Foundation and early years , Communist Party of Australia co-founder in 1920 , Communist Party of Australia co-founder in 1920 The Communist Party of Australia (CPA) was founded at the Australian Socialist Party Hall in Sydney on 30 October 1920
socialists inspired by reports of the
Russian Revolution. The estimates for attendees at the founding ranges from below thirteen (Alistair Davidson) Sixty invitations were issued. Among the party's founders were prominent Sydney trade unionists,
Jock Garden,
Tom Walsh, and
William Paisley Earsman, and suffragettes and anti-conscriptionists including
Adela Pankhurst (daughter of the British suffragist
Emmeline Pankhurst),
Christian Jollie Smith and
Katharine Susannah Prichard. Most of the then illegal Australian section of the
Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) joined, but the IWW soon left the Communist Party, with its original members, over disagreements with the direction of the
Soviet Union and
Bolshevism. In its early years, mainly through Garden's efforts, the party achieved some influence in the trade union movement in
New South Wales, but by the mid-1920s it had dwindled to an insignificant group. A visits to the 1924 New Zealand conference by CPA executive members Hetty and Hector Ross got the (also small)
Communist Party of New Zealand (CPNZ) agreeing to temporary affiliation with the CPA, and were followed by visits in 1925 by Harry Quaife, and by Norman Jeffery a bow-tie wearing former "
Wobbly" (IWW member). Garden and other communists were expelled from the
Labor Party (ALP) in 1924. The CPA ran candidates including Garden (for
Sydney) at the
1925 New South Wales state election in working-class seats against the ALP but was decisively defeated. This prompted Garden to leave the party in 1926 and return to the Labor Party. The leadership of the party went to
Jack Kavanagh, an experienced Canadian communist activist who had moved to Australia in 1925, and
Esmonde Higgins, a talented
Melbourne journalist who was the nephew of then-
High Court Justice,
H. B. Higgins. In 1929 the party leadership fell into disfavour with the
Communist International (Comintern), which under orders from
Joseph Stalin had taken a turn to radical revolutionary rhetoric (the so-called "
Third Period"). After allowing party member Bert Moxon in Queensland to organise Communist candidates for the
1929 Queensland state election, the CPA leadership refused to do the same for the
1929 Australian federal election and instead supported the ALP, leading the Comintern to denounce the party's relationship to the ALP as 'opportunist'. In December 1929, a new party leadership including Moxon,
Jack Miles,
Lance Sharkey and
Richard Dixon was elected in response to these denunciations, and began a period of strict centralisation and obedience to Moscow. Kavanagh was expelled in 1930 and Higgins resigned, and an emissary of the Comintern, the American communist
Harry M. Wicks, was sent to correct the party's perceived errors. Though Moxon was removed as national secretary by the end of 1930 and later expelled from the party's central committee entirely, Miles and then Sharkey would lead the party until 1965. In the 1930s, the CPA began a campaign to create mass organisations to organise militancy in the working-class, known as 'fraternal organisations' or '
fronts'. These organisations were nominally independent of the party and often included prominent non-communist office-holders, but were dominated by the CPA and its members who served as the organisers for them. Among these was the
Unemployed Workers Movement, founded in 1930, which at its height had 30,000 members and was infamous nationally for its anti-eviction campaign in Sydney. During this period the party experienced some growth, particularly after 1935 when the Comintern changed its policy in favour of a "united front against
fascism". The
Movement Against War and Fascism (MAWF) was founded to bring together all opponents of fascism under a communist controlled umbrella organisation. The movement instigated the events which led to the
attempted exclusion of Egon Kisch from Australia in late 1934 and early 1935. Alongside this, the CPA formed the
Workers Defence Corps (WDC). The CPA was the first Australian political party to make a commitment to
Aboriginal rights, which were included in its manifesto from 1931 onwards. The CPA, discussing in great detail the abuses suffered by Aboriginals, published a lengthy list of demands, calling for "full economic, political and social rights" for Aboriginal people.
Rise during World War II and the Labor United Front The Communist Party began to win positions in trade unions during the 1930s, with party members taking the national leadership of the
Federated Ironworkers' Association, the
Miners' Federation and the
Waterside Workers' Federation (WWF), as well as positions in other smaller unions or regional branches. At the same time, only a small minority of union members were themselves communists so these officials relied on the support of other militant unionists and the broader membership to maintain and exercise leadership, and the CPA's parliamentary candidates nearly always polled poorly at elections. The party also set up an organization of the unemployed to resist evictions. Activists from the party joined the
International Brigades to defend the
Second Republic against
Francisco Franco's troops, and instigated an industrial campaign by the WWF to ban shipments of scrap iron to Japan in 1938. Throughout this time, members of the CPA were under constant surveillance by police and intelligence forces and harassed by the courts. In 1939, after Soviet efforts to contain Nazi aggression through co-operation and alliance with France and Britain were rejected by the French and British,
Nazi Germany and the
Soviet Union signed a
Non-Aggression Treaty. Despite ideological opposition between the countries, the USSR agreed not to engage in hostilities against Germany at the outbreak of
World War II (Australia declared war on Nazi Germany for invading Poland). Consequently, the Communist Party of Australia opposed and sought to disrupt Australia's war effort against Germany in the early stages of the war under orders of the Comintern on the grounds that it was a war between imperialist nations, and not in the interests of the working class. Menzies banned the CPA after the fall of France in 1940, but by 1941 Stalin was forced to join the allied cause when Hitler reneged on the Pact and invaded the USSR. The USSR came to bear the brunt of the carnage of Hitler's war machine and the Communist Party in Australia lost its early war stigma as a result. Following the invasion of the Soviet Union, the CPA shifted towards a collaborative
United front approach to the Labor Party to fully support the Australian war effort against fascism. Party members held discussions with senior Labor ministers following the
Curtin government entering office in 1941, pledging to provide full support to mobilise resources for the war effort. The Shire was committed to
municipal socialism, advocating nationalisation of electricity and the expansion of the
social wage, and was unique for its commitment to activism around federal and international affairs. that was
declared invalid by the High Court, then by referendum to try to overcome the
constitutional obstacles to that legislation. The
1951 referendum was opposed by the Communist Party as well as the Australian Labor Party, and was narrowly defeated. The issue of communist influence in the unions remained potent and led to the
Australian Labor Party split of 1955 and the formation of the
Democratic Labor Party comprising disaffected ALP members who were concerned over communist influence in Australian unions.
Internal division and defections In 1956, three years after Stalin died, Soviet leader
Nikita Khrushchev gave the
Secret Speech, denouncing Stalin and Stalinism as fostering a
cult of personality, and revealing many abuses of power Stalin had committed while in power. The Australian party leadership—entirely committed to Stalinism—was confused about what to do. It tried to suppress discussions of the speech, which was widely reported in the press. According to
Ralph Gibson, several high-ranking members including
Ted Hill had received a copy of
Krushchev's secret speech directly from the
Communist Party of the Soviet Union However, the party denied the criticisms of Stalin within the party newspaper, Tribune. but it continued to hold positions in a number of trade unions, and it was also influential in the various protest movements of the period, especially the movement against the
Vietnam War. This period also saw the establishment of the
National Training Centre in
Minto, NSW, ostensibly for the purpose of educating in the ideology of Marxism-Leninism. The party became more openly critical about the Soviet Union and the
Communist Party of the Soviet Union. the Communist Party was dissolved and the New Left Party formed. a not-for-profit company set up in 1990 "to preserve and draw on the resources of the Communist Party of Australia and its archives." The archives of the party are now held at the State Library of NSW and can be accessed with the written permission of the SEARCH Foundation. The
State Library of New South Wales holds an extensive collection of material related to the Communist Party of Australia including oral history recordings, business papers, the personal papers of a range of men and women involved in the Party and a collection of images that were published in
Tribune, the Party's newspaper. The Victoria University Library holds the Crow Collection, donated by long-time Communist Party member
Ruth Crow, which includes materials from her years campaigning for the Communist Party. The University of Melbourne collection is "one of the most significant from the CPA held in Australia", containing 20th-century materials from the Victorian branch.
Successor Party In 1996 at the 8th National Congress the Socialist Party of Australia was renamed to Communist Party of Australia, thereby becoming the successor of the original party.
Search Foundation The SEARCH Foundation is a left-wing Australian not-for-profit company that was established in 1990 as a successor organisation of the Communist Party of Australia to preserve and draw on its resources and archives. It inherited over 3 million dollars from the CPA. SEARCH is an active membership-based organisation that runs speaking tours, publications and training programs. SEARCH maintains an office at
Sydney Trades Hall and holds events across Australia. Its archives are held by the
State Library of NSW. SEARCH is an acronym for "Social Education, Action and Research Concerning Humanity". ==Youth movement==