REVISING THE REDS.

Stuart Macintyre, The Reds, Allen and Unwin, 1998.

It is a handsome book. It is easy to read, as it is written in a limpid style interspersed with human interest stories and quiet jokes which lead easily from chronicle to analysis. Yet, as Bernard Smith has suggested, it is more likely to be used as the standard reference than read from end to end. This is firstly because it is very long. Despite the modesty of his claims, Stuart Macintyre waded through much of the enormous documentation which has become available since the collapse of the secretive Communist world. Indeed, as I read the book I was reminded of the comment made when Paolo Spriano was writing his mammoth five-volume account of the Italian Communist Party during the same years (roughly 1917-1940), that there were thousands more documents in the archives than real live Communists. There is much new detail to recount. So I think it will remain a book for a quick dip to discover what Jock or Guido or JB did or was like rather than the object of sustained reading to grasp what Communism meant in Australian history.

It is surprising, given the immense volume of new material, that The Reds does not really change the story which I told in my `stop-gap' history of thirty years ago, when even my meagre knowledge (and that of John Playford) was enough to provoke the suspicion among Party leaders that we were `spies'. This is so despite the claim that it presents a more nuanced view than that of my institutional history, where the progress of the Australian Communist Party was seen as a move towards an inappropriate Leninist model of political activity given labour traditions here. Certainly, this book does tell us much more about the motives, activities, and above all about the resistances of many Party members to the directives of a party which had been bolshevised by the thirties. It is able to do so by giving greater attention to the personal histories of Party members, sympathetically told. Yet it remains primarily an institutional history. The theme is that of many decent battlers often driven by the highest motives who joined a party whose leaders were all too often crooks, or so politically rigid that they had little ethical probity. The leadership of the thirties still remain servants of the bolshevised machine of Stalinism.

Consequently, the CPA still appears as alien in the telos of an essentially Australian history. I agree that this is the only way the Party's institutional history could be viewed, even with its own dissident voices within. Of course, once the members are factored into the account, as this work does well, the monolithic nature of Communism, as distinct from the Communist Party, is thrown into doubt. Macintyre makes clear why there was such resistance to central bodies and how that resistance was translated into different local practices, and, on occasion, forced the leadership to change its line. This is a welcome rectification to a history of a party as the history of its leading bodies. More, the need to show how that Party influenced the society is recognised, although that influence was small before the forties. Above all it was manifest among the unemployed and in the trade unions. In the latter, the success of the Communists is portrayed as the outcome of practices which were not really official or militant in the Communist sense.

But I had expected a different book. I had expected -- after my history of the CPA `from above' -- a history of the CPA `from below'. I had anticipated more of a social and cultural history which would have enabled readers to understand the effect which well over 100,000 Communists and ex-Communists had had on the social and political culture of Australia. In other words, I had expected that all those Reds would have been dug out in their everyday lives, say, in some bush town, to discover how they interacted and slowly changed (or did not change) the worlds in which they lived. This would have involved much interviewing and the use of the research techniques of popular history. It would have been a way of measuring what the CPA and Communism had meant for Australia in cultural rather than political terms. After all, the political history of the CPA is a closed book, not the cultural history of those who embody its experiences.

There is undoubtedly some of this in The Reds. There are accounts of the solitary rural Communist, of tomatoes dodged in the Domain; and, more importantly, a very good chapter on the impact of the Communists on literary and artistic life well before the forties. There is also much that was neglected or skated over in earlier work: we find an adequate discussion of women, indigenous peoples, and of the early participation of ethnic minorities in the Communist movement. But I am still left wondering what synthesis came from the meeting of our `little Moscows' and the `true blues'.

This is to plead for the book which was not written, which may seem unfair when the book is so good. But such a focus on a history `from below' would have helped us understand much better not only what Australia meant for Communism but the reverse. For example, Communists were the prime movers -- well before time -- of movements for Aborigines, women, ethnic minorities, the environment, peace and so on. These movements are covered in the book. But what is important is why the Communists were the first to espouse such causes, whose descendance today is the flourishing social movement politics of this country. It is difficult to explain such concerns by referring to anything here in even the most advanced working-class traditions. Rather, the latter were inimical to the call for equal treatment or even justice for such groups. Early CPA opposition to racism and sexism and thus to mainstream local culture is striking. While the pragmatism of Australian women Party members recalls that such principles were more honoured in the breach than the acceptance, they were the norms set by the Party. Such attitudes came from the centres of world Communism. Practically nowhere in the world except within that movement would a Jock Garden not only have rubbed shoulders with but have known that he should defer to Asians. It was world Communism which privileged the `workers from the East' (see the photos following p. 148).

I would argue that Communists and then later Australian culture -- in the form of social movements whose grandparents struggled against the tide in the thirties and forties -- owed much to the very marginality of Australian Communists. These people wanted to belong (and the party was their home) but they felt most at home `in the foreign parts', whose lessons had long been decried in Australia. They learnt new views from mixing with their international comrades: with the German left tendency, with Risch, with Picasso. Guido Baracchi is difficult to explain without his experience of the defeat of the German left and of Karl Korsch. Anomalies like the first translation into English of Pannekoek being made in Australia alert us to something special going on in Australian culture. Anyone who has frequented the homes of the men and women in this book knows how often the pictures and books on their wall show portholes onto worlds and values which mainstream Australia ignored. Stuart Macintyre touches on this when he notes how many Communist leaders were born overseas but he does not emphasise how many new worlds they added to their dominant Anglo experience. Not even the leaders of this country knew much beyond the English-speaking world in the thirties.

It is true that not all Communists were beneficiaries of such a wider world (the positive side of internationalism) and the abiding working-class know-nothingism of the leaders counteracted it. But much could be made of the Communist movement as an educational terrain for great numbers of working-class people. A history `from below' might have highlighted how important this education was. An old Communist friend of mine who still supports Sendero luminoso (and could be seen as more rigid than J.B. Miles) is also the most brilliant operator of formal meeting rules I have ever met. She learnt that in `the old Party'. Her world, and that of others, meant a respect and reverence in working-class Australians for non-whites when the bulk of Australians still supported the White Australia Policy.

It is these `translations' and cultural effects which I hope to see in the second volume of the history. This will deal with the period I referred to as a slow limping path back to Australian traditions by a Communist Party which had learnt through bitter experience the inappropriateness of Russian traditions in Australia. It will be much easier for that volume to tell quite a new story -- even for the institution.

I was simply wrong in the parameters of my approach thirty years ago. Already the `Australian traditions' were totally undermined by the development of a multicultural society. By 1970 Australian history had become a complex of different histories and a new context had emerged which requires us to break completely even with a vision of the CPA as a porthole which allowed Communists, for all their failings, to be the first to recognise different ways of being human. I can illustrate what I mean by pointing out that in the late seventies the Australian Federation of the Italian Communist Party was reputed to have as many members as the CPA itself. Whether true or false, it reminds us that even a Communist history from below has new voices to listen to after the Second World War. What this book recounts, and the way it recounts it, may be difficult to understand for these new Australians. A new approach is needed to take them into account.

Alastair Davidson is in Politics at Monash University.