Robin Gollan, Revolutionaries and Reformists (ANU Press 1975)
This review was originally published on an earlier blog, now defunct, as part of my ongoing research project on the history of communism in Wollongong and Australia more broadly.
Review of Robin Gollan, Revolutionaries and Reformists: Communism and the Australian Labour Movement 1920–1955, Australian National University Press, Canberra, 1975.
Robin Gollan’s Revolutionaries and Reformists is a survey of Communist Party policy and praxis in the Australian labour movement from its founding in 1917 to 1955. Gollan (1917–2007), who was a member of the party from 1936 until 1957, later became a historian at the ANU. The choice of time period is, therefore, particularly significant. The book covers the period of Gollan’s membership and concludes just prior to his leaving the party at a time when Khrushchev’s denunciation of Stalin in 1956 created ructions in the world Communist movement. While Gollan writes with a detached voice, a close reading reveals the significance of the brief acknowledgement in the preface that he had ‘joined the Communist Party in 1936 because it seemed to me to be the only party in Australia fully committed to a struggle for socialism and against fascism. I left it, with regret, in 1957, because this no longer seemed to be the case’.
Gollan explains that the book is ‘not intended to be a history of the party’ (Preface). Rather, it places the politics of the CPA in the context of the broader labour movement, particularly the Catholic labour movement and the ALP but also branching out to discuss the critiques of Communist policy made by the small number of Australian’s then influenced by Trotskyism. Gollan begins by discussing the party’s origins in the aftermath of the Russian Revolution. At its foundation in 1920, he explains, the party brought together a number of strands of Australia’s diverse labour movement in a fractious alliance that only really began to gain momentum with the onset of the Great Depression. During the Depression, Gollan describes how Communist-led groupings such as the Militant Minority Movement in the unions and the Unemployed Workers Movement helped organise militant struggles that inspired the working class. The hard-fought victories these organisations’ secured imbued the Communists with a new-found confidence and earned them the respect of the broader movement.
Gollan began his working life as a teacher and there is some discussion in the book of the early development of unionism in the profession and the important influence Communists had on its development. On the broader relationship of the party to intellectual work and cultural movements in Australia, Gollan’s account is unsatisfactory. Of course, this is a book primarily about the party’s relationship to the labour movement, rather than to the cultural and intellectual life of Australia more generally. Nevertheless, considering Gollan’s own positionality, his account of the way intellectuals related to the party is of course among the most personal points touched on. In a poignant passage on the party’s intellectual and cultural life in the period immediately following the Second World War he discusses the negative impact of the party’s growing dogmatism on intellectual and cultural matters under Moscow influence.
The majority of intellectuals ... either quietly withdrew or searched
their souls or their minds to discover what made them so unworthy—or professed themselves more working class than their working-class comrades (p. 254).
Despite the author’s conspicuous absence from the account in general, this quotation seems to hint at Gollan’s own struggle with the party and its legacy in his own life.
The CPA’s relationship to the international communist movement and the influence of Stalin are a major theme of the book. Gollan shows how, time and again, the CPA’s slavish adherence to Comintern policy (which increasingly meant Moscow policy) during the period hampered its relationships with other elements of organised labour in Australia and with the broader working class. At the same time, Gollan notes that during those periods when the party was more open to other working class parties, it often ended up tailing the ALP and seeking to influence its policy. Following the end of the Second World War, for example, Moscow’s call for a more independent and aggressive communist policy quickly isolated the party. The threat of illegality under Menzies’ Communist Party Dissolution Act and the subsequent referendum struggle, however, forced the party to cultivate and rely upon the support and solidarity of the labour movement. By 1955, notes Gollan,
the Communist Party had regained much of the strength in the unions which it had lost in the previous five years. But it had paid a high price for its recovery. The price paid was that it had sought to assimilate itself as nearly as possible to the traditional Australian labour movement. Communist union officials, except for issues involving the Soviet Union or Soviet interests, were hard to distinguish in their words and actions from other union officials’ (p. 284).
Gollan argues that the party was generally a small, isolated and unpopular force in Australia politics throughout the period under discussion. However, its prominence in particular movements such as the anti-fascist (pre-war) and peace (post-war) movements and in the trade unions gave it an influence far beyond its size. During the period under discussion, the CPA was the only significant force in Australian politics calling for the revolutionary overthrow of capitalism and the establishment of socialism. It reached its zenith during the Second World War and in the years immediately following. As the Cold War intensified, however, the party adopted a more defensive and sectarian posture which ultimately led to a decline in its influence. By the early 1960s, following an exodus from the party in the wake of Khrushchev’s secret speech and a 1963 split, in which Communists sympathetic to Peking’s position in the international communist movement left to form the Communist Party of Australia (Marxist-Leninist), ‘there was a return to the conditions which prevailed before Lenin’s revolution and Stalin’s Russia produced the monolithic world communist movement’ (p. 285).
In Gollan’s final assessment, he praises the ‘many brave and selfless battles for a more satisfactory way of life for the majority’ that Communists fought, ‘often at the cost of the destruction of their own lives’. Yet the party as a whole was riven by contradictions.
Communists believed that a society of freedom and equality could only be achieved by the revolutionary transformation of capitalism into socialism. In practice their efforts were directed towards making capitalism work more efficiently. Communists were internationalists but this was held in tension with an Australian nationalism which grew out of opposition to imperialism but settled into a nationalism which took its colour equally from specifically Australian experience and Russian chauvinism. Libertarianism versus authoritarianism was the third of these essential conflicts—so far as it was resolved it was in favour of authoritarianism (p. 288).
For the Party Town project, Gollan’s work raises a number of questions. To what extent are his findings about the party in general, applicable to the Wollongong experience? Certainly his argument that it was the actions of militant Communists in the unions and the unemployed movement during the Depression that first built the party and laid the foundations for its future influence in the labour movement rings true. To what extent, though, was Moscow policy adhered to in the Wollongong branch’s dealings with the ALP and the broader labour movement? While I do not expect to learn much about the first two decades of the CPA from my oral history work, hopefully these questions will inform both my study of the documentary history and stimulate discussion and analysis about the extent to which the same contradictions that haunted the party in its early days remained for later communists to grapple with.
