f the famous Trojan Horse it managed to penetrate to the very heart of the enemy's camp В». Instead of denunciations of В«social fascistsВ» Dimitrov referred to В«the ... camp of Left Social Democrats (without quotation marks)В».
The strategy of the popular front has been widely examined by historians of the communist movement and it is now being re-discussed in the light of new archival sources. In France and Spain where a communist party was relatively strong it sought a formal alliance with the social democratic and anti-fascist parties, usually in the form of a Peoples 'Front. In the English-speaking world where it was usually smaller, as in Australia or the United States, it appears to have used a different strategy. This involved the creation of an underground group within the main Labor or Social Democratic party. In the US, the CPUSA inititally tried to create a left-wing, third party as an alternative to the Democratic and Republican parties. To this end they were active in Minnesota's Farmer-Labor Party, Wisconsin's Progressive Party, the campaign to End Poverty in California (EPIC), the American Labor Party in New York and radical groups in Washington and Oregon. In the context of the Depression a number of these groups garnered significant voter support, particularly the Farmer-Labor Party. Whether these groups would have united and run candidates against Democrats, especially Roosevelt, is doubtful. But the CPUSA's putative strategy was abandoned after the Comintern advised that support for Roosevelt was more important, largely because of the needs of Soviet foreign policy. These hitherto unknown strategies of covert penetration were closely watched by the Anglo-American Secretariat of the Comintern, which hoped to influence national governments formed by social democratic parties in the direction of collective security with the USSR.
The newly released archives of the Communist International and the records of the now-disbanded Communist Party of Australia provide evidence for such a political strategy in Australia. After the change in political direction represented by the Seventh Congress in 1935 the Communist Party of Australia (CPA) began to recruit members of the Australian Labor Party (ALP). Rather than urging them to leave the ALP, these new communists were asked to remain inside the Labor Party and became undercover members. By 1939, these dual members, allied with the indigenous, non-communist left wing had ousted the leadership and took control of the largest and most politically powerful of the six state branches of the ALP, that of New South Wales (NSW). Two covert CPA members became senior officers of Labor in NSW, one of them the General Secretary. In the state of Western Australia, where a similar strategy was followed, a secret member of the Communist Party became a member of federal parliament. The growing success of this strategy in Australia was halted after the Soviet-German Non-Aggression Pact. The pact provoked a series of events in which the undercover communist wing split the NSW branch of the ALP and formed the В«State Labor PartyВ». While this split helped deny Labor office in the national elections of September 1940, the communist presence also deflected plans for a wartime government of national unity of Labor and conservatives.
Historians ' knowledge of this significant aspect of the Seventh Congress policies is scanty. When a communist presence in the Labor Party is acknowledged it is invariably minimised. No historian of Australian Labor has understood either the depth of CPA penetration nor its origins. Most assume that some kind of communist presence must have existed because the communist-led State Labor Party ultimately amalgamated with the Communist Party of Australia in January 1944. p> The evolution of the CPA's strategy toward the Labor Party began with a 1935 proposal discussed by the Political Bureau of the CPA, which stated that it was advisable В«To organise Left-wing movements in the Labor Party in order to fight for the united front proposals В»and to urgeВ« members of the Labor Party who join the Communist Party [to] retain their membership in the Labor Party and carefully work for united front proposals В». In a report to the CPA congress in 1935, CPA leader Lance Sharkey argued that in addition to joint trade union activity В«[i] t is also possible that certain of the Party members go into the Labor Party to work in such a way that all leftward elements in the Labor Party are brought to the leadership in order to ensure the acceptance of the proposals of the united front В».
The change towards Popular Front policies coincided with, and perhaps contributed to, a series of union successes for the CPA, which were reported in detail to the Comintern. In 1935-36, communists won the leadership of unions in the railways, mining, maritime and metal industries. More than this...
