The Show by Mark Aarons

Author:Mark Aarons
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: REL084000, POL055000, BIO010000, POL036000
Publisher: Scribe Publications
Published: 2017-07-31T04:00:00+00:00

9

The ghost of Stalinism

By the early 1970s, the CPA was a shadow of a once-formidable political and industrial organisation. Split into three separate parties, with an ageing and shrinking membership, and its power in the trade unions greatly diminished, the influence of its ideology in Australia was at its lowest ebb since the early 1930s. The party had suffered two catastrophic splits: the first in the early 1960s, and the second a decade later, both centred on the legacy of Stalinism.

In the early 1960s, a small but influential section left to form a pro-Beijing party, embracing Mao’s line that Stalin had basically pursued the correct communist line, and stridently denouncing Khrushchev’s condemnation of Stalin’s crimes. In the mid-1960s, an even greater upheaval occurred when a new generation of CPA leaders criticised Moscow’s embrace of neo-Stalinism after Brezhnev purged Khrushchev in 1964. Simmering tensions boiled over when the CPA leadership supported Alexander Dubček’s Prague Spring and condemned the 1968 Soviet-led invasion that crushed Czechoslovakia’s experiment in ‘socialism with a human face’. Eventually, one-third of the membership — including many key union leaders — formed a pro-Moscow party in 1971. The hatreds generated by these splits left deep scars.

Santamaria followed these developments, rightly discerning the immense possibilities they opened up for The Movement’s union operations. By then, his organisation was widely known as the National Civic Council (NCC), and this is the name by which it will be frequently called from this point forward, although members still affectionately called it The Movement or The Show.

In December 1970, ASIO obtained Santamaria’s sophisticated analysis of ‘the divisions in the C.P.A.’1 In what reads like an ASIO ‘Position Paper’ written by one of its top analysts, Santamaria observed that the latest CPA split offered ‘vast opportunities in the unions and elsewhere, but only if there are sufficiently trained “cadres” to exploit it’:

If the anti-Communist forces had the resources and handled themselves carefully, there could be nothing but very great gains in this particular field. At the moment, it seems that practically everything in the field of anti-Communist organisation ought to be subordinated to widespread recruitment and training of every possible person who can gain full time positions in unions.2

Santamaria correctly observed that Stalinism was at the core of the divisions. He also understood that bitter personal rivalries invariably surfaced during such factional battles. ‘Fights are not always about the issues which are invoked in the course of the fight,’ he wrote. ‘Fights are often about purely personal issues which are embellished into struggles of principle.’

In the following decade, the consequences of modelling The Movement upon the CPA would consume his own seemingly monolithic organisation, ending in an equally bitter split focussed on a form of ‘Stalinism’ in the NCC. This began in the mid-1970s with deep feuds involving John Maynes, whose authoritarianism caused divisive upheavals in NCC-controlled unions. Maynes had loyally served as Santamaria’s second-in-command as vice president (industrial), but in the early 1980s they had a severe falling-out when Santamaria effectively turned his back on unionism.

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