While this correspondence was still on its way, Moxon and Sharkey sent yet another telegram on 8 October: “Our motion that Comintern instructions be operated on received no support Central Committee”, which prompted the ECCI to cable Wright “Awaiting confirmation our telegram.” The general-secretary replied “Acknowledge cablegrams, report dispatched.” On October 21, the CEC was to censure Moxon and Sharkey for their factionalism, which involved circulating Cl documents and cables before CC members had seen them. The ECCI had followed their brief cable with another worded on October 18 at a meeting when Clayton (Tripp) was again present, stating, “that a victory for the Labor Party would strengthen illusions among the masses of workers and encourage liquidationist tendencies among Party members” and affirming once again that it was the duty of the Party to stand independent candidates. The same cable reported that an Open Letter from the Cl to the CPA was being sent, and it should be distributed for discussion before the ninth annual conference to be held in December. After delay, the cable was shown to the Central Committee and circularised among the Party groups.

The Open Letter

The Open Letter, written 13 October 1929, began “This is not the first time that the Communist International occupies itself with the Australian Question” and mentioned the 1927 visit of Robson and the 1928 “so-called Queensland Resolution”. It continued, “This time the immediate cause for consideration ... was the decision to support the Labor Party in the Federal elections.” The Letter proceeded to deal with the “third period”, the radicalisation of the working class and the “Right Deviation”, stating: “The question as to whether Australian capitalism will succeed in its plans to subjugate the working class or whether the working class will assume the counter-offensive and develop its revolutionary struggle against capitalism will depend on the ability and determination of the CP to organise and lead the counter-offensive ... This has not been the case until now. The Party has been slow in learning from the experience of the British, German, and French working class and from events in Australia proper. The important decisions of the Sixth World Congress and the Tenth Plenum of the Cl as well as the decisions of the Fourth RILU Congress seem to have been neglected by the CPA.”

It went on. “Even at its conference of December 1928, the Party could not give a proper political estimate of the Labor Party or define its fundamentally social-fascist character, its aggressively counter-revolutionary role in the present situation” and further, “apparently the Party regards itself as being merely a propagandist body and as a sort of adjunct to the Labor Party”. The Open Letter then emphasised the need for a Communist Party to “assert itself as the only true working class Party” and “to conduct open warfare against the Party of class collaboration”.

There was much agitation to have the Letter published in the CPA's newspaper, The Workers' Weekly, where it finally appeared on 6 December. The CEC took the opportunity to write again to the Comintern Executive on 16 December, replying in detail to the Open Letter, maintaining that the leadership “accepts without reservation the need to intensify and clarify the struggle against reformism” and this issue will be “the concern of our ninth conference”. In making criticisms of the Open Letter, the CEC, via Tom Wright, made the point that the present situation was seen as much sharper but not ripe for revolution. Wright pointed out that notes had been left with the Comintern by Higgins in September 1928 to the effect that the “time had come to emerge from the propaganda stage” as suggested in discussions with the ECCI in April but that no reply had been received. Further, he referred back to the resolution on the Labor Party adopted at the December 1928 conference, “no word of criticism came from you, and, even in the Open Letter, apart from reference to one passage in the conference resolution you express no opinion on the decisions of a year ago”. He concluded that if the CPA leadership had made mistakes, so had the ECCI because it had not raised any criticism at the time.

Very few in the CPA realised how fundamental were the changes in the policies emanating from the Comintern. With the defeat of Bukharin, Stalin had succeeded in redefining Third Period policies to mean that capitalist stabilisation was at an end and that revolutionary situations were now certain in Western capitalist countries. Social fascists were now the main enemy. Not understanding what had happened, most of the CPA leadership were bewildered at the advice they were now being given. They were also angry, and simply disagreed. They saw it as important to have the ALP, not the Nationalist Party in power. Indeed, the Labor Party under James Scullin, had succeeded in the October 1929 federal elections in defeating the Nationalist Country Party Coalition. Those, on the other hand, who were impatient with what they perceived as the CEC's slowness in developing an independent CPA campaign, were reinforced by the new Comintern line. The relative inexperience of the Australian communists, the inherent leftism of many of its members, and the feeling that they had been betrayed by the Labor Party, made the Comintern's new appraisal of social democrats as “social fascists” an attractive alternative to the old united front policies. The belief that revolution was already on the agenda was a huge incentive to those who believed in the socialist goal.

The new Comintern line appeared to be correct not only within the Australian context but world-wide. The Wall Street crash in October 1929 did indeed seem to herald the complete collapse of capitalism. As Friedrich I. Firsov, Doctor of Science of History, put it to me in Moscow in November, 1990: “It appeared as if Stalin was right and that capitalism wouldn't develop any further, but events took a different direction. It was a deep crisis but not one that would bring about the end of capitalism. It was one of many crises - but still just one. The crisis was solved in other ways than by proletarian revolution. In Germany it was solved by the totalitarian regime of Hitler. Other capitalist countries took different paths, for example, the welfare state and in the USA by Roosevelt's New Deal.”

Peter Morrison gives as one of the reasons for the differences which developed so strongly in 1929, the different experiences of the Labor Party in different states. The Commonwealth at this time was only 28 years old, and a great deal of power lay with the states. There was a continuing possibility of state breakaways within the Labor Party, and state ALP branches were not always obedient to the national body when developing policy. Federally, the Labor Party had not been in power since 1916, and so had no record on national issues by which it could be judged by the working class, a point made by Tom Wright in his defence of CEC policies in The Workers' Weekly on 1 November 1929. Now that Scullin was Prime Minister there would be opportunity to do so.

Within the CPA too there was state rivalry. This was mainly between Queensland and NSW, Victoria and the other states being less important at that time. These two States had quite different experiences with the Labor Party. The improved vote for the CPA in Queensland, which had a right-wing Labor Government for 14 years, no doubt convinced the party members of that state that the new policy was correct. The lack of similar experience in NSW, which had had a Nationalist Party government since the defeat of Lang in 1927 probably affected the opinion of NSW Party members. These different perceptions of the ALP produced Kavanagh's more cautious view, now branded as “exceptionalism”, that each state should be considered separately.

By December, discontent with CEC policies had reached a peak. After the Open Letter was finally published inThe Workers' Weekly on 6 December, open debate on the contentious issues was encouraged in its columns. As this debate continued, the lock-out in the Northern coalfields was reaching a dangerous climax. The NSW state government had sent in non-union labour, and a confrontation between the police and the locked-out miners led to the death of a miner on 16 December. The combined effect of this event, The Workers' Weekly debate, and the CI's Open Letter was a situation where rank and file support was swinging in favour of the minority on the CEC. To add to all this, another telegram had arrived on 16 December from the ECCI to be read at the ninth conference denouncing the “opportunist attitude” of the present policy and supporting the opposition's attitude as “perfectly sound and necessary”. Clayton (Tripp) and Walters (who had recently arrived to attend the Lenin school) were both at the meeting in Moscow where the contents of the telegram were decided. It was signed by Colon, Thaelman, Semard, Kuusinen and Pollitt.

The cable added fuel to the fire and it was in a mood for confrontation that the delegates began the ninth annual conference on 26 December. The struggle within the CPA until this point had been sharp, but it is very doubtful whether without the requested Comintern intervention, and the importance placed on the Comintern judgment by the Australian communists, it would have been conducted with so much intolerance and bitterness. Allegiance to the Comintern meant that those who disagreed with the “new line” were stigmatised as traitors to the working class. This process of stigmatisation in itself was not foreign to socialist politics. What was new was the belief that there was one path and one path only, and the situation where open disagreement could result in permanent ostracism. Thus it was the opposition's own attitude to the Comintern that created what Higgins described as “the poisonous atmosphere” within which the ninth annual conference took place.

The Ninth Annual Conference of the CPA

The discussion at the ninth conference (26-31 December 1929), the decisions it made, and the change in leadership were a turning point in CPA history. Both sides presented their case. Kavanagh, in the chair, referred to the sharp differences of opinion in his opening address, declaring these needed to be “thrashed out at this conference”. The decisions would be binding. He also reiterated that his own position was that “the central task of the Party is to assert its claim to independent leadership of the working class against capitalism and its reformist allies”. Tom Wright followed, giving the Central Committee report, outlining its policy on the Federal elections; he included acceptance of the fact that the majority opposed the CEC's policy on the Federal elections, and that this view was confirmed by the CI.

Herbert Moxon led the attack with a minority report on the second day of the Conference, dealing with the timber strike and the failure to get party groups into activity, the tardiness about the coal lockout, and the policy for the federal elections, charging the CC leadership with “right deviation” and “new guardism”. He gave details of the exchanges between the ECCI and the CPA and called for the conference to lift the censure on Moxon and Sharkey, which had been imposed in October, endorse the Open Letter of the CI, and realise it in practice. Kavanagh objected to this report indicating it was full of inaccuracies and should be placed before the delegates for discussion, but apparently this was not agreed to.

In the third session of the conference on Friday 28 December, immediately after the cable from the ECCI was read, Hector Ross weighed into the debate. He claimed that there had been “a whole mass of misrepresentations and exaggerations” and the debate on both sides had been waged “on a very low level indeed” but he supported the CEC position on the elections. In his analysis of the ninth conference, Morrison found that only the Sydney delegates, excluding Hetty Weitzel (representing the Women's Section) and Anne Isaacs, (YCL representative), supported Kavanagh, while all the states and both northern and southern districts of NSW were opposed to him. In a relatively small conference, Moxon, with nine representatives from Queensland, was able to control the final result.

Following Ross, speaker after speaker supported the minority position. These included Lance Sharkey, Jack Miles, Ted Docker, Bill Orr, Andy Barras, Len Varty and Jack Simpson, Mick Loughran and Richard Walker. Those under attack responded, several making the point that the differences of opinion were merely a pretext f or other motives. Kavanagh stated that the mainspring of the opposition was based on “an opportunist desire for control of the Communist Party”. Jack Ryan replied to the accusation of “right deviation”. Over the year, he said, many had been seen as suffering from it; Sharkey himself “was bumped off the CEC in 1927” as a right winger. The opposition was “utilising a certain situation on the CEC to capitalise in order to get control of the organisation”. Mocking their extremism he said, “I am a treacherous betrayer of the working class because I supported the policy of the CEC in the federal elections.”

Higgins and Jeffery had both changed their minds. Higgins recognised that the line adopted had been a mistake while Jeffery accepted the criticism that the CEC suffered from a right deviation and that “not one member of the whole CC should stand for the CE ... I stand behind CI discipline”. Joe Shelley was in a “quandary”; he argued that had it not been for the definite instructions of the CI the logical target of criticism would have been the decision made by the eighth conference in 1928 where the majority of delegates had made it clear that the Queensland resolution was not to apply generally. However, he said, “there was no excuse for the CC to adopt the attitude it did”. After the debate on the second day of the conference the result was a foregone conclusion. All those on the old CEC who had supported Kavanagh, except Esmonde Higgins whose stand had been equivocal, were voted out of office. The Moxon/Sharkey faction had won.

State and personal rivalries no doubt fuelled the fire, but in examining the material from the Comintern Archives together with evidence from Australian sources it is apparent that, rather than being a mere “pawn” in the game, the Comintern had been the deciding factor in defeating the former leadership. The ECCI had not issued directives from afar of its own volition, but had been very willing to intervene when it was requested to do so. Notwithstanding the bitter antagonism of Moxon towards the majority of the old CEC, it was not chiefly for narrow political gain that he and Sharkey had taken this action. The overriding concern was commitment to ideological unanimity with the Comintern. One of the first acts of the new leadership was to cable the ECCI on 30 December 1929, “offering unswerving loyalty to the new line”.

When all the tumult and the shouting had died away the CPA was profoundly changed. Some consider that the changes were necessary and beneficial, opening the way for the changes in policy and methods of work which led to an impressive growth for the CPA in the period of the great mass movements of the thirties. These gains were made, according to those who hold this view, in spite of the negative effect of the “social fascist” line in the years immediately following the conference. It is doubtful that the gains outweighed the losses. It is possible, as suggested by Blake, that without the sharp polarisation of viewpoint, aggravated by the ECCI intervention, a different and more representative CEC may have been elected. That is conjecture only, but what stands out clearly is that after the 1929 ninth annual conference something precious had disappeared. This was the atmosphere described by Edna Ryan when she referred to the CPA premises of the 1920s as “an open academy” - “it didn't occur to us at the time that we were enjoying liberty of thought and expression, but there was no hushing and stifling, no fear of being accused if one proposed a tactic or an idea”. Though the new leadership set out with courage and vigour to win support for the new line the free-ranging debate and discussion of the twenties under Kavanagh's leadership was gone. Now there was one correct line and to depart from it unless one indulged in self-criticism meant ostracism and possible expulsion.

Notes

I would like to thank the staffs of the Comintern Archives of the Institute of Marxism-Leninism attached to the CC CPSU; the ANU Archives of Business and Labour, Canberra; and the Mitchell Library, Sydney, for their assistance to me in my research. I am particularly grateful to Edna Ryan, Mary Wright, Hector Kavanagh, Steve Cooper and Ross Edmunds for their freely given comments about the events and personalities involved in these events. Finally I would like to thank Ann, Jean and Geoff Curthoys for encouraging me to accept the invitation to visit the Archives in Moscow and special thanks to Ann for her assistance with the first draft.

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