Archive for the ‘Communism’ Category

A Most Adaptable Party | by Ian Johnson – The New York Review of Books

In February the Chinese leader, Xi Jinping, held a gala reception at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing to announce a momentous accomplishment: the elimination of extreme rural poverty in China. The grand eventin an enormous ballroom with hundreds of dignitaries flown in from around the countrywas carefully timed to kick off a year of celebrations to mark the Chinese Communist Partys founding one hundred years ago. A country that many people once saw as synonymous with poverty had achieved the unattainable, Xi declared, creating a miracle that will go down in history.

Evoking history was more than self-congratulatory. For a party that aims to guide China toward domination of the futureespecially in crucial industries such as electric vehicles, renewable energy, and artificial intelligencethe first priority is controlling the past. In its telling, history brought it to power and, because it rules so well by doing things like eliminating poverty, history has decided to keep it there. For the Chinese Communist Party, history is legitimacy.

But just to make sure that history really appears to be on its side, the party spends an inordinate amount of time writing and rewriting it and preventing others from wielding their pens. Few Chinese leaders have done so with as much verve as Xi, who launched his reign in 2012 by making a major speech at an exhibition on Chinese history. Since then, he has waged war on historical nihilismin other words, those who want to criticize the partys missteps. Xi has many goals, such as battling corruption, fostering innovation, and projecting power abroad through his Belt and Road Initiative, but controlling history underlies them all.

This belief in the power of history is one of the few constants in the CCPs hundred-year saga. Though based on one creed, its ideology has actually been a blunderbuss of strategies: it started as a group of orthodox Marxists who looked to the industrial proletariat to lead the revolution, lurched to a rural-based party that tried to foment a peasant rebellion, morphed into a ruling party dominated by a personality cult built around Mao Zedong, transformed itself into an authoritarian technocracy, and now presents itself as in charge of a budding superpower dominated by a strong, charismatic leader.

These stages are united by three interlocking ideas. One has been held by many Chinese patriots since the nineteenth century: that modernizing China means making it wealthy and powerful rather than free and democratic.1 Another, also shared by Chinese patriots, is that only a strong state can achieve this. And finally, that history anointed the Communist Party to achieve these utilitarian goals.

The Chinese Communist Partys centenary coincides with unprecedented interest in how the country is ruled. After it took power in 1949, the CCP was seen by many as a Soviet Union copycat. In the 1960s, when ties between Beijing and Moscow unraveled, Western countries began to see China as an ally against the Soviets. When the party adopted capitalist-style economic policies in the late 1970s, China became a land of economic fantasies. Pathbreaking efforts to explain its governing structures remained mostly limited to a narrow field of Sinologists, investors, and activists.

That has changed over the past decade with Chinas emergence as a nascent superpower. An early example of this popular interest in how China is run was Richard McGregors The Party: The Secret World of Chinas Communist Rulers, which gave an overview of the CCPs widespread influence on Chinese society.2 McGregors book was an important corrective to the dominant storytold by many foreign journalists, think tankers, businesspeople, and government officialsthat China was becoming more and more like the West by adopting the Wests own mystical forces: the marketplace and the Internet. McGregor countered this naivet, showing how the CCP dominated not only politics but also academia, nongovernmental organizations, and the economy. In particular, its control of economic life has resulted in a hybrid capitalist state system rather than the neoliberal one imagined by many. Even private companies ultimately answer to the party: last year, for example, the government quashed the stock market listing of Jack Mas Ant Group, in part because Ma was seen as too outspoken.

When McGregor wrote his book, the CCP had 78 million membersnearly the population of Germanybut it now has roughly 92 million. While large in absolute terms, it is still only 7 percent of Chinas population, allowing it to control politics, economics, and society without losing its exclusivity. Anyone can apply to join, but applicants are carefully vetted and huge numbers are rejected. That makes it similar to the Soviet Unions narrowly based Communist Party, and indeed the Chinese founders modeled it on the Soviets Leninist system, making it hierarchical, disciplined, and mission-focused. But while the Soviet Communists lost power and were banned in 1991, the Chinese Communists have thrived by doing something rarely associated with an authoritarian system: adapting.

Marxism is not inherently adaptive, instead relying on historical determinism to analyze social development and chart a political path. Change was supposed to come via the industrial proletariat, which would realize it was being exploited, revolt, and set society on the road to communism. But by the 1930s Chinas Communist Party had found that this template didnt apply to a country with few industrial workers. Hounded by the armies of the ruling Kuomintang government and on the verge of extinction, the CCP began to improvise.

After much internal struggle, party leaders sided with Mao in acknowledging that the CCP had to be rural-based. They also forged alliances with non-Communist groups, such as religious believers, landowners, middle-class entrepreneurs, and freethinking writers. Once the party consolidated power, it was most successful when it applied the same flexibility in ruling China, such as adopting market-style economic policies and allowing nonparty members a greater say in public life.

In From Rebel to Ruler, his new history of the CCP, Tony Saich of the Harvard Kennedy School argues that the party also owes its survival to two much more hard-edged institutions: its organization and propaganda departments. The first keeps detailed dossiers on all members, allowing it to vet them for reliability and weed out those who dont follow what the party euphemistically calls correct behavior. And by tightly controlling who serves where and for how long, it prevents local leaders from building up fiefdoms that might foster bad governance or even challenge central control.

The CCP also keeps its millions in line through propaganda and indoctrination. It has more than three thousand party schools across the country. At times, foreign observers have written mirthful stories about how Milton Friedman was being taught at this or that party school, or made it seem as if one of them was Chinas version of the Kennedy School. There is some truth to these accountsmarket economics are taught, as are skills needed to be an effective civil servant. But the schools underlying goal is to make sure that party members know the priorities of whatever leader holds power.

As a longtime observer of the CCPhe first went to China in 1977 as a student from Holland and has returned regularly ever sinceSaich is able to give a sweeping and cogent history of it. Some of the book might be too detailed for general readers, but the introduction and conclusion are highly readable, summarizing major themes of the partys history. One is a belief in its infallibility, which partly stems from its improbable history. It was founded in Shanghai by a group of thirteen young Chinese men inspired by the Russian Revolution; Saich writes that the outcome

set in motion a movement that would create the most powerful political organization in the world, overseeing an economy that would come to rival that of the United States. It is an extraordinary story of survival, disaster, and resurrection. Given the conditions under which the movement labored, the CCP should never have come to power.

Saich gives a memorable account of a fellow Dutchman, Henk Sneevliet, who in 1921 was sent by Moscow to liaise with Chinese Communists. Sneevliet was present at the CCPs first meeting and was singularly unimpressed by themso much so that he advised against forming a full-fledged party. Instead, he argued that progressives should first pursue broader goals and link up with potential allies as a way to avoid destruction.

Over time, however, the CCPs real challenge turned out to be less institutional than ideational: if the party is so great, why is its history littered with so many failures, such as policies that caused the worlds deadliest recorded famine, or purges and social experiments that wiped out millions of opponentswith almost no one held accountable? How could history have legitimized an organization with this patchy record?

Party leaders developed two tactics to make history appear to be on their side. One is to blame foreigners, a storyline that plays well in a country whose official national history is of foreigners humiliating it in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Today, foreigners (often simplified as the West) are blamed for stoking tensions with Taiwan, encouraging opposition in Hong Kong, uncovering reeducation camps in Xinjiang, and trying to undermine CCP control by supporting nongovernmental organizations, academic exchanges, and other forms of peaceful evolution.

The other way the CCP explains problems is to blame members for following the wrong policies, even if at the time they were the partys official position. Hence when Mao died and his policies were overthrown, a group of leaders known as the Gang of Four was scapegoated and its followers purged, even though all were following Maos ideas.

This whipsawing doesnt encourage the sort of inner-party democracy that is supposed to prevail. In theory, members are allowed to say what they want inside the party as long as they accept final decisions and loyally carry them out. In practice, the ever-shifting correct line means that its best to keep ones mouth shut for fear that a statement that seems innocent now will become compromising later. This was especially true in the Mao era, when political rivals were purged and killed. But even in modern times, leaders who once were in favor are now sidelined or even jailedfor example, the onetime contender for the top position in China, Bo Xilai. As Saich notes, the concept of struggle permeates the partys language and actions:

This heritage created an especially violent language that was combined with the inability to accept criticism of the core concepts. Harsh rhetoric and even violence were deemed acceptable when dealing with criticsnot only those who attacked the party from without but also often critics from within. The concept of loyal opposition was rejected.

Hence the partys history has been especially tumultuous, with really only one peaceful transfer of powerfrom Jiang Zemin to Hu Jintao in 2002. All others have been accompanied by purges and show trials, including Bos dismissal from all his posts and expulsion from the party on the eve of Xis elevation in 2012.

But as Bruce J. Dickson writes in The Party and the People, assuming that the CCP rules mainly through fear is a lazy way of understanding China. The adaptability that the party used to make broad shifts in policy also helps explain how it rules on a daily basis. Leaders are often hypercautious and fail to anticipate problems, but once they decide to react, they do so quickly and bring huge resources to bear.

One example that Dickson cites to good effect is the Covid-19 crisis. As is now well known, local authorities tried to cover up what seemed like a minor health crisis in Wuhan, but when it blew up, central party leaders came down hard. Local officials were switched out and the government launched a blanket shutdown of the region, and later of large swaths of the country. It mobilized doctors and nurses from all across China, built pop-up hospitals, and sent in the military. Within a few months, the CCP had Covid-19 largely under control.

As Dickson notes, the partys adaptability and responsiveness is conventional wisdom in serious China-watching circles.3 Its just that this sort of nuanced understanding doesnt fit the dominant view today of China as a strategic threat that rules through brute force or big data. These caricatures are especially convincing from afar, which increasingly is how journalism and analysis are carried out. But they do little to explain how China has risen so quickly and why there is so little opposition to the party inside the country.

Dicksons book gives a useful overview of the various bodies that run China and the partys involvement in them. He also surveys a series of important questions, such as why the CCP doesnt like civil society or religious groups. He is especially strong on the issue of nationalism, which many foreign observers assert is growing in China, especially among young people. Dickson gives a sure-footed assessment of public opinion data to show that this is not the case, and that young people are in fact less nationalistic than their parents generation.

As to why so little opposition exists in China, Dickson doesnt dispute that this is partly the result of public securityopponents are rounded up and frequently given draconian jail sentences. But at least as important is the fact thataccording to surveys and anecdotal evidencea huge proportion of the Chinese people appear to be fairly satisfied with how the CCP runs their country. Many critics might wish this werent so, Dickson writes, but then how to explain why dissidents have so little following? China has no one like Andrei Sakharov or Aleksandr Solzhenitsynopposition figures who commanded widespread respect among the population.

In a chapter asking the eternal question Will China Become Democratic? Dickson analyzes how most Chinese understand the term. Surveys show that few define democracyminzhu in Chineseas meaning elections, the rule of law, political freedom, and equal rights. Instead, most see it in terms of outcomes, especially ruling in the peoples interest. That is minzhu, and that is what they favor.

This doesnt mean that Chinese people are passivemany do protest when they feel they are being treated unfairly. But, Dickson writes, as long as incomes continue to rise, higher education is more accessible, health care more available and affordable, air more breathable, and so on, they are not likely to demand competitive elections, a multiparty system, rule of law, free speech, and other institutional features of democracy. The difference in how democracy and good governance are understood helps explain why many outsiders see the CCP as repressive and authoritarian, while most Chinese have come to see it as relatively responsive and capable.

Over its long history, the CCP has had strategies other than adaptive authoritarianism, as Timothy Cheek, Klaus Mhlhahn, and Hans van der Ven demonstrate in another book published to coincide with the partys centenary, The Chinese Communist Party: A Century in Ten Lives. These poignant biographies include a liberal infamously purged by Mao in the 1940s, the wife of a deposed party secretary, an upright Communist who retreated to a hermit-like existence after the 1989 Tiananmen uprising, and a 1940s movie actress who was later purged. According to the editors, these lives show that the party also encompassed a liberal, cosmopolitan strand that at times was central:

Its proponents believed that China needed change and that the Party was necessary to achieve it. But they also were committed to intellectual and moral autonomy, the right to criticize the Party, and the decentralization of power.

The person who best fits this description is not profiled in this volume but hovers over all these books like a patron saint: Gao Hua, a historian at Nanjing University who died of liver cancer in 2011 at the age of fifty-seven. Gao grew up during the Cultural Revolution and witnessed the violence that Mao unleashed, much of it announced in handwritten posters that were plastered along the streets of his hometown. Many of them made reference to a purge in the 1940s that was aimed at authors, artists, and thinkers who had traveled to a poor, mountainous region of western China to join the Communists in their wartime redoubt in the small city of Yanan.

Gao was intrigued and wanted to learn more. That was difficult, because most books were banned during the Cultural Revolution. Then luck intervened. Several thousand books had been locked up in a warehouse near his home, and the kindly gentleman in charge let Gao and one of his friends borrow some. Gao read hundreds of banned books, including the novels of Ding Ling and the essays of Wang Shiwei, both of whom Mao had purged in Yanan twenty-five years earlier.

By the time Gao entered Nanjing University in 1978 he instinctively knew that this purge held a key to understanding the traumas that his country had gone through. He began collecting memoirs, papers, documents, and other accounts. Twenty-two years later, he published his lifes work, How the Red Sun Rose: The Origin and Development of the Yanan Rectification Movement, 193045.

The Red Sun, of course, is Mao, and the answer is that he rose through bloody purges that destroyed lives and forced obedience. In standard Communist histories, the Yanan Rectification Movement is portrayed as a great victory for the revolution, a harnessing of intellectuals to the sacred task of saving China under the guidance of the Chinese Communist Party. Many official accounts put it on a par with the May 4th Movement, a genuine outpouring of creativity and energy in 1919 that launched the most fertile period of thought in modern Chinese history. What Gao showed, however, was that Yanan was the opposite: a sterilization of Chinese intellectuals, who could avoid persecution only by becoming apparatchiks.

In a postscript to the book, Gao describes his upbringing, motivation, and research methods. He had to make do without access to official archivesfrom the start, his project was seen as too sensitive for him to be permitted to see government documents. He was regularly denied research grants, promotions, and the chance for a senior position at another university. Every book he bought and photocopy he made was financed on his puny salary. He wrote his enormous work at his kitchen table, chain-smoking and drinking tea, his reputation growing until people made pilgrimages to Nanjing to seek him out.

His early death robbed him of the chance to write his next book, which his friends say was to have focused on what happened after the Communists, remolded by Mao into a tool of his control, assumed power in 1949. But in some ways, his lifes work was finished. His book punctures what is perhaps the CCPs ur-myththat it started as a pure, clean band of idealists fighting for China. Although never published in China, Gaos book was released by the Chinese University of Hong Kong in 2000 and since then has gone through twenty-two printings. Two years ago it was masterfully translated by the veteran duo Stacy Mosher and Guo Jian.

The book is dense, long, and challenging. Professional historians have a hard time accepting all of Gaos efforts to psychoanalyze Mao and his motivations. But his achievement is overwhelming, calling into question the entire Communist project. Here was a Chinese historian, working in China, challenging the party on its most sacred soil.

Gao said that his goal was to follow the admonition of the great twentieth-century historian Chen Yinke, who died of heart failure after being persecuted during the Cultural Revolution: historians should observe the ocean in a drop of water. In this, Gao succeeded. He didnt just reconstruct erased history but uncovered a pattern of how the CCP has controlled generations of novelists and poets, artists and bloggers, videographers and citizen journaliststhe entire panoply of people struggling to make themselves heard, not just in the 1940s but for as long as the party has existed. While the CCP has succeeded in silencing most of them and convincing most others that they dont need to choose their leaders, Gao exemplifies an undercurrent of freethinking that remains alive one hundred years on.

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A Most Adaptable Party | by Ian Johnson - The New York Review of Books

Communism, Leninism to attend brother Socialisms Indian wedding – Al Jazeera English

These are names of the sons of a district-level communist leader in Tamil Nadu state, with the youngest set to marry Mamata Banerjee on Sunday.

Even little Marxism will not miss out when Socialism gets married in southern India this weekend with his big brothers Communism and Leninism in attendance.

All are the progeny of A Mohan, a district secretary of the Communist Party of India in Tamil Nadu state where left-wing ideology still burns red hot.

My first son was born during the fall of the Soviet Union and everywhere in the news I was reading that this was the end of communism, Mohan told AFP news agency.

But there is no end for communism as long as the human race lives on, so I named my first-born Communism, he said.

His next two sons were named Leninism whose five-month-old son Marxism will also attend the nuptials on Sunday and Socialism, the groom.

Pictures of the invitation to the wedding, embossed with hammer-and-sickle emblems, have gone viral on social media.

Socialisms bride-to-be, meanwhile, is P Mamata Banerjee, named by her grandfather after firebrand chief minister of West Bengal state, who recently defeated Prime Minister Narendra Modis right-wing party in state elections.

The fact that this other Banerjee also ended several decades of communist rule in 2011 in West Bengal to become its chief minister is not spoiling the party.

India leaned more towards the Soviet Union during the Cold War, and names such as Stalin, Lenin, Trotsky, Pushkin and even Pravda the name of the USSRs state newspaper are not unheard of, particularly in the south.

Tamil Nadus current chief minister is MK Stalin, named by his father in honour of the Soviet communist dictator just days before he died in Russia.

Mohan said that there was nothing unusual about his sons names. Some of his comrades gave their children names such as Moscow, Russia, Vietnam and Czechoslovakia, he said.

But he admitted that his boys, especially Communism, were sometimes teased at school. One hospital refused to admit Communism when he was three years old.

They were scared of the name Communism and initially I faced a lot of troubles. But over time, things smoothed out, he said.

All three sons, now in their 20s, are fellow members of the local communist party, and Leninism named his son after none other than German philosopher Karl Marx.

Now I am waiting for a granddaughter from one of my sons, who I will name Cubaism, Mohan added.

Excerpt from:
Communism, Leninism to attend brother Socialisms Indian wedding - Al Jazeera English

Taking the knee, and how BLM became synonymous with Communism – The Independent

As the Euro 2020 games are set to kick off, the debate around taking the knee continues to dominate the national conversation with some government ministers defending the act in the name of addressing racism, but criticising it when done in the name of Black Lives Matter.

But how did Black Lives Matter, a global movement centred on creating in world in which black peoples lives and futures count as much as anyone elses, become, for some, apparently synonymous with Communism?

Speaking on BBCs Question Time on Thursday evening, Education minister Gillian Keegan said that whats happening here is this in itself is actually being more divisive, its creating new divisions.

There are some Conservative MPs (that) are very much against it, why? Because Black Lives Matter stand for things that they dont stand for. Its really about defunding the police and the overthrow of capitalism, which is, you know, Black Lives Matter the actual political organisation, she said.

And on Friday, vaccines minister Nadhim Zahawi said he and the government supported taking the knee when the symbolism is linked to reminding the world of how painful it is to be subjected to the racism that Marcus Rashford has been subjected to, whether on social media or elsewhere, I absolutely back.

If you then extrapolate to a Black Lives Matter movement that has a political agenda ... thats a different place, thats my point which is why I think we just have to differentiate and rightly back our team.

But where has this idea come from?

What are the aims of the Black Lives Matter organisations?

Plural, but with one key focus ending structural inequalities. There are two leading rallying groups under this banner: BLM US and BLM UK, and yet more factions across the globe after that.

On the US groups website, it states that its mission is to eradicate white supremacy and build local power to intervene in violence inflicted on Black communities by the state and vigilantes.

Meanwhile, Black Lives Matter UKs branch says: We believe we can create a world without systemic violence and exploitation, where all can live full and free lives. This is what we believe liberation is.

The collective also calls to defund the police and invest in communities which means to divest funds from police forces and reallocating them to non-policing measures geared towards securing public safety; critics of BLM peddle the false narrative that the slogan means to abolish the police altogether.

Some 20 per cent of Britons oppose the BLM movement, according to recent data.

A now defunct fundraiser page belonging to the UK branch referred to the overthrow of capitalism.

The Communist influence?

Theres a long history of anti-racism movements being labelled as subversive Communist campaigns by critics, either through a lack of understanding, or through an apparent aim to discredit the causes altogether.

On both sides of the Atlantic, this trope has been witnessed over decades, whether through the targeting of Dr Martin Luther King by FBI director J Edgar Hoover and the US government in the 1960s, to the persecution of Black British activists by the authorities in the 1970s.

Hoover often denounced the Communist influence within the Negro movement while targeting various equalities activists and placing them under surveillance.

And in July 1970, the Foreign Office sent a report on the Black Power Movement in the UK to the Immigration Department at the Home Office. It was compiled by the Information Research Department (IRD), a covert propaganda unit set up during the Cold War to tackle communist influences.

While there may well have been socialists within any civil rights group, during the Cold War it was generally not uncommon for anti-communist politicians to capitalise on the political tensions by linking civil rights campaigns to communism.

Miriyam Aouragh, a lecturer at the London-based Westminster School of Media and Communication, told PolitiFact: I am fairly convinced these are mostly attempts to smear anti-racist activists.

I think in some media, Marxist is dog-whistle for something horrible, like Nazi, and thus enables to delegitimize/dehumanize them.

In a video from 2015 which resurfaced last year, Black Lives Matter US co-founder Patrisse Cullors had said that she and her fellow organisers are trained Marxists.

We are trained Marxists. We are super-versed on, sort of, ideological theories. And I think that what we really tried to do is build a movement that could be utilized by many, many Black folk, she told Jared Ball of the Real News Network.

Marxism is essentially underpinned by the principle of a classless society where the rich and the poor are equal.

The history of taking the knee

The act itself predates the Black Lives Matter organisation, which began life in 2013 and was reignited after the death of George Floyd at the hands of a white police officer in May 2020.

For many years, anti-racism activists have long-associated kneeling with the concept of protest against discrimination and as a means of asserting ones rights.

English potter and abolitionist Josiah Wedgwood created this medallion of an enslaved Black man kneeling, bearing the inscription Am I Not a Man and a Brother

(Medallion)

Notably, US civil rights figure Martin Luther King Jr took the knee during a march in Selma, Alabama, in 1965.

He made the gesture while leading a prayer outside the Dallas County Alabama Courthouse, along with several other equalities marchers, after the group of about 250 was arrested for parading without a permit.

Moreover, theres a renowned 18th-century image featured on a medallion, by English potter and abolitionist Josiah Wedgwood of an enslaved Black man kneeling, with the inscription Am I Not a Man and a Brother.

The illustration was widely reproduced and the phrase became a rallying call for European slavery abolitionists.

Civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. kneels with a group in prayer prior to going to jail in Selma, Alabama.

(Getty Images)

In 2016, former NFL quarterback Colin Kaepernick embraced the symbol once again, taking the knee after refusing to stand during the pre-game national anthem because of how minorities are treated across the US.

I am not going to stand up to show pride in a flag for a country that oppresses Black people and people of colour, Kaepernick said at the time.

It soon trickled through to other sports, and continues to play a part in the global discussion around racism.

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Taking the knee, and how BLM became synonymous with Communism - The Independent

How Bendigo became ‘the spearhead of communism’ | This week in history – Bendigo Advertiser

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BENDIGO had become "the spearhead of communism" and its trades hall needed to be purged, an RSL sub-branch president declared as hundreds of veterans prepared to march on the View Street building. The year was 1949 and returned servicemen were part of what today appears the unlikely vanguard of the fight against the Red Menace. It's a reminder of a forgotten era for RSLs, which this month marks 105 years since the first sub-branch was established in Australia. But for much of its history Australia's RSL network often found itself on the front line of a threat lurking in domestic politics, not foreign battlefields. That includes in Bendigo, where sometimes violent trades hall meetings spurred an anti-communist fervor that soon spread into a string of country towns. So, how did our city become a hotbed for forces awaiting the downfall of capitalism? And why on earth were RSLs leading the charge? This is a story about the fight for control of Bendigo Trades Hall, which by the late 1940s had been taken over by unions aligned with groups like the Communist Party of Australia. Communist aligned trade union officials barred the doors to the View Street hall multiple times, angry crowds heckled speakers and punches were thrown and multiple groups claimed control of the city's industrial agenda. Bendigo's RSL sub-branch was one of the most vocal members of an alliance that appears to have shaped and reflected deeply held views about the threat of communism at all levels of Australian life. It helped workers elect anti-communist union members to positions of power and organised rallies, then Bendigo RSL president J Skehan told his sub-branch's Anti-Communist Committee at a meeting attended by RSLs and multiple unions. "It is up to us to rid Bendigo generally of the menace," he said in a Bendigo Advertiser story from 1949. The RSL even had a weekly column in the newspaper which, among other things, occasionally plugged upcoming ant-communist rallies. "Diggers assemble," one column from October 1949 implored readers. "Bendigo sub-branch secretary urgently requests all diggers to assemble at the Memorial Hall to-night at 6.45pm," the cryptic article continued. "They will be informed of what is required of them on their arrival. The matter is extremely urgent." What followed that night were clashes between militant and moderate unionists at the town hall, with the latter taking over proceedings. For many World War Two veterans, the fear of losing liberties they had fought for to totalitarian regimes like those in Russia and China was powerful. More showdowns would take place in the year that followed, including later that month when police "chased" militant unionists from the hall, according to a Bendigo Advertiser report. Crowds of as many as 500 people regularly turned up to force communists out of the hall over that two-year period, multiple media reports from Victorian news outlets show. Numbers alone were not enough to stop communist-aligned groups. Scuffles often broke out as speakers were howled down and eggs were thrown. Some workers turned hoses on union officials trying to speak at one worksite. Anti-communist trade union officials began warning workers that their rivals were recruiting "bashers" to protect themselves at meetings, and to stay safe at Bendigo rallies. Pro-communist groups alleged they were the victims of the same sorts of tactics. La Trobe University's Ian Tulloch said Bendigo's industrial unrest was not as significant as others elsewhere in the country, but was a sign of the times. "We are talking about this historical period just at the really early stages of the Cold War," the expert on Australian politics said. "Mao had just taken over in China, Russia had risen." More from this history series: Did a dodgy cop's incompetence blow up an open and shut case? RSL leaders had been concerned about communism for decades and were finding common cause with conservative politicians, parts of the Labor party, right-wing unions and other "fellow travellers", Mr Tulloch said. Communists were a force to be reckoned with and had come close to taking control of the Australian Council of Trade Unions in 1945. It would have been a glittering prize. Unions represented as much as 60 per cent of the workforce, so they had a lot of influence. What's more, many Australian workers were happy to give communist union officials the keys to union buildings. "These leaders were all elected by members, of course. So it wasn't just that they took nefarious means to take over," Mr Tulloch said. Many workers - including in Bendigo - believed communist union leaders were among the few militant enough to deliver them better pay. They had a point. Then prime minister and Labor party leader Ben Chifley had taken over the country as World War Two ended. He had inherited an economy that had been pummeled by the war and was trying to rebuild it. Chifley feared what might happen if unions allowed inflation to rise by pushing for wages his government deemed to be too high. "I can imagine, quite easily, that this enabled a lot of Australian Communist Party officials to become elected," Mr Tulloch said. And why wouldn't you be prepared to strike for better pay and conditions? More from this history series: Should councils tax you? Why Bendigo's once wanted a slice of your income That is exactly what had happened earlier in 1949, when communist union leaders helped lead a coal worker strike with the support of people across the country. Chifley was so alarmed he deployed the army to fill labour shortages. It was the first time outside of war that soldiers had been used to break a strike. The Reds were not just under the bed. They were on the picket lines. Still, the Australian Communist Party largely failed to turn that workplace support into ideological change. People wanted better pay, not revolution. That communists controlled Bendigo's Trades Hall must have seemed an ominous sign to many when war with Russia seemed possible, if not likely. The fights over trade unions could not have come at a worse time for the Labor government, which was fighting a losing battle to keep control in a looming election. The Coalition was telling voters there was no difference between a moderate and militant in the Labor movement. When you vote LABOR you vote SOCIALIST! And socialism is the road downhill to communism," one typical 1949 Liberal party election advertisement declared in the Bendigo Advertiser. Labor lost power and unions lost their inside link to the corridors of power. Things turned out much better for the Bendigo RSL anti-communist campaign. It was so successful that towns like Echuca and Ballarat reenergised their own anti-communist movements. The new Coalition government tried unsuccessfully to ban the Australian Communist Party in the 1950s. Even without a ban, communist leaders in Bendigo had already lost power. Moderate unionists smashed their way into the hall in August 1950 after communists barricaded the doors, bringing that battle for Bendigo to a close. This story is the latest in the Bendigo Weekly's regular history series WHAT HAPPENED? Our journalists work hard to provide local, up-to-date news to the community. This is how you can access our trusted content:

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BENDIGO had become "the spearhead of communism" and its trades hall needed to be purged, an RSL sub-branch president declared as hundreds of veterans prepared to march on the View Street building.

The year was 1949 and returned servicemen were part of what today appears the unlikely vanguard of the fight against the Red Menace.

It's a reminder of a forgotten era for RSLs, which this month marks 105 years since the first sub-branch was established in Australia.

But for much of its history Australia's RSL network often found itself on the front line of a threat lurking in domestic politics, not foreign battlefields.

That includes in Bendigo, where sometimes violent trades hall meetings spurred an anti-communist fervor that soon spread into a string of country towns.

So, how did our city become a hotbed for forces awaiting the downfall of capitalism?

And why on earth were RSLs leading the charge?

A story in Melbourne paper The Argus from Wednesday August 10, 1949. Image courtesy of TROVE

Bitter feud a sign of the times

This is a story about the fight for control of Bendigo Trades Hall, which by the late 1940s had been taken over by unions aligned with groups like the Communist Party of Australia.

Communist aligned trade union officials barred the doors to the View Street hall multiple times, angry crowds heckled speakers and punches were thrown and multiple groups claimed control of the city's industrial agenda.

Bendigo's RSL sub-branch was one of the most vocal members of an alliance that appears to have shaped and reflected deeply held views about the threat of communism at all levels of Australian life.

It helped workers elect anti-communist union members to positions of power and organised rallies, then Bendigo RSL president J Skehan told his sub-branch's Anti-Communist Committee at a meeting attended by RSLs and multiple unions.

"It is up to us to rid Bendigo generally of the menace," he said in a Bendigo Advertiser story from 1949.

The RSL even had a weekly column in the newspaper which, among other things, occasionally plugged upcoming ant-communist rallies.

"Diggers assemble," one column from October 1949 implored readers.

A meeting outside trades hall shortly before moderate union and RSL groups stormed the building. Picture: BENDIGO ADVERTISER, courtesy of the Bendigo Library

"Bendigo sub-branch secretary urgently requests all diggers to assemble at the Memorial Hall to-night at 6.45pm," the cryptic article continued.

"They will be informed of what is required of them on their arrival. The matter is extremely urgent."

What followed that night were clashes between militant and moderate unionists at the town hall, with the latter taking over proceedings.

For many World War Two veterans, the fear of losing liberties they had fought for to totalitarian regimes like those in Russia and China was powerful.

More showdowns would take place in the year that followed, including later that month when police "chased" militant unionists from the hall, according to a Bendigo Advertiser report.

Crowds of as many as 500 people regularly turned up to force communists out of the hall over that two-year period, multiple media reports from Victorian news outlets show.

Numbers alone were not enough to stop communist-aligned groups.

Scuffles often broke out as speakers were howled down and eggs were thrown. Some workers turned hoses on union officials trying to speak at one worksite.

A front page story from the Bendigo Advertiser at the height of the conflict. Image courtesy of the Bendigo Library

Anti-communist trade union officials began warning workers that their rivals were recruiting "bashers" to protect themselves at meetings, and to stay safe at Bendigo rallies.

Pro-communist groups alleged they were the victims of the same sorts of tactics.

La Trobe University's Ian Tulloch said Bendigo's industrial unrest was not as significant as others elsewhere in the country, but was a sign of the times.

"We are talking about this historical period just at the really early stages of the Cold War," the expert on Australian politics said.

"Mao had just taken over in China, Russia had risen."

RSL leaders had been concerned about communism for decades and were finding common cause with conservative politicians, parts of the Labor party, right-wing unions and other "fellow travellers", Mr Tulloch said.

Communists were a force to be reckoned with and had come close to taking control of the Australian Council of Trade Unions in 1945.

It would have been a glittering prize. Unions represented as much as 60 per cent of the workforce, so they had a lot of influence.

What's more, many Australian workers were happy to give communist union officials the keys to union buildings.

"These leaders were all elected by members, of course. So it wasn't just that they took nefarious means to take over," Mr Tulloch said.

Many workers - including in Bendigo - believed communist union leaders were among the few militant enough to deliver them better pay.

Ben Chifley. Image courtesy of the National Museum of Australia

Wages stagnate in post-war rebuild

Then prime minister and Labor party leader Ben Chifley had taken over the country as World War Two ended.

He had inherited an economy that had been pummeled by the war and was trying to rebuild it.

Chifley feared what might happen if unions allowed inflation to rise by pushing for wages his government deemed to be too high.

"I can imagine, quite easily, that this enabled a lot of Australian Communist Party officials to become elected," Mr Tulloch said.

And why wouldn't you be prepared to strike for better pay and conditions?

That is exactly what had happened earlier in 1949, when communist union leaders helped lead a coal worker strike with the support of people across the country.

Chifley was so alarmed he deployed the army to fill labour shortages. It was the first time outside of war that soldiers had been used to break a strike.

The Reds were not just under the bed. They were on the picket lines.

Still, the Australian Communist Party largely failed to turn that workplace support into ideological change.

People wanted better pay, not revolution.

That communists controlled Bendigo's Trades Hall must have seemed an ominous sign to many when war with Russia seemed possible, if not likely.

The fights over trade unions could not have come at a worse time for the Labor government, which was fighting a losing battle to keep control in a looming election.

The Coalition was telling voters there was no difference between a moderate and militant in the Labor movement.

When you vote LABOR you vote SOCIALIST! And socialism is the road downhill to communism," one typical 1949 Liberal party election advertisement declared in the Bendigo Advertiser.

Labor lost power and unions lost their inside link to the corridors of power.

Things turned out much better for the Bendigo RSL anti-communist campaign.

A front page story from the Riverine Herald on Saturday October 22, 1949

It was so successful that towns like Echuca and Ballarat reenergised their own anti-communist movements.

The new Coalition government tried unsuccessfully to ban the Australian Communist Party in the 1950s.

Even without a ban, communist leaders in Bendigo had already lost power.

Moderate unionists smashed their way into the hall in August 1950 after communists barricaded the doors, bringing that battle for Bendigo to a close.

This story is the latest in the Bendigo Weekly's regular history series WHAT HAPPENED?

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How Bendigo became 'the spearhead of communism' | This week in history - Bendigo Advertiser

Elon Musk’s partner Grimes says ‘A.I. is the fastest path to communism’ – MarketWatch

Time for a Realiti check.

Canadian singer Grimes (nee Claire Boucher) hit the wrong note with many of her followers in a new TikTok video thats gone viral.

In a roughly minute-long clip that the musician and romantic partner of Tesla TSLA, +4.58% founder Elon Musk posted on Wednesday, Grimes claimed that artificial intelligence enables communism. In her own words:

So, typically, most of the communists I know are not big fans of A.I. But, if you think about it, A.I. is actually the fastest path to communism.

I have a proposition for the communists. So, typically, most of the communists I know are not big fans of A.I. But, if you think about it, A.I. is actually the fastest path to communism, the Realiti singer began.

So, if implemented correctly, A.I. could actually, theoretically solve for abundance. Like, we could totally get to a situation where nobody has to work. Everybody is provided for with a comparable state of being, comfortable living, Grimes continued. A.I. could automate all the farming, weed out systematic corruption, thereby bringing us as close as possible to genuine equality.

She concluded: So basically, everything everybody loves about communism but without the collective farm cause, lets be real, enforced farming is really not a vibe.

This sparked a strong reaction on both TikTok and Twitter TWTR, +3.49%, with many viewers questioning her grasp of communism. For one thing, people are still expected to work under the classless society derived from Karl Marx. All property is publicly owned, and each person works and is paid according to their abilities and needs, per the Oxford Dictionary definition of the political theory.

Other viewers pointed out that Musk, Grimess boyfriend and the father of her child, is the third wealthiest person in the world with a net worth around $150 billion, according to Forbes. So her push for economic equality falls somewhat flat when considering her own lavish lifestyle.

Just to be clear here the girlfriend of a billionaire who is currently vying for the most wealth ever amassed in history is arguing that AI will somehow bring us Communism, thereby forcing her bf to share his wealth with the rest of us? Like, couldnt he just do that whenever? wrote Twitter user @ibvanmat.

Why is GRIMES of all people talking about communism? asked another.

Grimes has adopted her boyfriends stunning ability to say a bunch of techbro nonsense and think she sounds profound, mused another viewer, whose comment has been liked 900 times.

The clip went viral overnight, with the original video drawing more than 14,000 comments and around 151,000 likes on TikTok. Grimes was also trending on Twitter on Thursday, with more than 17,000 tweets discussing her comments by the afternoon.

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Elon Musk's partner Grimes says 'A.I. is the fastest path to communism' - MarketWatch