Into the Mainstream

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SKU: 9780977504770 Category:

Description

At the end of World War II, the Communist Party was a major force in Australian working class life. Yet by the 1980s it had diminished to a demoralised rump, and today it’s only a memory. Did the party deserve this fate? Its courage and hard work brought together thousands of working-class fighters. It led them in important struggles. But then it inflicted on them the bitterest of disappointments.

Into the Mainstream traces the party’s decline from an influential movement, plagued by its bureaucratic Stalinist politics, to a shrinking organisation trying desperately to reinvent itself as a radical force, but finally drifting into the political mainstream. The story is set against such historic events as the Cold War, the Sino-Soviet split and the social radicalisation of the late sixties. It offers lessons for revolutionary activists today.

Tom O’Lincoln is an American born Marxist historian, author and one of the founders of the International Socialist Tendency in Australia. He has produced first-hand accounts of the 1974-75 revolution in Portugal, the Sandanistas in Nicaragua, the Phillipines after the downfall of Ferdinand Marcos, the USSR under Mikhail Gorbachev and the upheavals against Suharto in Indonesia. He is currently a member of Socialist Alternative and an editor of the online journal Marxist Interventions.

Additional information

Weight 270 g
Dimensions 15.5 × 23 × 1.896 cm