Comrade Roberts: Recollections of a Trotskyite
By Kenneth Gee
Desert Pea Press, 2006
207 pages, $29.95 (pb)
"My own small contribution to the Terminal Crisis of Capitalism", writes Kenneth Gee of his time as a boilermaker's labourer and Marxist revolutionary in Sydney during World War II, was to be the unwitting centre of a demarcation strike that brought every dockyard in Sydney to a brief halt. For three years, Gee was "Comrade Roberts" in the Communist League of Australia, the Australian section of the Fourth International, Leon Trotsky's international organisation of anti-Stalinist Marxist revolutionaries.
What possessed this comfortably well-off young solicitor to devote these few years to socialist revolution? And what made him chuck it all in for the life of a conservative crown prosecutor, queen's counsel and judge? His memoirs attempt to give some answers.
Gee moved from a flag-and-anthem upbringing to law school at Sydney University in the 1930s where fellow student and future governor-general and ex-socialist renegade, John Kerr, initiated him into Marxism as the answer to the capitalist economic depression.
Gee's route to the Trotskyist branch of Marxism began with the Christian socialists, then the Labor Party (where NSW Premier Jack Lang personally expelled him for his socialist politics), before bouncing off the Communist Party of Australia (repelled by the Hitler-Stalin pact and the Moscow show-trials) into the arms of the small group of Australian Trotskyists in 1939 around Nick Origlass.
Abandoning his career as a solicitor, an inspired Gee entered the ship-repair industry as a boilermaker's labourer, lugging heavy oxygen and acetylene cylinders on a French merchant marine ship at Finger Wharf at Woolloomooloo. Further posts as a semi-qualified metalworker at Morris hearses in Petersham, then tooled up for army vehicles (where Gee depressingly failed to get anyone except a bosses' stooge to a union meeting), and the Commonwealth Aircraft plant at Lidcombe making Beaufort bomber engines (where he fought against management attempts to restrict toilet breaks) saw out Gee's blue-collar days.
As if tackling the bosses on unionised but poorly organised shop floors wasn't enough of a challenge, Gee as a Trotskyist also had to contend with CPA dominance in the union movement. CPA shop stewards not only politically regarded Trotskyists with Stalinist suspicion as anti-socialist "Trotskyist-fascist wreckers" but they promoted class peace on the factory floor as part of the war effort against fascism.
This conflict reached its climax in the Ironworkers' Union, whose Balmain branch remained the only one not controlled by the CPA. As Ironworkers' delegates elected by the Balmain rank and file, Origlass at Morts Dock ship-repair yard and fellow Trotskyist (later turned right-winger) Laurie Short at Cockatoo dockyards, had tapped into submerged class resentment over the unequal sacrifices being made by workers and bosses for the war effort. Workers were chafing against bureaucratic control of the union by the CPA's Ernie Thornton. The sacking of Origlass as shop steward in 1945 by Thornton provoked a six-week strike by 3000 Balmain dockworkers, winning his reinstatement.
This high point of union struggle, however, was not enough to keep Gee in the Trotskyist camp and he silently folded his tent and left the Communist League, claiming that his three years of searching for the elusive "midwives of history", a revolutionary proletariat, had run aground on the illusions of Trotskyist, and Marxist, politics that just didn't understand capitalism and workers' contented, or apathetic, role within it.
Gee's memoirs have the shop-worn air of an ex-radical's renunciation filtered through conservative hindsight. Marxist revolutionaries, he asserts, are just adventurers and schemers lusting after power. Assisted by out-of-context — or just plain wrong — quotations, Gee frames Lenin as the arch Marxist villain, the "soul-less Lenin", the "ruthless, tunnel-minded Lenin", the "ultimate cynic", head of a revolutionary priesthood (the Marxist party) dispensing the "illusions" of a religion to the credulous groupies worshipping at the feet of "The Master" (variably Trotsky or Marx).
Gee admits to knowing little about history and retaining "such innocence to this day". In this, at least, he is accurate. His lazy characterisation of the Russian, or any, revolution as a minority affair of a small group of revolutionaries manipulating "the rabble", is permeated with a tone of mocking condescension towards the idealism of revolutionaries. Gee cannot admit to a passionate idealism in his romance with the left, for he would have to admit to similar motives in others (even the despised Lenin).
So, Gee's lifeless political doggerel clumps through the pages of his book with leaden monotony, while his portraits of his fellow Trotskyists, and Communists, are little more than character slurs. Gee describes his Trotskyist comrades as a ludicrous collection of oddities, eccentrics and steely fanatics despite rare displays of humour ("Comrade Bradley", in the Boot Trades Union, is called "Comrade the Reverend Bradley, caring for a thousand souls").
Origlass, a stubborn and hearty, if long-winded, fighter for the working class for over a half a century (including as mayor of Leichhardt Council) is, in Gee's book, a buffoon, an ideological sideshow exhibit, a ranting ideologue, "a natural authoritarian", "unable to tolerate any dogmatism except his own". Gee's personality portraits are not the generous caricatures by a comrade sharing the vision and vicissitudes of his fellow strugglers but post-facto character-doctoring to meet an ideological need to show Marxists in an unflattering light.
CPA members also fare poorly. Its members, too, were doughty fighters for the working class, even though frequently hobbled by the party's retrograde behaviour from slavishly following Stalin, but what we are served up is at best a bunch of dullards while, like some beetle-browed simian, Ernie Thornton, the Ironworkers' union leader, has a "prehensile" grasp on the union and, with a lexicon straight out of the Cold War propaganda manual, the rest of the CPA are busy taking union "scalps" and "capturing" unions like a "croupier" for the Comintern. That they could have earned working-class influence on their merits is not entertained.
Gee is from the right-wing Quadrant stable, so none of this is surprising — the vindictive character portraits; the dozens of factual blunders and B-grade critique of socialist theory and history; the reheated jargon that passes for substantive analysis of the political debates among the Trotskyists; the cursory treatment of the Balmain strike (one of the great strikes of Australian working-class history) in favour of gloomily dwelling on the low points and black holes of union struggle; the repetitive writing; right down to the careless proofreading that has the wartime Morris hearses making army "traitors" instead of vehicle trailers and the CPA's loyalist Ernie Thornton inconceivably denouncing the CPA's newspaper Tribune.
Gee is a curiously wraith-like presence in his memoirs, moving through three crucial years of Australian and world Trotskyism as a dispassionate observer rather than a committed participant. And as much as he tries to repudiate it, his past, and his obsession with his past, testifies to an idealistic stage in his life when he admits he was under the visionary spell of Trotsky.
Gee reflects that young people today "give themselves names like Resistance" but, he knows, they "will someday ask of themselves the question I have asked". His answer — you will meet some interesting if ridiculous characters but its all a sad illusion and a "false road to utopia" — is meant to convince today's socialist radicals to give up now. The hugely difficult but admirably determined and principled political commitment of Australia's pioneer generation of Trotskyist revolutionaries, so disparagingly mocked in Gee's dishonest book, is a thousand times better answer.