The contents of this issue reflect the substantial broadening of the journal’s scope. The main articles in this issue, in different ways, are all concerned with the analysis of societies very different to present-day Australia.
Timor has suddenly emerged from obscurity into controversy in recent months. The article by Grant Evans provides a background to and analysis of current developments on that island, in a situation where the Australian left has responded rather too simplistically. Timor is small and acutely underdeveloped, and little is known about the functioning of its social system. It can hardly be said to have a settled peasantry, let alone a proletariat. What content do the ready-made slogans about ‘national liberation and socialist development’ and ‘revolutionary vanguard parties’ have in such a context? Evans’ article is a reminder of the real, painful problems of underdevelopment, problems which are often obscured in a fog of romanticism in much current left writing on ‘third world’ countries.
The Benefits of a Liberal Education
Rex Mortimer
(from Meanjin, 2/1976)
Ted Hill made a fetish of secrecy and mystery, so when on that morning in February 1957 he said to me, ‘Come outside, I’ve got something to say to you,’ I knew he wanted to make sure that no ASIO bugging devices would pick up our conversation. Without preliminaries he dropped his bombshell. ‘You’ve been chosen to study in China. You’ll be leaving in about two weeks.’ Then he stood and watched my reaction with wry amusement. He did not doubt for one moment that I would go, any more than I did. But he also knew that I was stunned, my mind whirling with the implications of his deliberately blunt pronouncement.
The Party at the time was in a state of considerable stress, marking the onset, had we but known it, of a period of prolonged conflict and crisis in the ranks of Australian communism. The shock waves of the 20th Congress and Hungary were still reverberating, leaving behind them confusion, disillusionment and recrimination. The big ‘revisionist’ exodus had hardly begun; most of the dissidents were still searching for the root causes of the Great Betrayal, clinging to shreds of hope that the nightmare would give way to the dawn of a new beginning, while the leadership gradually recovered its self-confidence and moved from containment of the revolt to its suppression.
I was thirty-one years old, and already a communist for almost fourteen years. I had recently been elected to the Victorian State Committee, in recognition of the fact that (despite inner turmoil) I was one of the few tertiary-trained communists of some standing who had accepted and propagated official rationalisations of Soviet brutality. For the past three years, I had been employed as a solicitor in a communist law firm. Outside working hours, and often within them too, I was caught up in a host of party activities – bossing a group of locality branches, writing propaganda, taking study group courses, speaking at meetings, keeping the Party’s publications out of the law courts. In short, I was an indefatigable part-time apparatchik.
I had come a long way from that night in August 1943 when the Melbourne University branch of the Communist Party had accepted my application for membership on the casting vote of the chairman, the puritan half of the meeting holding that I was too ‘irresponsible’ to join the ranks of the remakers of history. Ironically, the dubious new recruit was to outstay them all and rise higher than any in the party hierarchy. Yet the overridden fifty per cent had a strong case. At that stage, the most pronounced feature of my radicalism was an exuberant and wayward energy, which drove me, as a seventeen-year-old fresher, newly liberated from the authoritarian restraints of school and a tyrannical grandfather, to seek self-realisation in the company of the most unconventional, dynamic and anarchistic student personalities of the time. Their attraction for me stemmed as much from their outrageous behaviour as from their left-wing views. My precocity in their circle took flight under the stimulus of liquor, endless philosophical debates, girls, utopian fancies, midnight destructive exploits, and student reform politics. I was very nearly sent down after less than six months at the University, but my bravado was undiminished: the Red Army was my charger, the partisans in Europe my standard-bearers. The select group of which I was a part not only understood what the war was really all about and how the postwar world would have to be remade; it also flouted capitalist conventions there and then. I was proud to be its acolyte, prouder still to be its upstart university spokesman.
There were, at the same time, other sources of my radicalism: the death of a father in my infancy from wounds received in the First World War, and then the long depression years when my mother supported three children, her parents, and up to six unemployed relatives at a time, out of a war widow’s pension and part-time work in a shoe shop. This background had formed a mind eager to renounce the view that war and poverty were natural calamities, that had tried and then come to scorn the comfortable platitudes of organised religion, and that now discovered in historical materialism the only convincing explanation and remedy for social evils. This mind could be disciplined, harnessed to a cause; it remembered with deep ambivalence a mother’s uncomplaining fortitude and acceptance of her lot.
The indulgent, make-believe qualities of university politics catered for both sides of my personality. After I had left this nursery my rebellious tendencies were gradually submerged beneath mounting layers of political conformism. It had been my ambition upon graduating to become a trade union official, my juvenile symbol of the proletarian leader. Ted Hill steered me instead into a communist law firm, where my energies were soon employed day and night for the advancement of the Party’s cause. I was closely involved in the great political campaigns of those cold war years – around the Communist Party Dissolution Act of 1950, the anti-communist powers referendum of 1951, the Petrov Commission of 1954–55 – along with a legion of lesser issues. I worked full-time in ‘front’ organisations and for the Party itself, carried out the deadening chores of party routine work, and acquired the skills of an agitator, organiser, propagandist, educator. I had entered half-knowingly on the road to transformation into a cadre. Occasional flashes of ‘liberalism’, as manifestations of independence of mind were called, together with an untameable frivolousness, failed to arrest the steady process of my incorporation into the inner world of the organisation.
Important as political indoctrination is in the formation of the cadre, the crucial element is habituation to the rules and ways of a small, confined, hierarchically ordered system, in which the neophyte finds his role, his meaning and his satisfactions. In this closed world of the organisation, which devours all his time and attention, the recruit gradually comes to see the outside world and its concerns as hostile, trivial and self-indulgent. His is the arena of purpose, knowledge, fellowship, where he is constantly reassured in the belief that he is at the heart of a world-transforming movement, a person of a special mould, a confidant and aide of an all-seeing, austere and demanding leadership; that he himself, in a measure, is a leader to whom others lower down in the hierarchy defer.
This conditioning, with its parallels in other closed belief systems, accounts for both the strengths and weaknesses of the cadre: on the one hand, his unstinting devotion and motivation to acquire the skills of his trade; on the other, his rigidity and dependence on the organisation for orientation. He whose associations have all but narrowed down to his party colleagues, whose reading seldom departs from the range available in party bookshops, whose thinking is shaped by the structured lines of party polemics, is a formidable motor of the apparatus. He is also a peculiarly vulnerable part of it. The impact of the wider world, when it does strike the cadre, produces profound psychological shock in all but the thoroughly desensitised. The unexpected, in a sense unimaginable, intrusion of situations not provided for in the party prospectus revives the latent conflict between the two worlds in which he resides. He may react in one of several characteristic ways. He may achieve a more complex (and usually more cynical) synthesis confirming his faith, thereby equipping himself for higher leadershi
p posts. He may deny the other world, embedding himself more deeply still in the mythological belief system of the organisation, becoming a true believer inaccessible to the impress of reality. He may seek to suppress the conflict by throwing himself more feverishly into routine activity, and becoming an unthinking and eventually useless cipher seeking relief in drink and the more vacuous traits and cults of the Dinkum Aussie. Or he may, often for quite trivial reasons on the surface, suddenly snap the ties that bind him to the organisation and rejoin the outside world, seldom without lasting neuroses induced by his failure to resolve his inner conflicts and refashion his disordered consciousness.
Some such choice as this was confronting me early in 1957 when Ted Hill produced his bombshell. I was very close to the Victorian Party Secretary at this time. We had worked together in the major legal confrontations between the Party and the government over a number of years, my role being that of pupil, fact-grubber, aide and messenger boy for the master. In return for my unstinting devotion, Ted had trained me in his rigorous analytical approach to the law, fed me his peculiarly intransigent brand of Leninism, and shown towards my irrepressible frivolity a rare degree of indulgence. Now, it seemed, the crowning reward for my labours and loyalty, the ultimate symbol of approval, and the way out of my political dilemmas, had been bestowed upon me by my patron. I was to journey to the land of revolutionary heroes.
China in 1957 was relatively untouched by the storms shaking the foundations of the communist movement elsewhere. Riding on a wave of post-revolutionary confidence and popularity, the CPC was reaching the heights of its first ‘liberal’ phase, characterised by a range of social experimentation surpassing the early years of Soviet Russia. Mao had proclaimed the slogan ‘Let all flowers bloom, all schools of thought contend’, under which both traditional and modern forms of art and discourse were enjoying their brief Indian summer. At the same time, the government was initiating new ventures in decentralisation, state-private cooperation in industry, democratic participation at the grassroots level, debureaucratisation.
Little of this had registered with me from reports in our party press, although it was vaguely realised in cadre circles that something different from the Soviet model was being fashioned in China. My scanty knowledge of events and life in this great civilisation, derived in the main from the writings of Lin Yu-tang and Edgar Snow, added up to a confused kaleidoscope of impressions, of which the most vivid was the picture of Mao’s romantic and ascetic guerilla army sweeping to power over the crumbling edifice of Chiang’s corruption. It was a powerful stimulant for jaded commitment. I sensed, rather than reasoned, that a new wave of conviction and enthusiasm was about to wash over me. In truth, though, it came to be no more than a reprieve; the experience that resolved one conflict was to ignite the slow-burning fuse of a new and more consuming one.
We arrived in Canton in the latter part of February. Our first impressions of China were overwhelmingly favourable, and so they were to remain. We were struck by the general air of neatness and cleanliness, the industry and pride of the Chinese people, the absence of beggars or extreme poverty, and above all by the indefinable impression the people gave that they felt ‘liberated’ in the sense of being masters of their own country and its future. Chinese communist officials too were characteristically modest, spartan, considerate and hard-working. Their ‘style’ was quite unlike anything we had encountered, seeming to combine selfless devotion with an almost elusive individuality, which together were extraordinarily impressive.
The hospitality which was lavished on us from the moment of our arrival in China was generous to the point of embarrassment. On tour we ate in banquet style, were treated to abundant entertainment, and waited upon hand and foot. Only during our formal study phase, lasting five months, was our living style reduced to more modest proportions. Our long-term residence in Peking had formerly been a warlord’s mansion. Surrounded by high walls, guarded day and night by armed men, the house consisted of a large block set in a courtyard and backed by a three-sided rectangle of small rooms. The four members of the Central Committee in our delegation were given large rooms in the central block, and the remainder of us were disposed, two to a room, in the small rooms behind the main building, which also contained our meeting room, dining-room, library and recreation room. We were supplied with domestic staff, interpreters, clothing and generous pocket money.
Our studies began early in March, and lasted in all eighteen weeks. The first six weeks were spent on the history of the Communist Party of China, followed by four weeks each on philosophy, the united national front, and the mass line method of work. All were based on Chinese experience and texts. Each morning for three days a week, a Chinese lecturer would visit our premises and deliver a lecture which was translated to us by one of our interpreters. After that, we would engage in private study during the afternoons and most evenings.
The central thread of the lectures was formed by the delineation of the nature and qualities of the Communist Party and communists. For the CPC, it was clear, the decisive question in social revolution is the Communist Party itself. Objective conditions may be more or less favourable from time to time, but correct leadership in the Party and firm resolve by its members will always enable it to survive and develop by adapting itself to the conditions of time and place and using positive features in any situation to its advantage. Likewise, every individual was considered capable of transcending his social origin or background, given the necessary will to do so. ‘Proletarian’ qualities, conceived of as a set of attributes (steadfastness, self-sacrificing zeal, modesty, etc.) vital to the proper functioning of the Party, derived essentially from an analysis of the needs experienced in the course of the revolutionary struggle, and were epitomised in the person of Mao himself.
The great pitfall to which communists were prone, and which threatened their undoing, was ‘subjectivism’ – the substitution of estimates based upon one’s personal interests or inclinations for a dispassionate review of the situation. There were many streams flowing into the river of subjectivism, but all must be dammed by following two courses: the continual practice of self-remoulding and dedication to the ‘mass line’ method of work. Ideological remoulding was never a final or finished process, but required repeated struggle with one’s weaknesses, in which criticism by others was a vital aid. Towards those outside the Party, the communists must display a combination of devoted concern and an awareness of their own special mission.
The Australian group members, particularly the younger ones, responded very favourably to these themes, and to the course of lectures as a whole. The emphasis on personal remoulding came as a revelation to most of us; we had been reared on a more deterministic variant of communism, in which the mastery of theory rather than the attainment of ideological purity was the main concern. The presentation by the Chinese lecturers, with its abundance of practical illustrations and moral examples, convinced us of the power of ideas, fused with organisation, to move mountains. Perhaps we subconsciously wanted to believe this, since objective circumstances in Australia were not proving beneficial to the progress of the communist movement; in any case, we raised no resistance to the ideas put before us.
Our supply of news was good enough to appease the hunger of isolated expatriates. Besides a shortwave radio, which we used to listen to Radio Australia, we had delivered to us daily copies of a Hsinhua Newsagency release containing an extensive coverage of international and domestic events. Chinese English-language magazines, and copies of the Soviet journals, Moscow News, New Times and International Affairs, arrived regularly. From time to time, batches of daily press cuttings from Australia, and copies of our own party newspapers, would arrive by airmail.
Each Monday night, we were driven by bus to the state store for sightseeing and shopping. We would then wander the markets and settle down in Peking’s one and only bar supplying draught beer, known to us as the Peace Pub, until 10 p.m. On Saturday nights, the Chinese would show us a film, usua
lly of the romantic revolutionary genre, to which the local members of our household also came.
At the conclusion of the course of lectures, we were given one week in which to write up our personal evaluations, for which we had been prepared at an early stage in our course by the Class Committee. One member of the delegation at this time had been appointed to pay special attention to the personal failings of individual members, and to hold private discussions with each in order to help the member to relate the matter of the lectures and reading to his or her deficiencies. The Chinese lecturers took no part in this process. As things turned out, our experience of ‘emptying the foul waters from our stomach’ was very mild indeed compared with what we later heard from members of previous delegations.
After our week of travail, we each read our self-criticism to the other members of our sub-group, who added their store of criticism to the pile and urged a more thorough-going examination. In my sub-group, however, the whole matter ended on a note of farce. After hearing our ‘confessions’ and adding his own caustic remarks about our personalities and behaviour, our leader flatly refused to present a self-criticism, informing us that he did not regard the process seriously and that, if he were going to bare his faults, it would be to the higher leaders of the Australian Party to whom he felt himself responsible. A furious argument ensued, but to no avail. We thereupon took the matter to the delegation leader who, after expressing his sympathy with our point of view, advised us to forget the matter, as he was convinced that no progress could be made. From this time on, our dedicated approach to systematic remoulding subsided.
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