Communist Party of Australia.

Party training manual / Communist Party of Australia. ([Sydney] : The Party, 1928)

There were Socialist parties formed in Australia in the last part of the nineteenth century. In the early years of the twentieth century these were brought together under the umbrella of the Socialist Federation of Australia. However, most Australians committed to labour reform were followers of the Australian Labor Party. This had grown from an initiative of the Sydney Trades and Labour Council in 1891, and was one of the major parties in Australian politics. The early Socialist parties split on the question as to whether or not they should oppose the ALP or try to influence it from within. After the Communist Party was formed in 1920, this issue continued to divide party members.

Among the items on display we see an early attempt to establish the Eureka Stockade as part of an Australian radical nationalist tradition. Other pamphlets develop the relationship between the Russian revolution and the Communist Party of Australia. Peter Simonoff, the first Soviet Consul-General to Australia actively encouraged the Australian socialists to form a Communist Party. The first meeting, on 30^th October 1920, was organised by the Australian Socialist Party and held at their hall in Sydney.

The party spent most of the 1920s trying for a "united front" with the Labor Party, but the ALP was extremely wary. In 1928 the Comintern decreed that the Communist parties in the various countries around the world must become the leaders of the workers' struggles. The Party Training Manual from that year sets as its aim to equip party members "with a working knowledge of revolutionary theory and practice … to more effectively dispel the reformist illusions, which bind the mass of the workers to the chariot of Capitalism." (p. 3) This manual evolved from classes in Marxist theory given by party leader, Jack Kavanagh in 1926.