Only One Road to Socialism

Writtem By: H.N.F. Macheraut

In regards to the International Marxist Leninist movement, from the outside looking in, you may think that these parties are all “Marxist Leninist” and therefore have the same views and aims, however revisionism abounds on the left today. Whether it be the Eurocommunism (1) in the French Communist Party, or the so called "Socialism with Chinese Characteristics" of the Communist Party of China, it has infiltrated the Marxist movement and has lead parties who take its road to irrelevance and failure, as in France, or pure capitalist restoration, as in China. But Australia, too, has a vicious strain of revisionism that has infected and destroyed previous Marxist-Leninist parties here and that is the doctrine that could be termed the “Australian Path to Socialism”. (2)

In February 1951, the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB) adopted a new program called the “British Road to Socialism” (3) which advocated for the creation of a People’s Democracy by the means of a grand coalition of working-class movements and the utilisation of parliament. By 1958, following the 20th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) and the ascendency of Khrushchev and his backers, this program was watered down even further. Parliamentary methods were taken to be the primary method of achieving not just a People’s Democracy but socialism itself and the party committed itself to a peaceful struggle “without armed conflict”. (4) This program was judged by the CPSU as “a suitable document for the Communist Parties of USA, Canada, Australia and other Anglo-Saxon countries (5) and, hence, in August 1951 at the 16th Congress of the Communist Party of Australia “Australia’s Path to Socialism” was first adopted. Heavily mirroring the British party’s program, it called for:

“The People’s Government, arising from, and based upon the People’s Movement and People’s Parliament, will immediately proceed to replace the present dangerous policy of war with a policy of peace and to break the power of the small clique of industrial, banking and land monopolies as the essential condition for opening the way to building Socialism.” (2)

Although not explicitly committing the party to an essentially parliamentary transition to socialism, the character of the document implicitly denied any possibility of a revolutionary confrontation, only raising notions that “...the People’s Government should be ready decisively to defeat [capitalist attempts to defend their power].” (6) It was not until the 18th Congress and the adoption of a revised edition of the program in 1958 that the program explicitly stated: 

“Our aim is to achieve Socialism by peaceful means, but this can only be realised by mounting an irresistible struggle of the working class in alliance with the small farmers, middle class elements and intellectuals against monopoly capitalism.” (7)

Like the change in the British program, the change in the Australian one from a vague program endorsing electoralism as a strategy “...opening the way to building Socialism” (8) to a directly reformist one was a result of the revisionist trend of the Khrushchev clique in the Soviet Union. Khrushchev deemed that the USSR was no longer the Dictatorship of the Proletariat but, rather, a State of the Whole People. (9) This abandonment of the class character of the state, which was fully codified in the 1977 constitution of the USSR (10), allowed for the class collaborationist ideas of “peaceful coexistence” with the imperialist bloc to reign supreme and for parties, like the CPA, to let the vanguard role of the proletariat and of the party slip away. 

This slackening on the importance of the proletarian vanguard party and necessity of revolution occurred all around the world, though primarily in Western Europe in the Italian, French and Spanish Communist Parties. Indeed, after the 20th Congress of the CPSU, the leader of the Italian Communist Party (PCI) adopted the “Italian Road to Socialism”, which itself was even more reformist than the British and Australian programmes, going so far that even Khrushchev denounced it. (11) Indeed, the PCI as well as the French Communist Party (PCF), which adopted its own similar “French Road to Socialism”, had histories of class collaboration in the wake of WWII and the betrayal of Algerian independence by the PCF. (12) These parties had been infiltrated and consumed by opportunist elements who preferred peace with their own bourgeois than create a proletarian state, and this eventually led to the next stage of revisionism: the clear rejection of Marxism.

This rejection of Marxism culminated in the birth of the Eurocommunist ideology which took the idea of a popular front to its logical conclusion: the abandonment of Vanguardism, the Dictatorship of the Proletariat and of the centrality of the class struggle. (13) In Europe this ideology was embraced wholeheartedly by the PCE and CPI, with the latter forming a political alliance with the Italian Christian Democrats in 1976. By 1991 it had abandoned the label of Communist entirely and became the Democrat Party of the Left; a party of the broad left. It continued to haemorrhage members and seven years later, having lost 300,000 members, it merged with other minor left parties.

This ideology spread to Australia too, and was embraced by the CPA. By this time the party had fallen from a membership of 25,000 in the aftermath of the Second World War to just over 5,000. This was the consequence of national revisionism (the Australian Path to Socialism), international revisionism (Khrushchev's Secret Speech) and the split of the CPA-ML in 1964 following the Sino-Soviet split. The party grew more and more anti-Soviet, with Laurie Aarons coming to power and ultimately adopting Eurocommunism. From here factions were allowed, and many non-Marxist-Leninist were let in, such as Denis Freney who was a Trotskyist and became a prominent writer and sub-editor for the party's newspaper, Tribune. (14) The CPA-ML, which split on the question of revisionism, went on to tail the Chinese party and its assessment that capitalism had been restored in the USSR and that the role of Communists was to support US imperialism against “Soviet social imperialism.”

The CPA declined, the pro-Soviet faction that developed after 1968 split from the CPA to form the Socialist Party of Australia (SPA) in 1971, also taking the idea of the Australian Road to Socialism with them. By 1991, the CPA had lost its prominent positions in the trade union movement and declined to fewer than a thousand members. It dissolved first into the New Left Party, seeking to become a broad left party like the PCI did. This, of course, did not happen and in 1992 this dissolved into the social-democratic SEARCH Foundation, taking all the assets of the old CPA with it. 

In 1996, the SPA adopted the name Communist Party of Australia, but it failed to serve as an adequate Vanguard Party. It still clung dearly to the ideas of the broad left front from the Australian Road to Socialism. This devotion to the idea of an “alliance of left and progressive forces” can be seen in that party's Program (15), Political Resolution (16) and evident in other publications such as the pamphlet Can we move the ALP to left by joining it?. (17) Indeed the party has an entire discussion paper dedicated to discussing what a People's Government would look like, sticking to the idea of an alliance of various left and progressive forces. (18)

This is a political dead end which encourages accommodation with the ALP rather than creating an independent and strong vanguard party to lead the working class. The Australian Communist Party fundamentally rejects working for the "Government of a New Type" espoused by the CPA and instead for a proletarian revolution. This is the only road to socialism. We must smash the ready-made state machinery and replace it with our own. It is not good enough to aim to lay hold of the ready-made machinery with a coalition of doubtful outfits, consisting of even bourgeois ones. This is an anti-Marxist idea and it is doomed to fail as much today as it has in the past.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

1. https://www.marxists.org/subject/eurocommunism/index.htm

2. https://www.reasoninrevolt.net.au/objects/pdf/a000776.pdf

3. https://www.marxists.org/history/international/comintern/sections/britain/brs/1951/51.htm

4. https://www.marxists.org/history/international/comintern/sections/britain/brs/1958/58.htm#oais

5. https://www.revolutionarydemocracy.org/rdv13n2/brs1951.htm

6. https://www.reasoninrevolt.net.au/objects/pdf/a000776.pdf p.25

7. https://revolutionarydemocracy.org/archive/AustPathSoc.pdf p.10

8. https://www.reasoninrevolt.net.au/objects/pdf/a000776.pdf p.22

9. https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdf/20098824.pdf?refreqid=excelsior%3A8f4a1daa3f258147c5a124d9b16adfb5 p.155

10. https://www.departments.bucknell.edu/russian/const/1977toc.html

11. https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/hoxha/works/euroco/env2-2.htm

12. https://www.marxists.org/francais/fln/works/1958/04/pcf.htm

13. https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/hoxha/works/euroco/env2-1.htm

14. https://www.search.org.au/denis_freney

15. https://www.cpa.org.au/resources/cpa-doc-current/cpa-program-amended-2017.pdf - Chapter 6 - Page 44 - The Process of Changing Australia

16. https://cpa.org.au/resources/cpa-doc-current/cpa-political-resolution-adopted-2017.pdf pp. 49-52

17. https://cpa.org.au/resources/cpa-doc-current/can-we-move-the-alp-to-the-left.pdf pp. 32-34

18. https://cpa.org.au/resources/cpa-doc-current/a-peoples-govt.pdf p. 2, pp. 4-8