The Communist Party of Australia (CPA), known as the Australian Communist Party (ACP) from 1944 to 1951, was an Australian communist party founded in 1920. The party existed until roughly 1991, with its membership and influence having been in a steady decline since its peak in 1945. Like most communist parties in the West, the party was heavily involved in the labour movement and the trade unions. Its membership, popularity and influence grew significantly during most of the interwar period before reaching its climax in 1945, where the party obtained a membership of slightly above 22,000 members. At its peak it was the largest communist party in the Anglophone countries on a population basis, and held industrial strength greater than the parties of "India, Latin America, and most of Western Europe".
Although the party did not elect a federal MP, Fred Paterson was elected to the Parliament of Queensland (for Bowen) at the 1944 state election. He won re-election in 1947 before the seat was abolished. The party also held office in over a dozen local government areas across New South Wales and Queensland.
After nineteen years of activity, the CPA was formally banned on 15 June 1940 under the relatively new Menzies government (1939–1941). The party was banned under the National Security (Subversive Associations) Regulations 1940. Two-and-a-half years later, the party was again a lawful organisation. When the party contested the federal election eight months later, it received its biggest vote total. Getting a total of 81,816 votes (1.93–2.00%), the party received over 20,000 in Victoria and Queensland, and over 19,000 in New South Wales. It was the party's biggest vote total since the 1934 federal election. However, by the late 1960s the party fell into single digit numbers before a brief spike in the mid 1970s. In the mid-to-late 1980s, the party was effectively stagnant and was dissolved in 1989.Michelle Grattan 'The Rise of Labor and the Right', Melbourne Age 26 December 1989 p. 11 To the present, the party is the fourth-oldest political party in Australian political history since Federation, lasting for .
History
Foundation and early years
The Communist Party of Australia (CPA) was founded at the Australian Socialist Party Hall in Sydney on 30 October 1920 socialists inspired by reports of the Russian Revolution. The estimates for attendees at the founding ranges from below thirteen (Alistair Davidson) to twenty-six (Stuart Macintyre). Sixty invitations were issued. Groups included the Australian Socialist Party (ASP), some members from the Victorian Socialist Party (although the party itself did not join), as well as a variety of militant trade unionists. Among the party's founders were prominent Sydney trade unionists, Jock Garden, Tom Walsh, and William Paisley Earsman, and suffragettes and anti-conscriptionists including Adela Pankhurst (daughter of the British suffragist Emmeline Pankhurst), Christian Jollie Smith and Katharine Susannah Prichard.
Most of the then illegal Australian section of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) joined, but the IWW soon left the Communist Party, with its original members, over disagreements with the direction of the Soviet Union and Bolshevism. In its early years, mainly through Garden's efforts, the party achieved some influence in the trade union movement in New South Wales, but by the mid-1920s it had dwindled to an insignificant group.
A visits to the 1924 New Zealand conference by CPA executive members Hetty and Hector Ross got the (also small) Communist Party of New Zealand (CPNZ) agreeing to temporary affiliation with the CPA, and were followed by visits in 1925 by Harry Quaife, and by Norman Jeffery a bow-tie wearing former "Wobbly" (IWW member).
Garden and other communists were expelled from the Labor Party (ALP) in 1924. The CPA ran candidates including Garden (for Sydney) at the 1925 New South Wales state election in working-class seats against the ALP but was decisively defeated. This prompted Garden to leave the party in 1926 and return to the Labor Party. The leadership of the party went to Jack Kavanagh, an experienced Canadian communist activist who had moved to Australia in 1925, and Esmonde Higgins, a talented Melbourne journalist who was the nephew of then-High Court Justice, H. B. Higgins.
In 1929 the party leadership fell into disfavour with the Communist International (Comintern), which under orders from Joseph Stalin had taken a turn to radical revolutionary rhetoric (the so-called "Third Period"). After allowing party member Bert Moxon in Queensland to organise Communist candidates for the 1929 Queensland state election, the CPA leadership refused to do the same for the 1929 Australian federal election and instead supported the ALP, leading the Comintern to denounce the party's relationship to the ALP as 'opportunist'. In December 1929, a new party leadership including Moxon, Jack Miles, Lance Sharkey and Richard Dixon was elected in response to these denunciations, and began a period of strict centralisation and obedience to Moscow. Kavanagh was expelled in 1930 and Higgins resigned, and an emissary of the Comintern, the American communist Harry M. Wicks, was sent to correct the party's perceived errors. Though Moxon was removed as national secretary by the end of 1930 and later expelled from the party's central committee entirely, Miles and then Sharkey would lead the party until 1965.
In the 1930s, the CPA began a campaign to create mass organisations to organise militancy in the working-class, known as 'fraternal organisations' or 'fronts'. These organisations were nominally independent of the party and often included prominent non-communist office-holders, but were dominated by the CPA and its members who served as the organisers for them. Among these was the Unemployed Workers Movement, founded in 1930, which at its height had 30,000 members and was infamous nationally for its anti-eviction campaign in Sydney.
During this period the party experienced some growth, particularly after 1935 when the Comintern changed its policy in favour of a "united front against fascism". The Movement Against War and Fascism (MAWF) was founded to bring together all opponents of fascism under a communist controlled umbrella organisation. The movement instigated the events which led to the attempted exclusion of Egon Kisch from Australia in late 1934 and early 1935. Alongside this, the CPA formed the Workers Defence Corps (WDC).
The CPA was the first Australian political party to make a commitment to Aboriginal rights, which were included in its manifesto from 1931 onwards. The CPA, discussing in great detail the abuses suffered by Aboriginals, published a lengthy list of demands, calling for "full economic, political and social rights" for Aboriginal people.
Rise during World War II and the Labor United Front
The Communist Party began to win positions in trade unions during the 1930s, with party members taking the national leadership of the Federated Ironworkers' Association, the Miners' Federation and the Waterside Workers' Federation (WWF), as well as positions in other smaller unions or regional branches. At the same time, only a small minority of union members were themselves communists so these officials relied on the support of other militant unionists and the broader membership to maintain and exercise leadership, and the CPA's parliamentary candidates nearly always polled poorly at elections. The party also set up an organization of the unemployed to resist evictions. Activists from the party joined the International Brigades to defend the Second Republic against Francisco Franco's troops, and instigated an industrial campaign by the WWF to ban shipments of scrap iron to Japan in 1938. Throughout this time, members of the CPA were under constant surveillance by police and intelligence forces and harassed by the courts.
In 1939, after Soviet efforts to contain Nazi aggression through co-operation and alliance with France and Britain were rejected by the French and British, Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union signed a Non-Aggression Treaty. Despite ideological opposition between the countries, the USSR agreed not to engage in hostilities against Germany at the outbreak of World War II (Australia declared war on Nazi Germany for invading Poland). Consequently, the Communist Party of Australia opposed and sought to disrupt Australia's war effort against Germany in the early stages of the war under orders of the Comintern on the grounds that it was a war between imperialist nations, and not in the interests of the working class. Menzies banned the CPA after the fall of France in 1940, but by 1941 Stalin was forced to join the allied cause when Hitler reneged on the Pact and invaded the USSR. The USSR came to bear the brunt of the carnage of Hitler's war machine and the Communist Party in Australia lost its early war stigma as a result.
Following the invasion of the Soviet Union, the CPA shifted towards a collaborative United front approach to the Labor Party to fully support the Australian war effort against fascism. Party members held discussions with senior Labor ministers following the Curtin government entering office in 1941, pledging to provide full support to mobilise resources for the war effort. The CPA supported calls for conscription, increased working hours, condemned strike action in war industries, and minimised criticism of John Curtin and his government. By 1942, the Curtin government legalised the CPA, exempted communist trade union and party officials from conscription, and provided the party's newspaper Tribune with a 'generous newsprint allocation' under wartime paper rationing.
During the united front period, the CPA's membership rose to 20,000, it won control of a number of important trade unions, and a Communist candidate, Fred Paterson, was elected to the Queensland parliament. The Communist Party achieved a majority of seats in the New South Wales' Kearsley Shire from 1944 to 1947. The Shire was committed to municipal socialism, advocating nationalisation of electricity and the expansion of the social wage, and was unique for its commitment to activism around federal and international affairs. The council notably rejected visits from the Governor of New South Wales, and criticised Britain for not supporting the Greek People's Liberation Army. But the party remained marginal to the Australian political mainstream. The Australian Labor Party remained the dominant party of the Australian left.
Postwar After 1945 and the onset of the Cold War, the party entered a steady decline. Following the new line from Moscow, and believing that a new "imperialist war" and a new depression were imminent, and that the CPA should immediately contest for leadership of the working class with the Australian Labor Party, the CPA launched an industrial offensive in 1947, culminating in a prolonged strike in the coal mines in 1949. The Chifley Labor government saw this as a communist challenge to its position in the labour movement, and used the army and strikebreakers to break the strike. The Communist Party never again held such a strong position in the union movement.