Jack McPhillips

Leslie John (Jack) McPhillips (* 1910 in Rockhampton, Queensland, † September 1, 2004 in Sydney, New South Wales) was for many years chairman of the party of the Communist Party of Australia (CPA ) and especially from the 1940s to the 1960s, a well-known figure in the Australian trade union movement.

Early life

Jack McPhillips was the eldest child in his family and went to Catholic school, which he finished with a qualified conclusion. His father was a railway engineer and he has performed in his early years into working life and later worked as a clerk at the Sydney Municipal Council, and as a reviewer for wool. McPhillips graduated from training at the East Sydney Technical College. He worked in a farmer cooperative and then at Colgate -Palmolive - Peet, where he also held positions in the trade unions. He was married from 1950 until his death and had two daughters.

Political life

1928 McPhillips joined the Australian Labor Party one, which he left at the time of the Great Depression in 1929 and then joined the CPA. As hundreds of thousands of other workers in Australia was forced to accept McPhillips in the years between the years 1931 to 1939 various temporary jobs. He was active in the former Unemployed Workers Movement and led to the CPA -led Militant Minority Movement, which pursued the goal of a militant, class-conscious labor union. In 1940 he was Secretary of the Federated Ironworkers Union and went for 18 months after Darwin and 1950 he was the national Generalsseketär. In 1949, he was arrested twice during the Australian coal mining strike of 1949 because of his active support and sentenced by the Court Industral and briefly detained. In 1952 he lost his position in the Iron Workers Union in the Cold War and the rise of anti-communism at the instigation of an anti-communist group in this union. From 1952 to 1968 worked in the CPA, which he supported in the union work.

As criticism arose in the military intervention in Czechoslovakia in 1968 and Euro communism as an alternative party model within the CPA, McPhillips was instrumental in the spin-off to the Socialist Party of Australia in 1971, the party chairman in 1984. He sat down in the SPA for cooperation with the Socialist Workers Party (SWP ) a, as the ALP and the combined in the Australian Council of Trade Unions Trade Unions in 1983 campaigning for a change in the wage and salary structures. The SWP was called in 1990 to the Democratic Socialist Party.

In 1988 McPhillips supported the SPA and SWP for a joint participation in elections as Socialist Alliance. The union failed after a sharp confrontation because of the Chinese massacre on Tiananmen Square in June 1989, because the SWP condemned this and the SPA advocated.

The CPA dissolved in 1991 and McPhillips sat down in 1996 to ensure that the SPA took the name Communist Party of Australia.

After the fall of the Soviet Union, McPhillips was ready to face the new demands of a socialist movement, which distinguished him from many of his generation communists.

He died at the age of 94 years in Sydney.