There’s been quite a lot of discussion about the political views of former Senator Arthur Gietzelt, who died recently at the age of 93, and in particular about claims[1] that he was a secret member of the Communist Party.
Although it’s scarcely conclusive, this is one of the few occasions when I have some direct evidence to contribute to a discussion of this kind. In the aftermath of 1975, I formed the view (ill-advised in retrospect) that I could help fix Australia’s problems by becoming a Labor party staffer. I wanted to move to Sydney, so I applied to all the shadow ministers based there, receiving replies only from Doug McClelland and Arthur Gietzelt.
I can’t remember much about McClelland, or even for sure if I met him. As I recall, he was associated with the Right, but didn’t have the thuggish persona that generally went with that group, especially after the rise of Graham Richardson.
But, although I didn’t get the job, I did have a brief conversation with Gietzelt, who said something to me along the following lines “When I was your age [I was in my early 20s at the time], we all thought the Soviet Union was the way of the future. But you young people will have to find a different way forward”. My politics then were much as they are now, on the left, but strongly anti-communist, and of course, I was puzzled as to how the left should respond to the resurgence of neoliberalism/market liberalism, represented at the time by Malcolm Fraser(!). So this resonated with me in a number of ways, and I’ve never forgotten it.
I took it to mean that Gietzelt had once been a communist sympathizer (whether a party member or ‘fellow traveller’) but had ceased to be so. That wouldn’t be totally inconsistent with an association with the then Communist Party of Australia, which had broken from Moscow after the invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968, but that wasn’t the impression I had: I assumed that his views had changed well before that, presumably in the wake of the Hungarian invasion and Kruschchev’s secret speech.
As I say, this is scarcely decisive evidence, but Gietzelt had no reason to mislead me, and no need to say anything at all to me along these lines: in all probability we were never going to meet again, and we didn’t.[2] So, my own guess is that, if Gietzelt was ever a member of the Communist Party, it was well before he entered the Federal Parliament.
[fn1] Made most prominently, I think, by Mark Aarons, who, however, wasn’t drawing on personal knowledge but from a reading of ASIO files – scarcely a reliable source as anyone who remembers the ASIO of the Cold War era will attest
[fn2] It was a long time ago, and it’s possible that I was still a candidate for the job. But presumably, in that case, a secret CPer would be dropping hints in the other direction, to see if I was likely to be OK with the idea.
John Quiggin 
@jungney
” Watch out for fit blondes with pony tails for whom no-one can account.”
Good one! I have a feeling that the expansion and professionalisation of quasi-spookdom post 9-11, and the evaporation of class-based left-right identity and other tribalisms leads to a new and untroubled self-confidence amongst recent generations who identify with bourgeois liberal ideas of national interest, personal freedom and individualism as transcendent and universal ideals, which are worth fighting for. That last element isptivational and crucial; it elevates the state (Big Brother) and is dangerous for the rest of us.
“Motivational and crucial” is what I meant.
@kevin1
With no disrespect, I’ll paraphrase what you’ve written above of the ‘new class’ as:
These people believe in nothing but personal advancement which ambition is the sin qua non of neoliberalism.
@jungney
The informant was definitely pie-face himself.
The cable is dated Friday 12 June, 2009 and is available on the internet:
Put the following into a search:
Cable reference id: #09MELBOURNE69
and you’ll get it. Here’s part of it:
@jungney
Of course, it IS disrespectful, and unnecessary. Say what YOU want to say, please don’t put your words into my mouth (and get your Latin right too).
Yairs, ok then. I’ll stand corrected on several fronts then 🙂
see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/State_Labor_Party for a communist rump controlling an official state labor party in 1940 and promoting the interests of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact.
This official NSW labour party was suspended by the federal executive in august 1940 so it reformed as the State Labor Party which later merged with the Communist Party in 1944,
in 1955, about 50 members of state and federal parliaments defected to form the Australian Labor Party (Anti-Communist)
@Jim Rose
I won’t respond to the systematic silliness of JR, and his backroom scholastic “learning”. (I don’t get my morals from monks either.)
But when I was an ALP and YLA (Young Labor) member in the early 70s, it was a very diverse organisation, a social microcosm of “thinking people”, with vigorous debate about the future that was probably it’s main virtue, but JR wouldn’t understand how progressive and disruptive to conventional thinking this experience can be. Clarifying and fighting for your ideas in a challenging forum is stimulating and educational if you’re open to argument, when it includes
activists in anti-war, anti-conscription, progressive education, environmental movements:
Groupers (NCC),
Socialist Left (SL) faction which was more left wing than the moderate CPA and included Trotskyists of various shades – the Victorian Labor College under Ted Tripp was a training school for working-class radicals,
ex-CPA (mainly from 1956) reformists
prominent union leaders like George Crawford Plumbers Union, Percy Johnston and Jim Roulston AMWU, and many others
academics in history, engineering, economics – I don’t need to name them
WL (Womens Liberation
factional leaders like Bill Hartley, Bob Hogg (described as “cankers on the party” by Hawke), Robert Ray on the right.
Certainly there were loads of interesting people in the ALP, and you could bowl up to them and talk about issues. Why? Because democratic voting means there are votes to be harvested everywhere, and they all count equally.
kevin1, the Young Labor you’ve described bears an uncanny resemblance to the one that my old mentor Ted Murphy says he was involved in.
@Paul Norton
and your point is?
@Paul Norton
Funny how Robert Ray was originally described by Paul Keating (NSW Right) as “that fat Indian”. Yes he did have darker skin, but was a Victorian although in the same national faction, but when you have no principles, like the Right, then being top dog matters – perhaps this is an example of “the narcissism of small differences”, a general human trait which politics displays most evidently.
Ray was a taxi-driver before entering parliament, as I recall, perhaps a sign of the democratic, non-status-conscious ALP of the time (Libs had been in since 1949).
@Paul Norton
Sorry, I sounded a bit rude. I was thinking at the time – I don’t need Ted Murphy to validate my experience (never met the guy). What did Ted have to say?
Speaking of invasive state surveillance, Greenwald etc…. have a new site to counter the establishment media lies:
firstlook.org/theintercept/
I have been banned from putting links in comments, but those of you who still have functioning brains can work out how to see it, and those of you who don’t – well there is a reason you fit that description.
@kevin1 Thanks for agreeing that there was extensive entryism of communists into the ALP.
Communists have no place in the Labor Party because they are not committed to democracy. Communists advocate the murder of their political opponents.
Have you forgotten that communists are fighting a class war to establish a dictatorship of the proletariat?
Ted had vivid memories of Robert Ray in the first half of the 1970s as the bombthrower of the Right in Young Labor, and when he spoke about Ray it was one of the few times I’ve heard Ted express personal dislike of a political adversary. At the time Ted himself was a member of the Socialist Youth Alliance engaged in entrism, and he was big on supporting the Palestinians which was always going to get a reaction from someone like Ray who had the Victorian Right’s Israel limerence. Ted was smart enough to slough off his SYA membership by the time he turned 18 and became a bona fide ALP Left activist and the immediate past Assistant National Secretary of my union.
Well, if we’re going to judge people politically by events quite some time before most of us were born, why stop at the 1930s or 1940s? Why not go back to the 1860s when the Communists (notably Karl Marx) opposed slavery and the US Democrats supported it?
@Jim Rose
Hmm. Entrism. Joining a group whose objectives you don’t support in order to influence its members towards an opposed position. Attempting this through relentless propaganda, repetition of opposite themes and citation of favored gurus and texts. Lofty didacticism which bores people to death.
Jim, I’ll defer to your expertise in this area. Glad to see the glimmerings of a sense of humour! Hope you can keep it up.
@Jim Rose
“Have you forgotten that communists are fighting a class war to establish a dictatorship of the proletariat?”
We communists have changed tactics and we are fighting the class war from the bottom up this time and we won’t dictate, we will shame and shape you into being decent human beings who will want to be nice not greedy selfish and judgemental type people.
Seriously, I think that my local state MP, is turning communist. In the local 6 page weekly local newsletter – which used to be only 4 pages last year – that’s progress – Ray Hopper, member for Condamine, a previous LNP member writes in this weeks issue;
“Recently, we have had the call from the LNP for candidates to come forward for the pre-selection for the seat of Condamine.
I certainly won’t be taking this lightly, as the last thing the seat of Condamine needs is a Member who wags their tail in front of the Premier hoping to get a pat.
We have serious issues facing the seat of Condamine and if by change a “yes” person wins this seat, we will see our prime agricultural land go under Coal Seam Gas.
We will also see the Liberal power of the rich get richer and look after their mates.
The normal everyday person must be looked after, which has been my plight for the last 14 years.”
LOL poor Ray and his plight! But he is supposed to be a member of PUP and yet, no mention of this affiliation on his column heading?
@Jim Rose
Good to see you keeping the cold war alive.
In fact I don’t know any communists or even socialists any more. Those of us who made the effort to study the failures of actually existing socialism usually made a rapid conversion to a pro-democracy position. Defending and extending democracy is the radical project these days given the way it is being eroded by the right. In any event it is my view that there is no ‘socialist’ objective that couldn’t be achieved in a functioning democracy.
Do we have to put up with this uneducated, misinformed, lunacy?
There are communists in parliament in;
Brazil
Belarus
Russia
India
Japan
Chile
China
Cuba
Cyprus
Czech R.
Denmark
France
Greece
India
Nepal
portugal
Ukraine
Vietnam
Sri lanka
Syria
Spain.
What Rose hides is the fact that capitalism actually did more covert entryism into popular movements of all types than any communist entryism. In fact they simply joined as is the right of every person. It was capitalism (and churches) that deliberately used paid spies to corrupt and disrupt progressive and labour movements of all types.
See wikipedia on COINTELPRO for the evidence.
Jim Rose
That doesn’t mean what many of those unacquainted with the phrase think it means. In Marxist terms, it referred to a society in which the state acted to protect the property forms through which the workers determined production, distribution and exchange. It was coined in express counter-position to Capitalism “The dictatorship of the bourgeoisie”.
In so far as communists continue to press for the D of the P this is simply another formulation of the appeal to put an end to the rule of capital by having a state centred on the interests of the producers.
So Pinochet was listening to the communists!! It all falls into place now.
@Fran Barlow
I was teasing, Fran (said he, cowering on the floor in the corner, warding off expected barbs of outraged PC).
I had forgotten that 20 (?) years ago, most young women ripped through Sydney on motorbikes trying to shake off a couple of ASIO heavies; that most young people at some stage have offered to insert a tyre lever in the orifice of choice of the said heavies and, in the vernacular of the time, suggested that they go home to their wives and family. All very boring and ho-hum – not an extreme in sight.
Still working through your four part multiple choice question: No 1 is such an obvious choice I know it’s a trick question, so I go for No 4 because I don’t have a clue what you mean.
I liked your comment #20 today. Still got some non-extremist fire in the belly, eh?
You must have been pretty chuffed (as I would be) to be labelled a pedant by Paul Walter?
@zoot
Who said this in 1980, seven years after brutal dictator Pinochet seized power? “”Chile is not a politically free system, and I do not condone the system. But the people there are freer than the people in Communist societies because government plays a smaller role.” Milton Friedman.
There is quite a debate about his culpability in collaborating with the regime when it was well-known what its murderous policies were. It seems he disclaimed political endorsement of Pinochet, being just an “independent economic adviser” advising on policy, and including considerations of welfare consequences (which he must know were never going to fly). He also advised repressive Communist governments.
Perhaps this is the classic technocratic position – “little room for politics here,but if the government adopts my policy recommendations it will generate social benefit.” Although there are judgement calls to be made, to give succour and credence to a repressive and evil dictatorship because it might cherry-pick something socially beneficial from your recommendations, which also politically advantages and extends its life, seems an abrogation of responsibility to me. There are times when it betrays human decency to prioritise economic policy influence over murderous and regressive objectives.
@Geoff Andrews
Bit concerned that “extremism” is becoming a pejorative term amongst some on this blog: is this a psychological need for respectability? Approval by the “median voter”?
I’ll stand up for 180 degree vision, if you don’t understand the extreme positions and have a satisfactory intellectual answer to them, you’re not a real thinker and should get out of the kitchen. Galileo, Einstein, Mandela, Marx, Trotsky, were not put off by taboos and fear of criticism.
@Geoff Andrews
1. There’s a difference between philosophy and lifestyle choice. Sometimes they overlap, but my ideas weren’t extremist. Then again, I find little substantive use for the term. If I’m characterising something, an absolute term is to be preferred. I recall reading somewhere — maybe it was Madison — that extremism in defence of liberty was no vice and moderation in the face of tyranny was no virtue. I suppose extremism might describe anything. FTR that would be 35 years ago.
2. I believe there were only three options, not four.
3. Paul is right. I am a pedant. I like things how I like them, and how I like them is tidy. That’s probably a schoolteacher thing, although it’s possible I was drawn to school teaching in part because of my love of tidiness. Things should be called by their right names. Principles should be carefully specified and cohere. People should understand and respect each other’s rights.
Oops still automod:
@Geoff Andrews
1. There’s a difference between philosophy and lifestyle choice. Sometimes they overlap, but my ideas weren’t extremist. Then again, I find little substantive use for the term. If I’m characterising something, an absolute term is to be preferred. I recall reading somewhere — maybe it was Madison — that extremism in defence of liberty was no vice and moderation in the face of t/ranny was no virtue. I suppose extremism might describe anything. FTR that would be 35 years ago.
2. I believe there were only three options, not four.
3. Paul is right. I am a pedant. I like things how I like them, and how I like them is tidy. That’s probably a schoolteacher thing, although it’s possible I was drawn to school teaching in part because of my love of tidiness. Things should be called by their right names. Principles should be carefully specified and cohere. People should understand and respect each other’s rights.
Oops still still automod:
@Geoff Andrews
1. There’s a difference between philosophy and lifestyle choice. Sometimes they overlap, but my ideas weren’t extremist. Then again, I find little substantive use for the term. If I’m characterising something, an absolute term is to be preferred. I recall reading somewhere — maybe it was Madison — that extremism in defence of liberty was no vice and moderation in the face of t/ranny was no virtue. I suppose extremism might describe anything. FTR that would be 35 years ago.
2. I believe there were only three options, not four.
3. Paul is right. I am a pedant. I like things how I like them, and how I like them is tidy. That’s probably a schoolteacher thing, although it’s possible …
I was drawn to school teaching in part because of my love of tidiness. Things should be called by their right names.
Principles should be carefully specified and cohere.
People should understand and respect each other’s rights.
Teasing, Fran.. we know its been leveled by uncharitable souls in the past..
If a Fran post is up I find time for it, there is usually substance involved, generally set out logically and if the post is long, that is usually because you are exploring some thing a bit deeper than others have been able to identify, and are trying to reduce complexity to comprehensibility, as the LP people tried to do.
Reducing, I respect you because you do a lot of grunt work people like myself would shy away from, for an easier life.
Thinking can be HARD work, but you seem to be one willing to take it on. I honor that, regardless of what you make of Paul Walter from past conversations on tricky, complex real world problems.
@paul walter
Glad you get something from them Paul.
If someone like me can, you could be influencing a lot of people.
@Fran Barlow
A comical misattribution. ‘I would remind you that extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice! And let me remind you also that moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue!’ is not a quote from Madison, but from Barry Goldwater’s speech accepting the Presidential nomination of the 1964 Republican National Convention.
@J-D
Thanks for the correction. I was merely making the point though that charges of extremism are at best vacuous, given that one person’s extremism may be more defensible than another’s moderation.
@Ivor ironically I have posted that very same list to show that communist parties do well overseas but bomb at the ballot box in australia.
the Trots in the Uk attract less votes that the monstor raving looney party
I also pointed out in such earlier posts that democracy makes democractic socialism pointless because electoral power is fleeting: sooner or latter, the left wing parties representing the socialist alternative lose power and capitalism is resorted.
Under pension fund socialism, with the majority of the share market owned by superannuation funds, any call for wide-spread nationalisations is political suicide. The same for re-nationalisation later when the left-parties get another turn in office.
p.s. were you booing or cheering when ordinary Germans tore down the Berlin Wall with their bare hands. The first ever popular revolution in a communist country!
Under moderation for 24 hours. I wonder why? Because I have a job, life etc. As to what triggers automoderation, who knows? – JQ
I was cheering, but as a point of historical fact it wasn’t even the first popular revolution in East Germany (there was one in 1953). The first popular revolution in a communist country was the Kronstadt uprising in 1921.
@Paul Norton
It’s difficult to know with confidence how “popular” the Kronstadt event was.
Re East Germany in 1989 …
I was glad the wall came down, and therewith the hated Stasi and Stalinist regime, yet hopeful that the proverbial baby would not be thrown out with the bathwater, and that a new revolution would lay the foundations for a workers’ republic, shaping the de-stalinisation movement in Comecon in a positive direction.
That instead, the resultant countries simply surrendered to capitalism, further immiserating their working people in most cases, was a factor in my rejection of Trotsky|sm as a credible alternative to capitalism. In none of these countries did the fall of Stalinism provoke even a modest surge in interest in revolutionary soc|alist politics, as it should have, in theory. What this suggested was that capitalism had not fully exhausted all of its work. It further reminded me that one cannot wish for social systems that are beyond the capacity of working people to imagine, and that what it is possible for working people to imagine is a consequence of their lived experience of systems and their attempts to extract from it social justice. Workingclass rule, unlike capitalism, implies a conscious set of political choices both before and after the event, and apt vehicles through which these choices can be realised and sustained. This was not tolerated by Stalinist autarky — ergo, only capitalism in some form or another could replace it. In the eyes of the working people, all that could be made of ‘socialism’ was its debauched caricature. They were never knocking on our door for guidance.
Indeed Paul Norton. The first demand of the Kronstadt mutineers included a claim for ‘free electoral propaganda’ in an attempt to counter wealth, authority and class privilege. If the parties of social democracy had been awake at the time then maybe we wouldn’t have to be dealing with Citizen Rupert.
Fran, it was popular enough for the Bolshevik forces to lose some 10,000 troops in the first days of fighting, of a force of 60,000, sent to suppress Kronstadt. Would greater numbers of dead count as evidence of the popularity of the uprising in your books?
@jungney
No, it wouldn’t. Popularity would describe the degree to which the event was supported by the population as a whole. That’s difficult to judge, though I suspect few of the populace of Russia at the time would have been able to form an opinion about it one way or the other.
Come to that, I’m not even sure all of the insurgents would have been able to give an account of the warrant for their acts.
@Fran Barlow
Well Fran, how could we understand the complexity, or simplicity, of the political consciousness of peasants and insurgents of the time. Through music and art only, I suspect. We can’t expect the past to conform to modernist sensibilities and rationality and then condemn the past when we find it wanting.
Fran Barlow see http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/germany/6525634/Berlin-Wall-anniversary-East-Germans-now-likely-to-be-as-rich-as-westerners.html for a discussion of german living standards and support for the left party
@jungney
Let’s keep in mind that on all sides at the time, both numeracy and literacy were very much the exception rather than the rule. Accurate, timely and salient information would have been hard even for the literate to obtain, even in the major population centres. Outside of the cities rumours and half truth would have predominated.
Regardless of one’s politics at that time, it’s hard to imagine that the Kronstadt rebels could have formed a considered view about the calculus in the enterprise they were undertaking, and given the comparative speed with which the events unfolded, informed by the brutality of the Civil War, it’s likely that many felt they had no choice but to fight alongside those nesting acting the rebellion, regardless of where reason and justice lay in the matter.
These days, we know about “wedge politics” and it would be a strange thing indeed if the Kronstadt rebels weren’t manipulated into this rebellion by enemies of the Bolshevik power.
That’s not to say that the Bolsheviks were rational actors between late 1917 and 1921. As I’ve said many a time, their view of what was possible was seriously flawed, and their actions not even tactically consistent with their own ostensible view of their place in the struggle of the world proletariat. They could and should have taken a minimalist position with respect to social change in post-Kerensky Russia. After all, if one believes that Russia is merely the first breach in the world capitalist system, but that socialism in backward Russia was impossible this side of the victory of the proletariat in a number of the most important capitalist countries, then it follows that rather than attempting some sort of ill-considered and breakneck rush to collectivist organisation, built largely by people who were recently illiterate rural labourers, and that in the midst of the disruption of the still very primitive agriculture by the war and the prevailing weather, which they had to abandon anyway, but rather by a measured return of the peasants to the land, a phased reform of land tenure, a re-establishment of light industry focused on servicing agriculture and of course, the establishment of the CA as a bridge to the SRs. This would have run the wedge against the Whites and allowed the Bolsheviks to secure and deploy food aid to stave off hunger in the cities.
If the revolution did come in the west, concessions to capitalism would be moot, and certainly, the chances would have been better had they signed a peace with Germany as soon as it had been proffered. If the revolution did not come, then they would still stand better not just in Russia, but to render their European comrades guidance. Fighting a brutal civil war was extremely taxing as was foreign intervention, and they paid a high price for this.
The Bolsheviks had no choice but to sweep aside Kerensky, but having done so, they overreached and a terrible tragedy followed.
@JKUU
Many sources on the Web (and elsewhere too, no doubt) attribute that line about extremism and moderation, or something similar, to Cicero, but I can’t find one that names a particular written work or speech of Cicero’s as the source. Wikiquote, which is scrupulous about giving citations, doesn’t include it in its list of Cicero quotations. I have read on the Web, though, that Harry Jaffa, reportedly the author of Goldwater’s speech, denies getting the idea from Cicero, although flattered by the mistake.
@Fran Barlow
I agree with pretty much all you’ve said but disagree over the degree of influence of the White Russian forces at Kronstadt. I think the key to understanding the intentions of the rebels is the Petropavlovsk resolution that presents quite reasonable demands and one’s which would not be out of place in a modern democracy.
@J-D
I can’t help further, J-D, in providing details on the attribution to Cicero. I suspected when reading Fran’s comment, however, that it did not originate with Madison. So, I too did a web search.
Madison is a favorite statesman of mine: federalist, a principal author of the US Constitution — particularly the Bill of Rights, and of course, he was the 4th US President. Slave ownership was a blemish on his record. A good quote from Madison, one that makes me smile is “If men were angels, no government would be necessary.” Amen.