Category Archives: Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution

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.

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.

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.

****

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.

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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.

 

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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’.

 

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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??!!

 

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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.

 

 

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