Cutting a figure: Baracchi, Love and Communism.

Communism: A Love Story (Melbourne University Press, 2007) by Jeff Sparrow

Jeff Sparrow's very readable Communism: A Love Story, and more particularly what I saw at the launch of his book, set me rethinking the history of Australian communism. The book recounts the life of Guido Baracchi and the one abiding love affair of his life, with communism. This was punctuated with multiple one night stands, short passions and marriages, in none of which Guido remained faithful. In the jargon of his era, Baracchi the militant was a bounder.

Guido Barrachi was born into a very wealthy upper middle-class family in Melbourne in 1887. His Italian father, who was State Astronomer, put him through the best private schools and then the University of Melbourne. In this progress, Guido mixed with the best Melbourne society. Little augured the radical he would become after he reached university. Then began an almost cliched progress through the debating club, to invitations to members of the newly elected ALP to speak 'in hall', to the editorship of the student magazine Fleur de Lys. The author describes a youth wearing a 'socialist cravat' and writing under the pseudonym of Libertas. But Guido was more than a poseur. Being rich, he was able to take up the place organised for him at the London School of Economics. After traipsing through Paris and listening to reactionary luminaries like Henri Bergson, he arrived as Fabianism became the rage among undergraduates.

So, when he returned home, he became a lonely voice against the jingoistic preparations for World War I, entering into public debate with Robert Menzies, who was starting his long and illustrious career on the Right. Baracchi's views, especially once the war had started, were not tolerable to either the staff or the bulk of the students at the university. The first forced him to make a public recantation and the second nearly drowned him in the university pond in what has since become one of the mythical events of student politics.

Several recantations of his views belied a progress towards the organised socialist movement. First, he became close to the IWW. In time these anti-war associations landed him in gaol for disloyalty. But by then he was on a path with several new IWW friends towards the foundation of the Communist Party of Australia (CPA) in 1920. His association with the tiny new party was short-lived. For personal reasons, and maybe because the more exciting possibility of a world revolution was happening 'over there', he departed for Weimar Germany. On arrival he joined the German Communist Party (KPD) and was soon employed at Inprecorr, the newspaper of the new Communist International. He also participated in plans for a communist rising and got to know many luminaries on the Left. Again we cannot fault Baracchi for his energy and courage but it was becoming obvious even to sympathisers that his love for such heady events made him a bit of a romantic. Christina Stead based one of her characters in Seven Poor Men of Sydney on Guido: he was a 'delightful ... romantic' who thought that getting arrested was a 'splendid adventure'.

The Communist Party he returned to must have been a come-down. It had practically no members (249 in 1928) and was led by a crook, Jock Garden. Guido joined the 'Right' within the Party, which favoured a policy of 'educating' the 'masses' and later joined the ALP. This led to his first expulsion from the CPA. Again there was recantation and flight, this time to the Soviet Union with a delegation of the Friends of the Soviet Union.

Far from the realities of the purges, he remained a firm apologist for Stalinism throughout the 1930s. But his romantic impetuosity was catching up with him. New, hard-headed 'grey' and unromantic men had come to power in the CPA. The tolerance of crooks was finished and, with the rapid growth of communism in the Depression, so was playing political games. His catholic friendships with people accused of 'Trotskyism' in the Soviet Union brought him into bad odour. Guido was again expelled in 1940. We can understand the predicament that drove him to a breakdown. He had been excluded totally from the family he had been in for thirty years: only his fellows, excluded 'Trotskyites' like himself, still wanted him.

If we regard Trotskyism as part of the history of communism, which we must, then Guido's love affair did not end with that expulsion. For another thirty years he hung around the Left, particularly Trotskyite groups, and was present as an old, old man even in the anti-Vietnam war movement of the 1970s. But he proved an easy target for the criticism of a workerist CPA because of his bourgeois background and general antics.

Perhaps if that had been all there was to his life we might have thought him an admirable, if bizarre, figure. But there is the other story, that of the young 'hot rabbit' who turned into the ridiculous ageing Lothario. Each part of his love story with communism was punctuated by a change of woman and side adventures, like that with a working-class Romanian woman (by whom he had a son and whom he seemingly did nothing to help or save before she disappeared in World War II). Among those recounted in this book is Guido's first wife Kathleen, soon deserted for K. S. Pritchard. Then Neura, who accompanied him in his German adventures and lasted through his infidelities for decades. Then his flight to Russia with Betty Rowland, who shared him with Neura in a menage-a-trois until it all got too much. In her turn, Rowland left and at least one long-term partner later remained. Guido obviously had something. They not only put up with his bad faith tous azimuths, but forgave him and frequently remained on friendly terms with him.

Guido was the eternal youth whom, unfortunately for them, his women found attractive. Being a bit of a prig, I ended up finding the whole story irritating. He was the sort of person who was always there, part of it all, and yet, if we leave out the fact that he was first among English-speaking communists to translate Karl Korsch, he seemed to have done very little that was tangible. His life was Monsalvat without the Monsalvation of the art. Was he worth wasting all that time both in the reading and the writing? Even the book seemed to peter out in its last chapters, the elucubrations of tiny Trotskyist sect activity of no real interest. There was simply nothing to write about. Gorky's exhortation that every person write their biography was directed at silenced workers, not at voluble upper middleclass charmers. Gramsci's refusal to write about himself, because only those who contributed something to history should do so, seemed the object lesson. But this irritation became concern when I put it into the context of what I saw and heard at the launch.

Trades Hall and Book Trade

The book was launched at the Melbourne Trades Hall, a place at once familiar and welcoming for me, and yet redolent of a past and temps perdus. When I arrived, a young woman from Melbourne University Press was talking up sales, gushing about how pleased they were to have the book on their lists. Compared with the many autobiographies of communists--by Ralph Gibson, John Sendy, Dorothy Hewitt and others, even Don Watson's excellent book about Brian Fitzpatrick--it will probably be appreciated by the average reader. It is definitely literature, pitched with style and wit to people who are unfamiliar with the worlds it describes, and, has little despite the footnotes, to remind us that it was originally a PhD. But the spiel from Ms MUP, now apparently as commercial a press as any other, showed that she had little familiarity with the concerns of communism. She would probably be bemused at this criticism on the grounds that her job was PR and that books by and about leftists were expected to upset more than half the public who condemned them but did not buy them. That was their job.

The bulk of the packed audience were young, but apart from Resistance members I recognised as friends of my children, I did not know the young faces. Yes, I was bit out of touch because I was coming from another shore into a half-remembered world. Obviously, I felt a little ill at ease as I headed for the older faces I knew from the Party and the student revolution, people between fifty and eighty years old. I was greeted with the usual: 'I heard you live in Europe now'--true for almost ten years. Still feeling a little 'fish out of the water', although guzzling the far-too-expensive wine helped the old warm feeling come back, I turned to Dave, who had given his life to the old Party and the unions, and asked him how he felt about the whole business of the leftist generations coming together for the launch of a book about Baracchi, a sort of antipodean Don Juan with the twist that he had been with a string of Australian women who were literary and feminist figures in their own right. Dave gave a wry smile and said words to this effect: 'I remember 1949 when Mao won. I was a student at RMIT. They sold the communist paper on every corner then and I rushed home [to Box Hill] to read the news. Everything seemed possible.' And while it may seem ridiculous today in 1968, and even in 1972, a great deal, if not everything, did seem possible. We thought that the world could still be turned upside down. But now we felt like grandparents at the kids' party and much that was being said around us suggested that Baracchi's story was seen as another unmasking of the evil empire, that it was about communism rather than a Melbourne personality.

I suddenly became alarmed that the book would be mistaken as something that explained what communism (after all, the constant 'love' of the title) was about; that the younger generation who have replaced 'pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will' by a wry cynicism masquerading as realism would think that telling Baracchi's story would throw light on Melbourne communism; that they even might think that what happened to him within the CPA told us in a sort of micro-history: what it had been all about before global capitalism triumphed and communism was dead. My question to myself is whether any story of an individual does do those things and how.

Sparrow's book brings out certain qualities, perhaps unintentionally, in communism, including Trotskyism, that need highlighting. Communism was not monolithic. It included people like Baracchi, far from the caricature of the Stalinist. He was a cultured upper middle-class member of Australia's cultural elite, which was nearly all left. Communism was racked with factions and disputes and arguments. Above all, it constituted a community--almost a family of men and women pushed together publicly and privately to protect each other from a very hostile majority. The proverbial tolerance of Australians did not extend to communists. Moreover, it shows that communists, like the Baracchis, were light years ahead of Australia's conservative intellectuals in both their cultural openness and their real knowledge of other worlds. They took for granted that quality of openness to an international world, an awareness and knowledge of what is today known as 'the Other'. No history of social movements can be written today without remembering that communists were there from the beginning. They were the only political group with larger horizons, albeit coloured by the Comintern and Stalinism. To go into Bernie Taft's or Noel Counihan's homes was to be materially reminded of this: paintings by Blackman and Bergner, stories of chats with Picasso, the multicultural pasts that came from a migrant experience. While Baracchi was never considered part of the 'ethnics', he epitomised a world which, if closed at home, was rich through its international contacts and friends, unlike emergent middle-class Melbourne. Old communists like him showed others, less fortunate than themselves, that greatness of soul and will as well as culture crosses all races, religions, genders. In sum, old communists were internationalists and multiculturalists despite the spate of disenchanted stories.

Sparrow's narrow view, focussing on the experience of an individual in communism, cannot avoid bringing out that reality and privileging it. It was when the workerist 'true blues' took over from the Scots (Garden, Miles), Irish and Canadians (Kavanagh), that a rampant Australian dislike of wanking intellectuals became clear. Baracchi was among its first victims.

No one would want to deny that today a history of communism must contain the stories of the myriad individuals who made it up as a movement. It is their histories and their refusal of what the Party and International did that ultimately explains its failure. But the issue is how? And the answer to that question depends on the historical method we adopt.

Alastair Davidson is Adjunct Professor in the School of Social Sciences, La Ttrobe University and author of two books and many articles on communism.