review | Jeff Sparrow

GEE FIZZ

• Kenneth Gee: Comrade Roberts: Recollections of a Trotskyite (Desert Pea Press, $29.95, ISBN 1876861096)

 “WERE WE FOOL THEN, or are we dishonest now?”
    Hazlitt’s response to William Godwin’s recantation of their shared Jacobin past nicely skewers one of the contradictions facing political apostates. Ex-radicals invariably daub their old ideas in the most lurid colours, seeking to paint themselves as repentant sinners joining the light (rather than, say, Judas Iscariot – the other obvious Biblical referent). But the more risible they render their old creeds, the more their claim to authority rests on a self-confessed gullibility. Before embarking on his own pilgrimage to the Right, the American Trotskyist Max Shactman scoffed at ‘the I-was-a-political-idiot-but-now-I-am-smart-school’, a college whose alumni include columnistas ranging from Christopher Hitchens to Keith Windschuttle.
    In Comrade Roberts: Recollections of a Trotskyite, Ken Gee reveals himself as a graduate of the same institution. His book essentially reheats anecdotes about Australian Trotskyism in the Second World War first served up in three (rather better) Quadrant articles in 1986.
    “We Trotskyites”, Gee says, “were a mixture of a handful of genuine Depression-hardened proletarians, with a residue of declassed intellectuals, idealists, dreamers, born losers, power seekers, thugs, neurotics and drunks.” But the very compulsion that Gee (who used the party name ‘Roberts’) feels to heap dirt on his long-dead comrades gives the lie to his description. Why else should such inconsequential misfits still disturb him to the point where he’s now produced two sets of memoirs, not about the six decades he spent as a conventionally right-wing Crown Prosecutor, QC and judge, but the three years he devoted to socialism?
    At some level, one presumes, Gee recognises that the zeal he and the others in the group’s orbit – people like Jim McClelland, Laurie Short and John Kerr – brought to Trotskyism entailed a nobility lacking from their more lucrative anti-communist careers. Whatever their eccentricities, the Trotskyist leaders Nick Origlass and John Wishart stuck, with their raggle-taggle followers, to their principles, as the government tried to ban them and the Communist Party slandered (and occasionally bashed) them as fascists. In almost impossible circumstances (several members were driven to suicide), they kept the traditions of classical Marxism alive throughout the midnight of the century.
That’s why, rather than the circus freaks Gee portrays, the early Trotskyists attracted such remarkable talents: not only McClelland and co. but people like Guido Baracchi, one of the founders of the Communist Party of Australia, and Jack Kavanagh, who played a leading role in both the Canadian and Australian communist movement.
    Of course, Gee, who now lauds the murderous anti-Semite Nicholas II as “relatively forward looking”, cannot acknowledge any value in the Trotskyist project. Instead, he frames his book largely as a cautionary tale about Marxism, a doctrine about which his brief dalliance with socialism seems to have taught him absolutely nothing. Accordingly, he muddles Sorel and Proudhon, mistakes Hewlett Johnson for Lincoln Steffens, attributes Marx’s Critique of the Gotha Program to Lenin, invents a tautological group called the International Workers of the World and criticises Gramsci for his leadership (long after his death) of the European communists. On almost every occasion where Gee, with the plonking condescension of the initiate, refers to communist theory or history, he manages to trip himself up – whether over the date of Makhno’s suppression or Trotsky’s relationship to the Workers’ Opposition.
    One can only presume that Comrade Roberts realises that his right-wing readers will neither know nor care about the truth, and so feels no pressure to complicate a nice story with actual research. Did Lenin really call fellow travellers ‘useful idiots’? Did he think ‘the Truth is whatever serves the revolution’? Of course he didn’t – but the quotes sound sufficiently villainous to send a pleasurable thrill down the withered shanks of Quadrant subscribers.
    At the same time, Gee’s unwillingness to seriously engage with Trotskyism’s intellectual legacy renders his book oddly empty – an unedifying attempt to score obscure personal points, rather than a useful piece of social history. Gee might not be capable of explaining the differences between Lenin and Trotsky but, hey, he can report that Wishart wore a scrotal truss, Origlass was bossy and Baracchi disliked cracked cups.
Remarkably, he manages even to get most of his trivia wrong. He riffs at length about Baracchi’s wealth – but describes his father as a wine importer rather than a gentleman astronomer, and so misses the patrician element that made Baracchi’s background so distinctive. He notes that Jack Kavanagh seemed ancient at fifty, an observation that loses some of its force when we realise that, in 1940, Kavanagh was already into his sixties. And so, relentlessly, on.
    Why do so many ex-radicals pick at their past like a scab that won’t heal? Because history can never really be undone. As a young man, Gee was brave and idealistic – and, much as that now bothers him, there’s nothing he can do to change it.

Jeff Sparrow is Overland’s reviews editor. His biography of Guido Baracchi will be published by MUP in 2007.

Overland 183–winter 2006, pp.84–85