Eric Aarons

Eric Aarons (16 March 1919 – 18 January 2019) was a member of the third of four generations of the Aarons family who played leading roles in the Communist Party of Australia (CPA).

When the CPA was formed in 1920 – inspired by the Russian Revolution of 1917 – Jane and Louis became foundation members in Melbourne and were among the early Australian communists to visit the Soviet Union.

Aarons' father, Sam, joined the CPA and became a prominent figure in the party's local activities and in the mid-1930s travelled to Spain to volunteer for the International Brigade formed to assist the Spanish Republic resist Francisco Franco's ultimately successful uprising against the elected Popular Front Government.

After finishing school in Melbourne, Eric Aarons moved back to Sydney in the mid-1930s and worked for a couple of years in his father's boot repair business before studying at Sydney University.

There he obtained a First Class Honours Bachelor of Science degree specialising in chemistry.

During this period he joined the CPA and became active in student politics and anti-fascist, anti-war and peace causes.

During the Second World War Aarons worked in key war industries using his scientific expertise for the war effort, but also was active in organising communist industrial branches.

After the war he took up work for the CPA as an educator, organising Marxist study courses that aimed to provide working class activists with theoretical frameworks that would help them develop and implement correct communist practice for Australian conditions.

Aarons played an important role in the party's work from the mid-1940s to the winding up of the party in the early 1990s.

In 1947 he was sent to Wollongong, as secretary of the CPA's South Coast District.

The idea was for Australian communists to familiarise themselves with Chinese communist theoretical ideas and to study the practical conditions that had led to the victory of Mao Zedong’s revolution in 1949 so that those experiences could help to develop an Australian path to communist revolution.

The CPA leadership chose Aarons to lead this delegation so that he would return to Australia with fresh ideas for new training and education methods and courses that would be relevant to local conditions.

He spent three years studying in China and upon his return he developed a fundamentally different approach to party education that was only partially implemented, due to resistance from older members of the CPA leadership.

His experiences in China led to further CPA groups studying in China, most notably an 18 months school led by his brother a few years later.

At this time, the CPA leadership was attracted to Mao’s political ideas and the apparent freshness and vigour of the “New China”.

CPA leaders also saw themselves as closely relating to other Asian communist parties within the wider International Communist Movement.

In this, Australian communists were well ahead of other Australian political parties and the Eurocentric Soviet-led communist movement in recognising the growing importance of Asia in world affairs.

In the early 1950s the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) invited the CPA to send a delegation to China to study for several years in Peking (now Beijing).

Ironically, in light of the long years the Aarons brothers, Sendy and Taft had spent in China, the first major catalyst for this new direction was the Sino-Soviet dispute which began to openly emerge in the late 1950s.

Nikita Khrushchev’s denunciation of Joseph Stalin at the Communist Party of the Soviet Union’s (CPSU) 20th Congress in 1956, followed shortly after by the suppression of the Hungarian Revolution of 1956 which aimed for an independent and more democratic kind of socialism, had thrown the CPA into chaos, as these events did within most Western communist parties.

In response to these and other events, the two Aarons brothers, together with a wider group of younger communist leaders (including John Sendy, Bernie Taft, Rex Mortimer, Alec and Mavis Robertson, among others) slowly evolved towards an anti-authoritarian version of socialism.

In 1959 Aarons was sent by the CPA to be secretary of the Newcastle District, a highly working class industrial and mining town 150 kilometres north of Sydney.

During this period he not only was closely engaged in trade union and community organising activities but also began to review the history of communism, both internationally and domestically, to try to come to terms with the re-appraisals that were taking place in Moscow and apply those lessons to the Australian experience.

By the early 1960s it had become clear that the division between Moscow and Beijing was centrally about Khrushchev’s inconsistent but nevertheless radical departure from Stalin’s political course, including his denunciation of Stalin’s crimes against humanity, catastrophic economic policies and destructive international policy which placed Soviet national interests, as Stalin saw them, first and foremost.

Mao was equally determined to reaffirm Stalinism and apply its methods in China, together with an extreme left position internationally which downplayed the dangers and horrors of nuclear war and urged “revolutionary” action irrespective of the realities in specific countries.

The older CPA leadership endorsed the direction adopted at the 1960 meeting of the International Communist Movement which overwhelmingly rejected Mao's position and that of his few supporters such as Enver Hoxha’s Albania.

When Mao launched an international offensive to split communist parties around the world a small group of pro-Chinese CPA members emerged around Melbourne leader, Ted Hill.

The younger group of CPA leaders, of which Aarons was a leading member, rallied CPA members against a return to Stalinist methods, as advocated by Hill and his small group of supporters.

Aarons then played a major role in helping to develop new theoretical frameworks to try to make the CPA more relevant in the rapidly changing world of the 1960s, especially looking at the impact on modern capitalism of the explosion of scientific and technological advances.

Aarons and the other members of the new national leadership became acutely aware from the mid-1960s onwards that both Chinese and Soviet authoritarian methods were highly damaging to the cause of communism in advanced democratic countries such as Australia.

This realisation soon brought them into sharp conflict with the CPSU, especially as Khrushchev's successor, Leonid Brezhnev, embarked on a new clampdown at this time that quickly undid the gains of Khrushchev's period of liberalisation.

This work coincided with his being elected to the post of CPA National Secretary in 1965 and at this time Aarons also became a key member of the CPA national leadership as the younger generation assumed power from the generation that had run the CPA since the onset of the Great Depression in 1929.

The first open breach between the Australian and Soviet communist parties came in 1965 over the question of official repression of Soviet Jewry and the gaoling of two dissident writers, Yuli Daniel and Andrei Sinyavsky, and which the CPA leadership publicly criticised.

The CPA's wider new direction also soon caused tensions with the Soviet leadership and conservative elements within the CPA, especially the development of a Charter of Democratic Rights which clearly advocated a style of socialism at odds with Soviet methods.

Aarons and other members of the new leadership warmly embraced Alexander Dubček’s Prague Spring policies in Czechoslovakia launched in January 1968, which advocated the freeing up of Czech political, social and economic systems and the development of a national road to socialism – “socialism with a human face”.

As the stand-off between the CPSU and the new Czech leadership developed into a crisis in mid-1968, Aarons was given the task of making a deep study of Czech developments and writing detailed analyses of the claims and counter-claims between Dubček and the Czechoslovak communists, and Leonid Brezhnev and his supporters among the neo-Stalinist regimes in East Germany, Hungary, Bulgaria and elsewhere.

The Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia in August 1968 deeply shocked Aarons and the other CPA leaders who had hoped that Dubček's new path would reinvigorate the communist cause, especially in Australia.

He rose to be in charge of party education, to be a leading theorist and author, a powerful advocate for de-Stalinisation of the CPA and was one of three people who jointly replaced his older brother, Laurie Aarons, as CPA National Secretary in 1976.

Born in Marrickville in inner-city Sydney, Aarons moved with his parents and older brother, Laurie, to Melbourne as a young boy.

Here he became close to his grandparents, Jane and Louis Aarons, Jewish immigrants from the United States and Britain who had earlier been active in both the Australian Labor Party (ALP) and the far more radical Victorian Socialist Party.