re Ill” before the disease becomes incurable and before it spreads.

“Follow me and you need never think again”: Richard Wright, Liu Shao-Chi, Julius Fucik, the CPA(ML)… and the fire we need…

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The following article is by Tom Griffiths…

“Follow me and you need never think again.”

This was the pithy saying uttered by an old comrade to describe secular religious thinking, or blind faith, in adhering to the Party line, no matter what the line was or how it was arrived at. It need not be confined to, or even predominantly associated with, Communist Party politics of course with yes sir, no sir, three bags full sir, the Daleks “I obey” and other variants all treding the same path. Follow me … arose in the aftermath of the CPA M-L kindly informing a number of us that we had “expelled” ourselves and the sense we then made of how a reputedly revolutionary organization, prompted by the arrest of the Gang of Four, could perform a 180 degree pivot overnight without discussion and still keep a straight face. I need hardly add that we did not keep a straight face but saw this as a joke – and not one on us.

I don’t know about others, but there are some sayings I hear that are gold and are instantly hard wired. “Follow me …” was one of them. It spoke to me then, and has done so since, most  recently after reading Richard Wright’s American Hunger, the second part of his autobiography Black Boy that deals, in large part, with his experiences in the CPUSA in the 1930’s. I will come back to this, for while this post is not about Wright per se, his experiences have certainly prompted it. Not for the first occasion it brought into sharp relief the contradiction between  communist aspirations (what we believe in, this is what we are fighting/struggling for), and the more disturbing, at times reactionary, internal and personal processes involved with what the ‘correct line’ is, how it is arrived at and ‘followed’. Walking the walk, as well as talking the talk, in other words; how what we do, and how we do it, as a reflection of our revolutionary (transformative or synthesizing) aspirations and practice.

So let me come back to Richard Wright and American Hunger. Wright (1908-1960) was a black American writer of great talent and vision who effectively fled the Jim Crow south when 19. Like so many of his black contemporaries he headed to Chicago. “The environment the South creates is too small to nourish human beings, especially Negro human beings.” he said later in a radio interview. He brought with him an intense curiosity, a hunger, a desire to grow. It was this that enabled him to observe in himself and others who had fled the south, loneliness and confusion. “Wherever my eyes turned they saw stricken, black faces trying vainly to cope with a civilization that they did not understand. I felt lonely. I had fled one insecurity and embraced another.”

By his mid twenties his hunger and curiosity, containing as they did a worldly, universalizing vision, had led him to the CPUSA. “Of all the developments in the Soviet Union the method by which scores of backward peoples had been led to unity on a national scale was what had enthralled me. I had read with awe how the Communists had sent phonetic experts into the vast regions of Russia to listen to the stammering dialects of peoples oppressed for centuries by the czars. I had made the first total emotional commitment of my life when I read how the phonetic experts had given these tongueless people a language, newspapers, institutions. I had read how these forgotten folk had been encouraged to keep their old cultures, to see in their ancient customs meanings and satisfactions as deep as those contained in supposedly superior ways of living. And I had exclaimed to myself how different this was from the way in which Negroes were sneered at in America.”

He wanted to use his ability and drive, with the organizational and political support of the CPUSA, to give the ignored and sneered at a place and a voice on the political stage. This was not simply a political quest, but also one that unavoidably required acculturation. In the same decade Mao was developing the mass line in China, while in still unoccupied Europe Bertolt Brecht was writing The Life of Galileo, the sixth scene of which begins with this couplet: ‘Things indeed take a wondrous turn/When learned men do stoop to learn’. In effect Wright advocated the adoption of a stooping stance and he began a process of taking oral histories from men, like himself, who had migrated north, effectively changing planets in the process. The one we hear about in American Hunger is Ross, a fellow Party member. But rather than applauding and supporting his initiative, what in Maoist language would be termed ‘learning from the masses’, the CPUSA viewed his project with suspicion. Paranoid thinking, in partnership with anxiety, is probably more accurate.

Outside of Ross, who was initially cooperative, this suspicion came from both black and white members. I think I get the nervousness of his black comrades. The confusion and insecurity Wright refers to above sounds very familiar to utterances I have heard from refugees. One, a young Hazara man from Afghanistan, said to a colleague some eight years ago, that what he really needed to know was “where do I fit in?” Coming from a society still dominated by strictly hierarchical and tribal norms this is a question he would never have had to seriously consider before he changed planets. Another, from a Sierra Leonean colleague, put the anxiety and confusion this way: “We have come from hell to find heaven. And it is heaven, if you change overnight.” Wright’s black comrades were still finding their feet, not yet standing on culturally solid ground and needed the support and approval of their white comrades.

Empathic understanding (an interest in, and understanding of, the hurdles they faced) appeared not to be present or offered, a situation Wright found baffling. Offering feelings of acceptance and purpose, probably patronizing, where the rules pertaining to these are too heavily sourced from above, was not good enough. Fascist organizations, and there were a few around at the time, provided this too. Indeed they were arguably better at it as they had no desire at all to see their membership grow intellectually or emotionally. Unthinking loyalty was what was demanded to both the organization and its ideological script.

Under a veil of suspicion Wright was repeatedly questioned about his motives and actions. His explanations fell on deaf ears and he was, again repeatedly, told by members higher up the food chain that he did “not understand”. Projection is an interesting psychological defence mechanism. It is a pity that those not listening to Wright were ignorant of their use of it. More disturbing, however, was the parallel process being reproduced in the party. Being a ‘good communist’ – being seen (needing to be seen) and understood as being compliant, obedient, well behaved and toeing the party line, qualities valorized by Lui Shao-Ch’i (see Quotations of Liu Shao-Ch’i, Paul Flesch and Co.1968, a ‘Little Yellow Book’ worth getting hold of), is not the same as being a good communist. The latter has the capacity, in reality develops the capacity, to swim against the tide, be that tide external or internal and to accept the associated risks. The party line down south was the Jim Crow line where the consequences for not being seen to be ‘good’ and obedient to Jim Crow cultural norms could, and often were, fatal. What Wright and so many others from down south were doing in heading north, was learning how to swim against the tide.

There is a difference between toeing the line (being obedient) and agreeing that a given line or position will be supported and acted upon, and that the processes by which it has been arrived at are democratic and not autocratic. Wright’s experience speaks of the latter and it was something, on a lesser scale, that I recognized at the time I and others ‘expelled ourselves’.

Walking hand in hand with this, and generally justifying it, was the question of organizational security. Wright mentions that, to his understanding, security was reckoned using the conditions under Czarist oppression as a measuring stick. The darkening clouds beginning to engulf Europe will have done nothing to abate this. But the USA was not a fascist state – unless you happened to be black living under the heel of Jim Crow. That this was not sufficiently grasped, underscores the importance of what Wright was trying to do and the failure of the CPUSA in supporting him in doing it. It also indicates that any purportedly revolutionary organization that is too reliant or wedded to top down decision making and the concomitant creation of a culture of membership obedience or compliance is likely to miss what’s under its nose.

None of this is meant to downplay the significance or need of security or measures to maintain a Party’s viability and effectiveness, considerations that become pressing the more oppressive and reactionary the prevailing context. The activities of the Czar’s secret police, the Okhrana, gave the Social Democrats, Bolsheviks, Mensheviks et al good reason to take those activities seriously. So too the activities of the Italian fascist secret police OVRA, the organization upon which the Nazi Gestapo was modelled, not to forget the Gestapo itself. But none of this could justify closing the minds of party members. Caution, in the face of external danger is not the same, and should not be confused with, closed or narrow mindedness in the face of such danger. Paranoid mindsets can be cultivated.

The most influential, and moving, account from a communist who kept the distinction between external danger and internal openness as distinct as circumstances would allow comes from Julius Fucik and his Report From the Gallows. Fucik, a central committee member of the Czech Party, was arrested and gaoled in 1942 and executed the following year. With the assistance of two patriotic cum anti fascist prison warders  he was able to write and smuggle out notes of his experiences and thoughts, his report from the gallows. I came across Fucik’s work in the mid to late 1970’s and, given recent events, I found it refreshing, insightful and invigorating. Here was a man experiencing the harshest of treatments, knowing that death was near, yet still embracing life rather than merely clinging to it. What I found particularly impressive was his ability to listen, to want to understand what made his jailers and wardens, most of whom came from working class stock, tick. Much of the book is devoted to what are dubbed in my edition “Figures and Little Figures”, nuanced reflections on comrades (Figures) and those in a more mixed bag, such as the prison superintendent who were certainly enemies and others among the wardens who deserved a deeper level of understanding (Little Figures), His ability to reflect upon and engage with both/all sides of contradictions was an ability, it would seem, that was absent, or certainly wanting in the CPUSA and the CPA M-L 

One of the things Fucik’s book did for me was to reinforce or make less abstract the absurdity of the CPA M-L adopting the same organizational structure as that used by the Czech and, I presume, other communist parties in occupied Europe (three member cell structures with one reporting higher up the chain, secrecy over membership etc). In occupied Europe this made a lot of sense – it was about survival. But not in the Australia we lived in. And in attempting to explain the rationale for its being, without getting sidetracked in theoretical bushland, the temptation to reach for the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (American Psychiatric Association) to determine the clinical criteria is difficult to resist. ‘Fucked’ seems an appropriate term to use that bridges the theoretical/clinical divide.

It is tempting to see my use of the concept ‘fuckedness’ as somewhat flippant. And to a degree it is because the ‘clinical’ component can seem like a cheap shot. But there is also a serious side to this that goes well beyond the drab manifestations I and others saw in the CPA-ML or the more disturbing, but not yet out of control manifestations that Wright witnessed and was subjected to. The example I wish to point to is the fate that befell the El Salvadoran revolutionary poet Roque Dalton who was murdered by elements in his own party with whom he was in disagreement over the importance of the party developing a mass base if it were to have any chance of overthrowing the regime. Unsurprisingly perhaps, given his murder, Dalton was argueing the importance of developing a mass base.

Dalton’s poetry is worth chasing up and to give a flavour of it – and of its relevance to this post – the following is the first stanza of his Dialectic of Genesis, Crisis and Rebirth:

‘For you we will not put the Party on an altar/Because you taught us that the Party/is an organism which lives in the real world/and it’s sickness is the same as bankruptcy/Because of you we know, Lenin/That the best crib for the Party/Is fire’

A bitter irony exposed in these lines is that Dalton’s murderers, and those who sanctioned it, were trying to put out the fire.

The fire that Dalton was speaking of, was not simply, or even primarily, that of the class enemy, whose fire belongs in the blindingly obvious department, but, as with Mao’s view of swimming against the tide being a revolutionary principle, refers to internal fire. Using gentler language, but making the same point, Wright referred to this as a “nurturing environment”. To see the meaning of this sentiment as being only directed against the tide generated by one’s political foes misses the point.

The proposition, be that stated openly or assumed, that the party line is, by definition correct, is a reflection of one sided, non dialectical thinking, the heritage of which comes more from medieval or pre medieval mind sets than modernist ones. If ever history were able to assume a sentient human form its reaction to the idea that leadership, be that in revolutionary organizations or not, automatically confers correctness and is thus deserving of deference, would be hysterical rolfing.

Our experience in the CPA M-L exposed political fuckedness, an organizational suspicion cum aversion to internal democratic processes, and a gift for paranoid thinking. This also seems to be the case in Wright’s experience of the CPUSA. The same cannot be said for Dalton’s. Politically fucked, certainly. But his murder exposed something pathalogical that was not only not organizationally contained, but was organizationally facilitated.

Revolutionary movements and parties in the developed world have disintegrated leaving in their wake a smug capitalist class and an opportunist and reactionary ‘left’ cum pseudo left drawn to every form of oppression other than that of class. It is ironic and certainly telling that we now live in an age where the capitalist class is quite happy to bend to and accommodate ‘woke’ agendas. And why not? The property question, the goal of expropriating the expropriators, has been successfully swept under the carpet. No prizes for guessing who/what has been doing most of the sweeping.

One of the tasks of a reemergent and genuine revolutionary left, will be to clean up its act regarding democratic processes; or to borrow from Dalton, to actually understand that the best crib or nurturing environment for its existence and growth is ‘fire’. It is not enough that a leadership pays lip service to the idea, as opposed to the practice of criticism and self criticism, reducing it to an auto de fe in the process. It must be open and be seen as being open, to itself being a target of fire.

One of the things communist parties, in whatever form their new iterations take, will need to do is to ensure that, to paraphrase and tweak Wright, the environment it creates is large enough to nourish the development and growth of rebellious and critical spirits, spirits who can not only keep an active eye and involvement on fire that is externally targeted and generated, but internally generated and directed.

Reflections on my trip to China in 1971, and the eventual victory of the ‘capitalist roaders’

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China 1971

An old comrade and friend recently wrote some of his reflections on his trip to China in 1978. This prompted me to write about my own time there, a month in May 1971. I was one of 19 Australians on a delegation organized by the Australia-China Friendship Society. Our aim was to promote the campaign for the establishment of diplomatic relations with China. Nearly all of us were sympathetic to the Chinese revolution, and a core was Maoists. The tour leader was the communist leader of Melbourne’s wharfies, Ted Bull. He often called in Jim Bacon and I for discussions on the trip, which makes me think we were his ‘deputies’.

My friend’s account of China in 1978, when he went there, makes me realize how quickly things can change. I must say that I disagree with his assessment of Deng Xiaoping as a ‘great man’. I take the opposite view, and shall explain why in relation to the features in China that attracted and inspired me back then, in 1971.

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My memories of the 1971 trip remain strong for a number of reasons. Firstly, during the 1970s, I gave talks and showed my slides about the trip on more than a hundred occasions. I only had a cheap ‘plastic’ camera but took 400 photographic slides. Incidentally, I was never stopped from taking photos over there.

In 1971, there was great interest in ‘Red China’ in Australia and it was sensational for any Australian to have ventured beyond ‘the Bamboo Curtain’. I remember a neighbor in my street in Brunswick asking, with great concern, as to whether I was worried that they might not let me out. I explained to the neighbor that China wanted a more open relationship with the world and that it was the Australian government that had placed tight restrictions on ordinary people travelling there.

During the 1980s and 1990s, I continued to show my slides but much less frequently. I last showed them about five years ago when some Chinese friends of a friend were visiting Australia and my friend told me the visitors would love to see slides of their homeland from way back in 1971. Their reactions to my commentary and slides suggested that ‘the past (really) is a foreign country – they do things differently there’. The visitors were very loyal to the current philosophy and policies of the Chinese Communist Party and had a kind of nostalgic attachment to the Mao period.

A few years prior to that I had shown the slides to one of the mums at the local school. My wife had told her that I had been to China and met Zhou Enlai. This young mum, whose parents were Chinese and had lived through the Cultural Revolution, was thrilled to meet me and to see the slides. She was gushing with enthusiasm to meet someone who had actually shaken the hand of the late Premier. Born years after Zhou’s death, she none the less gushed: “We Chinese LOVE Premier Zhou!”

My memories were also kept alive by an oral history project I recorded for the National Library in 2013 in which I interviewed several of those who were on the 1971 trip. Their memories and reflections, from the perspective of ‘now’, were fascinating and revived more of my own recollections. Later, I persuaded the Library to allow me to record the memories of members of the Australian table tennis team – the ‘ping-pong diplomats’ – who we met in Beijing in May 1971. It was another fascinating project. One of the players described to me the difference in the attitude of the everyday people in the eastern bloc, where he had also competed in table tennis, and those in China. The vibe of enthusiasm in China was a marked contrast, he told me, to the drabness and crushing sense of alienation in East Germany and other Soviet bloc countries.

I could relate to what he said because, wherever we went in China, the vibe in the streets was one of friendliness, happiness, engagement and curiosity. Perhaps all this was staged, but there were times when it couldn’t have been – such as when Jim Bacon and I told our guides in Shanghai that we wanted to go shopping and that we were confident we could manage on our own without a guide or interpreter. It is a humorous but insightful anecdote that I always tell with my slide show (but too long and complicated to take up space here). We were more or less mobbed by the locals, many of who sported Mao badges and all of whom seemed very happy people. I can imagine their vibe was not terribly different to that in other revolutionary societies, including the unleashing of enthusiasm during and immediately after the English civil war and the period in America when the British were defeated and Washington elected unanimously by the Congress as the first President.

Anyway all this has kept the memories alive for me.

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Like my old friend, I was keen to see socialism in action. I had read a fair bit of theory and there were detailed accounts by westerners like the American communist William Hinton who had spent long periods living there among the peasants and workers, poet Rewi Alley and novelist Han Suyin, and scholarly works by Joan Robinson, professor of economics at Cambridge University. It was Robinson’s book on the cultural revolution, published in 1968, that influenced me in terms of the Maoist view of the relationship between the economic base of a society and its superstructure. The deterministic brand of Marxism that saw the relationship as a one-way street was rejected by Mao and developed into a nuanced understanding that the superstructure, the culture, customs, and habits, can impact on the base of a society with such power as to turn it into its opposite (ie, under socialism, restoring capitalist social relations of production).

The source of the regressive impact was not ‘socialist’ but feudalist. In terms of ‘custom’ etc that reflects and in turn pushes the ongoing development of socialism, we are talking of a lengthy process (which is why Mao spoke of the need for many cultural revolutions). Feudalism was collectivist because there was no other choice: the individual, rights, and expectations being severely constrained. And it was this cultural drag that was able to present aspects of itself as ‘socialist’. The communists were waging a struggle on two fronts – against feudal ideas and practices (the latter of these especially because they can present themselves as ideologically free zones) and the emerging bourgeois ones that were also able to present themselves as revolutionary (and to the degree they were anti-feudal, they were).

Thus, it made sense to wage ‘cultural revolution’ against those in the communist party who sought to perpetuate bourgeois values of selfishness over serving the people, competitiveness over cooperation, and personal acquisition of great wealth, as a virtue. The much-promoted slogan for the socialist ethic at the time was ‘Serve the people’.

I could readily relate to this distinctively Maoist outlook for two main reasons: I was very much the “Arts” type and into subjectivity. I was easily moved by music, film and poetry. I loved expressing myself through writing and art and music. Mao emphasized human agency in the materialist dialectic. Marx had dealt with the power of subjectivity in the interaction between base and superstructure in footnotes – Mao pushed it centre-stage at a time when socialism was being built in China. Secondly, I felt part of a youth rebellion in the late 1960s. It took many forms, from rock music to opposition to censorship and rejection of notions of obedience. I grew my hair long. One day, walking along my street in Brunswick, a bloke in a Holden drove by, slowed down, and yelled out, “Get a haircut, ya poofta!” From that day on, I pledged to myself I’d be a ‘long hair’. (Even now, when Nature has placed a prohibition on me doing so, I at least like to grow a pony-tail). This ‘youth revolt’ was global and, as in China, we were challenging the old assumptions and the old ways. So, I went to China in 1971 very keen to see this playing out.

William Hinton’s book, ‘Fanshen’, based on his life with a commune, was a very detailed description of daily routines under conditions of land redistribution and ‘New Democracy’, with power placed in the hands of the people through revolutionary committees – similar to Russia’s earlier soviets – in which workers and peasants could directly elect their managers and recall them at any time by popular vote. These committees elected representatives to higher bodies and, in turn, they elected representatives still higher up. But the beauty of the revolutionary committee system, to me, was that the workers and peasants had a real say in the economic direction of their local community and the bigger society. It was the exact opposite power structure to that in Australia and other capitalist societies where, at best, you might have a corporation appointing a union boss to a board of management.

So, I was keen to see how these revolutionary committees worked.

****

I won’t go into detail here – I could write much more about all this – but I’ll list five principal features of China’s revolutionary life that inspired me and that I experienced during May 1971.

  1. The revolutionary committees. We met with cadres from two such committees (from memory) and one that I remember clearly (again, thanks to the slide showings) was based in a rolling stock and locomotive factory. The workers had produced surplus stock and the revolutionary committee convened a mass meeting to decide what the workers wanted to do with the surplus. We were told they decided to donate it to the government of Tanzania, where a railway was being built. The socialist ethic of ‘serving the people’ was not nationalistic but based on international solidarity. I returned to Melbourne and to La Trobe University with an almost evangelical zeal to convey what I knew about the revolutionary committees. One of our student demands was for ‘student power’. We even had to struggle for a student representative on the governing body of the university – indeed, in 1969, I received my first penalty for political protest on the campus when I was ‘severely reprimanded’ for being part of a deputation that ‘invaded’ the Council chambers during a Council meeting to demand student representation. We also wanted students to have the right to observe Council meetings.

 

  1. Big Character Posters. These were, in a sense, the Internet of the day. While the Cultural Revolution was dying down in 1971, with Mao concerned about the ultra-leftists and violence between the various ‘true Maoist’ factions, the Big Character posters were apparent in schools and streets. These were forms of grass-roots expression, usually expressing local grievances and/or criticizing capitalist-roaders within the communist party. The posters were something that anyone could do – hence my analogy with the Internet.

 

  1. Who needs a Navy? I’ll never forget meeting with party cadres and discussing the military threats to China from the Soviet social-imperialists (the Ussuri River border being a dangerous hot spot where fighting had broken out in 1969) and from the US imperialists in Indo-China and the Pacific. We were told that China’s military strategy was entirely defensive and based on the Peoples Liberation Army and civil defense. My ears pricked up when mention was made of a coastal naval defense force. I asked, “Why doesn’t China have a conventional Navy – why just a small coastal guard?” The reply, which I’ll never forget, was that “China does not need a Navy because we have no intention of expanding our interests beyond China. We shall never become imperialist! Only imperialists need a large powerful Navy!”

 

  1. Social ownership of property and poverty/progress. When Marx spoke of ‘private property’ he meant the means of production, not one’s spectacles or shoes. China’s communes were based on collective ownership of land once owned by individuals and formerly run in pursuit of maximizing the profit to the landlords. Socialism is social ownership of means of production. When that is lost, then you no longer have socialism. The grass-roots’ enthusiasm that I saw in China, and that people like William Hinton, Han Suyin and Rewi Alley wrote about based on experience living there, confirmed to me that society does not need greed or the pursuit of individual profit as a motivator for innovation. I saw things that were indicators of progress, especially in housing and, at the same time, I also saw a level of poverty that did not exist anywhere in Australia’s regions and cities. This was not disillusioning, though, because I knew, from works like Edgar Snow’s ‘Red Star over China’, what conditions had been like for the peasants pre-1949, when they had to eat bark off trees or hand over their children to landlords in lieu of rent. We met elderly folk who recalled the bad old days, usually with tears, and who described how their personal lives had changed for the better. Yes, they could have been party stooges, reciting by rote what the party bosses were forcing them to say. If that were the case, then China had some truly magnificent actors, individuals worthy of Academy awards. They seemed very genuine to me.

 

On the topic of progress, I’ll relate an episode when we visited a waterfront. With the assistance of an interpreter, Ted Bull was invited to speak to the Chinese waterside workers. Ted began by telling them that conditions on the wharves in Melbourne were superior to what he had seen in China. I was rather surprised by his frankness. He explained that this had been achieved by struggle, hard struggle, over many decades. He said that they had to struggle because the waterside workers were more or less ‘owned’ for the period of their labour by the ship owners and other capitalists. He told the Chinese workers that the big difference in China was that they had much greater ‘ownership’ of themselves as a class and could thus progress through struggle of a different kind, such as the struggle to develop better ways of improving safety on the job and better ways of innovating and producing stuff. He hardly needed to point out that socialist China had begun from a far less developed starting-point.

 

5    Politics in command – It is right to rebel!  In 1971, there were still signs of revolutionary enthusiasm such as big character posters and anti-imperialist and anti-racism billboards. Whenever we met with cadres, they were intensely political – politics was in command. The politics was based on dialectical understanding – the cadres often spoke about the on-going struggle between the two lines within the communist party. The notion of rebellion as a positive value struck me – but I may have been projecting my own values onto the situation. One would have to live there for many years to grasp anything like that – as William Hinton did. In 1971 I was living and breathing politics as an activist at La Trobe University, and had been since 1968/69. A highly politicized society strikes me as an engaged one: a participatory democracy. Apathy and cynicism are tantamount to surrender. Our struggles at La Trobe had no room for either.

 

****

 

Those five features, whether accurate or not, and whether a product of idealised rose-coloured glasses or not, struck me as essentials of socialism, of the dictatorship of the proletariat (ie, the replacement of the rule by the 0.1% with the rule of the 99.9%); things that would really take off with even greater success under conditions of advanced industrial capitalism. There was occasionally theoretical discussion in Melbourne about whether it was possible to ‘jump’ mature capitalist development from a semi-feudal society into socialism. At the time, I believed it was possible.

 

But each of those five features was gradually reversed following the coup – ‘regime change’ – after Mao’s death in 1976. And this leads me to why I have no time at all for Deng Xiaoping, the architect of ‘capitalism with Chinese characteristics’.

 

****

 

At the time of the coup in China, I merely followed the party line, the CPA(ML) line. I’d been like that for too many years – an obedient follower rather than a critical reflective thinker, researcher and debater. That was the negative of my experience for most of the 1970s. Dogmatism, group think, formula-thinking, failure to investigate and think for myself… and worst of all: obedience. I may have still called myself a ‘Maoist’ but I was far from being one. Of course, to rebel within the CPA(ML) was not easy and had bad personal consequences, especially if you were dependent on a social life based around others who also tended to have become dogmatic and obedient. (I could write a book about this period).

 

To the extent that I did think about it in the late 1970s and early 1980s, I regarded the rise of Deng as a positive move; something along the lines of Lenin’s New Economic Policy and the beginning of a modernization process (something Mao had wanted and which was clearly needed) rather than a regime change ushering in a completely different path. I would have agreed with the idea that Deng was a ‘great man’. The ‘Gang of Four’, I speculated (in the absence of any investigation or evidence), were ultra-leftists who put sloganeering above economic development. Closer to home, we had the Red Eureka Movement, who supported the Gang of Four – and (nearly) everyone in the party knew they were ‘no good’ and heaven help you if you suggested, even mildly, that they might have had a few good points. And, further, their ‘leader’, Albert Langer, was a CIA agent –a definite fact according to Duncan Clarke and other veterans. Of course, it was nonsense (and I’m ashamed to say I went along with such nonsense, for too long).

 

My doubts about Deng were slow to develop and I was able to question what had happened more freely after I resigned from the party late in 1980 or early 1981. I opened my mind to different possibilities about him and followed events in China more closely. And listened to the range of opinions and analyses on offer.

 

Something that struck me as strange was that the western media, almost unanimously, praised Deng and admired him. This usually doesn’t happen to genuine communists while they are alive. They are usually vilified and demonized by the capitalist press. But, no, Deng was almost heroic to some pro-capitalist western outlets: he was ‘opening up’ China’s economy by facilitating a market aspect. Well, I figured, maybe that is needed. Let’s see.

 

Then, in the early 1980s, I learned that the revolutionary committees had been disbanded in 1978 – not by the workers and peasants but from above. The revolutionary committees had formed the backbone of China’s New Democracy for more than a decade. No wonder the capitalist media was glowing in their admiration for Deng. In 1982, I also read about how the Chinese regime had banned the Big Character posters. This was done as part of the revision of the Constitution no less. Apparently, genuine rebellious types in China were using the posters to challenge the corruption that grew with the new market direction. Defiantly, other rebellious types revived them seven years later and, despite being unlawful, they became ubiquitous during the June Fourth protests in 1989.

 

It seemed to me that China under Deng’s influence might be going down the capitalist road as had happened in the Soviet Union but it didn’t preoccupy me as an issue. I was now living and studying in Sydney, enjoying life more, and this issue only arose for me through my reading of ‘Vanguard’ and newsletters of the Red Eureka Movement and occasional contact with former and current party members who wanted to talk about it.

 

I was easily influenced by others during the 1980s but I had at least started thinking again. I suppose ‘confused’ would be the best word to describe myself at that time. I’d read damning stuff about ‘the real Mao’ and been influenced by that, and then a counterpoint would come along and I’d feel okay about him again. The western media rightly portrayed Deng in contradistinction to Mao. They got that right. Either way, I still adhered to the values embodied in those five features of China in 1971 that impressed me so much. I still believed that socialism could work and offered something better, more innovative and productive, less alienating, more democratic and more conducive to the development of the full human being, than capitalism.

 

Then came another clanger for Deng in my eyes. “To get rich is glorious”. Really? Glorious? What happened to the socialist ethic: Serve the people? In 1986 in a Sixty Minutes interview, Deng did not deny saying that but tried to justify it by claiming he meant “For society to get rich is glorious”. In the context of the widening of the market economy under the reforms he supported, it was entirely plausible that what he meant was individuals getting rich was glorious. This is certainly supported by his other claim: “Let some people get rich first”.

 

And what was happening to the communist slogan, ‘Keep politics in command’? According to Deng, it was a case of “It doesn’t matter whether the cat is black or white so long as it catches mice”.

SAY WHAT??!!

 

****

 

During the 1980s, I had friends who visited China. Gone were the days of the early 1970s when the tourist industry was barely developed over there (which actually meant a greater degree of freedom for tourists, as I found in 1971). In the 1980s, the tourist industry was becoming large and sophisticated, and more controlled. Anecdotal evidence from my friends indicated that there had been a profound cultural change in China, reflecting the development of market capitalism. My friends would complain about how on every street corner in Beijing or Nanjing or wherever, someone was trying to sell you something. Everyone, they said, seemed to be out to make a fast buck. “To get rich is glorious”!

 

Still, around the mid-1980s, I still wouldn’t have felt confident to argue with anyone about all this. But then, in 1989, something happened to clinch it all: a ghastly massacre of young students and workers who had occupied Tiananmen Square to protest against government corruption. In rolled the tanks. And even the corpses were crushed.

 

A perennial question for any leftist confronted me: whose side was I on? Against the insistence of a handful of party loyalists (who struck me as increasingly eccentric) that it was all a foreign plot, I sided with the rebels, the protestors, the courageous ones, the ones without the tanks, the ‘long hairs’. And it wasn’t only because some sang ‘The Internationale’. It was because their cause was just, and their suppression despicable and completely unjust. (The Waterdale Road demonstrations from La Trobe University in 1970, which were violently attacked by police who made two arrests at gunpoint, were a pleasant afternoon tea party by comparison).

 

In my eyes, Deng – who was chairman of the central military commission in 1989 and had argued for swift military intervention – was clearly a social-fascist. Mao would have described him as such.

 

Marxist William Hinton’s book, ‘The Great Reversal: the privatization of China, 1978-1989’ provides an abundance of evidence and elaboration for all the above. He lived and worked there for many years, including during the 1980s.

 

On the Cultural Revolution, I recommend Mobo Gao’s ‘The battle for China’s past’ and Dongping Han’s ‘The unknown Cultural Revolution: life and change in a Chinese village’ for evidence-based alternatives to the mainstream understanding promoted through the media and universities.

 

 

*************************************************

ROB DARBY (1953-2019): Interviewed in 1982, 1983, 1984 and 1989 by John Herouvim for thesis on the Communist Party of Australia (Marxist-Leninist)

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The following transcript of an interview with my long-time friend, Rob Darby, who died in March this year, is based on interview sessions recorded in the 1980s by John Herouvim (who died in 1995). I know that Rob would have no problems with it being published more than 30 years later.

I have edited out the names of living persons, unless they are public figures.

The transcript may be of historical interest. The CPA(ML) quickly became a zombie party in the 1970s (I was one) and the transcript may help in understanding how and why this can happen.

I also recommend this article: https://c21stleft.com/2014/12/12/fascism-and-the-left-from-red-eureka-movement-november-1980/

 

* * * *

 

ROB DARBY: Interviewed in 1982, 1983, 1984 and 1989 by John Herouvim for thesis on the Communist Party of Australia (Marxist-Leninist) undertaken in the History Department at La Trobe University and supervised by Dr Peter Cook.

 

Tape 1, 22 August 1982

 

JOHN HEROUVIM: Interview with ROB DARBY, 22 August 1982. Okay, let’s start with the details. Your age?

 

ROB DARBY: Twenty-nine.

 

JOHN HEROUVIM: Your work?

 

ROB DARBY: I work in the Commonwealth Public Service.

 

JOHN HEROUVIM: When did you join the party [CPA(ML)]?

 

ROB DARBY: In 1976.

 

JOHN HEROUVIM: Do you remember when in ’76?

 

ROB DARBY: The same time that the USS Truxtun was visiting. The second half of the year, August or September.

 

JOHN HEROUVIM: I’ll track that down. Are you still a member of the party? When did you resign?

 

ROB DARBY: I never sent in any formal resignation but I don’t consider myself a member.

 

JOHN HEROUVIM: To what extent was the party’s connection with China, or its sister/brother relationship with the Chinese Communist Party, a factor in your support for it and your joining it?

 

ROB DARBY: It wasn’t a factor in my joining the party. I was first attracted to the party in 1974. For two reasons. Firstly, because a long-standing friend of mine was urging me to take an interest and I was following his example. But secondly and probably equally significantly, I was at that stage a member of the CPA [Communist Party of Australia] and having gone through the early 1970s, sort of radicalizing and in particular having developed an interest in Marxism, and having joined the CPA largely because a faction in it – the Carlton branch – offered intellectual stimulation of the kinds of Marxist works that I’d been reading. In particular they were sort of followers of Althusser who I’d just read a lot of, and it seemed to me very exciting that there were actually people around who were trying to put his ideas into practice. So I joined the CPA to be with what was then the Carlton branch or the ‘Adelaide Tendency’. That was in early 1974. The CPA Congress was held in the middle of that year.

I’d never really, at that stage, supported many of the CPA’s policies. In particular, I was very much against its sort of reformist attitudes towards trade union issues and towards the ALP, and even at that stage I was pretty much opposed to the Soviet Union which I regarded as an imperialist power. So during 1974, I first began to read copies of ‘Vanguard’, and the thing that attracted me to it at first and most decisively was its hostile attitude toward the ALP. I found this very much in accord with what I understood Lenin, which I’d been reading, and a very welcome relief from the mealy-mouthed apologetic attitude of the CPA. So, that was… I remember quite clearly that the attitude to the ALP was the decisive factor that encouraged me to keep reading Vanguard. In 1974, too, I was very much, in thought at least if not in actions, very much an ultra-leftist. You know, sort of a ‘red hot’ revolutionary… extremely pure and this sort of thing.

I think the CPA(ML) at that stage was going through a very leftist phase and the rhetoric of Vanguard was very appealing. China came in, only because China opposed revisionism. China sort of stood for the revolutionary purity of Marxism-Leninism and opposed the bureaucratic stagnation that we saw in the Soviet Union. And at that stage, of course, the heroes of the cultural revolution were still in power, and this was what I regarded as the correct revolutionary thing to do. Keep the revolution going, oppose stagnation, oppose bureaucrats consolidating power, fight revisionism, you know, support revolutionary movements all over the world. China stood for those things. China was good. But I never had any sentimental attraction to China. I never sort of looked to it as a ‘socialist motherland’ or a beacon. It was just that the Chinese represented, you know, the application of Marxism, the continuing application of revolutionary principles, as opposed to the Soviet Union.

 

JOHN HEROUVIM: Well, the big one: In your view, to what extent do you think the party was influenced or controlled, or whatever, by China? And do any specific examples of that come to mind?

 

ROB DARBY: Yes, well when I was in the party, I cherished the view that what was said in Vanguard was true, namely that it was just a fraternal party, that they had ideas in common, that they were both striving for Marxism-Leninism and that there was an identity of views rather than any kind of influence one way or the other. At least that was my impression at first. My conclusion is that indeed the party virtually hung on every word that came from China. There are numerous examples of that, not the least of which is that every time that Xinhua [China’s news agency] found a new issue in the world, Vanguard would duly take it up as a crucial issue for Australian communists to be concerned about. A classic case in my own experience was when – I was not in the party at that stage – but a group of friends at La Trobe University, amongst whom I was, and one had written an article asserting that Australia was in the Third World and this was duly published in ‘Australian Communist’ [journal], only to be retracted in the following issue, under a great cloud and storm, because the Chinese view was that Australia was in the Second World. It was quite clear that China had said that this was absolute nonsense.

 

JOHN HEROUVIM: In what way was it clear? How do you know that it was…?

 

ROB DARBY: It was clear because the person who worked on Vanguard said that’s what the Chinese had said. I suppose that’s hearsay. The other classic instance was over the arrest of the so-called ‘Gang of Four’, a fairly obvious example. The only details that I want to add is that shortly before that incident took place, I recall a discussion with some people – I don’t know whether they were party members or not but certainly close associates – and we were talking about how close the party was to China and I remember saying at the time that if there was a counter-revolutionary coup in China and the radicals were deposed, the party would support the radicals. Someone else there expressed the view that there were so many Sinophiles in the party that they would simply follow whatever the leadership decided was right, and almost to the letter that prophesy was fulfilled. I was working in the Vanguard office at the time of the arrest of the Gang of Four and there’s no doubt that but for my direct and more or less continuous contact with Duncan Clarke, the editor of Vanguard, I would have supported the radicals because they had been heroes and the very ideas which had led me to the party in the first place. And there was no real discussion, Duncan didn’t actually say anything about what was right, what was wrong for a couple of days, when he received a telegram from [Ted] Hill who was visiting Albania. Then he suddenly announced that they were publishing a statement in Vanguard in support of [Premier] Hua [Guofeng] and this was on the basis of no more than assurances Hill had received in Albania from the Chinese representatives.

 

JOHN HEROUVIM: How would you sum up the relationship between the Chinese party and the Australian party?

 

ROB DARBY: My impression is that the Australian party wanted a lot more control than the Chinese party were prepared to provide; a case of being ‘more Royalist than the King’. The Chinese were quite happy to have a party that was sympathetic but not subservient, except on major issues. But it was quite clear that in the leadership of the party itself there were those who wanted to be told what to do. They literally wanted a Big Brother and guardian along the correct path.

 

JOHN HEROUVIM: Was there anything in particular that gave you that impression?

 

ROB DARBY: Oh, there are definite incidents which, being reported to me… Can we turn it off for a minute?

 

[Tape turned off, then resumes]

 

JOHN HEROUVIM: In your view, then, how would you explain both the subservience and the desire for more subservience that you’ve mentioned on the part of the party leadership? I mean what did the party leaders and the party organisation from this relationship? What are the bases for that relationship?

 

ROB DARBY: Well, I think there are several bases. The first is an ideological one. The leaders of the party are all old men who’d come to communism in the 1930s when the Soviet Union was the socialist beacon. The views of communists all over the world was primarily to defend and support the Soviet Union, particularly during the War when it was menaced by the armies of fascism. This policy became extremely entrenched. Hill’s admitted, even in his recent publications, that in those days the party was far too subservient to the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and tended to play Soviet interests above Australian interests. It’s quite clear to me that the same attitudes coloured their relationship with China. It’s a very engrained kind of practice that you just can’t shake off. He seems to be of the opinion that the CPA(ML) has, but that’s just an assertion.

The other aspect is more a material one. When the split took place in the early 1960s, the Chinese provided a great deal of material assistance to the new party. Without their support, partly in the form of simply sending publications for sale and partly in the form of actually paying Duncan Clarke to be the Xinhua representative, and thereby in quite a major sense subsidizing the production of Vanguard, it’s very unlikely the new party would have got off the ground. And Duncan continued to be paid as Xinhua representative, as I understand, certainly until 1979 or 1980, so there was a direct financial aspect as well.

 

JOHN HEROUVIM: Do you have any views on, given the habit of subservience to a ‘socialist motherland’ of some description, why a group of people within the CPA should…

 

ROB DARBY: CPA or CPA(ML)?

 

JOHN HEROUVIM: …CPA… should switch their allegiance, in the context of the Sino-Soviet split, from the Soviet Union to China?

 

ROB DARBY: Well, this would just be speculation on my part…

 

JOHN HEROUVIM: Yes.

 

ROB DARBY: I think it had a lot to do with the evaluation of Stalin. I mean, again, these people had grown up with Stalin as the hero and father figure, and to find him denounced was a very great shock, and hence it’s logical that they would want to remain loyal to whatever international communist force would continue to recognize Stalin as a major figure. That’s not the whole story, of course, because, no doubt, I don’t believe that their motives were insincere. I’m sure they were sincere and believed that’s the CPA was revisionist and the Soviet Union’s policies were counter-revolutionary in some instances and they had a soft attitude to the state and to class struggle. They wanted a more fiery revolutionary spirit and I think they supported the Chinese position for that reason as well. I doubt that would have been strong enough without the denunciation of Stalin.

 

JOHN HEROUVIM: To your knowledge, were there any instances of disagreement on matters of policy between the Chinese and Australian parties?

 

ROB DARBY: Oh, I don’t know.

 

JOHN HEROUVIM: When Chinese policies changed, and you know, often changed completely overnight, before policies corresponding to the Chinese policies were adopted by the CPA(ML), were members consulted first or was there any sort of gauging of membership opinion before party opinion was brought into line with the new Chinese policy?

 

ROB DARBY: There was never any party discussion of any policy statement or any policy adopted by the party publicly. The usual pattern was for an idea to be aired in Vanguard as a contributed article, then backed up by a non-contributed article and finally stated as policy by a leading article or editorial. But at no stage was there any internal discussion of any of these things. At the very most, we’d be given a chance to comment on the policy as already formulated and announced. Never has any policy been changed as a result of internal discussion. The classic case, of course, was the Chinese change of line following the arrest of the Gang of Four when we were given Hill’s pamphlet to study. I recall that somebody had the temerity, in response to the invitation, to criticize this pamphlet as being rather unconvincing and they were simply told that it was a classic piece of Marxist-Leninist analysis and anyone who criticized it must be totally bourgeois.

 

JOHN HEROUVIM: I’d like to mention a number of policies and attitudes that were fundamental to the CPA(ML) especially under the period under consideration, 1972 to 1977, and seek your opinion as to the extent to which there was any Chinese influence involved in the adoption and propagation of these policies.

 

ROB DARBY: You need to remember that I was only directly involved in the last two of those years.

 

JOHN HEROUVIM: Right, okay. Everything I’m going to mention has relevance to those two years. The concept of revolution by stages, of independence being a prerequisite to socialism.

 

ROB DARBY: Sorry, what do you want me to say?

 

JOHN HEROUVIM: Well, do you think that policy owes anything to the party’s relationship with China?

 

ROB DARBY: I had understood that it was a result of the study of the Vietnamese experience. But I have no direct knowledge of how that policy came to be formulated.

 

JOHN HEROUVIM: The party’s attitude toward the Soviet Union.

 

ROB DARBY: I think it’s quite clear that they simply took over the Chinese analysis of that. They did not decide of their own accord that the Soviet Union was a capitalist imperialist power. Having got that analysis from China, they were quite prepared to find evidence to support it, but the origin of the view is definitely directly from China.

 

JOHN HEROUVIM: What about, in a broader context, the general attitude towards demonstrations and the need for militancy and the applauding of militant action at demonstrations? The general position that the CPA(ML) took up within the left of always advocating the most extreme slogans?

 

ROB DARBY: Well that was certainly the case until 1977 and even later, despite the change of line in China. It kept on, with the Chinese style of the cultural revolution, for some time afterwards. The party’s whole history coincided with that period of what the Chinese now denounce as the ultra-leftism of the cultural revolution period. Big demonstrations, militant struggle, that kind of thing. The party took that to heart and, yes, I think that’s where they got it from.  It’s also, I think, true that any left sect trying to be more left than the rest is inevitably going to put forward more militant type slogans and more militant demands. I mean, the Trotskyite sects are the classic example of that. They don’t get their militancy from China or anywhere else. It’s just that they’re more left and have to sound more extreme. I think there’s an element of that in the CPA(ML)’s policy as well.

 

JOHN HEROUVIM: Can you elaborate at all on your own experience from things that you saw or did, on the degree of indirect Chinese input in the sense of the cultural revolution and the style, methods and slogans of the cultural revolution within the party?

 

ROB DARBY: I’d really need to go back and analyse it, analyse the kind of leaflets we wrote and compare them with the kinds of slogans that came out during the cultural revolution. But the style was a highly confrontationist one. Enemies were multiplied enormously. Anybody who disagreed on a minor issue was denounced in extremely strong terms. The whole emphasis was on asserting an extreme position rather than winning allies or trying to win support to a line or argument that might be expected to gain adherents. ‘Confrontationist’ is probably the best single word to describe the style of operation. The language that we used was very much a Chinese language from that period. It’s easy enough to give examples from leaflets but I can’t think of any at the moment.

 

JOHN HEROUVIM: What about the party’s analysis of, and approach to action, around the time of the sacking of the Whitlam government at the end of 1975?

 

ROB DARBY: The strange thing is – it has to be remembered that I wasn’t a member of the party at this time – the strange thing is that the party appeared to have no policy and didn’t appear to be organising anything. One of the things I remember most vividly about the night of November 11th was that Ted Bull couldn’t be contacted because he was at a performance of the Chinese Philharmonic Orchestra or some such visiting Chinese musical group. As I said, I wasn’t a member of the party then but I was with that group of La Trobe students who were members of the party, and as far as I could see then, and nothing that has happened since has shown me otherwise, they were the only people doing anything. My impression is that, apart from bringing out a special edition of Vanguard a couple of days later, the party was doing absolutely nothing. The whole thing about the party was that its organisation – I mean, we talk about its policies and so forth but these are very largely what’s written in Vanguard – the actual organisation, actually doing things, is very hard to work out, even when it happened, because of their diffused organisational structure and the absence of any normal forms of organisation.

 

JOHN HEROUVIM: Apart from what’s been mentioned so far, the party had attitudes to economic struggles – well, let me isolate one other thing before I go on to general things – parliamentary and trade union politics, its attitude to them.

 

ROB DARBY: Well, I don’t know whether… I’m inclined to think that they didn’t owe very much to China. Unless… because, of course, in China neither of those things were a feature of the pre-revolutionary situation and this might have ironically forced the party to developing its own views on these questions. And, as I said earlier, these were the issues on which I was initially most attracted to the party. I think possibly more than anything else these were the result of the party leaders’ own experience in Australia. Certainly, Hill’s ‘Looking backward, looking forward’ is the result of the reflections of someone who’s been a communist and workers’ compensation lawyer over a long period. I don’t think they owe a lot to China.

 

JOHN HEROUVIM: Policies on an assortment of other issues that seem to be connected solely with Australia – health schemes, uranium, freeways and so on – do you see them in a similar way?

 

ROB DARBY: Well, the party there… if people were struggling over something the party just automatically said, you know, support people’s struggle. It was just a conditioned reflex.

 

JOHN HEROUVIM: How about uranium?

 

ROB DARBY: Well of course, the party’s policy on uranium changed. It didn’t actually change but it never unreservedly supported the anti-uranium position. It was of the opinion that there was, sort of, socialist uranium and capitalist uranium and that capitalist uranium was harmful and socialist uranium was a force for good. I’ve no doubt that was connected to the fact that China was embarking on a major atomic energy and nuclear missiles program.

 

JOHN HEROUVIM: Were you involved to any degree, both before and during your party membership, with any of the various groups that could be described as front groups for the party?

 

ROB DARBY: Yes, yes.

 

JOHN HEROUVIM: To what extent was allegiance to China or, you know, following the Chinese line, or even more generally the party line, a condition of being a member of those groups? To what extent was there any sort of Chinese domination of those groups?

 

ROB DARBY: Well, the two groups that I suppose we’re talking about are Students for Australian Independence at La Trobe University and the Australian Independence Movement [AIM] in Melbourne. Now, both these groups made a tremendous song-and-dance about how broad they were, and I’ve no doubt they would  have been delighted if someone who didn’t support China would have joined – until he actually started expressing views! But what those groups actually did, and the way they talked among themselves, would have made it virtually impossible for somebody who didn’t support China to be a member. The classic, the AIM became a public forum in which the CPA(ML)’s factional battles were fought out in public, particularly after the break with the followers of [Albert] Langer.

The Students for Australian Independence at La Trobe was a fantastically correct organisation which loyally put forward the party line on every issue, even to the extent of, at a demonstration over the installation of traffic lights, arguing that the press shouldn’t be invited because at that stage the party was having a campaign against the press. A good instance, actually, just to extend, the SAI was run by the party, not merely in that all its leading personnel were party members but I recall, it must have been in 1977, we had a demonstration against a visiting Russian academic at Melbourne University and we trooped down and confronted him with the flag and tried to prevent him speaking and then walked out. A week later, at our weekly SAI meeting, somebody said that – I don’t think he specified who – but we were to be thanked for this demonstration and it was greatly appreciated. We weren’t entirely clear who greatly appreciated but we regarded it that ‘higher beings’ regarded it as a very good thing.

 

JOHN HEROUVIM: Did you find yourself in any difficulties, political difficulties or difficulties with regard to talking to uncommitted people about party policy or politics in general as a consequence of finding yourself having to support Chinese policy and the changes in it?

 

ROB DARBY: It became particularly difficult after the Gang of Four and Kampuchea. Before then it wasn’t difficult because, by and large, people regarded China fairly sympathetically. Mostly I didn’t mention China, I didn’t talk about China at all, unless we got onto the question of socialism and people wanted to know where does socialism work and we’d say, ‘Well! Funny you should ask!’ But after the coup, or change of line or whatever you want to call, it in China, it became difficult partly because those people who most regarded as the goodies had been kicked out and were gone and the new leadership tended to represent the things people I was dealing with – students, people like that – precisely the things they hated, namely industrialisation, technology, heavy industry, motor cars, nuclear power, all the things they were opposed to, this group seemed to be pushing as the panacea to China’s ills. And of course, the issue of Kampuchea was a classic case of how adherence to China’s line brought absolute disaster.

 

JOHN HEROUVIM: You mean supporting Pol Pot?

 

ROB DARBY: Because we were supporting someone who everyone knew had babies for breakfast and it just became impossible to argue rationally on the issue because people would regard you as a raving lunatic.

 

JOHN HEROUVIM: Do you care to comment on the manner in which the disagreements with the group of people headed by Albert Langer challenged the party’s line following the arrest of the Gang of Four were handled and whether this has any bearing on the party’s subservience to China?

 

ROB DARBY: Yes, there’s no doubt that it was handled in an extremely dishonest and underhand way. I went along with it to my great shame. I recall that before the issue surfaced Duncan Clarke gave me a number of texts on economics, the economic situation in Australia and Marxism to read, and asked me for my opinion of them. I didn’t know who they were, they were just typescripts. I read them and thought they were very good. They accurately summed up Marx’s economic theory as I understood it and made useful analysis of the current economic trends in Australia such as inflation and unemployment. I couldn’t understand why Duncan was displeased with this analysis – until he revealed at some stage later that these had been written by Albert Langer. And he gave it to me again, to give me a second try to, you know, a second chance (laughs) to find out what was wrong with them. I suppose to my credit, I still said that I couldn’t see anything wrong with them, and he became angry and said, ‘Well, we think that these are bourgeois anti-Marxist documents. They’re just showing the way that this person’s going’. That must have been at the end of ’76, I think.

The big attack on Langer, I think, occurred just after May Day in 1977 and, incidentally, this was a classic instance of how the AIM operated as a communist front. There was no CPA(ML) presence at May Day but a big AIM contingent that could only be seen as co-terminus. Anyway, Langer was a speaker at May Day and I wasn’t there but I gather he discussed the kind of movement that was needed to successfully fight for socialist ideals. He was very strongly attacked, without being named, in the next issue of Vanguard as, you know, leading an attack on the workers from the workers’ platform. I considered the attacks on him in Vanguard to be very unfair, partly because they made no attempt to criticize the views he was actually expressing. They vented views that were attributed to him, namely Vanguard asserted that Langer argued that under capitalism the relations of production were already socialized. This point was hammered to death in Vanguard, though whether anybody understood the significance of it, even if he had said it, is another issue altogether. In fact, it was just a total straw man.

The other issue was one with which I was directly involved. He [Albert Langer] had come out to La Trobe to give a speech on American bases in Australia and I had recorded the speech and made a transcript of it and I think I sent a copy to Canberra to a friend and I think I sent it to Vanguard. Anyway, there was a comment in it about how after, or during, nuclear war he’d be out there fighting for peace, or for revolution, and this aroused Vanguard’s anger and a refutation of his erroneous views on the importance of firepower and weapons as opposed to people was published in Vanguard shortly after. For a start, I didn’t think that he had argued the importance of weapons over people – I think rather the contrary. And there was a sequel a little later on when Langer himself asked for a copy of the transcript, which I gave him, and he said that he’d been told by people in the party that his speech had caused a lot of controversy and confusion at La Trobe and had led people there astray, and I said, “No” (laughs) and he said, “Well, that’s what they told me” (laughs). So it’s clear again that there was quite a dishonest approach being taken there.

I also know of a case, purely in internal party terms, Langer at that stage was working as a postman and another person I knew was also working as a postman, and this person told me that somebody in the postal service who was widely regarded as being the party contact – this was long before any official denunciation of Langer had taken place – had warned him that they were not to have anything further to do with Langer because he had ‘gone bad’. This was just another example of the clearly underhand way in which dissidents were frozen out.

 

JOHN HEROUVIM: So you see his being frozen out and treated in this unprincipled manner as not in any way connected with the fact that he took a public position contrary to that of China and therefore of the party.

 

ROB DARBY: I haven’t really commented on that. I think, given the party’s organisational structure, the total lack of any internal democracy, the behaviour of that group – sorry, the treatment – the behaviour of the party in relation to that group, its treatment of that group, could be explained independently of China; though equally, I don’t doubt that the fact Langer was attacking the new Chinese leadership, and I’m sure that this added zest, at the very least, to the party’s hatred for him. It’s very hard to weigh up, sort of, what element was stronger. The disagreement over political economy came first. And the issue came to a head when the party supported Hua Guofeng and Langer supported the Gang of Four. If you read the Red Eureka Movement’s own documents, they certainly trace the disagreement to a long, long, way before that split. So I think it’s more complex than just a disagreement over China.

 

JOHN HEROUVIM: Did you visit China?

 

ROB DARBY: Yes.

 

JOHN HEROUVIM: While a party member?

 

ROB DARBY: Yes.

 

JOHN HEROUVIM: What was the nature of your tour?

 

ROB DARBY: I was on an official Vanguard delegation to China in 1978/79. When I was living in Melbourne I’d been doing quite a lot of work on Vanguard. I continued to write fairly regularly for it and I think this was my reward.

 

JOHN HEROUVIM: What were your impressions of China and did you gain any impressions of the party’s relationship to the party in China while there?

 

ROB DARBY: Well, oddly enough, China had rather a disillusioning effect on me…

 

JOHN HEROUVIM: That’s not odd.

 

ROB DARBY: I found China a poor Third World country. I didn’t see any wonders of socialism. People seemed pretty much the same as anywhere else. Buses were even more crowded than in Australia. Working people led remarkably bleak lives. Pollution was very bad. Of course, by that stage, the Chinese were emphasizing how backward they were, so I could certainly confirm their analysis. But, you know, unlike some people who visited China and came back with renewed faith in the future, or renewed faith in socialism, I came back far more sceptical of socialism than when I left. If that’s all it did for China, there was really very little about the place that anyone could regard as particularly… I would not want to live there. That was my impression.

Being a Vanguard delegation, Duncan himself had fairly long discussions with Chinese Xinhua officials that didn’t involve anyone else on the tour. But I do recall one instance. The tour was just after the 1978 [CPA(ML)] party congress and Duncan was taking to China a large bundle of documents from the congress to give to Chinese officials. Unless the parcels contained multiple copies, there were certainly far more documents in that bundle than I’d ever seen. I suppose that, in a sense, was a comment on what I saw as the party’s relationship to China while actually there.

The other classic case was the report of the Vanguard delegation, which I wrote more or less at Duncan’s dictation. As a report, it just doesn’t deserve the title of a ‘report’. It was simply a rehash of the official Chinese line on everything that was going on. We didn’t report anything we’d actually observed. In any case, you can’t tell on these tours because you’re brought into contact with people who are going to tell you what the Chinese, you know, want you to hear. So you can’t really judge. But the report itself might as well have been written by the Chinese, even though we wrote it ourselves.

 

JOHN HEROUVIM: Well, that’s my last question. Anything you want to add to the topic.

 

ROB DARBY: Well, I might but turn it off.

 

Continuation of interview, 13 March 1983

 

JOHN HEROUVIM: Were you introduced to party politics and Chinese politics at the same time?

 

ROB DARBY: More or less. The point was that I was in the CPA in 1974 and an old friend of mine at that stage was moving more in the direction of the CPA(ML) as a result of people he knew in Canberra. When I first joined the CPA, he was very critical of it because he’d been told the CPA(ML) was the best party, the most revolutionary party. I poo poo’d that saying it was very sectarian, didn’t have a party program or anything. I remember him going to the old East Wind Bookshop in Melbourne and asking for a copy of the party platform and being told in a rather shocked voice that no such thing existed. They did give him, I think, a recent copy of ‘The Australian Communist’ or some publication like that which listed some of the party’s aims and principles. Or they might have given him articles on striving for Marxism-Leninism in Australia, or something like that, and of course ‘Australia’s Revolution’ by Hill. But he agreed that if the party didn’t have a platform, it wasn’t to be taken seriously. During that year, 1974, I increasingly came round to the view that socialism was to be achieved through independence, so the things that drew me to the CPA(ML) were not connected with China except insofar as both the CPA(ML) and China opposed revisionism. What attracted me to the CPA(ML) was its opposition to the ALP, its analysis of the Soviet Union and its support of the independence struggle, its anti-imperialist position. Now, that led me on to China rather than the other way round, in the sense that it was the Chinese who pioneered that analysis of the Soviet Union. It was the Chinese who were most strongly supporting the Third World countries in their fight against imperialism. So, it was my interest in those political positions which led me both towards the CPA(ML) and China as another force supporting those positions.

 

JOHN HEROUVIM: Did you become interested in China or was China something you used to read a bit about as a consequence of becoming attracted to the CPA(ML).

 

ROB DARBY: Yes, the latter. I never had a great interest in China but when I began to move close to the CPA(ML) then I felt that I ought to read more about China because I began to see that as the kind of socialist model that we need to be looking at, that China was giving an example of what building socialism should be like, the right way to do it. So I read a few books about China but it was never a major attraction. The attraction to China was a consequence rather than a cause of getting interested in the CPA(ML).

 

JOHN HEROUVIM: How true do you think it is to say that the party, the CPA(ML), was formed as a consequence of the Sino-Soviet split?

 

ROB DARBY: Well, of course, I have no direct knowledge of that. What I know is what I read about it. It’s clear that the party was formed as a result of the split. Most of the points on which it later came to disagree with other parties on the left in Australia developed following the split. At the time of the split, the only issues were the evaluation of Stalin, the attitude to peaceful coexistence and the general line of the international communist movement.

 

JOHN HEROUVIM: There were also a lot of polemics about the Labor Party.

 

ROB DARBY: Yes, the Labor Party was the other issue Hill polemicized about. And the state too, was one of the factors precipitating the split. The CPA refused to publish a booklet, a pamphlet, that Hill had written on the state.

 

JOHN HEROUVIM: Did they? When?

 

ROB DARBY: Oh, just before the split.

 

JOHN HEROUVIM: Just before the rumblings or just before the break?

 

ROB DARBY: Just before the break. Or, it would have been in the course of the rumblings.

 

JOHN HEROUVIM: Where did you come across this?

 

ROB DARBY: I’ve got a copy of it.

 

JOHN HEROUVIM: Hill’s booklet on the state?

 

ROB DARBY: Yes.

 

JOHN HEROUVIM: What ‘Towards the Police State’?

 

ROB DARBY: Yes.

 

JOHN HEROUVIM: Where did you find that the CPA refused to print it?

 

ROB DARBY: It says so inside. The booklet states that Hill wrote this when he was still Victorian state secretary and the party refused to print it. So, the state was the other factor but it was only later that the analysis of the Australian revolution developed and the support for independence. Trade unions were, of course, another difference that arose fairly early but I don’t think they figured prominently in the debates about and within the split. Despite the issue of the state, I think the major issues were international ones and I think in that, the question of Stalin was probably the most important to most people. Basically, the CPA(ML) people could never accept the demotion of Stalin because they’d grown up in the heroic days of the 1930s and 1940s and in view of the Cold War defending him. It was just too traumatic to accept.

 

JOHN HEROUVIM: Do you think the split would have happened if not for the Sino-Soviet split?

 

ROB DARBY: That’s speculation. I can’t say. I don’t know. I would suspect not.

 

JOHN HEROUVIM: I suppose what I’m doing is asking you to speculate as to the motives of the people who broke with the CPA as to how much of it was because they had an alternative centre to follow and were given a lead, and how much was it because of differences because difference had existed for a long time.

 

ROB DARBY: I think without the split in the world communist movement the nucleus couldn’t have arisen, the differences could have been accommodated within the one party, but when another centre of world revolution came into existence it was possible for a second party to be formed.

 

JOHN HEROUVIM: How much influence do you think the conditions under which the party came into existence had on its subsequent development?

 

ROB DARBY: A very big influence. Dependence on China was there from the start. It never changed. It took different forms but essentially…

 

JOHN HEROUVIM: When you were a member of the party how important was it to you to do work to promote or support China? How high a priority was it?

 

ROB DARBY: (laughs) I couldn’t give a stuff about it! (laughs)

 

JOHN HEROUVIM: How high a priority was it in the party as a whole?

 

ROB DARBY: It used to be given quite high priority. I remember branch meetings with circulars saying it was terribly important to promote China. Vanguard would run promotions of Chinese publications. And I know the Australia-China Society [ACS] was riddled with party people who made it their main area of work. I just thought it was all bullshit.

JOHN HEROUVIM: Did you ever have any…

 

ROB DARBY: … though I went along with it, to a limited extent. I never took part in any… I was never a member of ACS. I can’t remember doing any… Oh, the only thing I ever did directly with China was when visiting Chinese journalists came to see Duncan Clarke and I remember talking to them.

 

JOHN HEROUVIM: When was that?

 

ROB DARBY: ’76, perhaps. [Mentions a name – deleted].

 

JOHN HEROUVIM: Oh, of course! (laughs) The sp… Xinhua correspondent.

 

ROB DARBY: The party found a worker, a wharfie, for him to go and talk to, at Fawkner, and I found the whole thing rather surprising because the worker basically wanted Russia and China to come to an understanding, to stop fighting among themselves, but to unite against US imperialism. And I thought, gee, if this is the best wharfie the CPA(ML) can find, it doesn’t say much for party influence on the wharves. He doesn’t accept the party analysis of the Soviet Union. [Name deleted] was very discreet, he didn’t disagree with anything he said, and just took notes. (laughs)

 

JOHN HEROUVIM: (laughs) How important were Chinese domestic campaigns to you? How closely did you follow the fall of Lin Piao and Deng Xiaoping’s fortunes?

 

ROB DARBY: Well, Lin Piao and the cultural revolution and all that were before my time. It was from ’74 onwards that I began to pay some attention to Chinese domestic politics. I was interested. I was basically, then, what became known as the Gang of Four, were the goodies. I sort of accepted their analysis of the bourgeoisie inside the party. I remember reading something, a small item, in the daily press towards the end of 1974, which talked about clashes in China, fighting, and suggestions that Chou Enlai was revisionist [inaudible for a few seconds]. I remember writing to [name deleted]and saying this was very likely. (laughs)

 

JOHN HEROUVIM: (laughs) That Chou Enlai be done away with?!

 

ROB DARBY: Well, that he was a revisionist.

 

JOHN HEROUVIM: Did you ever express those views within the party?

 

ROB DARBY: Well, I wasn’t in the party then.

 

JOHN HEROUVIM: No, but after you joined?

 

ROB DARBY: No.

 

JOHN HEROUVIM: Because you no longer held them or it wouldn’t have been wise?

 

ROB DARBY: Oh, I think the incident passed out of my mind. Until the coup, that is the coup in China, the ’76 coup, if ‘Peking Review’ had said that Chou Enlai was revisionist, I’d have said, well, he is. I found their articles on class struggle within the communist party, class struggle under socialism, very impressive, cogent, very revolutionary. I’d have believed anything they said. It was only after the coup, when Peking Review started saying the opposite that I realized that you couldn’t believe anything that you read in Peking Review. (laughs) It was purely a result of who happened to be in charge of it.

 

JOHN HEROUVIM: (laughs) How important was what happened in China to you? As a party member, I mean. How much of a bearing did it have on your overall work?

 

ROB DARBY: Well, my attitude when the Gang of Four were arrested in ’76, particularly the effect of that on both the party and its various supporting and front organisations was ‘what a nuisance’. (laughs) We were going so nicely, everything was going really well, ’76 was a tremendously successful and exciting year. The influence of the independence movement particularly seemed to be growing strongly. The party vanguard had got bigger. Really boom times. And then we get this wretched event in China that sends people off in all directions. It was the cause of splits and massive dissension. I was very angry.  Bloody Chinese! You know. (laughs)

 

JOHN HEROUVIM: (laughs) But it was obvious that a big event like that in China, even though it had no bearing on Australian events, would automatically cause enormous upheaval in the CPA(ML)?

 

ROB DARBY: Well it did have direct consequences, bigger consequences than any domestic issue ever had. I just remember being very annoyed by it. Just when we were going really well!

 

JOHN HEROUVIM: If a campaign was taking place in China, was it automatically important to you, something to be studied, was it automatically applied here, in some way? For instance, it was very important for students and intellectuals to perform manual labour and so on. Was that important here?

 

ROB DARBY: I wasn’t really in the party or in the movement when that issue was around, that was fairly early. I think there was always an attitude in the CPA(ML) of hostility towards intellectuals and it became apparent later on because they were afraid they could think. There was always the idea that someone who worked with his hands could think better than someone who worked with his mind, but that’s not really what you’re talking about.

 

JOHN HEROUVIM: No.

 

ROB DARBY: The campaigns that I remember, having some kind of repercussion, for example was the campaign to study the dictatorship of the proletariat in 1975. I remember thinking that was important, and I remember reading the Little Red Book that came out that consisted of quotes. Similarly, those two pamphlets by Yao Wenyuan and Chang Chun-chiao also came out at that time and I read those with great attention. They weren’t things I thought were relevant to Australia but I thought they were relevant to the principles of socialism. They were relevant to the construction of socialism, additions to communist theory, the theory of the dictatorship of the proletariat. They were important for that reason, not because they had any immediate relevance to Australia. I wasn’t particularly turned on by the campaign to criticize Lin Piao and Confucius. I remember getting the ‘Little White Book’ that came out but I don’t think I ever read it. That one rather bizarre.

 

JOHN HEROUVIM: That’s your personal attitude to it but what was the party’s attitude to those sorts of campaigns?

 

ROB DARBY: The party’s attitude was that rich lessons ought to be learned from studying Chinese material on these matters, party members should devote themselves seriously to the study of these things. They were taken very seriously with great emphasis placed on reading all this stuff.

 

JOHN HEROUVIM: I asked you something previously, didn’t I? To what degree was the overall style, the way the party worked and behaved, influenced by China, do you think?

 

ROB DARBY: By China. I’m tempted to say very heavily but the point is, of course, that the stereotyped style of party writing would have existed before the CPA(ML). Essentially, they retained the old style of the CPA in the ‘30s and ‘40s. The style [inaudible] very rhetorical with staccato sentences, a lot of hyperbole, grandiose phrases, blood and guts, hatred, a dogmatic and very non-dialectical style, a very crass style, were there already. What the Chinese connection did was perpetuate that style but, of course, the Chinese had also retained that style though they made it a lot more colourful and they did it a lot better than the party here ever did. The Chinese publications you felt they were really sincere when they did this stuff and they carried it off with aplomb and flair. It was good. But here it was a lot more mechanical and far less convincing. The Chinese connection really froze the party into that style of writing and presentation. Very staccato leaflets, for example, which were supposed to be written in an easy style that workers could understand.

 

JOHN HEROUVIM: In your inner party life, were there elements there that would have made it obvious to you or to anyone else who confronted with it, that picture of inner party life, that here was a party that modelled itself on, or was considerably influenced by, China? I mean, did you talk Chinese expressions and language forms? Did you model yourself in any way on what would have happened in China or what would the Chinese have reacted to this?

 

ROB DARBY: I don’t think I ever did that. I did a lot of my writing style for Vanguard. It was a great triumph when I could produce a piece of writing that looked as though it had been written by anybody! (laughs) A perfect piece of Vanguardese.

 

JOHN HEROUVIM: You genuinely, sincerely, thought that that was very good?

 

ROB DARBY: Oh yes. I was qualified to write for Vanguard now that I’d perfected the style. That wore off after a couple of years and I began to have the opposite view that more colour and life and variety of styles, more ordinary modes of expression, were desirable. I began to make efforts in that direction which were, of course, largely frustrated by Duncan. So I had to keep turning silk purses back into sow’s ears!

 

JOHN HEROUVIM: (laughs)

 

ROB DARBY: Party meetings were extremely practical. You know, banal almost in their practicality. Working out details like who was going to bring the drinks to a function or write a leaflet. This kind of thing was 90 percent.

 

JOHN HEROUVIM: Well, that’s your own experience but did you come across people, or hear of events or messages or anything that suggested otherwise? Some people have mentioned the ‘Sinophiles’ in their interviews.

 

ROB DARBY: I heard, I had the impression, that there were people who hung on every word from China around. There’s no doubt about that but I didn’t have any direct experience of it. I’d only be reporting rumours and stories that I’d heard and that you’d probably get more correctly from others.

 

JOHN HEROUVIM: Could I ask you something with respect of question 14? The overall orientation… The CCP was an elect party even when it had become more pragmatic and out-going in its international relationships at home under the influence first of Mao and then of the Gang of Four, the emphasis remained, you know, struggle struggle struggle. And so was the CPA(ML) during that period, and I think it’s fair to say that when the left influence was removed in China the CPA(ML) followed suit domestically and started saying that we should be more reasonable and there was no revolutionary situation in Australia. Do you see any connection between the overall left orientation of the CPA(ML) and the CCP?

 

ROB DARBY: Well I think that you’ve just expressed it, just stated it. I think it’s more than just sequential, not just a coincidence that after the Chinese party changed its line the CPA(ML) did domestically as well. I think it’s a direct consequence.

 

JOHN HEROUVIM: People like Ted Hill had a tradition of leftism and Victoria was more left than the other states and so on, there is an argument that when Hill and those people said that the Chinese and the CPA(ML) happened to share in common a subscription to Marxism-Leninism but they were both independently ultra-left. But then again the change after 1977…

 

ROB DARBY: That argument is logical. I used to use it myself when people said that the CPA(ML) just follows China. I used to say, no, the similarity in line just results from a similar analysis because they have a similar ideology and similar world view and similar adherence to Marxism-Leninism. But I think it would be remarkable if the common adherence to Marxism-Leninism meant that simultaneously they arrived at a new analysis and a new analysis of results deriving from their common adherence to Marxism-Leninism which not only led to them changing their minds about certain things at the same time but led them to change their minds about the same things at the same time. That’s stretching credulity.

 

JOHN HEROUVIM: Well, as a consequence of that, the CPA(ML) became associated within the left-wing movement as the violent ones, the ultra-militants, always with struggle. The lesson that was drawn from anything was ‘struggle gets you places’. Negotiations and so on were dirty words. Was there a connection between this sort of stance and the party’s relationship with China?

 

ROB DARBY: It’s difficult. The party’s association with violence was a patchy thing. The people who were associated with violence were, in fact, only a small section of the party but the movement, and many other people in the party or the movement, regarded them as loonies, strongly for the way they behaved. Now I think what the connection with China did was it led acts of senseless violence to be approved rather than condemned. As you mentioned, they were editorially approved, and I think that’s where the China influence came in. Without that, these actions might have been more critically examined and not endorsed so enthusiastically by a newspaper editor who knew nothing about what was really going on. But because it looked like struggle, it was militant, it had to be good. The irony was that those party members who were involved in real struggle situations, say in the trade unions, used every trick in the book – negotiating, lying low, concessions, you name it – and acted very subtly to achieve their ends, even though when any of their victories were written up in Vanguard it was always stated as merely a result of struggle rather than Norm Gallagher pulling a swiftie or doing a deal with the bosses to achieve something. So, you had this thing where Vanguard mindlessly approved every act of militancy regardless of its real content or real consequences and this, of course, encouraged those who had a disposition to behave like that anyway because it was approved of at the highest levels and they felt justified in continuing their behaviour.

 

JOHN HEROUVIM: Well, we’ll stick to…

 

ROB DARBY: The other point there, of course, the other reason why Vanguard and Hill always endorsed these things is that there knowledge of what went on came largely from the people carrying on these actions. Hence, they got their version of events rather than someone who was critical of them.

 

JOHN HEROUVIM: Following attacks on the US Consulate during a July 4 demonstration in Melbourne in 1968, editorials in every major Australian daily commented that the demonstration was un-Australian and employed foreign tactics, words to that effect. In what ways was the party and its members or supporters active in such demonstrations following some sort of lead from China, if they were at all?

 

ROB DARBY: I can’t think of any very good examples of that. It was 1968, well before, well, it’s my time, when I was young…

 

JOHN HEROUVIM: That’s just as an example…

 

ROB DARBY: An example of party people creating violence at demonstrations, I can remember a couple of incidents. There was a very small demonstration in support of Aboriginal land rights after the AUS [Australian Union of Students] council meeting in August 1974 and we marched. I was at that stage just becoming…

 

JOHN HEROUVIM: Free Fred Fogarty! (laughs)

 

ROB DARBY: Yes, it might have been Free Fred Fogarty, a real tongue-twister. We marched to the Old Customs House and then marched back to the Queensland Tourist Bureau in Collins Street. It was all quite friendly and a low-key affair until we got to the tourist bureau, it might have been the Northern Territory Tourist Bureau, and we all sort of gathered around the window and [name deleted] threw a rock through it, someone threw something through the window, and the whole character changed. And I was rather shocked by that. Frightened. But that sort of thing happened.

The other, of course, was the July 4, 1975, throwing rocks at Pan Am. So, yes, well, it was a classic case of desperately trying to revive days… in ‘68/’69, it was just media rhetoric to say they were un-Australian and just provoked by a small core of demonstrators. The whole mood of the demonstrators in those days was violent and militant…

 

JOHN HEROUVIM: But was it, though?

 

ROB DARBY: What went on involved quite large numbers of people. Well, the Springbok demonstration. I think that throwing firecrackers and marbles, it wasn’t just a minority of the crowd. Everyone who went was pretty wild. By the time I was involved that pre-’72 atmosphere had changed dramatically.

 

JOHN HEROUVIM: Why do you think the people who were trying to keep it going were trying to keep it going? Why couldn’t they just accept that times had changed? Do you think they were psychologically just vandals? What was it? There’s Barry’s theory that there was the second-generation of Maoists – you know, people like myself – and they came into the piece late and were really upset that all that was over and wanted to keep it going and that’s what they liked about it?

 

ROB DARBY: Well, Barry might be right but I don’t know. I don’t know why people get hooked on a particular mode of operating but it’s a fact that people very often do. People tend to get hooked on the thing that they did when they feel they were most successful when they were in their prime of life. Just as they retain the hair-do’s of their youth, like E F Hill…

 

JOHN HEROUVIM: (laughs)

 

ROB DARBY: You know, when they were spunkiest and all the rest of it. So, they retain a commitment to what they did in the good old days. What went on at La Trobe, of course, is the classic instance of that. As late as 1977, they were putting out broadsheets, you know, ‘La Trobe’s militant tradition lives!’ but it had been dead for about five years. (laughs) It was a pathetic attempt to try and convince students that they were heirs to a revolutionary and struggle tradition that they knew nothing about and didn’t want to know anything about and certainly didn’t want to be part of. (laughs)

 

JOHN HEROUVIM: As late as 1976, the front cover of the RSM [Radical Student Movement] alternate handbook was a policeman being unseated from his horse by a besieged [crowd] with flagpoles.

 

ROB DARBY: It was just a pathetic attempt to impose a tradition on people. If people had just stopped for five minutes to think about what students were really like, it wouldn’t have even been contemplated.

 

JOHN HEROUVIM: Were you part of that?

 

ROB DARBY: Yeah.

 

JOHN HEROUVIM: Well why?

 

ROB DARBY: Well, this is where Barry’s third or second generation thing probably applies. When I joined the movement I was desperately anxious to sort of prove my credentials. I took Lenin and Mao and all those people very seriously and I wanted to prove myself as a fighter and as a theorist and all these things. I wanted to be accepted as one of the [inaudible] and be accepted as a loyal supporter and member of the party so I just, whatever the prevailing attitude and prevailing styles were, endorsed them uncritically because I felt that the best way to be accepted and approved of was to do what was regarded as good with fervour. I didn’t have a critical attitude at all.

 

JOHN HEROUVIM: You thought it was right?

 

ROB DARBY: I probably did, too, yes. I didn’t think that what I was doing was wrong but that I had to do it in order to be accepted. I think I genuinely thought that what I was doing was the right thing.

 

JOHN HEROUVIM: Can you recall instances or examples where you did things or said things that you weren’t comfortable with or didn’t think were right? You know, that psychological dimension of party discipline. Conformity.

 

ROB DARBY: Some things. One July 4 threw rocks at Kentucky Fried Chicken or MacDonald’s. Kentucky Fried Chicken, you know, buildings, shops. [inaudible] We went out on this expedition and I remember saying it was really stupid and we shouldn’t go ahead. But I went ahead none the less.

 

JOHN HEROUVIM: Why?

 

ROB DARBY: Well, I believe that if a democratic decision, a majority decision, is to do something then I’ll do it. Where things got really bad [inaudible] I really felt that what I was doing was wrong came after the coup in China. For example, I [inaudible] printing the Vanguard editorial at that time which hailed the defeat of the Gang of Four. At that stage I was convinced it was a counter-revolutionary coup like a lot of people, in those early stages, were. I didn’t say anything and just went ahead and did the [Vanguard] mail-out.

 

JOHN HEROUVIM: Why not?

 

ROB DARBY: I think it was a case of who I knew. By that stage my close associates were people like you and like Duncan. Duncan was a hard person to argue with, he tended to just bowl you along with his enthusiasm. And I really didn’t want to have an argument with him. And to an extent I trusted him: Duncan knows about these things, no doubt he’ll be proven right as time goes on and the evidence comes out. His position will be proven to be correct but, at that time, I had this sort of seeking feeling. (laughs)

 

JOHN HEROUVIM: (laughs) Well, getting back to the question of violence and the number of other party’s even more strongly-held principles, their secrecy in organisation, their opposition to parliament and to everything that was the mainstream of Australian politics and even the mainstream on the left, they were totally divorced from it in many ways, to what extent do you think this was a product of the party’s relationship with China and to what extent did other factors bring this about, for instance, the old Bolshevik/Comintern tradition in which a lot of the party leaders grew up in?

 

ROB DARBY: Yes, well I think two things. I think the influence of China was important because, you know, they were thinking of the Chinese party organising secretly under the Kuomintang in the White Areas of China and that was the inspiration. But I think if that was their model, it was a pretty pale amateur imitation. Secrecy was never very good, never very effective. I think the other major factor was simply Hill’s dominance in the party. It was a Hill characteristic which he had throughout his party career to be very sensitive on the issue of the state. Secrecy was one of his characteristics, so when he came to lead the party, he did more than lead, I mean he ruled it. I don’t think anyone has had such dominance over an organisation. He was its brains. He was its everything, so he just stamped it, the whole organisation, with his own obsessions. I think that in many ways is the most important factor, in so far as it took its model from the Chinese Communist Party in the White Areas in the ‘30s and ‘40s and the writings of Mao, ‘fish in water’ idea, that came from Hill. But as I say, the ideals were far from the execution.

 

Tape 2A, 13 March 1983

 

ROB DARBY: The example of that is the Vanguard itself which, the notion of secrecy…

 

JOHN HEROUVIM: This is ROB DARBY, tape two, by the way…

 

ROB DARBY: Oh, right. A good example of that was the very production of the newspaper. How on earth do you have a secret organisation that produces a newspaper printed at a commercial printer’s, distributed through the post. Even if it was with false names and post office boxes. It’s just absurd. An example of just how absurd all the secrecy was, at one stage, it would have been ’77, after the decision was taken to break up party cells based on a common workplace and to put all sorts of weird combinations of people together for study purposes, I was meeting a funny little guy who had some job with a fishing co-op, I can’t remember his name but the office was in South Melbourne…

 

JOHN HEROUVIM: Did he have a bung eye?

 

ROB DARBY: Oh, I can’t remember. And I was going to meet him at his office one day, we were going to go off somewhere, and I’d forgotten the address. I happened to be working in the Vanguard office so I asked Duncan (laughs) where he was (laughs), what his address was (laughs), and Duncan just told me. Out loud! (laughs) In this presumably bugged Vanguard office.

 

JOHN HEROUVIM: Was his name Basil?

 

ROB DARBY: I don’t think so. He was Greek. Well, it probably was him.

 

JOHN HEROUVIM: Short bloke, white hair, bung eye. You don’t remember his name? Basil Steffanou.

 

ROB DARBY: Yes, possibly.

 

JOHN HEROUVIM: You weren’t ever a member of the ACS [Australia China Society] were you? What was your impression of the ACS as a party member, like, what did you think the connection was between ACS and the party?

 

ROB DARBY: Oh, I knew the connection. I knew the ACS was largely a party front organisation.

 

JOHN HEROUVIM: Was that how it was regarded in party circles? Did you think of it as one of our groups?

 

ROB DARBY: Oh yes, for sure, but it was irrelevant to what I was on about. (laughs)

 

JOHN HEROUVIM: Your trip to China wasn’t organised through the ACS.

 

ROB DARBY: No.

 

JOHN HEROUVIM: You said to me a couple of weeks ago that you had further thoughts about your trip to China that you wanted to relate to me.

 

ROB DARBY: I don’t know whether I’d… I don’t know that I really do. Turn it off for a minute. [turns off tape, then resumes] Yes, the trip to China was quite strange because as an official Vanguard delegation given extremely red carpet treatment wherever we went, massively fed and feted and met important people, it was a classic case of being duchessed.

 

JOHN HEROUVIM: Who did you meet?

 

ROB DARBY: One guy we met was… turn it off.

 

[turns off tape, then resumes]

 

JOHN HEROUVIM: So he was a Politburo member?

 

ROB DARBY: He was quite senior. He was the most senior person that we met. We were duchessed from one end of China to the other but, as I said earlier on, the thing that impressed me most about China was the poverty, [inaudible], hopes for the future. I was also impressed with how relaxed people were, how little concerned with politics and struggle, which led me to be a lot more relaxed in my own attitudes when I got back. Probably the opposite effect it has on some people who go to China and are impressed by the puritanism of Chinese life and come back extremely puritanical but I was impressed by their lustiness (laughs) and came back even less puritanical than when I left.

The other thing about China and about leading Chinese people, people in government circles, was how little they knew about Marxism, how little they knew about socialism and capitalism. I remember Duncan and I went to give a talk to journalism students at this new journalism institute in Peking. I was just outlining a few basic facts about advertising in western media and they were just amazed at what I said, that the newspapers were paid for by advertising and that about 90 percent of newspapers were advertisements, that advertisers bought audiences through the media. What the media were doing was selling a commodity, turning the readers into a commodity and selling them to the advertisers. I thought this was a fairly basic, if reasonably developed, Marxist concept of media but they were all absolutely stunned. At that time, of course, Peking was beginning to receive its first billboards advertising Coca Cola and other wonderful things. Which even Hill doesn’t like. [laughs]

 

JOHN HEROUVIM: Billboards?

 

ROB DARBY: He has reservations about them. So, there’s a naivety about capitalism. Because the leaders want to be a modern technocratic society, they take things from capitalism that look good without realizing how they developed, that they’re organically part of the capitalist system of exploitation, and they gaily throw them around China. Either things like advertising will wither in China because of their irrelevance to the mode of production or the society will develop in such a way that they will flourish and they will become organically part of the society as they are in the West.

The things that I liked about China, the things that most people in fact like about China, is its pre-industrial characteristics: the peasant community, the manure in the fields, the intensive cultivation, the absence of heavy industry, the absence of the rat race. That’s what people liked. The moral fervour, the idealism, all the things the Chinese have turned their back on since 1976. The other thing about China… who was it who went? That Milliss. Roger Milliss whose father, I forget which is which, his father, the elder one, and his wife, went to China. He didn’t like it very much but his wife was ecstatic. She just loved it, and the reason was [inaudible] (laughs) That was at the time of the cultural revolution.

 

JOHN HEROUVIM: What do you know about the publication ‘New China News’?

 

ROB DARBY: I know who produced it. I know who did the proof-reading at one stage.

 

JOHN HEROUVIM: What was the…

 

ROB DARBY: It was basically a system by which Duncan got money from the Chinese.

 

JOHN HEROUVIM: Were you familiar with the publication?

 

ROB DARBY: Yes.

 

JOHN HEROUVIM: Did you read it?

 

ROB DARBY: No.

 

JOHN HEROUVIM: Did many people read it?

 

ROB DARBY: I don’t know anyone who read it. [laughs]

 

JOHN HEROUVIM: What was its standing in the party, to your knowledge?

 

ROB DARBY: I regarded it as a joke. I thought it was a load of shit. (laughs) How anyone could take it seriously, I don’t know.

 

JOHN HEROUVIM: What do you mean when you say it was a way of Duncan Clarke getting money?

 

ROB DARBY: Well, of course, he produced it for the Chinese. They probably paid him at a rate far exceeding the value of what they were getting in return. (laughs)

 

JOHN HEROUVIM: You don’t know what he was getting paid?

 

ROB DARBY: No.

 

JOHN HEROUVIM: Were you aware of Duncan’s position as a Xinhua correspondent?

 

ROB DARBY: Yes.

 

JOHN HEROUVIM: Did you have many dealings with the Chinese in Australia? With the Embassy?

 

ROB DARBY: No, not many. Like I said, a couple of times when Xinhua correspondents were in Melbourne, I drove them around a bit and answered their questions about Australian life and politics.

 

JOHN HEROUVIM: What was the status of that sort of thing? I mean I did the same thing too, quite a few times. How did you regard it? Was it proletarian internationalism? Was it natural that we’d help the Chinese?

 

ROB DARBY: I guess I never really thought about it. It was something I was never really easy about. I was flattered, I think, was probably the major reaction because it seemed that I was getting into important international political circles. You know, meeting and talking to people and being terribly grown up and I thought, wow, I’m really in with the heavies now. So, it was very flattering to be doing something that seemed so important. You know, it came about just through personal connections with Duncan. I didn’t see it as a party duty of any kind but, you know, I was pretty keen on working on Vanguard and very very keen on everything that was going on, and I liked Duncan very much and I would have done anything that he wanted me to, practically.

 

JOHN HEROUVIM: In what ways, other than that feeling of prestige, of derived importance that members got, do you think the Chinese aided the party, to your knowledge, ranging from the material to what I regard as the more important psychological implications of it being a member of a group that’s got 800 million de facto members?

 

ROB DARBY: Well, it helped in a number of ways. It helped financially.

 

JOHN HEROUVIM: Do you know how it helped financially?

 

ROB DARBY: Well, the only way that I know it helped financially was through paying Duncan Clarke to be Xinhua correspondent and paying him to produce New China News and buying vast quantities of party publications at inflated prices.

 

JOHN HEROUVIM: Do you know that they did that?

 

ROB DARBY: Yes.

 

JOHN HEROUVIM: Do you know how many they bought?

 

ROB DARBY: I remember at one stage packing massive box-loads of Hill’s books and sending them to China. Hundreds of them.

 

JOHN HEROUVIM: Do you know what the Chinese paid for them?

 

ROB DARBY: I don’t know how much they paid, no, I don’t.

 

JOHN HEROUVIM: Box-loads of Hill’s books. They used to get a thousand Vanguards. Which is incredible. I don’t know what they paid for them.

 

ROB DARBY: I always assumed that they’d pay at inflated prices and this would be a way of financing the party. And, of course, they supplied their books, their own publications, for the bookshops at reduced prices, so that was another one, whereas the bookshop would sell them at a large profit, and that was another way.

I think the most important aid the Chinese party gave the CPA(ML) was to provide a political line. They virtually wrote the political line of Vanguard, the editorials. All the locals had to do was to fill in different places, different names. The Chinese supplied an all-purpose algebra and Hill or Duncan just filled in the numbers. He wrote the same editorial about everything, just slightly different. It was like a Mills & Boon romance. (laughs)

 

JOHN HEROUVIM: Any other contributions by way of aid?

 

ROB DARBY: The provision of political line. The provision of political advice. Duncan used to regularly visit the Embassy and not only to talk about complications and things but just to be told what the political line is.

 

JOHN HEROUVIM: Is this something that you deduced rather than he told you?

 

ROB DARBY: Well, a mixture of both. He’d say that he’d had discussions at the Embassy and he’d give a bit of an outline about some of the things they’d discussed about the international situation. It was when the party was having great trouble with its line on superpower contention and the ‘main enemy’, all this kind of thing, and Duncan always used to go there to be straightened out. (laughs) Then he’d come back and very often the results of those discussions would appear in a Vanguard editorial or a lead article or non-contributed article.

 

JOHN HEROUVIM: There are some people I’ve spoken to who said that the Chinese, from what they can gather, was quite goofy and that the party took its lead from China just by reading Chinese material and then went overboard and exaggerated and said things the Chinese would never say.

 

ROB DARBY: Yes, yes. I think that’s true.

 

JOHN HEROUVIM: How does that gel with this notion of being straightened out?

 

ROB DARBY: Well (laughs), Duncan would do that or he’d read a ‘Peking Review’ or he’d read a Chinese publication of some sort and he’d think, wow, and improve it. (laughs) Then on one of his regular visits to the Embassy they’d try and straighten him out. The two are quite consistent, I mean, one was the counterpart of the other.

 

JOHN HEROUVIM: Can you give me any specific examples of Duncan being straightened out, that you know of? Or the issues involved?

 

ROB DARBY: Where it was most apparent was on the issue of the… well, it must have happened on the issue of the ‘three worlds’. China’s policy was that Australia was part of the Second World.

 

JOHN HEROUVIM: That definitely happened, I know that.

 

ROB DARBY: ‘AC’ [The Australian Communist journal] published something saying that it was part of the Third World. I have no direct knowledge of that, it’s inference. But I know that when the following [inaudible] in ’76 the party was having great trouble handling ‘superpower contention’ and getting the issue of the ‘main enemy’ right, the correct way of conducting struggle against US imperialism while not letting the wolf in the back door or whatever it was. I think that’s where discussions at the Embassy played an important role in sort of preventing the party from adopting a too pro-American position, which they were inclined to do. They were inclined to, not only make superpower contention the cause of everything from unemployed teachers to…

 

JOHN HEROUVIM: Lack of traffic lights at La Trobe University! (laughs)

 

ROB DARBY: Lack of traffic lights at La Trobe University. There’s an example of party supporters taking the line to an absurdity, something I did myself, utter absurdity.

 

JOHN HEROUVIM: I’m still keen to get down some basics.

 

ROB DARBY: Specific examples.

 

JOHN HEROUVIM: You say the Chinese helped, well their advice prevented the hardening of a pro-American line. Now, how do you know that? I mean, did Duncan Clarke come back from the Embassy one day and say, well, the Chinese have just pointed out to me how we should not be pro-American. What happened?

 

ROB DARBY: Nothing as obvious as that. It would just be that the Vanguard editorials or lead stories would be tending towards an increasingly pro-Fraser and anti-Russian. Hill would write things like that the coup had this good effect in that it stopped a pro-Russian government from staying in power in Australia, and then after Duncan visited the Embassy that sort of trend would stop and it would go back to a more critical stance on the multinationals and be reminded that GMH was actually operating in Australia! (laughs)

 

JOHN HEROUVIM: And you noticed the coincidence between Duncan’s visits…

 

ROB DARBY: I noticed the coincidence and he’d talk about what they were saying. He’d say we’ve got to have something on, we’ve got to emphasize workers’ struggle a bit more, something like that. He never concealed, well, he probably concealed some of the things he talked about but he never concealed the fact that he’d been there and talked about things and that he got a lot out of it. I wish I could give you some striking examples.

 

JOHN HEROUVIM: No. I only want what happened, what you know.

 

ROB DARBY: So they’re the two main ones. The Chinese helped the party. The other main one was as a big brother, immense ideological support. Not so much for me or my age group but for the older, the original party members, who’d spent their adult lives worshipping Stalin and being inspired by the socialist beacon in northern Europe and northern Asia, the Soviet Union, and I really don’t think they could survive any other way.

 

JOHN HEROUVIM: One interviewee has said that the organisational structure of the party was altered when after a visit to China, during which he toured the former White areas and studied Liu Shao-Chi’s methods of organisation, Ted Hill returned from China – and he said the source of this information to him was his party contact with the Central Committee – how likely in light of your experience as a party member does this sound, that such a major organisational change could occur because of something Ted Hill had been told in China?

 

ROB DARBY: As I’ve said I think much of the party’s organisation derived from long-standing views of Hill. I don’t know to what stage this refers. Do you?

 

JOHN HEROUVIM: Yes, it was in the late ‘70s. Seventy-nine.

 

ROB DARBY: So that was the change?

 

JOHN HEROUVIM: When they instituted the change whereby all contact, any branches that were left were dissolved, there would be no study groups, all contact would be one to one. And that was also part of the ‘lay low’, in the sense of ‘don’t open your mouth’.

 

ROB DARBY: Yes, I think that’s quite possible. It’s consistent with what I understand about the party’s characteristics. Also, I mean it’s just a further intensification, as I’ve emphasized, of the party organisation being based on Hill’s long-standing characteristics. Well, this is an intensification of that, not a departure from it. My whole impression of party organisation was that it just didn’t exist. A total absence of any organisation. When I became cynical about the party, I used to say that this was not so much for reasons of security but to make it easier for Hill to control the organisation, because if you don’t know any other party members then you can’t organise effectively to have policies changed. In effect, there’s no effective internal democracy.

 

JOHN HEROUVIM: Do you think that’s the rationale? The real explanation?

 

ROB DARBY: No. I don’t think that’s the reason why it was set up like that but I think once it was set up like that, Hill and the rest fully utilized that characteristic to make sure that their own will always prevailed and dissenters were isolated and ineffective. They didn’t set it up with that reason specifically in mind but they fully utilized it once it was there. I think it mainly reflected the fact that the party here was not a mass movement. It was basically this hot-house product. In China the Communist Party was a creation of a mass movement against imperialism and against landlords. In Australia, the party was trying to bring the mass movement into existence.

 

JOHN HEROUVIM: The party began to lose members fairly rapidly in 1977 to 1978. Some went into opposition and others just drifted away. Most, I think, just drifted away from Marxist-Leninist politics. Why the loss of membership then?

 

ROB DARBY: I think the main factor is the coup in China, not necessarily because people supported the Gang of Four but because people were disgusted that they’d been arrested and disgusted with the party’s support for the new Chinese leadership. Many people were simply disgusted by the cynicism that the party displayed in, you know, endorsing without question this somersault in Chinese policies, the fact that the party could warmly hail Hua Guofeng and Deng Xiaoping only a few months after condemning them, you know, Deng as a revisionist, and do so without apology, without explanation, it was the brazen cynicism with which this was done, which I think alienated most people rather than the content of the decisions that were made.

 

JOHN HEROUVIM: Do you think the arrest of the Gang of Four was a cause or a trigger?

 

ROB DARBY: It was a trigger in some cases because certainly people around Langer had been disenchanted with the party for some time. That disenchantment grew mainly out of the party’s hopeless understanding of economics. He [Langer] began his Political Economy study group at least a year before the split was consummated and he’d become very critical of the party’s line on economic questions, its arguments about inflation and recession and unemployment and so forth, and he began writing stuff for Vanguard and AC and also began writing critical commentaries on party pamphlets and articles that had appeared. I remember Duncan showing them to me one day and saying ‘Tell me what you think’ and I came back and said ‘I think they’re very good’. (laughs) And I couldn’t understand why he didn’t look pleased. He got me to read them again and I told him it seemed really good stuff to me, and he just got very angry and said, ‘Well, we think they’re bourgeois and revisionist and no good. Anti-Marxist’. He got his friend Vera to read them and she didn’t like them very much. Vera was never a Marxist so (laughs) I didn’t really find this very… One of the things Langer had written was in fact a criticism of an article…

 

JOHN HEROUVIM: Based on what Vera had said.

 

ROB DARBY: Of hers, yes. About inflation. It was some fantastic concoction about…

 

JOHN HEROUVIM: Inflation was the same…

 

ROB DARBY: Capital inflow. I remember saying to you, we were looking at the original article in AC in the Vanguard office and I was saying I thought the criticism was correct and I never understood this article and I asked you whether you’d ever understood that point, and you said you’d never understood it either, and Duncan said, ‘Well, it makes sense to me!’ (laughs) And I said to him, ‘Well, can you explain it to us’… (laughs)

 

JOHN HEROUVIM: ‘Go away and read it!’

 

ROB DARBY: …and he couldn’t explain it in words of two syllables. (laughs) And what of course had happened was that Langer had been bringing these criticisms mainly to Duncan and to Hill, and Duncan always says when anyone criticizes Vanguard, ‘Well, you write it! You do it better!’, so, of course, Langer stunned him by – well, Duncan was telling me this – so Langer did produce a lead article for Vanguard on inflation and Duncan said, ‘Of course, we couldn’t print it! (laughs) It was anti-party!’ (laughs)

 

JOHN HEROUVIM: Well, ‘You write it in a different way saying exactly the same thing like you’ve been told to do!’

 

ROB DARBY: So, in their case, certainly, the opposition had been going for a long time and the party’s somersault over the Gang of Four had brought to a head… well, throughout ’77, or ’76, following the Gang of Four thing, Vanguard entered a very drab phase.

 

JOHN HEROUVIM: Well, it’s hard to get whipped up over the ‘four modernizations’!

 

ROB DARBY: Vanguard was full of articles from workers saying how good the party was. They were desperately trying to… you know, by patting themselves on the back they could avoid charges they’d gone revisionist. They published a letter by someone who’d been in England saying they didn’t think the party was revisionist. And an article from two workers saying the party’s line is correct.

 

JOHN HEROUVIM: I remember typing that one up.

 

ROB DARBY: But that’s not really relevant. What are we talking about?

 

JOHN HEROUVIM: We’re talking about question 26.

 

ROB DARBY: Why people drifted away.

 

JOHN HEROUVIM: Yes.

 

ROB DARBY: The party somersault brought a lot of disagreements to a head and they centred on the attitude to the Soviet Union and superpower contention, the softer line on US bases and US imperialism generally, Iump all the Chinese things together in the somersault, and the local things, the change of attitude (laughter)… so, domestic issues were important, disenchantment over the party’s policies on economic questions, disagreement with the party’s policy on many international issues that, following China, the support for reactionary regimes that happened to be anti-Russian, I think was an important factor.

 

JOHN HEROUVIM: Again, that re-raises the question of the party going too far, or certainly further than the Chinese required them to. I remember, for instance, an article being submitted by someone who couched it in such anti-Soviet terms that it was obvious that it was meant to do no damage to the united front but it was about a giant anti-missile testing base in Zaire. And it was rejected.

 

ROB DARBY: Well, it’s all this thing about going overboard, as you say.

 

JOHN HEROUVIM: Why do you think they went so overboard? Because they had no political line of their own? Were they trying to curry favour?

 

ROB DARBY: I think both those factors. They didn’t really understand. They accepted the results of the Chinese analysis without understanding how the Chinese came to it. They thought that if ‘x’ was the line, if ‘x’ was good then therefore ‘xx’ was better. You know, the more strongly you applied the line the better it must be, that kind of thing.

 

JOHN HEROUVIM: How were changes in line conveyed?

 

ROB DARBY: They were usually conveyed in Vanguard but it depends on how big the change was.

 

JOHN HEROUVIM: Take for an example then, the shift from superpower contention being the enemy to Russia being the enemy.

 

ROB DARBY: I think that was fairly well orchestrated. It begins with you writing ‘contributed’ articles, and then Marcus or somebody writing enthusiastic responses to those ‘contributed’ articles and producing evidence and lots of facts and this builds up into a crescendo with masses of stuff on it and then editorials and lead articles. There was no discussion in the party about any change of line, it was all orchestrated from the top.

 

JOHN HEROUVIM: Well, given that a number of the changes were very drastic…

 

ROB DARBY: You can follow that in Vanguard.

 

JOHN HEROUVIM: Yes, that’s right. So it wasn’t through the party organisation or anything, it was through Vanguard?

 

ROB DARBY: The most that party members might be asked to do was to discuss such and such an article in order that they can better agree with it. (laughs)

 

JOHN HEROUVIM: Well, there were two types of changes, the gradual change in emphasis and also the one-hit jobs like ‘the Gang of Four is bad’. Now, given that a lot of those changes were so drastic compared to what you as a party member had been told to believe, did you accept them? And if so, why?

 

ROB DARBY: I accepted the Gang of Four thing. I’m really not sure why. I guess the main reason is that I didn’t care much. It was China. It wasn’t really all that upset about it, as long as the party was right on Australian issues. What I thought about China, I thought, was secondary. I think that’s the main reason I accepted the Gang of Four business.

 

JOHN HEROUVIM: What about, did you accept domestic…

 

ROB DARBY: Now, when, when, I accepted the change from superpower contention to the Soviet Union. I basically agreed with that. Where I disagreed, and this is what led me to place myself outside the party, was the change of line from independence struggle to reserving sovereignty and lying low and not sort of doing anything. It was at that point that I no longer accepted what it was doing, what it was saying.

 

JOHN HEROUVIM: Were there things that you accepted at the time which you later rejected?

 

ROB DARBY: Oh yes, yes. The extent of their emphasis on the Soviet Union, for example. I disagree with that. Their acceptance of US bases, attitude to the arms race. I totally disagree with that.

 

JOHN HEROUVIM: Then why did you accept them at the time? Did the facts seem to make sense? Or were you just being loyal? Was it a habit of always accepting what was in Vanguard?

 

ROB DARBY: Well, I think the bases thing was a consequence of the analysis of the Soviet Union so as long as I accepted the whole policy on the Soviet Union it was inevitable that bases had to be agreed to. Once my attitude to that had changed, then similarly my attitude to bases would change. The other big area is the area of moral issues. I could never stand the party’s policies on women, for example, on sexuality, they stank! But I was just gutless. I didn’t want to raise them.

 

JOHN HEROUVIM: Why?

 

ROB DARBY: I did on one occasion. It produced such a furore.

 

JOHN HEROUVIM: Can you tell me about that? What happened?

 

ROB DARBY: Well, Duncan used to have this extremely efficient way of producing Hill’s books which was to get them typeset and then have people read them for comment. (laughs) This would maximise the amount of work you had to do in laying them out. So, I was simultaneously reading one of Hill’s book – I can’t remember which one it was, one of the later ones, I lose track of them as they all became the same in the end (laughs) – and he was talking about ‘Man’ in history and so forth, and I just made the point to Duncan that I thought Hill’s terminology, which was of course common to all the things he wrote, was unfortunate because it would make it difficult, or more difficult, to read and agree with what he saying because of the exclusive use of this terminology. I asked Duncan whether he could raise this with Hill and just saying ‘people’. (laughs) This kind of thing. I didn’t make a big deal out of it. Well, Duncan did that and Hill, according to Duncan, Hill went off his brain in fury. He wrote back an angry comment, you know, ‘do you want us to talk about dogs and bitches’! Duncan was very angry, as a result with me, but he didn’t actually attack me very much, he marauded [name deleted] and reduced her to tears. Then the usual, we got this highly provocative article in Vanguard from an ‘aunty Tom’ in the party talking about ‘Man’ this and ‘Man’ that and ‘HIS’ with a capital ‘H’. Deliberately provocative. I was tempted to refuse to lay it out but, again, gutlessness prevailed.

 

JOHN HEROUVIM: Why do you think the party members as a whole accepted these changes?

 

ROB DARBY: Well, one doesn’t know whether… finally the party members as a whole didn’t. (laughs) That’s why they all left. (laughs) But why they accepted what they did accept was because, I think, it was the kind of party that encouraged ‘yes men’ or ‘yes people’ because there was no opportunity for internal democratic discussion. Your only contact with the party was Vanguard and, you know, if you rejected Vanguard, you were out. You just sort of weren’t part of it. There was just nothing in the party structure to encourage a critical attitude to anything. You either accepted what Vanguard said, you know, or you weren’t part of the party. The other option, which I think people did most, was that they grumbled about what they read in Vanguard among their friends, the people they knew, you know, ‘What a load of shit this is’ or ‘Get a load of this?!’ but, you know, basically, oh well, it may be bad but it’s all we’ve got, that kind of attitude, there’s nothing better around.

 

JOHN HEROUVIM: Question number 32 now. Around 1979 to 1980, there were a number of significant changes made to the party’s line. I’d like to go through them one by one with you.

 

 

Tape 3, 13 March 1983

 

JOHN HEROUVIM: Well, the dropping of opposition to US bases.

 

ROB DARBY: Right, the dropping of opposition to US bases was of course a consequence of the party’s line on the Soviet Union, which was overkill from the Chinese position, as we’ve discussed. My only doubts about the dropping of opposition to Omega is whether it was done in response to the Chinese line on foreign affairs and their seeking of an alliance with the United States against Russia or whether it was dropped so as to save Gallagher embarrassment about building it. Gallagher, I think, is a trade union wheeler and dealer first and a party supporter second but the party has to accommodate him because he’s their only remaining link with the organised working class. Omega, foreign bases, directly related to Chinese policy through the line on the Soviet Union. It’s perfectly consistent. It’s the logical consequence of regarding the Soviet Union as the main enemy to support US bases, and it results from misreading the parallel with the 1930s which, you know, was just sad, so heavily pushed by Vanguard in this period, constant stuff on fascism and appeasement. You know, the Soviet Union was the equivalent of Nazi Germany in the thirties and hence we had to unite with…

 

JOHN HEROUVIM: Modern day Churchills.

 

ROB DARBY: Modern day Churchills. And in the Chinese case, with Japan invading China, as Japan was to China in that period so Russia was to Australia, a kind of crude transposition of previous historical situations.

 

JOHN HEROUVIM: I won’t even bother with… their support for Liu Shaoqi’s rehabilitation’s obvious. Also a more tolerant attitude was expressed to parties which up to them had been regarded as revisionist. The quotation marks were dropped around the Communist Party of Australia.

 

ROB DARBY: That’s interesting, isn’t it? Hill and other leading comrades have finally had a meeting with the CPA to discuss common interests. I better make a few speculations here. I think part of it is that the party has now become so small that they’re desperately seeking a new membership, that they’re desperately seeking unity with anybody who they can unite with because the party’s in danger of extinction. Certainly most of the young people who joined in the ‘60s and ‘70s have dropped out, there’s a few left, but most of the party members are the old original core. There can’t be many apart from that. So one thing is a desperate search for members, maybe some kind of merger is eventually planned.

 

JOHN HEROUVIM: Are you suggesting that they might want to merge or attract members from these organisations?

 

ROB DARBY: Possibly the initial plan would be to attract members from the CPA but a merger is also a possibility if that fails. The other possibility is that China is reconsidering its connection with the CPA(ML). If the CPA(ML) is becoming as marginal as I think it is, then it’s becoming correspondingly of less use to the Chinese who might be considering establishing links with the CPA instead. The CPA(ML) may be wishing to guard itself against that possibility. Another possibility is of course, you mentioned the Theory of the Three Worlds before, the Chinese publication of the Theory of the Three Worlds, its advice for western communist parties, for some time the Chinese have been emphasizing the need for left-wing parties in the Second World to get together and cooperate more. I think it’s also a response to that.

 

JOHN HEROUVIM: Also, the Chinese have received delegations from revisionists.

 

ROB DARBY: Yes, well the Chinese have had a lot of dealings with European, previously revisionist, parties. Not, as far as I know with the CPA in Australia but one never knows. So, again, I think it’s following the Chinese lead in that respect, toning down opposition to revisionism. That’s been going on for some time, of course. Hill wrote something several years ago.

 

JOHN HEROUVIM: Well, if that’s the case then, well, to ask a broader question: Do you think that the party’s leadership, or Ted Hill’s, or whoever you think is the appropriate group to ask the question about, that their adherence, or loyalty, to China is in the final analysis stronger than their loyalty to any single political principle? Because, you know, something like the polemic, the break with the CPA, is so fundamental. The opposition to American bases has been fundamental from the start. You know, from the first Vanguard that was published. You would have thought that the support for the cultural revolution… but alright that can be seen as Chinese matters. But on domestic matters, the intolerance of revisionism and the opposition to American bases, is there anything do you think that they wouldn’t somersault on?

 

ROB DARBY: No. No, I think you put it well. The only situation where I could see them going for political principles rather than following China is if they had another model. Now, the only… and when the business with the Gang of Four occurred and there were some people who started to take their inspiration from Albania, now I could see the party sticking to political principles if it had somewhere like Albania to be the next big brother. I mean, who could take Albania seriously! (laughs) There was never the slightest likelihood of that happening. Hill never particularly liked the Albanians in any case. They were insignificant in terms of the world balance of forces.

 

JOHN HEROUVIM: Why do you say Hill never particularly liked the Albanians?

 

ROB DARBY: I remember, he went… just before or at the time of the coup against the Gang of Four, he was in Albania as an observer at the whatever-it-was [Seventh] congress of the Albanian Party of Labour, and reading something while he was there that he disapproved of the practice of having foreign observers present at these functions. So, I think, you know, he said nice things about Albania because it was the right thing to do but I don’t think he ever regarded it as a serious kind of place. (laughs)

 

JOHN HEROUVIM: Did you have any experience with Ted Hill?

 

ROB DARBY: I met him once in Canberra. He and Duncan had come up for a Chinese National Day function and we met briefly in his hotel room. Duncan set the tone for the evening by raising a letter I’d written to you about an article in Vanguard…

 

JOHN HEROUVIM: Withers?

 

ROB DARBY: It was something which blamed superpower contention for some event. I can’t remember what the event was. It might have been the Wither’s sacking. Anyway it was something where the notion of superpower contention as a causative factor was preposterous, and I wrote a somewhat expostulatory letter saying what a load of bullshit.

 

JOHN HEROUVIM: Which I agreed with, and so we both got criticized in an editorial.

 

ROB DARBY: So Duncan suggested we discuss this use. But Hill’s idea of a discussion is, of course, giving you a lecture. So Hill proceeded to give a lecture in which he was extremely insulting. He just talked about people who write well but secretly don’t accept the party’s line on the Soviet Union and virtually, you know, sort of insinuated, without saying anything directly, that I was basically pro-Russian.

 

JOHN HEROUVIM: (laughs) If not a KGB agent! (laughs)

 

ROB DARBY: If not a KGB agent. Only someone who was fundamentally pro-Russian and didn’t really accept his analysis could have disagreed with the analysis made of that event. And he made one of his typically disparaging references to people who can write well, as though that were a sign of ideological unsoundness.

 

JOHN HEROUVIM: Well, he’s got no worries on that score.

 

ROB DARBY: (laughs) So, I just sat and endured that.

 

JOHN HEROUVIM: Did you object to him?

 

ROB DARBY: No. No, I didn’t argue.

 

JOHN HEROUVIM: You were obviously unhappy with that meeting. What had your impression of Hill been before that? Let me ask you this: What did you used to think of Ted Hill and what do you think of Ted Hill?

 

ROB DARBY: I always respected him and what I still respect is his incredibly obstinacy, his most dominant characteristic. You know, stick at something through thick and thin regardless of reality. (laughs) The CPA held a series of functions for their 60th anniversary, it must have been 1981, and I read a report on that written by John Sendy. Hill gave a talk, and he was questioned and people were asking questions about how isolated the party was and somebody said, ‘If you keep going at your present rate, you’ll end up a minority of one. You’ll be on your own’, and he said, “It wouldn’t be the first time”.

 

JOHN HEROUVIM: (laughs)

 

ROBERT DARBY: So there’s that incredible, almost evangelical, inner strength that he has. But the other side of that is that he is an incredibly inflexible and dogmatic kind of person. I’ve never been impressed with any of his theoretical writings. I found them dry and superficial. I read ‘Australian Revolution’. I didn’t think it broke new ground either in revolutionary theory or in Australian history. I just found it repeating formulae that had been around for a long time. The books which followed that were even worse. The only area where I think he made a real contribution was on the theory of trade unions and, related to that, his strong position on the state. I think on those two issues he did have some original thoughts, but significantly they’re both issues that China has had no experience of, and where he could actually think for himself rather than have the line fed to him by his Chinese comrades.

Hill is not somebody you could ever like. But I certainly respected his tenacity, his hard working party work, and all that kind of thing. Now, I don’t mind if he’s any of those things but I feel now that they’re being used for evil (laughs) rather than good. (laughs) To that extent, unfortunate. I think an Australia ruled by Ted Hill would be the closest thing to Hell on Earth. (laughs)

 

JOHN HEROUVIM: Well, you’ve already made comments to that regard, I want to know whether you want to add to them. Ted Hill’s influence. His position within the party. He’s certainly a central figure, which he denies.

 

ROBERT DARBY: Oh, Hill and the party, I mean, as I said, I don’t think anyone has exercised such a total domination over any organisation that I can think of. I mean he was the party’s brains, he was its public image, its front. Everything the party does, its policy, its organisation, is personally shaped by him. I read something, read a document he wrote at one stage, Duncan left lying around, and I kept them (laughs). Shortly after the Gang of Four business, saying how the party ought to have its next congress, and it was saying how – it must have been addressed to Central Committee members – saying how at previous congresses ‘comrades have asked that I write their speeches for them. I’m quite prepared to do that if you want me to, but I don’t think it’s necessary’. (laughs) So, it extends even that far. Whether this is just because he so surrounds himself by incompetents, all his close associates are incompetent ‘yes men’ who can’t write speeches, so that’s another possibility. He’s a bit like Fraser or Menzies in that respect. I don’t think he’d want people around him who could threaten his position. It goes back to his hatred of intellectuals.

 

JOHN HEROUVIM: To hear him called a revisionist, which I heard in early 1977, was just an absolute… I couldn’t countenance the idea of Ted Hill being called a revisionist or of Ted Hill being criticized. You know, all sorts of things would be criticized by Ted Hill was outside that circle. He was certainly, he was incredibly, he was worshipped by all sorts of people, by Clarrie O’Shea, by Ted Bull, certainly by the younger generation. Now, part of that, I think, was his quaintness really; in the way that this stodgy old bastard can make incredible comments. Like, I remember the glow I got when Duncan was arranging my defence when I bashed that Nazi up and Ted Hill said…

 

ROBERT DARBY: When you didn’t bash that Nazi up. (laughs)

 

JOHN HEROUVIM: When I didn’t bash that Nazi up. They can’t try you twice! And Ted Hill said, “Well, there’s two unfortunate things about this incident. One, a comrade was arrested. And two, that the bastard wasn’t killed.” Now, from a lawyer – ‘kill the bastard’…

 

ROBERT DARBY: (laughs)

 

JOHN HEROUVIM: Why do you think his name was so revered. Plus the mystique that he deliberately… but I’ve come across ordinary people who’ve met him and sort of think, ‘Wow! What a man!’

 

ROBERT DARBY: Well, I think you can answer that question much better than me and you’ve given the answer. I only met him on one occasion and on that occasion didn’t lead me to respect him at all.

 

JOHN HEROUVIM: How attributable is the party’s support of China to him?

 

ROBERT DARBY: I think we’ve already answered that question in different ways. I mean it’s not due to him alone. It’s due to a generation of communists who went with him, their history of dependency on a socialist motherland. So, in that sense, he’s representative of that whole group. He’s not personally responsible. But, I will say that, but for Hill, the party would have supported the Gang of Four in 1976. When the incident happened, certainly Betty Little, Kalkadoon Bookshop, put out Yao Wenyuan’s and Zhang Chunqiao’s pamphlets very prominently and Vanguard reprinted something Hill had written prior to the fall of Deng Xiaoping which was a pro-Gang of Four article. Well, the party had always supported the Gang of Four because they were running China. But after the coup, and I also read this in a circular from Hill that Duncan left lying around, he actually wrote, ‘Many of you wanted to put out a statement supporting the Gang of Four but I persuaded you to wait until I visited China’. And while he was away, and before he in fact got to China, he got ‘Peoples Daily’ in Albania and it was on the basis of that, without consulting the party, that he sent the telegram to Vanguard saying support the coup.

 

JOHN HEROUVIM: He said publish this in Vanguard after consulting leading comrades and [inaudible]…

 

ROBERT DARBY: Yes.

 

JOHN HEROUVIM: That was the question I was going to ask you: Had Ted Hill supported the Gang of Four in the party?

 

ROBERT DARBY: Oh yes. Yes. For sure.

 

JOHN HEROUVIM: Are you prepared to make a guess of any sort as to the party’s size during your period of membership?

 

ROBERT DARBY: Well, it’s very hard to know. Of course, it depends how you define members.

 

JOHN HEROUVIM: Members in the sense that you were a member, that now someone recruited you.

 

ROBERT DARBY: I guess there might have been five hundred people throughout Australia.

 

JOHN HEROUVIM: Is there anything you’d like to add to anything you said?

 

ROBERT DARBY: Yes! IT’S ALL LIES!!! (laughs)

 

JOHN HEROUVIM: (laughs)

 

Continuation 6 May 1984 (on cassette 2B)

 

JOHN HEROUVIM: Can I go through those little points that you jotted down first? Timor, Helen Hill, issues not pushed by CPA(ML) despite China.

 

ROB DARBY: I just remember reading somewhere, possibly ‘Arena’, by Helen Hill where she expressed surprise that given China’s very fervent support for Timor, this would be ’75 to ’77, I suppose, it was remarkable that the local CPA(ML), the local Maoists, generally were devoting so little attention to the issue. That’s all that is.

 

JOHN HEROUVIM: What about, here it says, ‘Duncan paid off by Xinhua in 1980, long service leave, superannuation’?

 

ROB DARBY: Yes. He rang me up at work during 1980 to ask me if I could find out what an AJA [Australian Journalists Association] member would be entitled to after how ever many years’ service he had. It would be twenty years, I suppose, service. I can’t remember whether it was superannuation or pay in lieu of sick pay or holiday pay or what, but it was one of those things, and he was quite surprised at how little it was. It wasn’t very much. This was because Xinhua obviously wanted, they terminated their agreement…

 

JOHN HEROUVIM: He told you that?

 

ROB DARBY: Yes. Or maybe I just assumed it[inaudible]. But they wanted to know exactly what he would be entitled to if he were an Australian journalist, under AJA rates, what he’d be entitled to after that many years.

 

JOHN HEROUVIM: And that was 1980?

 

ROB DARBY: Yes. That was 1980.

 

JOHN HEROUVIM: Yes, [reading from list] Split. Those that followed Hill. Blind devotion to Stalin. Could not take criticism. [Name deleted] in Canberra. [Name deleted]. And ‘New Times’.

 

ROB DARBY: Right. That’s just the idea that some of those who followed Hill in the early ‘60s did so largely because they were still committed to Stalin and they couldn’t take the Kruschev and the CPA criticism of Stalin. And one classic example of that is [name deleted], now [name deleted] can tell you a lot more about [name deleted] than I can, but of course when he came to run the bookshop here in Canberra and the… now, what was it, you’d better check with [name deleted] what the incident was but there was some international incident… it wasn’t Kampuchea, it was much earlier, it would have been ’76, there was some big incident in ’76, he was basically supporting the soviet union on that question and when various reports of this went back to Melbourne but, of course, nothing had ever happened. It was during the attempt of the local BWIU to take over the BLF here and [name deleted] was in town. And he went into the bookshop and asked for something on whatever the issue was, Vietnam, Timor, and [name deleted] gave him a copy of ‘New Times’ from under the counter.

 

JOHN HEROUVIM: So he knew that he wasn’t supposed to be…

 

ROB DARBY: Oh yes. And he was very smartly moved, after this. [Name deleted] would know the details.

 

JOHN HEROUVIM: Did [name deleted] tell you about that?

 

ROB DARBY: No, [name deleted] did.

 

JOHN HEROUVIM: [Continues reading from Rob’s list] Pat Malone, Paddy Malone. Union heavies guaranteed adherence of other officials and organisers and, why did Bull leave no successor or Gallagher? No, because of wheeling and dealing style.

 

ROB DARBY: Isn’t that self-explanatory?

 

JOHN HEROUVIM: Yes, it is but I just wondered whether you had any particular insights.

 

ROB DARBY: No. Just a thought.

 

JOHN HEROUVIM: Before you joined or were recruited to the CPA(ML), what was your image of the party? What did you think it would be that you were joining?

 

ROB DARBY: I don’t know whether I had a very clearly defined image but I expected something very well organised, very dedicated and very secret. There was an ABC science fiction serial one time and they had this secret organisation preparing for the future. I saw it very much in that sort of light. I expected a party, I guess, similar to that which existed in China under the terror of the Chiang Kai-shek regime but obviously not quite so intense as that, not shooting people. But I expected at an organisational level it to have about that sort of intensity.

 

JOHN HEROUVIM: Well, what did you find?

 

ROB DARBY: At first, that impression was confirmed. The student branch that I was a member of took things very seriously, did everything by the book, weekly meeting, were very careful about not talking about party matters other than at party meetings, messages were sent in the approved way and answers received. I guess the first hint that there were certain defects in the machinery, and things got a little bit creaky, was the length of time it took to receive replies to questions that were sent through party channels. There were scathing remarks by people like you on this very point: they always take ages to reply and it’s all bullshit anyway, or something to that effect. They send back nonsense. I remember we sent in a question about 3CR, whether we should be involved in 3CR. I don’t know how many weeks it took to get a reply but it was a very vague about how 3CR can be closed down by the state at any time and revolutionaries have to assess for themselves where’s the most useful place for them to be active in. They said you shouldn’t place all your eggs in one basket but again it’s a chance to put forward the correct line and these opportunities should be seized. Well, we sort of knew that!

 

JOHN HEROUVIM: What were your organisational experiences in the CPA(ML)? How were you organised? Initially in a student branch?

 

ROB DARBY: Well, the student branch at La Trobe first and then after that a series of bizarre meetings.

 

JOHN HEROUVIM: Can you go into some detail there?

 

ROB DARBY: But the student branch was active, well organised and seemed to take things seriously. Now, the situation then changed slightly when Barry and [name deleted] and you left La Trobe and there was only [name deleted] and [name deleted] and me left, and we continued to meet in the old way, I guess, for about… well you three left in ’76… I guess we continued to meet in the old way for about six months. We often used to meet in [name deleted]’s room [inaudible], we didn’t meet in pubs so much where we used to meet. [name deleted] was the person who had contact with the party contact. I think I worked out who it was too. I saw him wandering through the uni. (laughs)

 

JOHN HEROUVIM: Who?

 

ROB DARBY: I never knew his name. Dark haired guy, young, wore and Independence badge, beard, very intense looking person. Anyway, we then got a message to the effect that we would no longer be organised in this way [inaudible] it was felt that this type of organisation merely duplicated, that workplace based organisation merely duplicated what you were doing anyway and if it were tested, we’d find this [new] way effective. We were split up and each of us got somebody else to meet with, purely for study purposes. There was no question of using it on a political organising base for political activity, which is what our branch had always been. We’d always organised political activities at La Trobe through it. It was meeting for purposes of study and that was all. It might be theoretical study or it might study of some Vanguard article or AC article but there was no orientation towards action. My person I met with was this funny little man who worked at some fishermen’s co-op at South Melbourne. A Greek guy.

 

JOHN HEROUVIM: Do you know his name?

 

ROB DARBY: I can’t remember his name.

 

JOHN HEROUVIM: Would you remember it if you heard it?

 

ROB DARBY: Possibly.

 

JOHN HEROUVIM: Basil?

 

ROB DARBY: Doesn’t ring a bell. He was a friend of Duncan. He sometimes dropped in to the…

 

JOHN HEROUVIM: Crook eye? One crook eye?

 

ROB DARBY: He was quite short.

 

JOHN HEROUVIM: Used to wear a grey dustcoat?

 

ROB DARBY: No. Used to wear a tie and stuff. He came into the Vanguard office one time and gave Duncan some money. Another time I was due to meet him at his workplace and I’d lost the address, I couldn’t remember where it was, and I had to ask Duncan where it was. (laughs)

 

JOHN HEROUVIM: It was just you and him?

 

ROB DARBY: Yes. We used to meet. One time we went down there to the Exhibition Gardens and sat on a park bench and talked about the ‘Theory of the Three Worlds’. And that’s the kind of thing we did.

 

JOHN HEROUVIM: How often?

 

ROB DARBY: Once a fortnight. I don’t know if it meant anything to him but it certainly meant nothing to me. I just found the whole thing a time-wasting distraction. By that stage it was the end of ’77 and I was working quite a lot for Vanguard again.

 

JOHN HEROUVIM: Did you ever complain about this ‘time-wasting distraction’?

 

ROB DARBY: No. I think the main reasons why I never complained, first, I thought my main party work had nothing to do with those meetings. My main party work was in relation to doing stuff for Vanguard and AIM [Australian Independence Movement], and various other mainly writing type of things. That’s what I was involved in. That’s what mattered. The other thing is that I regarded it as a ritual which one did in order to conform with what was expected of you, rather than anything of any practical or even theoretical use. The second reason was, I think I’d learnt the futility of complaining about anything. It didn’t matter if you complained about something. You never knew where the message would go. For one thing, you didn’t know how to complain. How could you send a message of complaint, and through whom and to whom?

 

JOHN HEROUVIM: Well, through your proper channels, surely.

 

ROB DARBY: Well, that would have been that guy. (laughs) I could hardly send as message through him saying that I didn’t want to meet with him, that I couldn’t see much point in it. So how do you send a message? What effect will it have? And I just didn’t think it mattered. A wasted hour every fortnight for the sake of form, you know, is not worth making a fuss over. I’ll do it because that’s what’s expected. I’ll confine my real work to where it matters.

 

JOHN HEROUVIM: So the period of your organisation in this manner was from 1977, was it?

 

ROB DARBY: Mid-77 ‘til I left Melbourne in March ’78.

 

JOHN HEROUVIM: When you came to Canberra were you picked up? Were arrangements made?

 

ROB DARBY: Yes. Quite quickly.

 

JOHN HEROUVIM: And in what form were you organised then?

 

ROB DARBY: Well, [name deleted] came round to my room at the Macquarie Private Hotel one night. I’d met him before so when he arrived there I guessed immediately what…

 

JOHN HEROUVIM: Were you expecting him? Were you told in Melbourne by your fish market man that something would happen or how did you know that…

 

ROB DARBY: I think I asked Duncan whether arrangements would be made for me in Canberra and he assured me that they would. I don’t think I said anything to the fish market man about it. There were a couple of groups in Canberra.

 

JOHN HEROUVIM: What? That you knew of?

 

ROB DARBY: Yes.

 

JOHN HEROUVIM: So there could have been more.

 

ROB DARBY: I knew of two. I doubt that there were more. There was [inaudible], [name deleted] and a guy called [name deleted]… [inaudible]

 

JOHN HEROUVIM: Worker or organiser?

 

ROB DARBY: (laughs) A bit of both. I think he was a carpenter by trade. He wasn’t a full-time organiser. I think he was out of work. We met, once again, on the study group basis. [name deleted] and [name deleted] were not in AIM. [Name deleted] ran the China Society and [name deleted] was active in the union, of course. They’d also attempted to form a group called the Canberra Workers’ Alliance which was just them [inaudible]… a few leaflets [inaudible]… the BLF plus [name deleted], it was a terrible shame to be a teacher. You had to be a blue collar worker to be worth anything. And we just studied ‘The great cause of Australian independence’ and other such works and we used to meet alternatively in each other’s house.

 

JOHN HEROUVIM: When you studied, did you read it out loud at meetings and then discuss it?

 

ROB DARBY: No, not necessarily. We might read out passages but we’d set a section to be read by next time. Someone would introduce and lead the discussion.

 

JOHN HEROUVIM: So, these meetings were weekly?

 

ROB DARBY: No, fortnightly.

 

JOHN HEROUVIM: Was that by decision of the cell? Did it seem to be a rule?

 

ROB DARBY: No, just our local decision.

 

JOHN HEROUVIM: So you were organised in that way for how long?

 

ROB DARBY: It would have gone on for probably about two years, ’78 to early 1980. Then we were organised, things worked out differently, partly because [name deleted] broke up with his wife and went overseas. Apart from that, I’m not sure why. I think again that it was to do with the party directive that branches were to concentrate more on study. I was organised with [name deleted] and [name deleted]. Now, I didn’t meet with Ian for very long because that was around the time he decided he was leaving the party and winding up the bookshop. So [name deleted] and I continued to meet for a while. Oh, now, somebody else was brought in. [name deleted], a metal worker. Queanbeyan City Council.

 

JOHN HEROUVIM: Ex-student worker?

 

ROB DARBY: No, he was a worker worker.

 

JOHN HEROUVIM: And what about [name deleted], what does he do?

 

ROB DARBY: He’s an economist, ex-La Trobe but before you lot, before Barry.

 

JOHN HEROUVIM: Again, that was a study thing?

 

ROB DARBY: Turn it off for a minute.

 

[Turns off tape, then resumes]

 

JOHN HEROUVIM: That was a study thing?

 

ROB DARBY: Oh yes. Just correcting it a little bit. First of all, [name deleted] replaced [name deleted]. [name deleted] was organised in a different way, and [name deleted] and he and I continued to meet. Then, after that, we were organised differently again. [Name deleted], [name deleted] and me. Then [name deleted] and I decided to recruit [name deleted] into it. [Name deleted], [name deleted] and I met probably until the end of ’81.

 

JOHN HEROUVIM: Then what happened?

 

ROB DARBY: Then I decided that I was leaving.

 

JOHN HEROUVIM: When you recruited a new person…

 

ROB DARBY: During most of ’81, most of our discussions were about the party’s failings. [Name deleted] had discussions with his contact in Melbourne and raised some of the objections about what was going on.

 

JOHN HEROUVIM: And what happened?

 

ROB DARBY: [inaudible] I considered it so unsatisfactory that it confirmed my decision to leave.

 

JOHN HEROUVIM: So [name deleted]’s superior was in Melbourne not Canberra?

 

ROB DARBY: Yes.

 

JOHN HEROUVIM: And what? He’d have to go to Melbourne to have those discussions?

 

ROB DARBY: [inaudible] I think they communicated by.

 

JOHN HEROUVIM: Do you know who the contact was?

 

ROB DARBY: No.

 

JOHN HEROUVIM: When you recruited someone new, did you put them in for approval?

 

ROB DARBY: No.

 

JOHN HEROUVIM: The two of you decided and that person became a member? Did you convey that to the centre that you’d done it?

 

ROB DARBY: [Name deleted] may have. I couldn’t be sure of that.

 

JOHN HEROUVIM: In 1978, there was a congress. Were you part of that?

 

ROB DARBY: Oh, we did receive a few documents. (laughs)

 

JOHN HEROUVIM: And what about the subsequent congress in ’82?

 

ROB DARBY: No.

 

JOHN HEROUVIM: You weren’t a member technically. Well, you were technically but you…

 

ROB DARBY: No-one in Canberra was sent any documents.

 

JOHN HEROUVIM: How did you find out? You read about the congress, did you?

 

ROB DARBY: I found out from [name deleted] in Sydney that documents were being circulated. I told [name deleted] and he was very scandalized. He made a big protest. Canberra had been excluded, we thought, because of the interface between [Norm] Gallagher and [Peter] O’Dea. This was the time when Gallagher and O’Dea were at each other’s throats. We might have been cut off for that reason.

(tape ends)

 

Continuation Tape 3A

 

JOHN HEROUVIM: ROB DARBY tape 3. Eventually you did receive some documents?

 

ROB DARBY: We did receive some documents but it must have been probably sheer formality because any discussions or amendments or anything meant to have taken place I’m sure would have well and truly taken place by then. We were really just given a look at what others had seen.

 

JOHN HEROUVIM: Did you receive documents with explanation or an apology?

 

ROB DARBY: Oh, I’d lost interest by then.

 

JOHN HEROUVIM: Well, in your political activity, during your period of party membership, how much direct guidance did you receive from the party?

 

ROB DARBY: There was no direct guidance from the party. My main activity in Canberra was in AIM and more specifically, after we started ‘Southern Cross’, producing the newspaper ‘Southern Cross’. The party didn’t provide any kind of support or advice, except when it was trying to put forward the idea of the deferral of independence. There was an article in ‘The Australian Communist’ about Australia being dependent yet independent or whatever the precise phrase was, and effectively meaning that the independence struggle should be postponed. [inaudible] to defend democratic rights and the struggle against Soviet social-imperialism. Now we wrote a criticism of this article which we sent in to the party, and we got a reply, not from, I don’t know who from in Melbourne, but I suspect just the contact. I found it a very inadequate reply to it. But I’ve got those documents and you’ve seen them. That would be 1980, I guess, but you can check whichever issue of the AC. That was the only time it tried to impose definite political guidance. And we, sort of, duly objected. (laughs) [inaudible] unacceptable. So I continued to concentrate on newspapers. I always had the impression that the party organised a little coup to stop ‘Southern Cross’ being published, mainly through [name deleted]. [inaudible] exposed people too much.

 

JOHN HEROUVIM: There was only one edition wasn’t there?

 

ROB DARBY: Oh no, it went for over a year.

 

JOHN HEROUVIM: You have them all?

 

ROB DARBY: They’re in the National Library now. It did well. The first issue came out in November ’78. It was published throughout ’79 and the last one came out in June/July 1980. It went for 18 months.

 

JOHN HEROUVIM: And it was Canberra AIM?

 

ROB DARBY: Yes.

 

JOHN HEROUVIM: Were you active in a mass way, in a mass organisation?

 

ROB DARBY: Well, AIM was never really a mass organisation.

 

JOHN HEROUVIM: What the party called mass organisations.

 

ROB DARBY: I suppose.

 

JOHN HEROUVIM: AIM, Students for Australian Independence.

 

ROB DARBY: Well, [inaudible] there wasn’t a student movement.

 

JOHN HEROUVIM: When you were in Melbourne.

 

ROB DARBY: Oh yes.

 

JOHN HEROUVIM: How broad were those organisations?

 

ROB DARBY: They weren’t broad at all.

 

JOHN HEROUVIM: Why?

 

ROB DARBY: They essentially consisted of party members in different clothes.

 

JOHN HEROUVIM: Why?

 

ROB DARBY: I think because they existed on pure party policy. They talked about being broad but what in fact they put forward was very strict line on every question. It was pure detailed party line, even down to the same… One of the few widely supported struggles we had at La Trobe, the famous traffic light struggle, this was the time when Hill was feeling cheesed off with the press and Vanguard was saying ‘never talk to the press’, so we argued at student meetings that the press should not be invited and we shouldn’t speak to them.

 

JOHN HEROUVIM: Was an organisation like Canberra AIM led by party members, made up of party members?

 

ROB DARBY: Oh yes. [Name deleted] and [name deleted] were the main people in it, and [name deleted]. She’s an old Stalinist. (laughs)

 

JOHN HEROUVIM: And the imposition of this line, it wasn’t something that happened externally to those organisations? The party didn’t say you must do this or that, you acted independently in thinking that was the best way to do it, or why did it happen that way?

 

ROB DARBY: AIM here existed before I got here so I don’t know why or how it was set up. [inaudible] I mean, AIM was formed after the coup. In 1976-77 it was quite a large organisation. It was declining steadily and by the time I got to Canberra was in quite rapid decline, and continued to do so. Its main activity was just having a stall every week in Civic near the shops. But it used to have meetings when I first arrived in Canberra in 1978, it had quite large meetings. There might be up to fifteen people there. Most of who, as far as I knew, were not party people at all. We’d discuss different issues as much as organize things.

 

JOHN HEROUVIM: In this broader independence style organisation you were a member of, were there formal party links and party guidance of these organisations?

 

ROB DARBY: Well, at different stages there were. When SAI at La Trobe, of course, the leaders of SAI were just the La Trobe party cell, with virtually duplicate meetings. The party cell would meet every week and decide what to do at the next SAI meeting. (laughs) I don’t think there was any guidance from the party to that cell as to what they should do, except I think we were told to organise some kind of anti-Soviet… Were we told to organise it, or did we just decide to do it?

 

JOHN HEROUVIM: I don’t remember any orders.

 

ROB DARBY: Then we had that mysterious ‘thanks’ from nobody-knew-where. (laughs)

 

JOHN HEROUVIM: I forget that. Can you tell me what happened?

 

ROB DARBY: We had this Russian academic, foreign affairs guy, talking at Melbourne University and we had a demo against that. Well, we just came in, disrupted things a bit, and then pissed off. Didn’t make a good impression on anybody. The OSS [Overseas Students Service] students were there too and they remained quiet until the end and embarrassed him with questions. But we didn’t do it that way. We just came and stormed around with flags, created a scene, and hit someone, and so forth. The usual style. And at the SAI meeting the following week, you informed the group that you’d been asked to thank them for this demo, that it was very much appreciated.

 

JOHN HEROUVIM: (laughs) The SAI meeting?!

 

ROB DARBY: Yes. Everybody thought, ‘Isn’t that nice?’ I don’t think anybody thought to ask who asked him to thank us. (laughs) The Chinese? (laughs) It was a mystery.

 

JOHN HEROUVIM: Now I remember it. I think it was Ted Hill who had asked Duncan to ask me…

 

ROB DARBY: Well, that’s what I guessed, the chain of command.

 

JOHN HEROUVIM: Did you recruit people to the party?

 

ROB DARBY: Well, only, that guy I mentioned here in Canberra. I think I did mention that I recruited [name deleted]. I definitely did raise that with you.

 

JOHN HEROUVIM: What happened with that?

 

ROB DARBY: I think it happened. That must have been in ’77 before I left for Canberra. I said to you that I think you should recruit him. He was still at Melbourne Uni at that stage, or maybe he had a job by then. It doesn’t matter. You agreed and I think you saw Ted Bull about it and I asked [name deleted] whether anything had happened, and months later it hadn’t. (laughs) So I mentioned it to you again and you said you’d do something about it and eventually something did happen.

 

JOHN HEROUVIM: You were recruited, I’d imagine, in the usual way, someone from La Trobe came up to you and said this-and-that.

 

ROB DARBY: I think it was Barry.

 

JOHN HEROUVIM: Right. So, were any of the recruits that you were involved in recruiting, in either Canberra or Melbourne, critical of China?

 

ROB DARBY: No.

 

JOHN HEROUVIM: What did you see as the standards you’d apply?

 

ROB DARBY: Oh, effectively anyone you’d been working closely with.

 

JOHN HEROUVIM: So it would be a question of what’s technically in the constitution, whether they support the party line…

 

ROB DARBY: Whether they supported the party line more or less uncritically and whether they were active and did things.

 

JOHN HEROUVIM: You’ve already touched on, in fact spoken at length about criticizing party policy and how nothing ever came of it, and also in terms of your organisational dissatisfaction in Melbourne there were criticisms you’d didn’t mention, you didn’t raise, what about others, were there other criticisms and reservations that you didn’t mention and, of so, why? What I’m asking is during your party membership were you unhappy with the political line of the party or with behaviour, or statements, but you didn’t convey that unhappiness to the party leadership?

 

ROB DARBY: Oh yes. I had disagreements with a lot of particular policies. Its understanding of economics was weak. Its policy on literature and art was crude. Its policies on sexuality were objectionable. I guess they’re the three main areas but I just put them aside on the grounds that its political line was so correct that these issues were side issues and you had to take the bad with the good. Plus I knew only too well that to seriously tackle such issues would destroy your credibility and no-one would trust you any more. So I just put them aide. There was an occasion I remember. The people at La Trobe were writing some document on the student movement and there was some reference to sexuality, ‘bourgeois decadence’ or something of that kind, which I argued against, that it should be deleted because it’s nonsense.

 

JOHN HEROUVIM: Was it?

 

ROB DARBY: It was deleted, yes.

 

JOHN HEROUVIM: To the outside observer, the party…

 

ROB DARBY: Another interesting example is when Duncan once gave me some type-written articles on political economy to read, and said tell me what you think of them. I read them and told him they excellent, the best thing that I’d read for years. I thought they were very good. I didn’t quite understand why he was so displeased by this response and eventually it proved that they were things Langer had been writing, partly at his request and partly as part of his critique of the party’s policies on political economy. As far as I was concerned, they were pretty sound Marxist economics. Duncan eventually told me they were by Langer and they were no good and I realized that I had to change my opinion (laughs).

 

JOHN HEROUVIM: And did you? Superficially at least?

 

ROB DARBY: Of, well, I didn’t realize that there was a political hidden purpose, a hidden agenda.

 

JOHN HEROUVIM: Was the party as monolithic as outside observers thought it was? Were there factions in the party, differences?

 

ROB DARBY: Well, not that I was aware of until the Langer thing surfaced. He had quite a large faction behind him. The party wasn’t monolithic. It was more that its policy was monolithic, and accountable to nobody. But the functioning of the party was diffuse and random. It wasn’t organisationally monolithic but it was in terms of policy and political direction.

 

JOHN HEROUVIM: Do you remember a separate Canberra branch being organised?

 

ROB DARBY: I don’t, no.

 

JOHN HEROUVIM: How seriously did you take the party’s emphases on mass work, on avoiding left blocism and so on? What was the understanding of mass work?

 

ROB DARBY: Well, everybody paid lip service to it but the party’s own requirements made it impossible because the emphasis was on doing things, which by definition had to be organised by a small group of committed people. So in practice you spent most your time with other party members preparing leaflets and organising meetings and demo’s and so forth and there was no time left for the ordinary affairs of life.

 

JOHN HEROUVIM: Do you think that was a general condition or a student one?

 

ROB DARBY: No. No, it was particularly acute among students but a similar thing with any member who was involved in any kind of organised work, organised activity, publishing, or AIM, or anything like that, and you had a lot of antagonism between people who thought what they should be doing was mass work, particularly ex-student factory workers who, you know, felt that it was legitimate political work for them to go to the pub with their workmates, and frowned severely on students who suggested they might do the same thing with their fellow students, and there was a lot of resentment and hostility between the two groups. There were those who emphasized just immersing yourself in the workplace and those who believed it was more important to get out and do things. There were always arguments about that.

 

JOHN HEROUVIM: Do you think that the Maoists as a group on the left, because of their emphasis on ordinary people and mass work, they in fact had more mass connections with non-political non-left people than other groups like the CPA or the Trotskyites?

 

ROB DARBY: No. I think they had far less.

 

JOHN HEROUVIM: You think they had less?

 

ROB DARBY: Oh, not less than the Trotskyites! (laughs) Less than the CPA.

 

JOHN HEROUVIM: You think they were more of a left bloc?

 

ROB DARBY: Oh yes. But they idealized ordinary people. An ordinary person was someone who (laughs) virtually subscribed to the party line because it was just so obvious and transparent that any reasonable man could not but agree with it. (laughs) Plus there was an increasing tendency, as I pointed out, to idealize right-wingers, to see them as the source of all virtue because they had the simple basic hatred of Russia. (laughs)

 

JOHN HEROUVIM: Of communism.

 

ROB DARBY: Of communism. (laughs)

 

JOHN HEROUVIM: What happened inside the party on November 11, 1975?

 

ROB DARBY: Well, as far as I’m aware: nothing! (laughs) There’s no evidence that I’m aware of, that the party organised anything in relation to 1975. Vanguard came out at the same time with a special insert – when was November 11th? It must have been a Tuesday – Vanguard came out as normal on the Thursday and had a special insert. But naturally I headed for the city square in the evening and I had copies of ‘Independence Voice’ that I just put out with a story about John Kerr in it and other they were handed out, and you know what happened after that. But I was very concerned and alarmed. I was waiting, hoping, for some kind of direction, some kind of leadership, some kind of organisation to emerge but nothing ever did. We all looked to you to secure that but, of course, you know what you were told. I in fact raised this issue with the little Greek fishmonger man, some years later and said how I was disturbed that, on November 11, the party didn’t show leadership. Had we [La Trobe students] not organised the demo that evening and the following day, the party would have done absolutely nothing. It disturbs me. And he just assured me that the party was there, and if there was a necessity for anything to happen it would have been done. (laughs).

 

JOHN HEROUVIM: [inaudible] You’ve mentioned also before that one of the things you were disturbed about was the party’s attitude to sexuality. Generally speaking on the sex and drugs and rock-n-roll front, the party had a puritanical attitude quite out of keeping with the lifestyle of its youth members. Would you agree with that?

 

ROB DARBY: Oh, no. I don’t think it was out of keeping with its youth members. I mean, its youthful members were mostly Ockers. They weren’t into drugs. They were all mostly very straight. Male chauvinism was quite widespread. It wasn’t out of keeping with typical Australian youth attitudes. They were out of keeping with student attitudes.

 

JOHN HEROUVIM: Student party members were out of keeping?

 

ROB DARBY: Yes. They were just totally out of sympathy with the student lifestyle and general attitudes because they were puritanical, because they were heavy, because they disapproved of drugs and they really didn’t enjoy themselves very much.

 

JOHN HEROUVIM: Were they a humourless bunch?

 

ROB DARBY: No, they were very humorous.

 

JOHN HEROUVIM: Was the party the brunt of any of the humour?

 

ROB DARBY: Frequently.

 

JOHN HEROUVIM: What did that mean?

 

ROB DARBY: Well, it just that you were sufficiently committed to be able to joke about it.

 

JOHN HEROUVIM: Was Ted Hill the butt of any of the humour?

 

ROB DARBYD: Oh yes. We used to sing Ted Hill songs, ‘I dreamed I saw Ted Hill last night, the same as you and me’. (laughs) Oh frequently. Frequently he was the butt of humour. But it was kind of good natured humour that’s associated with something that you basically respect and trust, and you’re so committed to it that you don’t have any worries about laughing at it.

 

JOHN HEROUVIM: How about both the party’s attitude, the party’s attitude is on record, the average party member’s attitude to other left groups that would always be in inverted commas if ‘left’ was used.

 

ROB DARBY: Most people were extremely hostile. Some of the young people who came in in ’76 or ’77 tended to be more tolerant.

 

JOHN HEROUVIM: Did that change?

 

ROB DARBY: I remember, at La Trobe of course we had atrocious relations with everybody, awful, absolute low life, but during ’77 we made some attempt to be nice to everybody and they really trusted us. They realized, I think, that we were just very weak and couldn’t afford to be nasty to anybody. I remember how angry [name deleted] was when I tried to get us to participate in SRC type things, go to meetings about the La Trobe workers’ strike, and how he disagreed with my… There was some argument with the Union Board over a barbeque or something, I’ve forgotten the details but I was conciliatory and agreed to do everything they said. [Name deleted] got very angry about this and I shouldn’t have behaved like that. He made the remark that people like [name deleted] and [name deleted] didn’t like my leadership because they were worried that if there was a fight I wouldn’t back them. (laughs)

 

JOHN HEROUVIM: (laughs) [name deleted]! Brawler [name deleted].

 

ROB DARBY: I think what I said to [name deleted] was, of course I wouldn’t back them! (laughs) I didn’t want to get into a fight again. And, of course, the year ended with [name deleted] and – what’s the name of that young lunatic?

 

JOHN HEROUVIM: Which one? [name deleted]?

 

ROB DARBY: No, the little guy.

 

JOHN HEROUVIM: [name deleted]?

 

ROB DARBY: [name deleted]’s and [name deleted]’s attack on that Spartacist down at the bus shelter.

 

JOHN HEROUVIM: You were involved with the production of Vanguard, putting it out. How was the Vanguard office run?

 

ROB DARBY: Well, Duncan Clarke. It was run like a little newspaper in the 1930s. It was a very Bohemian set-up. Quite extraordinary in many ways. The practical detailed work, really it was Reva who held it together. Duncan used to storm ‘round the place losing things all the time. Reva basically doing the work, getting the correspondence out, being a very efficient secretary for a very absent-minded boss. It held together by string and glue, and hard work.

 

JOHN HEROUVIM: Do you think that the circumstances under which the paper was produced had an effect on not so much the line but the sort of paper it was?

 

ROB DARBY: No, I don’t think so. I think Hill said what kind of paper he wanted and Duncan did that. It’s come out looking identical for twenty years. (laughs) That’s pretty good going. They decided they wanted a paper that puts the line so you have the front page covered with editorials rather than anything interesting. That’s how it’s always been, and the shape hasn’t changed.

 

JOHN HEROUVIM: Did you have anything to do, or any knowledge about, the despatch office at Milton Street?

 

ROB DARBY: Yes.

 

JOHN HEROUVIM: Can you tell me as much about that as you know? Who owned it?

 

ROB DARBY: Wasn’t it owned by [name deleted]? Well, my impression is [name deleted] owned it.

 

JOHN HEROUVIM: Did you meet him?

 

ROB DARBY: No, I never met him. Oh, maybe I did meet him. I only went there a couple of times. Once when we were despatching great stacks of all Hill’s books to China and another couple of times to drop in the Vanguards being sent out and another time when they were short of people to wrap the stuff and I helped with despatching.

 

JOHN HEROUVIM: What is stacks of Hill’s book? Hundreds? Thousands?

 

ROB DARBY: Well, at the end of ’77, we got all his surplus copies, anything we could find, not thousands, hundreds of copies of each.

 

JOHN HEROUVIM: Hundreds of copies of each book?

 

ROB DARBY: Yes. Sent them [inaudible] to Kalkadoon and got their surplus stocks.

 

JOHN HEROUVIM: And sent them to China.

 

ROB DARBY: Sent them to China.

 

JOHN HEROUVIM: And they were paid for?

 

ROB DARBY: Yes.

 

JOHN HEROUVIM: Do you remember what price?

 

ROB DARBY: Oh, no idea.

 

JOHN HEROUVIM: And you also said you took the Vanguards down there on a couple of occasions…

 

ROB DARBY: To Milton Street.

 

JOHN HEROUVIM: The forward run?

 

ROB DARBY: Yes, all of them.

 

JOHN HEROUVIM: Straight from the printer’s?

 

ROB DARBY: Oh no, I don’t think I ever collected Vanguard from the printer. I never knew how many were printed. I knew it was about four or five thousand.

 

JOHN HEROUVIM: Can you remember how you knew that?

 

ROB DARBY: Duncan said so.

 

JOHN HEROUVIM: So Milton Street, they’d mail things out from Milton Street?

 

ROB DARBY: Yes. And that’s about all. The mailing list from Milton didn’t seem very large, the mailing list for Australia didn’t seem very large. The mailing list to China was quite big. (laughs)

 

JOHN HEROUVIM: Was it?

 

ROB DARBY: I reckon they’d send a stack of Vanguards about six inches high to China, but possibly not much more [inaudible] in Australia.

 

JOHN HEROUVIM: That would hardly account for five thousand.

 

ROB DARBY: Oh, it wouldn’t, they wouldn’t dispose of… Of course, there’s the bookshops, a lot went to bookshops. There were two groups sent out, one sent to institutions and so forth, were mailed out separately, and the less well wrapped ones went to individuals, to individual addresses. They were wrapped so tightly I’m sure no-one was able to read it. (laughs)

 

JOHN HEROUVIM: They still wrap them that way.

 

ROB DARBY: (laughs) Mainly old women and a couple of old men used to work there.

 

JOHN HEROUVIM: What about ‘The Independent Australian’ magazine? Was that a… I mean, I’ve been told a fair bit by [name deleted] about what was involved. Were you involved at all?

 

ROB DARBY: No.

 

JOHN HEROUVIM: Did you pick up from your relations with Duncan Clarke anything about it?

 

ROB DARBY: Obviously, I picked up a lot from him and from [name deleted] about it. I knew nothing about it until I saw the first issue. I’d have liked to have been more involved than I ever was. My first involvement in it was to help with the layout on the third or fourth issue, with the film theme cover, and to research a little story about Eddie Gilbert, the cricketer. It wasn’t until I came to Canberra that I began to write for it to any great extent.

 

JOHN HEROUVIM: When you were in China was there much by way of political discussion…

 

ROB DARBY: Oh, except for the tour, the Albury-Wadonga story. Duncan and [name deleted] and [name deleted] and I went on a trip to Albury-Wadonga.

 

JOHN HEROUVIM: With pre-arranged contacts up there?

 

ROB DARBY: Oh, no. Just went up to interview the people involved in the Albury-Wadonga project and I wrote the story, which was published.

 

JOHN HEROUVIM: When you were in China did you have political discussions with the Chinese?

 

ROB DARBY: No.

 

JOHN HEROUVIM: So, did they take place but you were excluded?

 

ROB DARBY: No. Duncan had a lot of publishing business to attend to. Xinhua business, that kind of stuff. Everywhere we went, of course, we received the same lecture about the Gang of Four. (laughs) But that was not in the nature of discussion. We were just told what was what. I remember (laughs) Duncan and I went to the equivalent of a tech school in Peking. He gave a little talk about the press in Australia and I gave a talk about advertising. (laughs)

 

JOHN HEROUVIM: How do you think they saw the party? Did you get any impressions?

 

ROB DARBY: Impossible to tell. You got the impression, you know, they thought it was going to take power any minute.

 

JOHN HEROUVIM: What, from their speeches?

 

ROB DARBY: Yes. You know, their standard form of speech. They believed that [runs words together very fast] the Australian working-class under the leadership of the Communist Party of Australia (Marxist-Leninist) led by E. F. Hill was making great strides in the battle for national independence and socialism and to defeat US imperialism and repel Soviet social imperialism. We were treated extremely well, and shown great respect. We were shown not just respect but luxury, like royalty, but that’s Chinese hospitality.

 

JOHN HEROUVIM: Did it have the effect on you that such things might be designed to fortify you?

 

ROB DARBY: Well, my trip to China made me more sceptical. I could see no justification for the way we were being treated, considering how insignificant we really were. I wasn’t impressed with socialism in China. I just found it a poor Third World country. They had a lot they needed to do. I came back feeling more relaxed about personal [inaudible]. They weren’t terribly ideological, by and large. The mass of the population were the same as anywhere else. They just wanted to have a wander in the park and lead an ordinary kind of human life. They didn’t want to run ‘round waving placards and shouting slogans. And I was disturbed by the way Duncan seemed to think, you know, the main test of a policy or anything was how it was received in China. Any time I criticized Vanguard, he’d say ‘The Chinese think so highly of it’. It was a constant. And that was the last word. The Chinese think it’s the best overseas paper anyone produces.

 

JOHN HEROUVIM: Do you know what the basis of him making those comments was? Do you think it’s likely that the Chinese would have said such a thing to him?

 

ROB DARBY: I’m sure that the Chinese said very complimentary things about it all the time.

 

JOHN HEROUVIM: As they probably did to every…

 

ROB DARBY: (laughs) As they would have, no doubt, to all the others. And the main reason the Chinese would have liked it was because of the way it always supported their line so fervently and reprint their important communications. Hill’s stuff was always being reprinted in ‘Peking Review’ and Xinhua and so forth.

 

JOHN HEROUVIM: I’d like to run through a list of names…

 

ROB DARBY: [Jokingly speaks in German accent] I don’t know any of them.

 

JOHN HEROUVIM: And see if any of them ring a bell, things that Duncan’s told you or personal experience or whatever.

 

ROB DARBY: Right.

 

JOHN HEROUVIM: Frank Johnson.

 

ROB DARBY: Well, all I know about Frank Johnson is what you’ve told me.

 

JOHN HEROUVIM: Paddy Malone, Ken Miller…

 

ROB DARBY: Duncan was always talking about Ken Miller. I ended up hating him! (laughs) Every year this wretched little peon of praise to this paragon would appear in AC. I’d think, shit, Ken Miller again. (laughs)

 

[At this point, John Herouvim mentions names of several of the older generation of party members but ROB DARBY responds negatively that he does not know them].

 

JOHN HEROUVIM: Gerry O’Dea.

 

ROB DARBY: Yes. Duncan used to talk a lot about him. They were good friends. They died. When did he die?

 

JOHN HEROUVIM: Around 1970, I think.

 

ROB DARBY: I don’t know any great stories about him. All I know is that Duncan thought very highly of him.

 

JOHN HEROUVIM: [name deleted]

 

ROB DARBY: No.

 

JOHN HEROUVIM: Don Scott.

 

ROB DARBY: Yes. He was a very old revolutionary. He’d been involved in the revolutionary movement throughout most of the century. He left all his books to Duncan. We had them in that room in the new office in St Kilda Road. I don’t know much about him, except that he was a founding member of the CPA in 1920.

 

JOHN HEROUVIM: You might be getting him mixed up with his father, Jim Scott.

 

ROB DARBY: Well, anyway, he died in 1978 and left his books to Duncan.

 

JOHN HEROUVIM: [name deleted]

 

ROB DARBY: No.

 

JOHN HEROUVIM: [name deleted]

 

ROB DARBY: No.

 

JOHN HEROUVIM: Jack MacLeod.

 

ROB DARBY: Jack MacLeod. Well, I know that he was ‘Mister Bookshop’. Also, organised the Pilbara Aborigines in the ‘40s. There’s a book about that.

 

JOHN HEROUVIM: Is there? Where? You got it?

 

ROB DARBY: Upstairs. But again [name deleted] would have had a lot of [inaudible]. I never knew him but I think I might have met him a few times in Milton Street.

 

JOHN HEROUVIM: [name deleted]. A fellow called Alec who was an accountant and used to work…

 

ROB DARBY: Only what was in ‘Nation Review’.

 

JOHN HEROUVIM: What was in Nation Review?

 

ROB DARBY: A story about him.

 

JOHN HEROUVIM: When?

 

ROB DARBY: ’77 probably.

 

JOHN HEROUVIM: About Alec?

 

ROB DARBY: Yes. An article about the CPA and Hill.

 

JOHN HEROUVIM: [name deleted]

 

ROB DARBY: No.

 

JOHN HEROUVIM: George Slater.

 

ROB DARBY: Oh, Duncan still had contact with him. He used to go and see George from time to time.

 

JOHN HEROUVIM: Do you know what that was all about? Just mateship?

 

ROB DARBY: No, I thought Slater was meant to be in the party, some tenuous connection with the party.

 

JOHN HEROUVIM: Dulcie Stephanou.

 

ROB DARBY: Only what you told me or what [name deleted] has told me.

 

JOHN HEROUVIM: Albert Langer.

 

ROB DARBY: (laughs) Where shall I begin?! (laughs) What do you want to know?

 

JOHN HEROUVIM: Well, you would have been, you were recruited to the party before the blow-up with Langer happened. What impressions did you have before then? Did you regard him as an important man?

 

ROB DARBY: I had a lot of respect for Langer. It was curious. I was responsible for the first blow being struck against Langer by the party because, it must have been ’76, and I got Langer out to speak on foreign bases at La Trobe and I recorded his talk and transcribed it and I sent a copy to Vanguard and I sent a copy to somebody in Canberra. And Duncan, obviously looking for grounds on which to discredit Langer, and he picked up two little things in the transcript. One about having a light-hearted attitude towards nuclear destruction, and the other thing some reference to the relations of production being socialized. That’s where that little thing came from. In the course of an answer to some question, he used an expression like that. I even have a copy of the transcript.

 

JOHN HEROUVIM: I remember that meeting. I remember him saying it. I thought it was a slip of the tongue.

 

ROB DARBY: And Langer was severely spoken to about that and criticized and he saw me about it afterwards and asked whether people at La Trobe had complained about his talk and I said, ‘No, I even sent it to Vanguard. I thought it was a good talk’. And he said, ‘Oh, I’d been told that I’d gone to La Trobe and misled everybody, that I’d caused great confusion among La Trobe students’. (laughs) That would be later in ’76. I didn’t have much to do with Langer. The closest I came apart from that was we used to print ‘Independence Voice’ on the press in his garage, and I’d occasionally see him there.

 

JOHN HEROUVIM: Jack Lazarus.

 

ROB DARBY: No.

 

[Again, John Herouvim mentions names of several of the older generation of party members but ROB DARBY responds negatively that he does not know them].

 

JOHN HEROUVIM: Charlie McCaffrey.

 

ROB DARBY: No, but I know who he is, the Adelaide guy.

 

JOHN HEROUVIM: [name deleted]

 

ROB DARBY: No.

 

JOHN HEROUVIM: [name deleted]

 

ROB DARBY: No.

 

JOHN HEROUVIM: Ted Bull.

 

ROB DARBY: Well, I know him. Well, I know [name deleted] and I’ve heard of [name deleted]. But I couldn’t tell you anything about them that you wouldn’t already know. I never had very much to do with them.

 

[Again, at this point, John Herouvim mentions names of several of the older generation of party members but ROB DARBY responds negatively that he does not know them].

 

JOHN HEROUVIM: Jock McEwen. There was a Jock and a Jack.

 

ROB DARBY: Was he the one who wrote ‘Once a jolly comrade’?

 

JOHN HEROUVIM: No, no. That was Keith… [name deleted].

 

ROB DARBY: No. Oh, BLF guy.

 

JOHN HEROUVIM: [name deleted].

 

ROB DARBY: Another BLF guy.

 

JOHN HEROUVIM: Yes. I know where they come from. I just wondered whether… Rick and Betty Oke.

 

ROB DARBY: I met Rick once at the office.

 

JOHN HEROUVIM: How did he strike you?

 

ROB DARBY: Oh, very little, mild, gentle. A nice man.

 

JOHN HEROUVIM: Why was he there? Do you remember?

 

ROB DARBY: Something to do with publishing something. No, I don’t know what he was doing there.

 

JOHN HEROUVIM: Norm Wallace.

 

ROB DARBY: BLF.

 

JOHN HEROUVIM: [name deleted].

 

ROB DARBY: No.

 

JOHN HEROUVIM: Harry Daniher.

 

ROB DARBY: BLF. I interviewed him about the Depression.

 

[Turns over tape]

 

Tape continues

 

ROB DARBY: Where shall I begin with Gallagher?

 

JOHN HEROUVIM: Begin with how you thought of him as a party member and what your close relationship with a member of the party leadership, i.e. Duncan Clarke, led you to believe was Gallagher’s position in the party.

 

ROB DARBY: Gallagher was meant to be Vice Chairman though his name was silently removed after he voted with the ACTU Executive to support wage indexation in 1975. This is a well-known historical fact. I had no reason not to respect Gallagher and indeed came round to support the party in the traumatic process of the federal intervention into the New South Wales BLF office which was an issue of course at AUS. [name deleted] and I, in so far as we could, supported Gallagher and supported the BLF at AUS, against the pro-Mundy people there who were in the vast majority. So, I had no reason not to…

 

JOHN HEROUVIM: Do you have documents from that time?

 

ROB DARBY: Yes.

 

JOHN HEROUVIM: That trace your coming to the party and so on? Any letters and anything?

 

ROB DARBY: Yes.

 

JOHN HEROUVIM: Could you look at them one day when you’ve got a bit of time and see if there’s anything for me?

 

ROB DARBY: Yes.

 

JOHN HEROUVIM: Okay, so [name deleted] and you were supporting Gallagher. Why? Because of the arguments that Gallagher was putting forward or because you already supported the party and therefore felt it incumbent on you to…

 

ROB DARBY: A bit of both. I think our position was that Mundy had no political defence because the ML policy was correct and the CPA policy isn’t. (laughs) That was the political side, and the other side was we were prepared to believe Gallagher’s side’s account of mismanagement and financial corruption and that kind of stuff. So, you know, I had no reason not to respect Gallagher and nothing ever happened, he just didn’t seem to figure in the party very much. You just saw his name as Vice-Chairman on and off (laughs), according to whether he’d done something that was considered good or bad. It was hard to think of him… An occasion I saw him in the pub, I never met him, I saw him in the pub, he was like a medieval baron among his vassals. The closest, the best comparison I think you could draw is a rorty old down-to-earth baron surrounded by his retainers. He was holding court in the corner while everybody sort of swilled and fawned around him. He had a barbeque after May Day in 1975 at the new BLF house they bought in Brunswick…

 

JOHN HEROUVIM: The anti-fascist Centre.

 

ROB DARBY: Had a big barbeque out the back. Talk about left blocism! (laughs) And you know, again, he was just this enormous baronial presence. He was very fatherly, like a feudal seigneur. It was very hard to connect him with the party’s policies. He seemed to have his own life and did his own things. Duncan occasionally had to drop into the BLF office for some reason, I suspect to give Gallagher internal party documents like the ones that were circulated among the leadership, mostly written by Hill, the central committee or whatever they had. I did interview Gallagher once, over Fraser Island, for Independence Voice, it was published in an issue of that, opposing sand mining. That’s really the extent of my contact with him. I recall Duncan telling me, this must have been in ’77, about Gallagher who was under even more than usual attack by the Establishment press, you can look up whatever the particular issue was, and Hill was writing various things in his defence, various things about him, and Duncan saying, “Ted’s got a real soft spot for Normie”. You know, as though Hill’s attitude to him was not a strictly political attitude because they were old buddies. You know, he was going to stick by him no matter what.

 

JOHN HEROUVIM: And did your fondness or your support for Gallagher change over time?

 

ROB DARBY: Well it didn’t, it didn’t. I mean I still respect him as a real old-style larrikin unionist. There’s a certain abrasive charm in that. But he’s certainly done nothing to give communism a good name. If you look at him at all objectively, you’d come to the conclusion that he’s basically concerned with his own union position and that’s his principle concern in life.

 

JOHN HEROUVIM: I just thought of another one of those comments that caused a furore in the party. He said, ‘The bosses are like a maiden. They string you along but when you put the hard word on them for the goods they start squealing’.

 

ROB DARBY: (laughs) Even worse than that he described them as ‘a pack of old women’. He made an apology in Vanguard or Hill wrote an apology saying that Gallagher apologizes for this.

 

[Again, John Herouvim mentions names of several of the older generation of party members but ROB DARBY responds negatively that he does not know them].

 

JOHN HEROUVIM: Marj Broadbent.

 

ROB DARBY: Oh, through the peace movement.

 

JOHN HEROUVIM: Did you know who she was at the time?

 

ROB DARBY: No, I hadn’t the faintest idea. I thought she was some child of the masses. (laughs) A peacenik.

 

JOHN HEROUVIM: Gwen Sullivan.

 

ROB DARBY: Yes, I met Gwen. Well, I didn’t really meet her but she used to run the bookshop, didn’t she?

 

JOHN HEROUVIM: East Wind. What did you think of her?

 

ROB DARBY: Oh, she was very frightening, a frightening figure. Scared to go to the bookshop, she was so formidable.

 

JOHN HEROUVIM: In what way?

 

ROB DARBY: She’d stare at you and wonder what you were doing there, as though you were stealing something or even worse as though your political line might be weak in some little area that you’d never suspected and she’d pounce on you, anyone without the correct line who was found in her bookshop. But I went to the bookshop quite early on, in ’74, and bought a few things, some Lenin or something. It might have been even earlier. Yes, probably even earlier, ‘72. I was doing Chinese politics at Melbourne Uni and I needed to get Mao’s Selected Works and they were cheaper there than anywhere else. They were two-dollars-ten (laughs). Cheap. And she said, “Here, you’d better have this, Lenin on revisionism. They don’t publish this in the Soviet Union any more since the bloody revisionists got in charge”. (laughs) [Name deleted] interviewed her for the Depression [History course at La Trobe]. If he doesn’t have a transcript, it’s quite possible David Potts does.

 

JOHN HEROUVIM: Betty Little.

 

ROB DARBY: Well, bookshop but I never really had very much to do with her.

 

JOHN HEROUVIM: Duncan Clarke. (laughs) My final question.

 

ROB DARBY: (laughs) Where shall I begin?!

 

JOHN HEROUVIM: Anywhere. Rave. Ramble. I want to know what sort of fellow was Duncan Clarke? Was he an important party leader?

 

ROB DARBY: No. He was the editor of the newspaper.

 

JOHN HEROUVIM: That sounds important. He was a member of the Political Committee, wasn’t he?

 

ROB DARBY: I think he was mistrusted because he was such a Bohemian. I don’t think he was a leader. I think he was there to do Hill’s bidding. Essentially, he was a real messenger boy for Hill. He couldn’t argue with Hill. He didn’t really have a mind of his own in relation to Hill. His behaviour in Hill’s presence was always quite different to his behaviour anywhere else.

 

JOHN HEROUVIM: Were you witness to that behaviour?

 

ROB DARBY: Yes, he’d get very formal and almost abashed, almost embarrassed, if Hill was there. He’d be very correct but other times he was far more light-hearted and flamboyant and flippant about things. He was there to do Hill’s bidding. Even to the extent that, you know, Hill would be down at Lorne, at his holiday house, and Duncan would have to drive down there every day to pick up things Hill wrote for Vanguard and then take the Vanguard proofs down for Hill to read. Really, the inconvenience he was put to was staggering. At four o-clock in the morning having to drive down to Lorne. So, you know, he was always running round. I first met Duncan because I asked you whether you knew anybody who I could interview for the Depression unit I was doing at La Trobe and you said you knew an old guy who might be prepared to be talked to. You gave me this address in this block of flats in St Kilda Road…

 

JOHN HEROUVIM: Did I tell you who he was?

 

ROB DARBY: No. But I quickly put two-and-two, it didn’t take long. I was walking down the corridor, after noticing his flat had ‘Futureways Publicity Editorial Ltd’, I had a fair idea what I would find. And sure enough when I got in, there was this hearty old guy with a big desk with laid-out pages of Vanguard in front of him. (laughs) And this came as no great surprise. Anyway, we talked about the Depression and he didn’t want me to use his name. And then he asked me to do some proof-reading. (laughs). It always ends with proof-reading.

 

JOHN HEROUVIM: I must say this so I can remember it myself, when he picked up a hitch-hiker and brought her into the office (laughs) and introduced her to me (laughs) and she was proof-reading (laughs) ‘New China News’ (laughs). He literally picked her up off the street (laughs), poor girl!

 

ROB DARBY: Well, that was the kind of improvisation that you needed to keep that paper going, to keep that apparatus going. At the time they were trying to make some money out of the thing, would have been late ’77, trying to get all kinds of ordinary jobs, they’d be up all day and night for various union journals and real estate brochures and this kind of stuff. The next contact was farmers, dairy farmers, had a big demo in Melbourne and dear old ‘Uhl’ [nickname of someone] and I took a banner, a dreadful time, we nearly got lynched (laughs), we had a big banner ‘Workers and Farmers Unite against Multinationals’. We were very brave, carrying this on the procession. I wrote a story about that, which I took down to the office because I was quite intrigued by [inaudible] and I gave them the story and did the proof reading.

 

JOHN HEROUVIM: Was this before you were in the party?

 

ROB DARBY: Oh yes. This must have been ’75. Less than a year. So, you know, gradually my contact increased and Duncan got me to go down there on Thursdays to help do the postage, send off the Vanguards and New China News, at the office Thursday mornings.

 

JOHN HEROUVIM: Side-tracking for a moment, I think I might have you this last time but just quickly, how was the New China News handled? What was that and was it well distributed?

 

ROB DARBY: I think the mailing list was very old. (laughs) A hundred copies went to the Moulders’ Union (laughs) and fifty copies went to the Waterside Workers branch in Brisbane. (laughs) You know, this kind of thing. I don’t think any amendments were made for twenty years. (laughs) I can’t believe anybody ever reading it. Always thousands of copies left over. And, oh, it was just Xinhua stories with boring pictures of giant tumours and things. (laughs)

 

JOHN HEROUVIM: Go on, so you gradually became more involved…

 

ROB DARBY: I began writing and started doing lay-out, and started coming down over the weekend to work on lay-out.

 

JOHN HEROUVIM: Well, I’m interested in Duncan Clarke. What sort of fellow was Duncan Clarke?

 

ROB DARBY: He was in many ways a classic journalist Bohemian of the ‘30s. He was very hearty, good-natured.

 

JOHN HEROUVIM: Was he an idealist or a cynic?

 

ROB DARBY: Generous. Very cynical. I mean cynical about everything. It was very hard to know what he believed in. He could mock anything. He had no trouble putting shit on anything. He was quite capable of writing a beautiful editorial one day supporting one thing and then the opposite point of view the next day. He was the ideal editor when the line’s going to change so frequently. He wasn’t a theorist. He was a good story-teller. His greatest skill was as a raconteur. He had endless stories about his life and the weirdos he’d met. They were superb to listen to. He was afraid of Hill, it was a rather school-masterly kind of relationship. He didn’t want to be seen to be playing up when Hill was around. The dome of silence would descend and his expression would change. There was one time, in ’77, I think, and he had to go over to Hill’s place, home, with the Vanguard to fix something up or get something from him and he was a bit late getting away when he left and Hill rang up the office. I was the only person there and Duncan had said he’d ring to tell me something, so I assumed it was Duncan. So I said [Chinese accent], “Oh herro, Duncan Crarke, Chinese raundry service” and Hill said, “What? Who’s that? Is Mr Clarke there?” and I said, “Oh, no, he’s just gone out”. (laughs)

 

JOHN HEROUVIM: (laughs)

 

ROB DARBY: (laughs)

 

JOHN HEROUVIM: Did Duncan say anything about it when he got back?

 

ROB DARBY: Well, I told Duncan what had happened and he just laughed and laughed and said that Hill had mentioned it to him and I just said, “Well, some of the people I employ down there are real weirdos”. (laughs) I don’t think Hill had the slightest idea how the place was actually run. I think he thought Duncan employed people in a sort of employer-employee relationship. Certainly I think that was his attitude when we were making political objections to the way certain things were being run, the way the paper was being produced, in particular sexist language. And Hill’s reply was “Well, if they don’t like it, get somebody else”.

 

JOHN HEROUVIM: What?!

 

ROB DARBY: You remember that incident, that dreadful Saturday? We were there till all hours.

 

JOHN HEROUVIM: Yes, I remember that big character poster.

 

ROB DARBY: We put up the big character poster. That had come on top of my objection to sexist language in Hill’s book, which Duncan agreed to and obviously got scolded by Hill over and then came back and scolded us, or more particularly Helen. And, you know, we left that note that we’d be there for all hours because we had to rewrite this article that had been laid out. It was so wasteful and stupid. And I remember Duncan saying what Hill had said, you know, that the people you’ve got there if you don’t like them then get somebody else. So I don’t know whether he knew they were party people who could be ordered round or whether he just thought they were just employees who could be ordered round.

 

JOHN HEROUVIM: He thought they were part of the Vanguard collective…

 

ROB DARBY: None of this collective shit! (laughs) You were there to do a job, oh you had control to the extent that you knew what was acceptable and you would do what was acceptable.

 

JOHN HEROUVIM: More on Duncan Clarke?

 

ROB DARBY: Well, you probably have as many Duncan Clarke stories as I. Just stop the tape. [tape stops, then resumes] One of the things about Duncan was that he had a very difficult almost impossible task of getting out a weekly newspaper. It was his sole responsibility. He’d be in severe trouble if he didn’t do it, but he had very little in the way of resources. He only had those resources that he could drag in, often. As Vanguard got larger, from ’76 onwards, it of course required far more work and there developed a real contradiction between Hill’s demands that Vanguard office was getting too open, too used and too much a meeting centre, when in fact that was essential if the paper was to come out because it got so big and so much was being done there, that you needed that number of people working on it. I remember in ’77 I was ordered to have nothing to do with the Vanguard office, not to go down there, and that lasted for four or five months, maybe six months, after which the pressure of work there became so great that it had to be ignored. From then on, late ’77 onwards, I was there nearly every day working there full-time.

 

 

Interview continues on 4 March 1989 in Melbourne

 

JOHN HEROUVIM: It’s now the 4th of March, 1989. We’re in Melbourne. The thing that I told you I wanted to get on tape to supplement the interviews that you’ve already done is the story about the park in…

 

ROB DARBY: Exhibition Gardens.

 

JOHN HEROUVIM: So what’s the suburb there? It’s it in the city, it’s Melbourne. Around which you were taken for a walk…

 

ROB DARBY: By Basil…

 

JOHN HEROUVIM: Basil Steffanou.

 

ROB DARBY: Basil Steffanou.

 

JOHN HEROUVIM: Apparently the same park that for security reasons Dulcie Steffanou, his wife, used with [name deleted].

 

ROB DARBY: That has to come last! You have to tell the story correctly so as to make it…

 

JOHN HEROUVIM: A punch-line.

 

ROB DARBY: Correct.

 

JOHN HEROUVIM: Well, this to me…

 

ROB DARBY: It has to be retrospective.

 

JOHN HEROUVIM: Well, all interviews are.

 

ROB DARBY: Well, what you’ve got to do is tell it in terms of [inaudible] talked to [name deleted]. I can’t do it now! (laughs)

 

[tape turned off]

[tape resumes]

 

ROB DARBY: When I was round at [name deleted]’s and we were talking about when we were in the party, I was explaining how after the order came to virtually dissolve party branches, which essentially meant to reduce opposition by separating people who knew each other, I had hitherto belonged to a La Trobe University branch which had been – a cell, I suppose you’d call it, a branch or cell – which had been fairly active and sent in recommendations and generally, you know, been sufficiently lively to get the reputation for being students or intellectuals, etcetera.

 

JOHN HEROUVIM: Intellectuals! That’s the worst thing you can be!

 

ROB DARBY: Which is even worse! And all this was changed by a radically new party directive. It would have been early 1977, and the story was that each individual member would have a party contact and my particular contact was a little man called Basil whose surname I later discovered to be Steffanou. I didn’t know that at the time. Now I don’t remember my first meeting with Basil but it was all set up in a fairly secretive kind of manner.

 

[A third voice, a woman’s voice] And John was still in the party?

 

JOHN HEROUVIM: Oh shit yes!

 

ROB DARBY: I was at La Trobe then. John was teaching. I thought this Basil character might have been somebody genuinely fresh and new, a real worker or something, and I remember I was always in great demand at the Vanguard office and I said to Duncan “I’ve got to go off and meet this character. I’m a bit late. Do you know where I can get him after hours?” and he said, “Oh Basil! Oh, yeah. He’s at the bloody fish market in South Melbourne! I can’t remember the street but you go down this street and…”

 

JOHN HEROUVIM: He was a proletarian fish-monger.

 

ROB DARBY: He was, sort of, not quite as basic as that. He was more an entrepreneur.

 

JOHN HEROUVIM: Yes, being a Greek he’d be a businessman. Yes.

 

ROB DARBY: A business operator in the fish trade, and he had this bloody office underneath the shell of the new freeway, I think it was the Westgate freeway. Well, far from being someone fresh and new he was some ancient bloody character Duncan had known for years.

 

JOHN HEROUVIM: From the days of the split.

 

ROB DARBY: So that was that, that illusion was dispensed. But I was saying to [name deleted] how we used to meet for our discussions, because the point about branches was not to formulate strategy or anything like that, or to develop ideas for change or, you know, to propose things to do or anything of that kind. It was to discuss lengthy essays and positions on the world situation handed down, and the particular thing at issue at that time…

 

JOHN HEROUVIM: Meet and talk about the Theory of the Three Worlds.

 

ROB DARBY: Was some fake document that they supposed Chairman Mao had written about the Three Worlds, which I remember laying out in the Vanguard office. So much so that I could virtually quote it word for word without understanding a single syllable. Our duty was to intimately digest this particular document, so because nowhere in the world was safe on account of spies, etc, Basil used to meet me at the Exhibition Gardens just south of the Exhibition buildings. And I said that I would see him fairly close to the toilets just in case anything interesting came up but nothing ever did, they couldn’t have been empty. And, you know, he’d come up and we’d have a fairly abstract discussion about what we’d read and this particularly document had been published by the Chinese and then republished by Vanguard, so it wasn’t exactly inaccessible to those in the know, and we’d walk around the gardens so as to avoid the microphones in the trees, discussing the pros and cons.

 

JOHN HEROUVIM: An old man and a young man walk around the Exhibition gardens in order not to attract suspicion.

 

ROB DARBY: Not to attract attention in any kind of way but I didn’t think about that kind of thing in the context. And I was saying this to [name deleted] many years later and she suddenly said, “But that’s where I used to meet Dulcie Steffanou!” (laughs) who was this guy’s wife, who was equally a party member, who used to discuss precisely the same issues in exactly the same spot, on other days of the week. Such was the disorganisation of individuals within the party that it took, sort of, like, five years later. Like, she [name deleted] and I were good friends, we were at La Trobe together. We used to be in the same branch together until it was disrupted and years later we realize we’d been organised in this peculiar way with this husband and wife team to keep us apart but they both used the same bloody gardens to walk around, talking about the Theory of the Three Worlds.

 

JOHN HEROUVIM: It was not beyond the realms of possibility that it could have happened one afternoon, unless Dulcie and Basil liaised closely, that Rob and [name deleted] might have bumped into each other coming in opposite directions on the circuit. [Seemed to be talking to the third person, the woman present].

 

ROB DARBY: Oh, I’m sure they were sensible enough to make it different days.

 

JOHN HEROUVIM: Thank you Rob.

 

[turned tape off] [tape resumes]

 

ROB DARBY: One of the great doubts we had, which you brought out in your article, was that the CPA(ML) was a paper organisation that really had no existence apart from the newspaper it published. And our fears on this point were greatly confirmed on November 11, 1975, when we found that we, that is to say La Trobe University students, were the only people making any fuss about the coup, and one of the great issues or things that emerged, whether true or not, was that when we tried to contact one of the leaders of the party we found he was too busy attending a performance of the Shanghai Philharmonic at the Town Hall to be concerned with such an important issue. That was Ted Bull of the Waterside Workers Federation. Whether he was or not is neither here nor there, we were trying to do something about the issue. The party appeared to have no leadership and no concern. It was just taken totally by shock. All this business about the vanguard party and leadership and so forth was shown to be totally hollow.

 

JOHN HEROUVIM: Insofar as it existed, it was left to a handful of students at La Trobe.

 

ROB DARBY: Now I raised this with Basil a couple of years later at the Exhibition Gardens. I said, well, when I was at La Trobe in 1975, we felt we were out on a limb. No-one else was doing anything. Ted Bull was at the Shanghai Philharmonic. Vanguard came out, and as it normally does, saying various things but, you know, there wasn’t any leadership shown or any directions for activity given, apart from what we ourselves could offer. We were a bit disappointed. We felt the party let us down, that in fact the party didn’t exist apart from what we were doing. We were a bit demoralised. I felt as though we were the only people around who felt anything. I didn’t feel that anyone around was doing anything else. It was as though the party hardly existed. You know, what I would have liked to have felt was that there was some deep laid strategy, that certain people were lying underground and all this was thought about. And he sort of said, “Well, yes, I think you were right to think that”. (laughs)

 

JOHN HEROUVIM: Really?

 

ROB DARBY: I let him off the hook in other words.

 

JOHN HEROUVIM: Yes. I know what you mean.

 

ROB DARBY: He had nothing to offer. I let them off the hook by offering this excuse that there was some deep laid strategy that was not being brought into the open and which we may have been the sacrificial victims to publicity. But he sort of knew there was some much deeper organisation which was withstanding all this kind of stuff.

 

JOHN HEROUVIM: What did you think about that? Were you reassured?

 

ROB DARBY: Not in the slightest. I thought he was talking bullshit.

 

JOHN HEROUVIM: And you met him again, and again after that?

 

ROB DARBY: Not all that often but a few times. I mean I never took him seriously from the start.

 

JOHN HEROUVIM: How were your meetings decided? At the end of each meeting would you decide on the next meeting?

 

ROB DARBY: I think it was every fortnight.

 

JOHN HEROUVIM: In the Exhibition gardens, same time, same place? And each time it was a discussion about some abstract policy matter?

 

ROB DARBY: It was the Theory of the Three Worlds for, I don’t know, a couple of weeks and then Hill’s ‘Class struggle and the Communist parties’. And then, I can’t remember, I think it petered out. It just stopped.

 

JOHN HEROUVIM: Because you went to Canberra?

 

ROB DARBY: Well, I didn’t go to Canberra for some time after that. I think there was another reorganisation but for the moment I can’t think what happened. I may recollect but I’m uncertain.

 

 

[END OF INTERVIEW SESSIONS]

Fascism and the Left (from Red Eureka Movement, November 1980)

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… scratch a “Communist” and one quite often finds a fascist underneath.

(Note: I was personally on the other side, the wrong side, during the conflict described in this article. I opposed the Red Eureka Movement. I now regret not being open-minded and rebellious and instead clinging to the safety of dogma, a close social circle and the Party Line. We all have our dark years, I suppose. The thing is to face them and keep learning…).

* * * *

A major theme in left wing propaganda is opposition to fascism. Quite often relatively moderate opponents of the left are described as “fascists”.

Yet scratch a “Communist” and one quite often finds a fascist underneath.

The regime that began with the October Revolution is now a fascist dictatorship. In China too, since the defeat of the Cultural Revolution many revolutionaries have been executed and the right to speak out freely, hold great debates, put up big character posters and so on has been officially and formally repudiated.

The degeneration of Communist Parties in power is a separate problem calling for a separate analysis. But what about the degeneration of parties holding no power?

THE CPA (ML)

Our experiences with the “Communist Party of Australia (Marxist-Leninist)” were sufficiently frightening to require some deep analysis. Almost any split is accompanied by outraged cries of “unfair” or “undemocratic” from the losing side, so it seemed undesirable to distract attention from the fundamental issues at stake by going into details of who done what to who. But another reason why we never got around to it was probably embarrassment at ever having been involved with such a sick group.

The bankruptcy of Australian nationalism as an ideology for communists is now pretty apparent, while the question of whether China has gone revisionist has been settled by open proclamations from the Chinese leadership themselves. Although Vanguard keeps coming out each week, the people behind it seem pretty discredited and there is little need to discredit them further.

In Adelaide the “Worker Student Alliance for Australian Independence” has disintegrated, along with its newspaper People’s Voice. In Melbourne the entire editorial collective of Independence Voice quit some time ago, there was no “Independence platform” at Mayday, the “Australian Independence Movement” is virtually defunct and supporters of this line have been completely routed in “Community Radio” 3CR. The Australia China Society is unable to defend the new regime in China and little has been heard from the CPA(ML) in the trade union movement either.

As a complete expression of E.F.Hill’s bankruptcy we have the suggestion in “Australian Communist”, that they want unity with us (previously described as “Soviet agents”). Hill has even signed an article proposing reunification with the CPA in “one Communist Party” (presumably because the Chinese revisionists, having recently re-united with their Italian and Yugoslav colleagues, also wish to re-establish relations with the CPA, leaving Hill out in the cold).

The thuggish behaviour of the CPA(ML) supporters in attempting to intimidate their opponents is well known. Both intellectual and physical thuggery, in 3CR and elsewhere, has become so notorious that the only “broad united front” they have been able to create has been that directed against themselves. They have also become notorious for openly preferring to ally themselves with various Nazis and other fascists against the Soviet Union rather than trying to unite the people, and especially the left, against Soviet imperialism on the basis of progressive principles. Their main political theme these days is the united front they claim to have with Malcolm Fraser,who nevertheless remains quite unaware of their existence. As for China, they openly say they would rather not talk about it, even though China was, and is, central to their whole political outlook.

These facts are mentioned, not to kick a dead horse, but to emphasise that the horse really is dead and to confirm that the additional facts about it cited below are genuine observations and not just part of some ongoing sectarian faction fight.

OTHERS TOO

The more or less open fascism of the CPA (ML) has resulted in that group being simply dismissed as “crazies”. But in fact they are only a more extreme expression of problems that exist, less overtly, throughout the left. Indeed it has been noticeable in 3CR for example, that the excuse of “keeping out the crazies”, has been used to justify appallingly manipulative and undemocratic behaviour (e.g. elected listener sponsor representatives voting against explicit directives from a large general meeting of listener sponsors). People who would be shocked and indignant about that in other contexts have made excuses for it when their own friends are doing it. Really how far is it from making excuses to acting in the same way?  And how far from there to ending up just like the “crazies” themselves?

Also the fact that China and the Chinese parrots are anti-Soviet (and Reagan, Thatcher, Fraser etc) has become an excuse to actually apologise for Soviet actions that would be called “fascist” if American was doing it.  Indeed many quite non-crazy “left liberals” have been prepared to go through the most amazing mental contortions to justify the Vietnamese occupation of Kampuchea or to minimise the significance of Soviet aggression elsewhere.  Rather than agree with “right-wingers” (like Churchill), they prefer to apologise for fascists (like Hitler).

Where was the left wing outrage (as distinct from concern) when Polish workers were being denied the elementary right to form free trade unions?  Why do “militants” in “left-wing” unions take delight in the same bureaucratic manoeuvres their opponents use to stay in power?  Why are splits in left wing groups so common and so nasty?

In Australia many other groups supposedly on the left have exhibited a personal intolerance comparable to the Chinese parrots, and also a comparable willingness to apologise for reactionary regimes in other countries, provided those regimes pay lip service to “anti-imperialist” principles. (Vietnam, Cuba, Iran, Libya… name a country that is suppressing some other country or trying to impose some medieval religion on its people and you will find a “left” group wildly enthusiastic about it.)  Scanning overseas “left” newspapers one gets the impression that narrow minded religious bigotry is pretty common, and even where it is not taken to extremes, it is still present.  No wonder so many on the “left” thought a fellow zealot like Khomeiny would be progressive for Iran.

The undemocratic tendencies of “Leninists” is a common theme in anti-Communist propaganda – from open representatives of the bourgeoisie, from Social Democrats, from Anarchists, from “Left” or “Council” Communists and what have you.  Nevertheless, attacks from our opponents should be taken seriously, and indeed have been taken seriously by the classic exponents of Marxism.

CHINESE FASCISM

This question was especially taken seriously in China and some of the material from the Chinese Cultural Revolution is very valuable for understanding the emergence of fascist tendencies among alleged “Communists”.

For example Mao Tsetung’s unpublished works, and the material criticizing Lin Piao (the “successor” who turned out to be a fascist). The Cultural Revolution was after all a direct struggle between revolutionaries and counter-revolutionaries who both purported to be part of the “left”. The concept of fighting bourgeois ideas disguised as “left” ideas was crucial to unleashing the 1960s upsurge and will be crucial again. It was necessary to challenge the “peace” ideas that were dominant in the left in the 1960s and it will be necessary to challenge the views that are dominant now – many of which are again crystallised in the eclectic mishmash of the “CPA”.

In the “gang of four’s” Peking University Journal of September 1, 1976 there is an important article on “The Bureaucrat Class and the Dictatorship of the Proletariat”:

…We must further recognise the high concentration of political and economic powers under the dictatorship of the proletariat. If the bureaucrat class succeeded in usurping power and in its restorationist conspiracies throughout the country, then it would continue to flaunt the banner of socialism, take advantage of this high concentration of political and economic powers and turn the democratic centralism of the proletariat into the fascist centralism of the bureaucrat class.

In controlling and manipulating the means of production and the product of Labor, these bureaucrats will be far more powerful than any previous exploiting classes and their political representatives, than the slave owners and feudal rulers who claimed that “all land under the sun is my territory and all people on earth are my subjects”, and than the bureaucrats and financiers in capitalist countries…In a similar vein, the present day new tsars behave much worse than the old tsars…

(Translation from Selections from People’s Republic of China Magazines No 895, American Consulate General, Hong Kong. Reprinted in Study Notes No 6, Red Eureka Movement, August 1978)

This article also goes into the question of the transformation of authority into capital and capital into authority, which is relevant to an understanding of imperialism in the West as well as in the Soviet Union and China.

Western bourgeois democratic society is heading towards an acute crisis and upheaval as another Great Depression and a Third World War develop. The outcome can be Communist Revolution or some form of fascism or social-fascism. We could face a new ruling class more powerful than the present one. It largely depends on how clear the left is on what we are fighting for and what we are fighting against and how sharply we can draw the line against perpetuating the old system of exploitation in our own practice. If the left continues to whinge about capitalism, and even oppose it from a reactionary perspective then it cannot hope to inspire people to fight for something fundamentally different.

Indeed, just as one would have to defend the national independence that Western and Third World countries have already achieved, from Soviet “socialist” imperialism, one would also have to defend the achievements already won by the bourgeois democratic revolution from attack by alleged “socialists” who want to go backwards to a more oppressive society.

DEMOCRATIC CENTRALISM

If the democratic centralism of the proletarian dictatorship can be easily transformed into the fascist centralism of the bureaucrat class in a developing socialist country, then what about democratic centralism in Leninist parties out of power? Is this an argument against democratic centralism and proletarian dictatorship, as anarchists and others insist?

The answer to this argument is that there never can be a guarantee against proletarian dictatorship turning into its opposite, and Communists in power must always be prepared for transition to underground life as Communists in opposition to capitalist roaders in power. Likewise in Communist Parties generally – one must be prepared to rebel and to be expelled for rebelling.

But if there was no democratic centralism and proletarian dictatorship then it would be quite impossible for the revolutionary ideas held only by a minority in capitalist and socialist society to be centralised and dominant and in that case the bourgeoisie holds power anyway. So weakening democratic centralism is not the answer. On the contrary, it needs to be strengthened to keep fascists out, on the same argument that the left cannot afford to be pacifist and must learn the use of arms if it doesn’t want warmongers to hold power.

Proletarian dictatorship means just that. It does not mean dictatorship over the proletariat by some bureaucrats. It means a political system in which the working class can really wield political power – something that can be achieved by workers councils led by a revolutionary party and cannot be achieved by parliamentary institutions or by milling around in confusion.

Democratic centralism also means just that. It does not mean the leadership imposing decisions on a reluctant membership. It means that the abstract “parliamentary” right which almost all organisations give their members to ultimately take decisions, is made real by conscious leadership of the decision making process to make it “from the masses, to the masses” and so make it actually work without manipulation or obstruction.

This article is not a plea for everybody to be more tolerant of everybody else. It is a call for sharper defence of our basic principles and less tolerance of attempts to undermine them. One cannot be a Communist if one is not first a democrat. The democratic revolutionaries of England, France and so on in earlier centuries had no hesitation about chopping off the heads of their aristocratic opponents and neither should we.

Fear of strengthening democratic centralism is really fear of struggle. Such fear is fully understandable in the present situation, and a lot better than blinkered complacency. But it must be overcome.

The quote from Orwell’s “Road to Wigan Pier” in “the Personal is Political” (Discussion Bulletin No 9) rang a few bells and is worth repeating:

…..”Socialism” is pictured as a state of affairs in which our more vocal Socialists would feel thoroughly at home. This does great harm to the cause. The ordinary man may not flinch from a dictatorship of the proletariat, if you offer it tactfully; offer him a dictatorship of the prigs,and he gets ready to fight.

We should be ready to fight against the dictatorship of the prigs and to do this it is necessary to understand the transformation of Communists into prigs.

ARE WE DIFFERENT?

If we take Lin Piao for example, there is no doubt that he did make contributions to the Chinese revolution before emerging as an outright fascist. The superstitious Mao cult he built up in opposition to Mao had definite roots in China’s feudal past, but also struck a chord among Western “Maoists”.

Ted Hill now appears to be nothing more than a follower of Liu Shao-chi, then Lin Piao (as a major cult advocate) then Liu Shao-chi again, or whoever may hold power in China at any given moment. But some of his analyses of revisionism,parliamentarism and trade union politics in publications like “Looking Backward; Looking Forward” are still valuable and he once made a point of opposing sacred cows and stereotypes and supporting rebellion.

Things were drastically wrong with the CPA(ML) long before we parted company and people are entitled to ask how we got mixed up with them and why we should be regarded as any different. If we are to be any different then we must analyse the thin dividing line that appears to exist between being a Marxist-Leninist or “Maoist” on the one hand, and being a lunatic or a fascist on the other.

There is little need to “expose” the CPA(ML) leadership now in view of its obvious degeneration. But the roots of current fascist attitudes do need study, so the following facts are placed on the record for our own benefit rather than for the benefit of anyone still taken in by Hill.

SOME FACTS

  1. There never was anything remotely resembling democracy within the CPA(ML). This became obvious when concrete disagreements made it necessary to have a proper discussion and take a decision. But it should have been obvious even when people thought they were in agreement.
  2. As soon as a disagreement in principle was announced “through the proper channels” etcetera, the immediate response was to launch vituperative attacks on individuals – at first surreptitiously behind their backs and then openly in Vanguard.
  3. The very idea of discussing the differences was repudiated and “security” was abused to tell people that there had been a full democratic discussion, which they just didn’t happen to be part of.
  4. As a matter of fact it turned out that no Central Committee actually existed. One member of the Red Eureka Movement discovered that he was supposed to be a CC member after wanting to express his views to the CC. This must be some sort of record in the international communist movement!
  5. Other members of the Red Eureka Movement who were both on the Central Committee and knew it , were able to expose the lie that there had been some kind of Central Committee discussion about China and that documents expressing opposition had been circulated to the Central Committee etc.
  6. Individual party members had to go outside the “channels” to get any kind of discussion and then discovered that the “channels” didn’t really exist. Now others who accepted this are finding the same situation.

7.It was not a case of discussion being suppressed arbitrarily and decisions usurped, but of there being no provision whatever for seriously discussing and reversing a policy disagreed with.

  1. This situation which existed long before it came to a head was put up with by people who would rebel strongly against similar fascist practices in any other social institution.
  2. Many people on becoming aware of it, and seeing people branded as Soviet agents etcetera, took a cynical attitude that this was wrong but not a major question of principle requiring them to take a stand.
  3. Our initial reaction to all this shit was not to launch a public struggle as in the Cultural Revolution or in accord with our own experiences in the 1960s. Instead we had great hangups about “the party” and organised semi-conspiratorially.
  4. Despite being a very small group, since breaking with the CPA(ML) leadership we have not been able to resolve internal disagreements in a civilised, let alone comradely manner, but have had two further splits. While nowhere near as bad as Hill’s, these have also involved strange behaviour that would not be tolerated in most community organisations and should not be tolerated on the left. Moreover they have occurred in a situation where we are not leading any great revolutionary struggle and no pressing life or death decision was at stake.

LIFE WASN’T MEANT TO BE EASY!

We did not fully realise it at the time, but there was little alternative to the apparent extremism of Hill’s stand because there really wasn’t any possibility of a discussion. If he had agreed to a discussion, what could he possibly have said? And if the CPA(ML) did not follow China religiously, what else could it do? We cannot blame Hill for our own naivety.

We only realised how difficult most people find it to rebel and think for themselves once we had broken with Hill and company. “Stalinists without a country” was the contemptuous Trotskyist label, and there is something in it. It really is enormously easier to at least think you know what you’re doing when there is some “socialist motherland”backing you up. (Or a “Fourth International”, a “great leader” or some other crutch).

For non-revolutionaries its fairly easy to maintain a political position sustained by one or other of the reformist currents in mainstream bourgeois society. But in a non-revolutionary society and with no back up from a revolutionary society, it requires real effort to develop a revolutionary program. How much easer it would have been if we could have forgotten that we didn’t have such a program by simply pretending to ourselves that China, or Albania or somewhere was revolutionary and that supporting them would somehow produce a revolution here. Or by pretending that if we were all more dedicated, we would figure out where we were going while getting there.

Its interesting to note how even people with no attachment to Russia, China or Albania have managed to persuade themselves that Vietnam is still worth supporting and feel a deep and personal threat to their whole ideology when this is questioned. Or how people leaving REM because it hasn’t been getting anywhere who know perfectly well what’s wrong with the political line of the Revolutionary Communist Party (USA), are nevertheless attracted by the reassuring certainty of that group’s proclamations.

“Idealism and metaphysics are the easiest things in the world, because people can talk as much nonsense as they like without basing it on objective reality or having it tested against reality. Materialism and dialectics, on the other hand, need effort. They must be based on and tested by objective reality. Unless one makes the effort, one is liable to slip into idealism and metaphysics.”(Mao Tsetung)

PRIESTS AND HORSES

Judging from overseas literature, the temptation of closed minded religious fanaticism is very strong in this situation. It provides a certainty that would otherwise be lacking and puts an end to all confusion,doubt,cynicism, liberalism and so on.

But this way out is the way out of the movement.It means joining the innumerable sects that are much better organised and disciplined than we are, and are able to get more done precisely because they do not have the “burden” of really having to think out a revolutionary line.

We did not hesitate to reject the “security” of blindly following China, Albania or anybody else so we should not regret the consequences.

One consequence is that we are in some respects more vulnerable to confusion, doubt, liberalism, cynicism and so on than other left groups that feel more confident about their (manifestly wrong!) lines. The reason horses are given blinkers is that it keeps them working away steadily without getting distracted by things they might see.Groups that have attached themselves to a foreign state, or that merely reflect a reformist current  in mainstream bourgeois ideology, have a secure basis for their activity and can work away at it for years after it has ceased to have any social relevance or has become purely reactionary.

The same can easily be true of “revolutionary” groups that feel secure, or pretend to feel secure in their “correct line”. They can whip up a great frenzy of activity, full of sound and fury, but signifying nothing. Take a look at the Communist Workers Party or the Revolutionary Communist Party (USA). On many points we would be in full agreement. They have a similar analysis of China and Albania to ours and they certainly do make a clear distinction between communist revolution and the bourgeois reformism advocated by most “revolutionaries”.

On international questions of very great significance they appear to have a fundamentally wrong analysis, But even more important, their whole approach to “correct line” politics seems alien. They are certainly not paralysed by liberalism like we are – but so what?

While confusion, doubt, liberalism, cynicism and so on persist we will remain unable to accomplish very much, including theoretical work:

“We must have faith in the masses and we must have faith in the Party. These are two cardinal principles. If we doubt these principles, we shall accomplish nothing.”(Mao Tsetung)

But the only basis for faith in the Party is confidence in the soundness of its analysis and line. Once we have grounds for such faith we will be able to accomplish something, but not before. (And of course once we do, we will again have the problem of blind faith and the potential for people to continue following a leadership that has proved itself worthy of confidence, long after it has ceased to play a progressive or revolutionary role. But then it would be at a higher stage of the spiral).

Demands that people pull themselves together, combat liberalism or what have you, will not solve the problem of lack of faith. This is an atheistic age and real communists are atheistic people. Our only God is the masses and the only basis for our faith is scientific analysis of reality.

The situation we are in calls urgently for working out where we are and where we are going. Without that , calls to press on more resolutely and with greater vigour will only result in people getting more lost.

CHIN UP, BACK STRAIGHT, EYES SHUT!

It is conservative, not revolutionary to promote “leadership”, “organisation”, “doing things”, “collective life” and so on without a clear perspective for liberating people from oppression. Defenders of the status quo habitually make such appeals and every organisation, revolutionary or not, naturally wants to be as effectively organised as possible (and most sewing circles and amateur theatrical societies are probably a lot better organised than REM). But it is quite wrong to see the organisational reflection of our confusion as the central problem instead of dealing with the confusion itself. (As for any who are not confused, they would have an even greater problem. Take off the blinkers!)

Communism is not the only ideology opposed to liberalism. Fascism opposes liberalism too. It is one thing to want to widen and deepen and ultimately transcend democracy by going beyond such mere forms as majority voting. It is quite another thing to declare that ones policies have proved their own correctness and deliberately exclude others from even a vote, let alone a real say, on the matter. Yet we have repeatedly experienced this kind of behaviour not just from enemies, but from comrades who probably really do want to be revolutionaries.

The fact that people like Lin Piao or Ted Hill could turn out to be fascists and that we could go along with a load of shit for a long time should alert us to the dangers. When people on the left start acting like people on the extreme right they must be pulled up sharply and told “You’re Ill” before the disease becomes incurable and before it spreads.

*******