This was only one indication of a deep cleavage in our group, the implications of which were to prove one of the most potent influences making for my subsequent rebellion and renunciation. The younger and more junior members of the delegation came to recognise and discuss among themselves, at first guardedly and hesitantly, and then with increasing cynicism, the ways in which the most senior and high-ranking among us least measured up to the CPC criteria for being ‘a good communist’. They were the most self-indulgent, the most authoritarian, the most petty and the most complacent. Their decisions were frequently arbitrary and capricious, their response to criticism intolerant and vindictive, and their mutual relations marked by jealousy and spite.
At first we had accepted the special powers, privileges and allowances accorded to our leaders as their due, but as the respect in which they were held declined, so our resentment at these perquisites of office grew. No overt challenge to the leadership was ever mounted – our feelings were too confused and our vulnerability too great for that, and Chinese instruction emphasised party discipline just as strongly (if less one-sidedly) as did the Stalinist doctrine by which we had been fashioned. But frequent mutterings and cynical comments were retailed with relish, obstructive tactics were occasionally applied, and any safe opportunity to ‘put down’ one of the men at the top was grasped eagerly. The general morale of the group suffered considerably as time went on, especially when boredom, homesickness, and other frustrations of the monastic life raised the general level of tension in the group.
Viewed from a later and more dispassionate perspective, the inadequacies of these men, in terms of the ideals which we were internalising as a result of our instruction, are readily understandable. Products of the rough-and-tumble depression years, and reared in a tough, rigid and authoritarian Stalinist school in which survival demanded ruthlessness and deviousness, they had become set in habits which could hardly be transformed by a few months of spiritual evangelism. Their positions and their self-esteem had been hard won precisely by successful display of these characteristics, and to have given them up would have involved not only a threat to their life’s ambitions and security, but a drastic change in their mental make up. Self-indulgence for them was both a means of easing the anxieties and strains of their positions, and an exercise of the privileges earned by their success in climbing to the top of the party ladder. It was also in tune with the working-class ethos rampant in the Party, which exalted the larrikin qualities of ‘real men’.
At the time, however, we were viewing these men through spectacles supplied by Mao; he insisted that leadership demanded spiritual qualities above all else, and China’s revolutionary and post-revolutionary achievements, in contrast to the catastrophic human results of Stalinism, seemed to bear him out. A seed of disillusionment was sown in me by the failings of our group leaders; as yet it had barely germinated, since I had not begun to generalise the experience I was undergoing. A humid party climate, and the fertilising effects of group conflict, would do their work before too long.
Other foci of conflict and unease existed in the group, each of which served to reinforce in my mind the Chinese teaching that defective ideology saps the unity and energy of a revolutionary organisation. The restricted and artificial life we were leading threw individual weaknesses into high relief, and magnified petty irritations into bitter antagonisms. The lack of sexual outlet, and a succession of ailments (particularly influenza and dysentery) from which we suffered all added to the toll. Some members found it difficult to adjust to the food, some were unused to prolonged study, and others were made restless by sustained periods of inactivity.
There was no small element of priggishness in my attitude towards the personal inadequacies of my fellow members, although I was not so blind as to be unaware of the gulf between my own ideals and my behaviour: in fact this caused me bouts of guilt and depression. Essentially, though, I perceived a major difference between the outlook of myself and some other members of the group, on the one hand, and that of our leaders in particular. While we accepted and tried to emulate Chinese norms of behaviour, the others made no apparent effort to do so and in many instances displayed arrant hyprocrisy in their manipulation of the norms to their own personal advantage.
Despite these tensions, most of us were reasonably content with our lot. Absorption in Chinese life and revolutionary history dominated our thinking and feeling, but as well, informal relationships within the group did much to mitigate resentments by providing a sympathetic network through which members relaxed and let off steam. One device for relieving strain was to apply outlandish nicknames to individuals to dramatise their quirks; these were publicly used and mostly accepted in good part. I had the luxury of two appellations. Because, in my naïve enthralment with China, I had been the first to buy and wear a ‘Mao suit’, I was dubbed ‘Shanka’, a contraction of Chiang Kai-Shek. Alternatively, the fact that I awoke on my first morning in Peking with an erection inspired my room-mate to label me ‘Rigor Mortis’, in a deft play of words on my surname. Another outlet was the performance of satirical lampoons on the characteristics of unnamed but easily recognisable group members; this became a feature of our Sunday night entertainment, and one member of the delegation revealed an unusual talent for devising scripts of considerable aptness and incisiveness.
Our five months of study in Peking were followed by a two-month journey through eastern China, from the Soviet border in Manchuria to Shanghai, designed to flesh out our studies with practical insights into China’s achievements, programs and problems. While it achieved this objective, its effect on our ideology was rather contradictory: frequently we must have resembled a guzzling, inebriated bandwaggon of western barbarians.
Arriving back in Melbourne in early October 1957, my overriding aspiration was to give more devoted service to the Party, and to try to introduce the more flexible and democratic practices of the Chinese CP. I hoped to work full-time for the Party, being convinced that what I had learned had strengthened my dedication and better fitted me for leadership. Before I had gone away, I had generally supported the leadership style of Ted Hill, noted for his uncompromising strength of mind and will and his decisiveness. I now had strong reservations about this type of leadership and its effect, but my mood was directed towards reform rather than rebellion.
My hopes of being taken on full-time by the Party were not disappointed, and I became a journalist on the party weekly in Victoria. I soon learned, however, that the atmosphere in the leading circles of the Victorian Party was not sympathetic to the kind of reforms I contemplated. Ted Hill had drawn the conclusion from the political crises of 1956 that firm and strict control was needed in the Party to guard against ‘revisionism’ and other sins. He was not favourably impressed by the ‘psychological’ techniques of the CPC, and relied upon a small circle of loyal followers in the party apparatus to execute his commands without question. My first major clash with him came when he treated a member of the newspaper staff in what I considered to be a high-handed and inconsiderate manner. After this incident, I was discreetly approached by another party official and found to my surprise that a core of opposition had formed against the Secretary and his dictatorial methods.
In a disconcertingly short space of time, I found myself catapulted into a desperate struggle for survival against the Secretary and his group, who interpreted the criticism levelled against them by the rebels as outright revolt. The fury of their counter-attack, with its demands for recantation and self-abasement, gave us no alternative but to respond in kind or resign ourselves to disgrace and expulsion. We were far too convinced of our moral rectitude and historical justification to take the latter course. To add to our troubles, the ideological context of the dispute took a sudden and unexpected turn. We had been basing our stand on the principles of communist organisation and behaviour we had learned in China, but, with the outbreak of the Sino-Soviet dispute, Chinese political propaganda began to appear to both sides as the embodiment of intra
nsigence and inflexibility. Ted Hill quickly apprehended the domestic implications of this new trend, and the erstwhile admirer of Soviet communism was transformed into a Sinophile. We dissidents were obliged by polemical necessity to seek to reconcile the Chinese teaching we had taken in with the liberalising doctrines of Khrushchev, a not too comfortable contortion.
Intra-communist conflict is invariably bitter and sordid. This internecine strife, which lasted over three years, was no exception. The whole arsenal of marxist invective was dredged for ammunition, the lives and careers of the participants were culled for evidence of symptomatic misdeeds, and wills were bent towards the systematic breakdown of the opponents’ morale. At first confined to the higher committees of the Victorian Party, where it raged without remission, it soon drew in both the national leaders of the Party and many rank-and-file members. Suspicion, intrigue, mutual espionage, gossip and slander became a daily occurrence. People who were obliged by their party roles to work together did so with stiff-lipped formality, behind which lurked the ever-present anticipation of some weakness in the other side which could be exploited in the next round of the conflict. Outside formal contacts, relations between the opposing forces were confined to venomous glances and acid remarks. Old friendships seized up with friction and turned into lasting enmity. One’s entire life became dominated by the need to be on guard against treachery and denunciation. Thus a rare personal visit to my flat by a longtime ex-communist friend, observed by an adversary, was used as evidence of my unsavoury associations with the class enemy. A leader’s extra-marital liaison was exposed in any anonymous letter to his wife. Those who prided themselves on their lofty motives, including myself, stooped to acts of devious malice which in normal circumstances most would have regarded as unthinkable.
In time, the physical and psychic costs of the conflict began to tell upon us all. Ted Hill, long suffering from poor health, came at times to the brink of collapse; I recall at one meeting he spent a considerable time lying on the floor swallowing pills to control his hypertension, unable to desert the field of battle. I myself began to suffer regular migraine attacks, and developed an ulcer along with lesser symptoms of nervous tension. To save my sanity, I fell back upon an early passion, the blues, and would lie for hours in bed clinging desperately to the gut humanity and fortitude boomed out by Bessie Smith and Leadbelly. When, many years later, I read Peter Berger’s comment that the only revolutionary worthy of trust is a sad one, I knew only too well what he meant.
The Secretary had the numbers and, initially, the backing of the Party’s national leaders. By all the rules of the communist game, our small group should have capitulated or been ejected. Two factors saved us: the desire of the national leadership to conceal its adherence to the Chinese cause in the international conflict, and the support we enjoyed from officials of one of the largest and most important party-controlled trade unions, whose president on one occasion actually threw his party ticket on the table in front of the party national secretary to forestall our destruction. Eventually, in 1961, for reasons still obscure, the national leadership returned to Moscow’s fold, and Ted Hill became the hunted rather than the hunter. The conflict raged on for another eighteen months, but we, the odious renegades, had been miraculously transformed into heroic defenders of communist principle against a dogmatic tyrant. (Though, to be sure, since rebellion is contagious, we were treated with just a hint of caution.)
After the Party split, I was promoted to the post of editor of the Victorian party paper, and elected a member of the seven-man Victorian State Executive and of the Central Committee. For the next three years, I helped to map out and apply the more flexible policies adopted by the Party during prolonged and painful post-mortems. In addition, I was fighting to overcome the fatigue, depression and scarring resulting from years of debilitating internecine conflict.
By 1965, however, I had come to a dead end. I was frustrated in my work on the newspaper, since it was obvious that the attempt to popularise it could not make ground against the pressures of financial retrenchment and party ambivalence. Dimly I sensed that this was only part of a more deep-seated problem: the endemic crisis in the movement, which stemmed from the obsolescence of its doctrine, its inappropriateness to the circumstances of contemporary advanced society. Attempts by the Australian party leaders to refurbish the Party’s image had gone some distance, but were ultimately outweighed by the doctrinaire defensive reflexes of most of the membership, the leaders’ decades of conditioning and social exclusiveness, and the oppressive authoritarianism of the communist states with which they were identified.
I was becoming more and more openly critical of the Party, and below the specific issues on which I was expressing disagreement, there subsisted a general reservoir of estrangement and disenchantment. Deep down, I divined that my long years of incarceration in the inner world of the party organisation had atrophied my critical and intellectual faculties, and immured me in a set of concepts which bore but the crudest relation to the social reality of my time. I yearned to wrestle once more with this reality, but had lost a grip on the required tools. At the same time, I was not yet ready to break entirely with the Party, to face the outside world alone, bearing the guilt of my ‘defection’. So I compromised. Resigning my post as editor of the Guardian, I commenced an MA preliminary course in politics at Monash University and, upon its completion, began work on a post-graduate thesis. I began to rediscover the greatly changed world of scholarship, to renew acquaintance with the intellectual culture, and to plunge over my head in the stimulating, frustrating, pedantic theories of the social sciences.
I kept up, with flagging interest and growing strain, my participation in the work of higher party committees. But my party colleagues recognised, as I did, that the alteration in my milieu and perspectives had made me an outsider. The gulf between us yawned, widened by disagreements and mutual disappointments. In 1968, I left for a year’s study in Europe. My observations and experiences there, taking in the May events in France and the Russian invasion of Czechoslovakia, left me convinced that there was no hope of resuscitating the communist movement in the West on any basis that I could support. Upon arriving back in Australia in April 1969, I submitted my resignation after twenty-six years’ membership.
In retrospect, my Chinese adventure stands out as a watershed in my party history. Situated roughly halfway along the path of my membership, it marked the apogee of my unquestioning commitment as a party cadre, from which point the curve rapidly turned downward. Although the immediate effect of the training was to enhance my dedication by impressing me with the qualities, the achievements and the ideas of the Chinese communists, it also prepared the ground for my subsequent rebellion and disenchantment. The overwhelming stress placed upon the moral purity of the communists themselves as the crucial factor in the success of revolutionary movements, served to raise considerably my level of expectation regarding the performance of the Australian Party and its leading members. When the Party not only failed to meet my demands but treated them as seeds of treachery, the way was open for my passage from reform to rebellion. Our revolt might easily have degenerated into just another squalid factional fight had it not been for the outbreak of the Sino-Soviet dispute, which injected into it issues which called in question fundamental postulates of the movement itself. The changes set in train within the Australian Party (or, rather, the main contingent of Australian communism) served to delay, but could not finally prevent, my departure from its ranks. The questioning had gone too far, the answers were not forthcoming.
The days of overseas training for mainstream Australian communists are over. First the Chinese, then the Russian, schooling was repudiated as the Party in this country moved towards a position of greater ideological independence. But if the Chinese leaders ever reflect upon the period during which they exercised such a profound influence on the thought of their Australian comrades, it may occur to them with some perplexity that the chief leaders of ‘revisionism’ in
this country were trained in their academies.
For my part, I have come to regard my time in China as one of the most precious experiences in my life, just as I now view China’s social experiments as among the more hopeful in an increasingly depressing world. And I shall always be grateful to Mao and his colleagues for the benefits of a liberal education.
An Anarchist Comes to Power
(adapted, from the Bulletin, 21.7.73)
After having not seen him for a number of years, we met our old anarchist friend John Flaus in the Royal Oak Hotel, Chippendale. This was in the mid seventies just before the Royal Oak became a feminist separatist hotel. John looked the same as ever – black and white flowing beard, beret, conversationally enlivened, but something was missing. No, not missing – something was present. He had shoes on.
We knew then that there was a story in it.
We interrogated him and he admitted to having compromised but said ‘Look, no socks’. The defiance of bourgeois trappings was still there.
It turned out that John was in Sydney for his first meeting as a member of the Australian Film and Television School board. John had come to power and corruption had set in.
After apologising for the shoes, he told us that the commonwealth chauffeur who had picked him up from his room in Carlton had still been disturbed by his appearance, especially when he had finished his dressing and toilet in the car on the way to the airport.
But John’s rise to power was slow.
John was one of the original filmniks, as well as a theoretical and practising anarchist. A filmnik in the sixties was one of those people, especially in Sydney, who was evangelically enthusiastic about ‘film’ as an art – especially about the value of the popular, or B-grade, films. They gathered around the Workers’ Educational Association (WEA) film group and the University of Sydney film group. They began to study popular culture so long scorned by high culture.
Days of Wine and Rage Page 33
