By Claudine Holt
Where did you buy your copy of 91×ÔÅÄÂÛ̳ Weekly? Was it in Adelaide's Rundle Mall? Hobart's Salamanca Markets? Melbourne's Flinders Street Station? Or perhaps it was at protests against the dictatorship in Indonesia or the Jabiluka uranium mine? If so, you were not alone — well over two-thirds of 91×ÔÅÄÂÛ̳ are purchased in this way.
Selling radical newspapers on street corners is nothing new. The labour and socialist movements have a century-long and colourful tradition of distributing the newspaper on Australian streets. Without wealthy backers to finance them, to insert paid advertising or fund newsagency distribution, the socialist movement has had to rely on its own efforts to spread its views.
May Francis, an anti-conscription activist, remembers selling with a fellow member of the Women's Political Association, Rachel Helsey, in Melbourne in 1914: "I was selling [the WPA's] weekly paper at the corner of Swanston and Flinders Streets on a Saturday morning a few months after the war had started. To draw attention to the small paper, we had stencilled a poster. On this Saturday, the poster read 'Germany wants Peace'.
"Within minutes, Rachel Helsey's posters and papers were torn from her at the corner of St Pauls. Although only 19 years old, she had taken part in the suffragette movement in England before arriving in Australia just before the outbreak of war. Realising that this would be a new experience for me, she rushed across the road and told me to drop the poster and papers quickly and slip away into the large crowd making its way into the railway station.
"I refused to do this and we were both attacked by the crowd ... the word had passed around that we were pro-German ... I had no hope of saving the poster but fought and succeeded in saving the papers."
The most successful radical newspaper during the first world war, Direct Action, was produced by the Industrial Workers of the World. Known as the "Wobblies", the IWW were key crusaders against conscription, which Labor PM Billy Hughes was determined to introduce.
In response to a previous PM's pledge to defend the British empire down to "our last man and our last shilling", the IWW declared: "If they (politicians of Australia) want blood let them cut their own throats."
Their most famous poster read: "To arms! Capitalists, parsons, politicians, landlords, newspaper editors, and other stay at home patrons. Your country needs you in the trenches. Workers, follow your master!".
Even though 12 of their members had been framed and jailed for conspiracy to commit arson in Sydney, the Wobblies could still attract crowds of 10,000 to their public meetings in the Domain. During this period of intense campaigning, they claimed they collected more than £200 worth of sales money each month (at a few pence a paper, that's about 16,000 copies of Direct Action).
In the end, the weakness of the IWW's strategy, combined with government repression, resulted in its eventual decline.
Communist Party newspapers
Out of the rubble and fragmentation left after the war, a group of 30 or so people inspired by the Russian Revolution met to form the Communist Party of Australia (CPA) in October 1920. The Australian Communist was launched on Christmas eve that year, renamed The Communist in May 1921, then became Workers' Weekly about a year later.
While sales didn't reach the heights of Direct Action during the anti-conscription campaign, the results were respectable, with 25 dozen copies of The Communist sold each week in the Newcastle region.
As Ross Edwards noted in his book Storm and Struggle, the CPA's paper "did its best to expose the exploitative nature of British capitalism, both within Australia and throughout the empire. The insular mainstream newspapers ignored the struggles of colonial people, such as the Indians, for self-determination. In contrast, the Workers' Weekly made its readers aware that the struggle against oppression in Australia was but part of a world struggle."
By the close of the 1920s, CPA membership was still a small and isolated 250. With the onset of the Great Depression, the party was able to reach a broader audience, winning greater respect and authority, especially from its leading role in the Unemployed Workers Movement (which reached 68,000 members in the eastern states). The CPA fought evictions, campaigned for jobs and demanded the introduction of cash dole payments.
By 1932, 22 branches operated in Victoria with some 2000 members. The party put enormous resources into sales of the paper. Wherever there was a gathering of people, there was also a party seller. Newspapers were sold regularly on door-knocks, on city and suburban streets, at trade union, anti-war and unemployed meetings, at factory gates, at rallies and marches, in the pubs and at the universities.
Ralph Gibson, a CPA leader wrote: "The Workers' Weekly served as a real beacon to the pioneers of the party. An enthusiastic drive early in 1932 raised the sales of the paper in Sydney by 50% in nine weeks ... Dan Ran, a middle-aged railway man who lived in my local area used to deliver six dozen papers weekly by push bike all over Box Hill and Mrs Bella Peach, a party veteran, already advanced in middle age, used to sell about 12 dozen on the Yarra bank every Sunday."
As the CPA's influence spread, the authorities cracked down. In 1933, Workers' Weekly was refused carriage on trains or by mail. In response, the party established a chain of interstate newspapers: Workers' Star in WA; the Guardian in Queensland; and Workers' Voice in Victoria.
Alf Watt, editor of Workers' Voice from 1934-38, remembers: "[The paper] started with a circulation of 2000 and finished at our peak with 8000, a twice-weekly publication, and our own printing press."
State repression
The sales reflected the growing dissatisfaction among workers at capitalism's chronic inability to meet people's basic needs of food and housing. At the trough of the depression, unemployment reached 30% of the work force — almost 1 million people. Shanty towns, such as "Happy Valley" at La Perouse in Sydney, were established by people who had been evicted or could not afford rent.
The CPA fought not only with and for the unemployed, but with the trade union movement and against the impending war in Europe. At the end of the 1930s, CPA membership had increased to 5000 members. At the outbreak of World War II, the Menzies conservative government announced that, like Britain, it too was at war with Nazi Germany.
In an atmosphere of anti-communist hysteria, the Stalin-Hitler pact was used as a pretext for Menzies to ban the CPA and other left-wing bodies. This meant that the CPA's state papers and national newspaper, Tribune (which Workers' Weekly became in 1939), were also banned.
Despite this censorship, CPA members continued to produce journals and newspapers, under pen names and produced them on printing presses and roneo machines concealed in their homes and sheds. However, circulation was affected, and a number of members were arrested for possessing and distributing literature and sentenced to six months' jail.
When Hitler invaded the Soviet Union in June 1941, the CPA shifted to a policy of support for national unity to further the war effort and gave full backing to John Curtin's Labor government, elected in September 1941. The CPA discouraged strikes. Not surprisingly, the ban on it was lifted in December 1942.
Popular support for the beleaguered Soviet Union's fight against fascism bolstered interest in the CPA. By the time of its un-banning, membership had swelled to 16,000. It peaked in 1944 at 24,000. The 35,000 print run for its educational program series was insufficient.
In 1945, the combined sales of Tribune and the CPA's state newspapers exceeded 60,000, reflecting the politically charged atmosphere in Australia.
The CPA and its newspapers went into decline in the late '40s and '50s, due to the anti-communist climate of the Cold War and the internal Stalinist regime. It never repeated the high sales achieved during the war.
The CPA's efforts to write, produce and distribute a paper which opposed capitalism and encouraged a movement to fight for the overthrow of the system showed the way for the activists who conceived 91×ÔÅÄÂÛ̳ Weekly.
The IWW and the CPA proved that with a network of committed activists you can challenge and undermine the capitalists' propaganda about how wonderful this society is. You don't need gimmicky advertising campaigns or great newsagency distribution deals to successfully sell a radical paper. You need people who are prepared to proudly go public with their political views and talk with and meet ordinary people wherever they gather to take political action.