THE FAMILY FILE
By MARK AARONS
Black Inc., 2010, 346 pages, $34.95 (pb)
Review by Phil Shannon
Mark Aarons gave every hint of being as politically troublesome as the rest of the family dynasty when, in 1958, the precocious seven-year-old with his wooden rifle answered the door-knocking Salvation Army’s query - ‘Hello sonny, are you an army man?’ - with a bold, ‘No, I’m a Red Army man!’. Like the rest of the Aarons clan and their four generations of involvement in revolutionary socialist politics in Australia, it was not long before Mark, too, aged just thirteen, was on the files of the secret police.
Aarons’ The Family File is his memoir of the family’s political activism which began with his great-great-great immigrant grandfather, Charles, who was part of the poor Jewish exodus from Europe in the late 19th century. There followed Louis and Jane, active in the revolutionary tendency of the early 1900s’ Australian Labor Party, then as foundation members of the Communist Party of Australia (CPA) in 1920-21.
Their children, Sam, Millie and Miriam, then took up the baton. Sam was blooded, literally, in the anti-conscription campaign during World War 1, served as an International Brigades volunteer in Spain in 1937 to fight the early march of fascism before becoming Secretary of the CPA in Western Australia from 1946 to 1971. Sam “never shrank from a fight”, a “trait he passed down the family line’.
Sam’s son, Laurie, showed early signs of notoriety, being brought to the attention of Prime Minister Joe Lyons by the Commonwealth security services in 1932. Laurie fulfilled the spooks’ fears, becoming a full-time CPA functionary for 33 years, including CPA National Secretary from 1965. Laurie’s brother, Eric, too, assumed leadership in the CPA. Brian, John and Mark, the sons of Laurie and Carol continued their parents’ CPA activism into the 1970s.
This was a political genealogy which kept Australia’s secret police (the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation [ASIO] and its predecessors) busy. Close physical surveillance, infiltration of agents, extensive photography and bugging resulted in the Aarons’ family racking up a record 32,000 pages in ASIO’s files.
Although much of this was driven by ASIO’s counter-espionage branch because of the CPA’s links to the Soviet Union and concerns over spying for the KGB, ASIO’s counter-subversion branch was heavily involved, reporting on the party’s legal political activities in the labour movement and anti-racist, environmental and other social protest movements.
ASIO turned up some examples of espionage (CPA member, Wally Clayton, was the Australian spymaster for a small network of CPA members who passed on strategic intelligence to the KGB) and some cases of financial subsidies from Moscow to a party which was always in dire financial straits after its high-water membership mark during the second world war.
Although Aarons gives these Soviet-CPA relations a somewhat sensationalist treatment, none of it should be surprising, or necessarily reprehensible. All the early generations of CPA members were inspired by the 1917 Russian Revolution which appeared to offer a concrete alternative to capitalism, war, depression and fascism, and a tiny handful of members took this to its, at the time, logical extreme.
The Soviet Union’s invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968, however, was one betrayal too many and it prompted a de-Stalinisation of the CPA, which ditched its pro-Beijing wing in 1963 and its pro-Moscow wing in 1971 after bitter factional battles. The reformed CPA adopted an “independent Australian socialist model”, inspired by the ‘Eurocommunist’ parties of Italy and France, but despite retaining significant influence in the labour and radical movements, the party folded before the century was out.
Aarons’ book is a history, through the Aarons family prism, of the 70 years of the CPA and he judiciously balances the negative (misplaced loyalty to Moscow rather than to democratic socialist principles; ballot-rigging in the 1949 Ironworkers’ union elections) with the positive (lasting achievements in the union, anti-war, anti-colonial, anti-racism and other social movements). There are, however, two areas that are dealt with less satisfactorily.
Aarons concludes that it was the pro-Moscow and pro-Beijing factions that fatally weakened the CPA. The departure of these Stalinists, however, actually strengthened the CPA and attracted a younger, more democratic-minded, cadre whilst it was the CPA’s increasing reformism and abandonment of revolutionary politics which provided the coup de grace - in particular, the party’s support in the 1980s for the ALP’s class collaborationist, wage-cutting and union-debilitating ALP-ACTU Accord.
This is a political development which gets no mention in the book – disappointingly so, but perhaps not surprising from someone who had left the party in 1978, renouncing ‘class warfare’ as no longer relevant and the term ‘Marxist’ as fatally compromised, and who now declares the “collapse of the socialist project”.
Equally disappointing, for someone who has skilfully investigated the Australian state’s involvement in the importation of Nazi war criminals, is Aarons’ treatment of ASIO’s spying on the CPA – “a legitimate task’, he concludes. It may have led to a few “career setbacks”, he notes, but the laudable aim was to protect Australia’s citizens and Australian ‘national security’.
Yet, as Aarons notes, one of ASIO’s key tasks was to populate, with CPA members, lists for internment without trial (Laurie was on this list for 25 years) during a ‘national emergency’. As former Prime Minister, Robert Menzies (author of legislation and a defeated referendum to ban the CPA in 1951) understood this, a ‘national emergency’ could be anything which seriously threatened ‘free enterprise’. A powerful strike wave or anti-war movement, perhaps, certainly a socialist revolution.
It is surprising that a member of the socialist Aarons family, which has contributed much to Australian social justice and political democracy, would agree that a socialist revolution for greater democracy and equality is illegitimate. The job of the political police in the capitalist state has been, and remains, the defence of inequality, of ruling class power, of capitalism. Despite the political blemishes, the Aarons family stood on the side of democracy for the many. Their spies in ASIO stood on the side of the privileged few.