> ## Content Index > Fetch the complete content index at: https://redflag.org.au/llms.txt > Use this file to discover other available public pages before exploring further. # When Australian socialists dared to dream - URL: https://redflag.org.au/article/when-australian-socialists-dared-to-dream/ - Published: 2026-10-15T00:58:57.000Z - Updated: 2026-10-15T00:58:57.000Z - Author: Connor Knight - Tags: Culture and Reviews, History, Marxism and Socialism In the years after World War One, the Australian socialist movement reached its peak influence. Socialists led big strikes, gave speeches to crowds of tens of thousands and oversaw a flourishing radical press. Thousands of workers believed socialism was possible. But until now, few historians have given this generation of Australian socialists the acknowledgement they deserve. Duncan Hart has been a prominent socialist in Brisbane for nearly two decades. [His new book](https://shop.redflag.org.au/collections/new/products/from-revolutionary-hopes-to-shattered-dreams-the-socialist-movement-in-australia-1918-1925-pre-order?ref=redflag.org.au), *From Revolutionary Hopes to Shattered Dreams: The Socialist Movement in Australia:1918-1925,* brings this momentous period of Australian socialism to life—its revolutionary promise, the fierce debates that animated it and its eventual decline. He spoke to *Red Flag*’s Connor Knight in Brisbane about the book. --- ### **What inspired you to write this book?** I was inspired at first by reading some of the history on the period that did already exist. I started to get the sense that it was a much more significant period than it has been given credit for. I was inspired by reading about the people in the movement—they were genuine socialists who wanted to overthrow capitalism, not supporters of dictatorships or advocates of gradual reform. ### **Your book covers the period directly after World War One. How did the war affect life in Australia, and how did it contribute to the growth of the socialist and workers’ movements?** The war leads to a huge polarisation in Australian society. Around 300,000 Australians go to the war; half of those are casualties and 60,000 are killed—it’s a horrific conflict. At home, the Labor government tries to implement conscription through two referendums. Though the Labor Prime Minister Billy Hughes is confident he will win, the unions, in many cases led by the socialists, launch a campaign which ends in conscription being rejected. In this process, you see multiple general strikes, including the 1917 New South Wales Great Strike involving around 100,000 workers. This leads to a split in the Labor Party, which expels the leaders who had pushed for conscription. So, a big space is opened up for the left to influence the party. ### **You argue in the book that this radicalisation peaked in 1919\. What happened in 1919, and what prevented a revolutionary situation from developing?** It’s still an open question whether there could have been a revolution in Australia in 1919\. Based on where things were at, probably not, but there’s certainly a huge strike wave and political polarisation. The strike wave involves around 15 percent of the working class across the year. The most significant strike is led by seamen, which paralyses other industries and leads to food shortages in northern Queensland and Western Australia. The leader of the strike wanted it to spark a general strike. As well, hundreds of thousands of soldiers are returning from the war. The government is very concerned about this, as some soldiers had been radicalised by their experiences in the war and were open to socialist arguments. Unfortunately, the revolutionaries were not interested in relating to the soldiers. Instead, the right-wing Returned Services League steps in, and the Labor Party on the other side organises soldiers into a loyal voter base. This defuses some of the revolutionary potential. ### **You argue that the socialist movement in this period is best understood as a radical *current* within the broader workers’ movement.** Yes, it’s a very diffuse current, and so the main way it has been looked at is through studying the individual organisations. For example, there are books on the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), the Victorian Socialist Party, as well as various studies of the Labor Party. But there wasn’t anything written that looked at the broader movement and investigated their shared framework and political outlook across the competing tendencies. ### **What were some of the features of this shared political framework?** The main argument I make is that they shared a conception which separated industrial and political action, which I call the “industrial-political framework”. There’s also shared practices. They looked to the working class as the agents of change and promoted working-class self-education. They are very focused on the union movement as well as propaganda in public spaces like the Domain \[in Sydney\], Botanic Park in Adelaide or Yarra Bank in Melbourne. ### **You go on to show how the Russian Revolution forced socialists in Australia to reconsider and update their politics. How did Russia change things here?** The Russian Revolution has a big impact firstly because it inspires people to think that socialism is possible. But it takes until the end of 1919 for people here to get a clear understanding of what happened in the revolution, through writings by Bolsheviks sent by the Communist International. Initially, you get a lot of eyewitness accounts from people like \[American journalist\] John Reed. But most socialists reading those accounts take them to confirm their own pre-existing strategy, the main one being setting up one big revolutionary industrial union to unite the working class. Once the Comintern material starts to get to Australia, it makes people think: how could a revolution actually happen? And it shows how we need a popular revolution that smashes the existing state institutions, and that out of that revolution, new institutions are formed, like the soviets. There emerged a new concept about how the workers could prepare for that kind of revolution: of a revolutionary party leading mass action. Mass action is an important concept in the Australian movement—it bridges the gap between workers’ industrial and political action. ### **This led socialists to push to form a new organisation: the Communist Party of Australia (CPA). How did the formation of the CPA transform the politics and organisational makeup of the socialist movement?** It’s important to see that the CPA isn’t formed based on this longstanding caricature of Leninism as this top-down, dictatorial organisation. What inspired people to get involved was the example of Russia, but also the arguments coming out of Russia, like mass action, the need to smash the state and so on. These ideas were being discussed across the whole socialist movement. People are reading books like Lenin’s *State and Revolution* and *Left-Wing Communism,* and they’re all debating them and trying to understand them. This leads to all these different currents of the socialist movement coming together to form the CPA. ### **What lessons can socialists today take from this history?** As I said at the beginning, these were socialists who genuinely wanted to overthrow capitalism. One of the biggest features of the movement was self-education—they trained people to be working-class fighters. The other thing I think is useful for people to grapple with is what the socialist movement in Australia learnt from the Russian Revolution. There are so many myths about what the revolution represented, so many lies told about it. So, even though this isn’t a book about Russia, it’s about what the Russian revolutionaries argued to socialists internationally about the significance of their experience. There are still many lessons we can learn from them today.