The communist party of Australia and the eighty‐one parties conference

Abstract

Abstract In November 1960 a conference of eighty‐one communist parties convened in Moscow to try to resolve serious differences which had arisen between the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) and the Communist Party of China (CPC or CCP). It was ‘probably the most important gathering of its kind in the entire history of Communism’ (Zagoria 1962:343). Several years later the position adopted at that conference by the Communist Party of Australia (CPA) became the subject of an acrimonious and inconclusive controversy between pro‐Soviet and pro‐Chinese elements in the Australian party. Of various scholars who commented on the CPA's stance, almost all ([Rigby] 1964:37; Mayo‐Wren 1981:87; Turner 1961:7; Turner 1965:154) claimed categorically that the CPA's delegates, Sharkey and Dixon, backed China. However in one exhaustive account of the conference (Griffith 1962) the CPA did not appear among the CPC's partisans. Most observers outside Australia relied heavily on Kremlinologist Edward Crankshaw. Crankshaw originally omitted the CPA from his list of pro‐Chinese parties (1962:10) but later revised his account (1963:61; 1965:120, 134).1 In the standard historical work on the CPA Davidson (1969:160,152) qualified the notion that the CPA had supported China. ‘After a careful study of various views’ he concluded: At the conference of eighty‐one communist parties in Moscow in 1960 the Communist Party of Australia (CPA) supported the Chinese interpretation of Marxist‐Leninist doctrine in preference to that of the Soviet party. Previous emphasis on the CPA's commitment to international communist unity has tended to obscure and even deny this.