RGASPI 495–20–3. 13 October 1929, Political Secretariat ECCI: letter: Open letter to the CEC of the CPA. In English, Russian, French and German versions. Typescript.
This ‘Open Letter’ from the ECCI to the CPA’s CEC, dated October 1929, was published in the Workers’ Weekly on 6 December, and thus became available to all Party members. It openly criticises the ‘wrong policy’ of the CPA towards the ALP, and indicates that the Party must reconsider its position at its forthcoming Ninth Conference.
Oct. 13, 1929.
Dear Comrades,
This is not the first time that the Communist International occupies itself with the Australian question. Already in 1927, it was found necessary to send a representative of the CI to your Party Convention, for the purpose of clarifying certain political and organisational issues then confronting your Party. In 1928, the ECCI, together with a representative from the CPA, formulated and adopted the so-called Queensland Resolution pertaining to the policy and tactics of the CP in the Queensland elections.
This time, the immediate cause for the serious consideration of the Australian question by the ECCI was the decision by a majority of your Central Committee to support the Labour Party in the Federal Elections in October of this year. This decision, plus your reply to our subsequent cable, makes it necessary to review as broadly as possible the situation at present confronting the Australian working class, and to analyse the central political tasks and organisational and tactical questions now before the CPA.
It is too obvious to permit of any doubt that the Australian working class and labour movement are at present living through a crisis of transition, which is only the reflection of the industrial and political fields of the new phase of development which Australian capitalism and economics have entered. Australian capitalism, like world capitalism, is passing through its third phase, which finds expression in the crumbling of capitalist stabilisation and in the intensification of class antagonisms.
The rather unique and privileged position of young Australian capitalism (with its huge territory and sparse population; its strong and almost monopolistic position as a producer and exporter of primary products; its keen shortage of labour in both industry and agriculture before the war; its strong State capitalistic and protectionist tendencies; its “White Australia” policy; the widespread Arbitration Court system which was in reality a more or less perfected system of industrial peace; and its comparative isolation from world politics due to its former position in relation to Great Britain), —all this is now undergoing very deep changes.
Australian capitalism is now passing through a new phase of development. Having participated actively in the last imperialist world war, it has definitely been drawn into the maelstrom of capitalist-imperialist contradictions, this time no longer as a passive annex to British imperialism, but as an active agent and participant.
Australia, with its vast possibilities of further development and its exclusive strategic position in the Pacific (where the conflict of imperial interests, especially between the two chief rivals—USA and Britain—is keenest), becomes the scene of ever sharper competition between American and British capital.
In this rivalry Australia strives to play off Great Britain against America in the effort to ensure an independent imperialist development. On the one hand the Australian bourgeoisie is still dependent on Great Britain as the main market for its primary products, and on the other it is anxious to utilise American finance capital for developing its industries. In order to compete successfully in the world market (as regards primary products), and on the home market—with the manufactures of the more advanced industrial countries, the Australian bourgeoisie is compelled to secure a drastic reduction in costs of production and to reduce the working and living standards of the Australian working class to the lower level of the British and European proletariat. This is glaringly revealed by the general capitalist offensive of the last two years:—The Crimes Act, the Anti-Trade Union Law, the Transport Act, the Literature Ban; the defeat of the seamen, the smashing of the watersiders, the lockout and bitter five-month struggle of the timber workers who have been robbed of the 44-hour week; the lockout of the miners; the attack on the railwaymen and metal workers; the attack on the NSW basic wage, etc., etc.
The comparatively privileged position which the Australian working class occupied for several decades, and which was the result of the specific characteristics of Australian capitalism and economics (outlined above), has thus also been shaken to its foundations. Instead of a keen shortage of labour in the gradually expanding industries and in agriculture, there is now an army of unemployed reaching nearly 250,000. The 44-hour week is almost non-existent at present. The basic wage is being reduced. The trade union movement, which in the course of two decades has been devitalised and demoralised by the Arbitration Courts, is now shackled by the new Anti-Trade Union Law whose drastic provisions surpass even the British Anti-Trade Union Law. All the forces of the State, the military, the police, the judiciary, are put into action against the working class (seamen’s strike, waterfront strike and timber lockout). In this general capitalist offensive the methods and tactics used by the Australian bourgeoisie are the well known and tested methods of the older capitalist countries: lockouts, ruthless crushing of strikes “industrial peace” conferences on the Mond-Turner pattern, etc.
The illusions that existed among broad sections of the Australian working class and that were fostered by the social-reformist agents of the capitalism abroad, to the effect that Australia was a “social paradise” and an “exception” to the general rule of capitalist development, are rapidly being shattered. The Australian working class is being robbed of all its “privileges”.
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.
The prospects are thus most favourable for the only revolutionary Party in Australia—the Communist Party.
With objective and subjective conditions in its favour, the CPA will be able to fulfil its functions as a Communist Party only if it proceeds consciously and without vacillation as the initiator, organiser and leader of the economic and political struggles of the working class, and only if it consistently works among the masses and unmasks ruthlessly the treacherous social-fascist role of the Labour Party and of the trade union bureaucracy. 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 VI World Congress and X Plenum of the CI as well as the decision of the IV RILU Congress seem to have been neglected by the CPA. Even at its conference of December 1928 the Party could not give a proper political estimate of the Labour Party, define its fundamentally social-fascist character, its aggressive counter-revolutionary role in the present situation.
The Party by its tactics during the elections still appears to cling to the idea that the Labour Party of Australia continues to represent in some way the interests of the working class when as a matter of fact its past history, when in and out of Government, proves it to have been an instrument of the Australian bourgeoisie. In the present, third period of post-war capitalism generally and in the specific conditions of present-day Australian capitalism in particular, the role of the Australian Labour Party as the agents of the bourgeoisie stands out more clearly than ever. Under these circumstances to persist in the tactics the Communist Party of Australia is now pursuing means, not to lead, but to mislead the working class. The Party must clearly understand that a labour organisation—however radical it may claim to be—which fails to carry out a definitely militant class policy must inevitably drift to the side of the bourgeoisie. In regard to the Labour Party of Australia it must be said definitely that it has already gone over to the side of the bourgeoisie and to support it in any way means to support the enemies of the working class. Consequently, the decision of the majority of your CEC to support the Labour Party in the last elections is a glaring example of grave Right deviation deserving the severest condemnation.
The whole policy of the Party finds its crowning expression in the following statement of the Workers Weekly (August 2, 1929):-
In this country there will be no strike on August 1st. Not that the Australian workers have less need than our fellow workers in Europe to demonstrate against imperialist war and the warmongers, but that in this country the lines of the class struggle have not yet become so clear that the working class is only beginning to realise that its enemy is capitalism and the capitalist State. The task of militants in this country is not yet to lead the working class in a direct challenge to capitalism, but to popularise the basic ideas of the class struggle amongst the workers, their wives and children.
To this we would add the following passage from the resolution passed at your last Party Conference in December 1928:-
We must not lose sight of the fact that the way to the CP leads through this Left Wing—not because we want it so, not because we in any way hesitate to transfer these masses directly from the path of reformism and Labour Party illusions to our own revolutionary ideology and action, but because these masses still hesitate to do so.
This transformation is not effected through political miracles, nor will we accomplish it through virtuous isolation of the CP from the masses, but it is a long and difficult process whose various phases we must help in speeding up.
It must be said that such statements border on liquidationism. They are a denial of the elementary principles of the role and functions of the Communist Party as laid down by the Communist International. In the light of these statements the decided Right deviation of the Communist Party of Australia becomes comprehensible. It also explains why the Party still has such poor organisational contacts with the masses and why it has made no headway on the road towards becoming a mass Party of the working class. Apparently, the Party regards itself as being merely a propagandist body and as a sort of adjunct to the Left Wing of the Labour Party, whereas our conception of the role and functions of the Communist Party is that it should be the leader of the working class and the principal driving force in its political and economic struggles. Instead of this the Communist Party of Australia is content to trail behind the working class and to preach to “the workers, their wives and children”. The Party grossly underestimates the intensity of the class struggle in Australia and fails to appreciate its role in this struggle. Clearly, as long as this state of affairs continues it is hopeless to expect the Communist Party of Australia to be anything more than a relative handful of propagandists—however ardent—isolated from the masses. We earnestly urge you, and the whole of the Party membership, to submit your policy and tactics to a thorough overhauling and we are convinced that, if you really have the cause of Communism at heart, you will radically alter your course and henceforth pursue the line of the Communist International.
At the present turning point, where the class struggle in Australia is growing keener from day to day, with a general capitalist offensive actually in full swing, with the Labour Party politicians and trade union bureaucracy revealing their treacherous social-fascist role as allies and agents of the Capitalist State, with the inevitable radicalisation of the masses, it is urgently necessary for the CP to assert itself as the only true working class Party which organises and leads the workers in the struggle against capitalism, imperialism and its agents. At this point it is not only impermissible to support the ALP directly or indirectly (whether in State or Federal elections, and regardless of place), but it is the duty of the CP to conduct open warfare against the party of class collaboration and Industrial Peace, against the party of capitalist arbitration, against the party of such labour-fascists as McCormack, Hogan & Co., against the party of strike-breakers, wage reducers and police terror (seamen, watersiders, railwaymen in Queensland, etc.), against the party of race prejudice and White chauvinism (“White Australia”), against the party agency of British imperialism which is feverishly preparing a war against the only Workers’ State, the USSR.
[…]
The Party must make a thorough study of the resolutions of the VI Congress of the CI and the X Plenum of the ECCI in all nuclei and reorganise its work on the basis of self-criticism, eliminating all opportunist waverings, deviations and mistakes in its practical work. In order to assure the carrying out of the new policy you must take effective measures to secure the attendance of the largest possible number of delegates straight from the factories at your next Congress. The Congress should be preceded by a wide discussion among the Party members on the basis of this letter with the object of finding the practical form of carrying that policy into effect. To this purpose you must publish this letter and secure its widest possible circulation among the Party membership.
We fully appreciate the enormity of the tasks that the present period of capitalism imposes upon the numerically small Communist Party. But we insist that the smallness of its membership is mainly due to the wrong policy it has hitherto pursued. We are convinced that if your numerically small Party resolutely sets to work on the lines set out above it will hew a path for itself to the masses and by proving to them that it is really their leader in their struggles it will open the way for itself to become a real mass party of the working class.
POLITICAL SECRETARIAT OF THE ECCI.