Maoism in the Developed World

The new party, the Communist Parry of Australia-Marxist Leninist, was apparently formally established at a meeting in Melbourne on March 15, 1964. (Professor van der Kroef noted that no public statement of the date was made until five years later).[554] E. F. Hill was named party Chairman. Clarie O’Shea, secretary of the Melbourne Tramways Union, and Paddy Malone of the Building Labourers’ Federation, were elected Vice Chairmen, and Frank Johnson, who had succeeded Hill as secretary of the Victoria PCA organization, was chosen as secretary.[555]

The Nature of CPA-ML

Justus van der Kroef wrote in 1970 that the CPA-ML “is, and will probably remain for some time, a small, tightly organized, and secretive, sect of ideologues, seemingly concerned more with preserving and articulating its dogmatic rectitude than with establishing practical programmes or organizations for joint popular action (as the parent CPA is attempting) or even with winning broader public support. Whereas the parent CPA regularly publicizes its conferences and other party gatherings, the changes in its party constitution, as well as the names and decisions of its national, state and local committees, neither CPA-ML organs, nor any other public media, have ever adopted on any conference held by the Maoist faction since its founding, nor has its Constitution ever been published (assuming there is one), nor have the names of its present or of any previous Central Committee ever been published. … CPA-ML publications carry neither the names of editors, nor the editorial and business addresses.”[556]

The CPA-ML continued to be a highly secretive organization. Peter Beilharz reported in 1976 that “Organizationally, the CPA (ML) remains a mystery. Its unofficial youth offshoot, the Worker-Student Alliance [WSA], was disbanded; it is unclear as to whether the Young Communist League, formed to help the CPA (ML) ‘direct’ the WSA, still exists or not.”[557]

Professor van der Kroef noted that “The CPA-ML and E. F. Hill appear, in many respects, to be operationally synonymous and the party chairman evidently brooks no contenders for the leadership. Though little is known of the circumstances, there have been a number of early party associates who have fallen out with Hill.”[558]

A certain degree of factionalism apparently continued within the CPA-ML in the 1970s. It was reported concerning some of the party’s student activists that by 1972 “their own attitude to him is not so uncritical as it was.”[559]

By the early 1970s, Norm Gallagher, the CPA-ML leader among the construction workers unions, had succeeded Paddy Malone as one of the two vice chairmen of the party. However, in 1975 Gallagher had been “returned to the rank and file for his misdeeds.”[560]

By 1980, it was reported that there also exists a breakaway Maoist organization under the leadership of the two former student activists from the 1960s, Albert Langer and Harry Van Moorst. Langer’s group has attacked the present leadership in the People’s Republic of China and the CPA (M-L).[561]

Ideology of the CPA-ML

The avowed aim of the CPA-ML was the achievement of “a socialist revolution in Australia.” In his political report to the founding meeting of the party, which Justus van der Kroef called “the chief theoretical guidelines” of the organization, E. F. Hill argued that Australian capitalism was “in the grip of American monopoly capital and military interests.”[562] The parry’s official program asserted that “Australia has developed into a monopoly capitalist imperialist country,” but also was a “satellite imperialism” under the influence of the United States and Great Britain.[563]

According to the CPA-ML, the quarter million industrial workers in Australia were “the basic force for Australian independence,” along with an estimated 200,000 “class brothers” among the agrarian wage workers. The small farmers were seen to be “important allies” of the urban and agrarian workers, as were an estimated 900,000 white collar workers.[564]

However, the CPA-ML’s. definition of “small farmers” would seem to have been somewhat elastic. Although the category was generally considered by the party to include those farmers with 50 acres or less, one writer in The Australian Communist suggested that in parts of Queensland, “where the smallest holdings are in the 150 to 200 acre range, Marxist analysis cannot place every one of these in the category of middle bourgeoisie. Surely the fundamental question here is the hire of labor power. A very great number of these farmers do not employ labor. They are interested in their own emancipation and are potential allies of the proletariat, thus fitting the classification of small farmers.”[565]