Historical Events of the Revolutionary World Movement

The Great Coal Strike 1949 Australia

The great coal strike of 1949

J D Blake

Australian Communist Party pamphlet, August 1949

The magnificent seven-weeks strike of the mineworkers in July and August 1949 brought into sharper focus than any other event of the postwar period the true nature and policy of all political parties and classes in the Australian community. This struggle was a great turning point in Australian post-war history, which threw into clear relief the new conditions that confront the working class.

The interpretations of this struggle that have been advanced by the Labor governments, the Tory parties and the daily press are many and varied, but the stock argument used by practically all these forces hostile to the working class was that the coal strike was a Communist plot or a Communist conspiracy.

Even a cursory, but honest, examination of the facts and events before and during the strike clearly show that this interpretation is completely unfounded and false. From the very beginning, the strike developed on the basis of genuine industrial issues, that is, upon the basis of the economic claims that were advanced by the mineworkers. But it soon became clear that, so far as the ruling class and the various governments were concerned, the struggle involved much more profound issues than the economic claims of the miners. For this reason also, the outcome of the struggle meant much more for the workers than simply the satisfaction of the economic claims of the mineworkers.

Already in the second week of the strike, it became known that the Collins House monopolists and the federal and state Labor governments had set themselves the deliberate aim of securing the extinction of the Communist Party as an effective organisation in Australia. It was made known that Labor politicians in both the federal and NSW parliaments looked upon this struggle as an opportunity to destroy the influence of the Communists in the trade union movement. They openly acknowledged that most of the postwar advances in wages, hours and working conditions were associated in the minds of the workers with those key unions in which Communists played a prominent part in the leadership.

For this reason Chifley, McGirr and other Labor Party leaders had two major aims in connection with the coal strike. These were to smash the Communist Party and to break the back of the Miners Federation as the first stage of their grand plan to cripple the militant trade unions, deprive them of their leadership and in this way disarm the working class.

This plan of the Labour Party leaders did not arise out of thin air, but from their consideration of the economic crisis developing in the capitalist world. This developing crisis compels them to employ violent police state measures against the working class in their efforts to defend capitalism and unload upon the backs of the working people all the misery and suffering resulting from economic crisis.

The economic crisis now spreading through the capitalist world is a grave menace to capitalism, and all the more so if the working class remains unshackled; hence one of the main preparatory steps of the capitalist class, and of the government which represent that class, is to shackle and cripple the working class by smashing militant unions and the Communist Party.

Aggravating the critical situation created by growing economic crisis is the enormous burden of war expenditure involved in the war preparation of the Chifley government. This war expenditure of the federal Labor government is designed to transform Australia into a Pacific war base for the use of the Yankee imperialists in their aggressive war plans.

Undoubtedly the greatest barrier in the path of all these capitalist plans is the Communist Party, for this reason the whole power of the ruling class and its governments and all the venom of the capitalist daily press is directed against the Communist Party.