Australia's "Left Convention", held in April, was a much more promising development than London's, judging from the comments which have just reached us. In the immediate future there seems to be a greater possibility of a united revolutionary movement, with a mass base in the working class and amongst students, emerging in Australia. The reasons for this are to be found in the more advanced ideological differentiation occurring in the Communist Party there, in the relatively early emergence of the revolutionary potential of the 'white collar' workers in Australia, in the fact that the Australian left movement,developed a little behind those in other advanced capitalist countries,can learn from the experience of those countries, and in the perceptive boldness of some comrades in the ranks of the "groupuscules'.
While this greater promise is due mainly to different objective conditions and local peculiarities, some lessons could be drawn from the Australian situation.
The organisers of the Australian "Left Action Conference" as it was called - secured the co-operation and serious participation of all the forces of the Left, whereas the London conference was marked by obvious absences and by the lack of serious preparation by many delegates.
800 delegates and participants attended the Australian conference
(Australian population: 12 million) and these comrades represented every left tendency in the working class and socialist movement: - from the left trade
union leaders through to ultra-left Maoists. As for the social composition of the delegates: - the biggest blocs were +: 130 tertiary level students, 35 secondary school students and 125 industrial workers.
The delegates came in response to the necessity to evaluate their experience, work out perspectives and co-ordinate future action. Already in January, the 'groupuscules' had met to form a loose "Revolutionary Socialist Alliance" in response to the same necessities.
The numbers involved in anti-capitalist and anti-imperialist struggles, and the heat of these struggles, has gone up in the last few years in Australia. Not only has industrial militancy increased but there have been a number of conspicuous stand-up fights over 'control' - not just building workers taking safety arrangements into their own hands but striking teachers claiming control over certain things inside the school and demanding the ereation of a supreme Education Commission on which they would have half the mem.:bers, and pilots demanding the power to draw up thcir own schedules and decide on the composition of crews. Black workers too have started, for the first time, to take strike action. Naturally, too, there have been the student battles, mobilising increasing numbers, against imperialist violence in Vietnam,burgeoning authoritarianism at home, and university oligarchs. And as well, secondary school students have acted against the war, school oppression and deprivation; there have been three school sit-ins in Sydney this year.
The bringing together of all militants embroiled in these struggles was largely made possible by changes in the Communist Party of Australia. In fact, the "Left Action Conference" was initiated by leaders of the C.P.A. The C.P.A. has proportionally the same membership as the British CP, and like that party has significant strength in industry but little or no electoral support. The C.P.A. wields more influence over its Labour Party and trade union 'left' than does the CPGB.
The C.P.A. is undoubtedly the most democratic CP in the world, it is no longer exceptional for this Party's weekly paper to carry analyses, written by Trotskyites on the bureaucratic degeneration which occurred in the Soviet Union or on the future of the workers' control movement.
It is also one of the most independent of the world's communist parties and was one of the first to condemn the five Warsaw Pact states' invasion of Czechoslovakia. Nor was the C.P.A. leadership content with the explanation - accepted by the British CP leaders - that the 'neo-Stalinists in the Kremlin were 'trigger-happy' about imperialist threats to their security and that was why they marched in. The invasion of Czechoslovakia and its continued consequenges, has meant a continuing debate in the C.P.A. over the nature of the Soviet Union today.
The leadership of this independent and democratic CP - with its aging membership - has recently decided on a 'left course' - after fruitlessly pursuing a right-wing tangent from 1965 to 1967 and cutting itself off from the revolutionary students and young workers. This new 'left course' naturally entails a certain wooing of the 'groupuscules,
Predictably, this ‘left turn' of the leadership has aroused a strong minority opposition in the C.P.A. This opposition is led by, and composed of, almost all the Party's trade union leaders - who are, almost to a man, routinists and neo-Stalinists as well as pro-Russian. Characteristically, two of these union leaders were touring the ‘socialist countries' at the time of the Czechoslovak occupation. and issued blood-curdling statement of support for the invasion. These union leaders have been the bulwark of the C. P.A. in the past and are - if Moscow gives the word - likely to split away and form a pro-Moscow C.P.A. taking a lot of the membership with them. Understandably, the C.P.A. leaders do not like the prospect and thére are observers who are certain that the leaders will - before the crunch - sacrifice anything to avoid this happening; yet there is so far no indication of the leadership abandoning the new course.
The most obvious manifestation of this 'left turn' has been in the industrial policies of the C.P.A. leaders; they have adopted the cause of ‘workers! control' and 'self-management' and pronounced themselves in favour of a confrontation with and struggles against the compulsory arbitration and its attendant penal system. r
(In Australia, immediately a strike begins, the boss can get a court order making the strike illegal. After that, the dispute is theoretically supposed yo go before an..impartial bourgeois judge who then settles it; his decision carrying the force of law. If the men continue to strike in defiance of the court order, then the union to which they belong can be fined up to 1000 dollars a day (£450) - regardless of the position of union officials.
Last year, during a strike in the metal industry, unions were fined 100,000 dollars.
The only exception to this general position is Western Australia where fines can be imposed on unofficial strikers personally. They had an experiance of this law last year which should interest the British comradeé&e Seven boilermakers, ‘'convicted' of striking, after a court order ordered them back refused to pay the fines imposed on them. The state govern ment proposed to gaol them; the unions threatened a general strike and the prisdm:: warders union announced it would never accept them as prisoners. Eventually the ‘anonymous' employers paid the fines.)
The ‘Left Action Conference' was, then, the result of resurgent class struggle, the desire for effective, united left offensives, and the encouraging - even if limited to mostly words and gestures so far - the evolution of part of the C.P.A. which made such a meeting with the revolutionary left possible.... wary as this revolutionary left remains. '
The two major decisions of the Australian conference were: to launch a solidarity-with-the-NLF campaign and to convene a conference on workers! control and self-management. These were both issues raised by the non-CP revolutionary left.
Since its inception the Australian ‘anti-war movement', has, for the most part, never gone beyond demanding withdrawal of the Australian troops from Vietnam. But in 1967 groups of students initiated solidarity campaigns in this ‘South Africa' of Asia. Of course, parliament immediately made this illegal. Yet all the small groups continued their campaigning (at times
sanctioned, if not fully supported by mass student rallies) and now the majority of the left have committed themselves to an anti-imperialist and internationalist position, thereby re-activating one of the best traditions of the Australian labour movement. This decision is not merely important now, but as a precedent and preparation for the future, because the Australian ruling class, which supports every counter-revolutionary regime in Asia, will surely become involved in other Vietnams in the future.
After years of propaganda work by the Australian section of the Fourth International, after the recent strikes and struggles against the power of boss and bureaucract, after the recent conversion of part of the C.P.A., the decision to convene a conference on ‘workers' control and self-management’ - note well the formulation - was passed without opposition. Determined to avoid some of the traps of earlier movements of this kind, delegate after delegate spoke against 'participation' and about workers' control struggles and victories as preparatory steps leading up to the seizure of power by the working class and self-management of the whole of society.
Not only will the Australian control movement learn a lot from the pioneering movement in Britain but vice versa. The speech to the conference of Denis Freney (RSA) is an example. Freney advocated a renewed syndicalism exercised by action committees at the base, in all spheres of society. He spoke of 'self-management', not only as the essence of a future socialist society, not only as an immediate slogan which gave meaning and perspective to all the rebellions against capitalist authority and workers' temporary conquests of this or that area of authority, but as a tactic for present and future use in the form of active occupations whenever possible. The revolution and socialist soci,ty mist be anticipated and boldy prepared for.
Freney gave as an example of what he meant. Recently there was a national rail strike in Australia, and he suggested that during the next rail strike comrades involved should urge not only occupation but active occupation, with running of the trains for commuting workers by the workers themselves. He continued: "Someone from the floor mentionedthe example of the Tokyo busmen who did just such a thing. Is ii so outlandish? I believe it is not. Such action would not antagonise the working and travelling public, and would thus disarm the capitalist press of one of its main anti-strike prop2ganda means. But in addition, and more important, it would give a living example. to the workers throughout the economy of what they could do if they wished."
The nascent Australian workers' control and self-management movement - learning from the British movement and the May revolt in France and anticipating what the workers in the bureaucratic Eastern European countries will do when they rise - is determined to avoid 'particigation' traps and is oriented towards occupations, seizures of power, and the workers, students and citizens managing the whole of society themselves.
Finally, because his speech is remarkable and because he was the initiator of the conference, I will give a general summary of the speech delivered by Laurie Aarons, national secretary of the C.P.A. In this long, wide-ranging speech he outline & the features of the democratic state and self-managing society of abundance m@de possible by the scientific and technOlogical revolution and which could be constructed in an advanced country after a socialist revolution. He provides a useful description of imperialist, bureau-
-cratic, monopoly capitlaism which distorts, stunts and denies possibilities for the full human development made possible by the technological revolution. He draws out, and suggests solutions to the problems of unifying the working class, including its new strata and the radical students and, in a general way, nominates the issues which will mobilise them. He outlines such demands as: a minimum living wage and increased leisure time based on the new expectations, the struggle for democratic social control, and aid to anti-imperialist movements. He recognized also the need to contest the ruling power structure's 'cultural' hegemony, by which capitalism gets its subjects to '‘love' it and accept it.
But Aarons is most stimulating in the section of his speech he sub-titles "methods of action". On parliamentary gradualism and revolutionary force he says:
"If we mean just revolution by the ballot, this is certainly unreal; any
serious structural reforms, let alonefundamental social change, can only
be pushed through by a mass movement outside parliament... the New Guard
/Australia's fascists in the 1930's, M.Q._/ was only beaten by workers’ ¢ counter to fascist violence. The aim of socialist revolution without
civil war can only be realised through creating an overwhelming balance
of mass opinion backed up by a mighty mass movement of strikes, demonst-
rations, occupation of decisive factories and institutions, by so divid-
ing the men who make up coercive power of the state as to intimidate the
controllers and rulersof the system. This obviously is impossible with-
out mass action and struggles, confrontation and defeat of reactionary
violence, intimidating and paralysing those who would prefer civil war
rather than a revolutionary social change that destroys their power and
privilege."
As to the question of whether Australian society wouldever be gripped by a revolutionary crisis "when the majority can no longer live, and the minority can no longer rule, in the old ways"; Aarons answers - YES. And goes on to outline some of the possible developments in Australian capitlaism's internal contradictions and external relations which could lead to such a crisis and emphasis«s the need for theoretical work to narrow the general possibilities down to more concrete expectations which can be prepared for.
If such a revolutionary eruption is to culminate in a successful socialist revolution then a mass revolutionary party - initiating action, standing in the front line with the class, arousing and advising it - is necessary.
If the dominant, anti-bureaucratic, wing of the C.P.A. continues its evolution; taking clear revolutionary initiatives and publicly repudiating Stalinism, its conjunction with the small forces of revolutionary socialism in a reconstituted, democratic, communist party is possible. Such a party with a membership of thousands, combining the over-35 rank and file industrial militants of the C.P.A. with the revolutionary young students and workers, would be of great aid in the liberation struggles in Australia and in South Asia.
The Australian 'Left Action Conference! certainly was a step towards the birth of such a party, one of a new type, relevant to the new social and historical conditions we now live in.