Date: Mon, 10 Feb 1997 17:15:10 +1000 (EST)
From: Gary MacLennan <g.maclennan-AT-qut.edu.au>
Subject: M-I: homage to a stalinist


On Friday nite I made an exception.  I actually went out.  No bottle of wine
in front of the tele with a hot pizza to smack over.  No headed off to the
90 th birthday celebration of Jim Henderson.  Jim was one of the top
bureaucrats in the CPA and when they split in 1968 over Czechoslovakia, Jim
headed up the hard line pro-Moscow SPA.  Now history has turned full circle
and the old SPA have taken the name of The Communist Party of Australia as
that dissolved itself a few years ago.

So there I  was at Trade's Hall to honour a man who is synonymous with
Stalinist politics in Australia.  I had debated Jim in Public 17 years ago
on the Afghanistan issue.  My position was classic ISO - opposition to
Russian Imperialism.  Well the implacable and remorseless dialectic in the
form of the Taliban Militia have had the final word on that position.

I have also had contact with Jim over the years and slowly but gradually I
came to respect him as someone with a genuine orientation to the working
class.  I have also thought long and hard about the faction of the CPA that
Jim opposed -  the Aarons' family in Sydney. They embraced the values and
ethics of the New Left and apart from the glorious moment of the Builders
Laborers pro environmental Green bans, theirs was a politics that ended up
thoroughly petty bourgeois.  For instance towards the end their theoretical
journal The Australian Left Review was saturated with the politics of post
modernism.

So I have re-evaluated Jim and his politics.  I have come to see the
necessity of not rejecting him or them out of hand.  In other words I have
attempted to approach him with respect  and also with some subtlety.  I have
come into conflict here with the anarchists I work with.  To them Jim is the
old Stalinist anti-Christ and the mark of  the beast is on his forehead.  I
think such politics, which I used to have by the way, are wrong deeply wrong.

Anyway at the celebration there was an account of Jim's life by another 92
year old veteran of the Struggle here -  Edgar Ross.  Both Edgar and Jim
when he spoke later took 1917 as the defining moment for humanity.  This was
the space of truth and promise, the prefiguration of the golden age.  They
talked frankly of their sorrow at its passing but spoke movingly of the
continuation of hope in their remaining years that the promise of Lenin to
the workers of the world would once more be redeemed.

There were lots of other stories, of branches of the Communist Party
springing up all over Queensland, of workers in struggle.  There were also
tales of the Cold War when the Right wing thugs, and here the word has its
proper significance, organized to physically smash Jim and his comrades.  

At one meeting Jim was hit in the ribs with a raw Mango - something tougher
than a baseball- and fell to the ground.  He immediately jumped back up on
the platform and confronted the howling mob again. - "A communist disdains
to hide his aims", Jim said to us in explanation.

There were some 65 people at the meeting and apart from a young comrade from
Indonesia, it was a very old audience.  Something of the elegy was the
central note of the night. But there was also the determination to strive,
to seek, to find, and not to yield and to accomplish that final work of
noble note.

I was sorry that there were not more people there.  Jim had been in the
party for 71 years and deserved better. But the split in 1968 was a very
bitter one and still today many of the old comrades will not speak to one
another.

I took Jim, his  wife and daughter home by taxi.  He thanked me for coming
and sold me the party paper. Some habits never die, I thought.  I walked
home from Jim's and thought about the night and the experience of paying
homage to someone whom I once would have dismissed as a total Stalinist.
There is a similar conundrum in my thesis when I discuss the David Bradbury
film on Wilfrid Burchett - the Stalinist Journalist.  Bradbury was
criticized by the libertarian Left here for not exposing Burchett's support
for the East European purges of  the 40s.  According to the libertarians
left Burchett as a Stalinist was not worthy of respect.

Yet Burchett was a good man.  And so is Jim Henderson.  Both gave a life
time to the revolution and surely they deserved more than to be dismissed by
the arrogant epithet of "Stalinist".

regards

Gary



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