18.07.2024

Primary task set

Theory and programme are treated seriously, but there are leftist and anarchistic carryovers. Martin Greenfield reports on the Revolutionary Communist Organisation conference in Australia and the next steps that are needed in what will doubtless be a long journey

What a breath of fresh air: an organisation on the Australian left has emerged that has set its primary task as re-establishing a Communist Party!

Meeting at just its second conference in Brisbane on the weekend of July 6-7, the Revolutionary Communist Organisation passed a motion that states:

There is no possible road to a socialist society without the organisation of a mass communist workers’ party and the elevation of the working class to power led by this party. In the absence of such a party, the primary task of all communists is to create one.

If the comrades had passed no other motion, that would put them head and shoulders above the existing small confessional sects that litter the left.

Unlike those organisations, Trotskyite or Stalinite, which either pretend that other left groups do not exist or see the path to socialism through a handful of cadre going ‘directly to the class’, the RCO seeks to unify Marxist currents through a process of fusion to build strong links with the working class and its organisations over time.

Unlike most of the Marxist left in Australia, the RCO also takes theory and programme seriously. It seeks to adopt the approach of classical and orthodox Marxism - a programme with a minimum-maximum structure, that prioritises politics and the demand for a democratic republic at its centre. It understands partyism, that unity is around a programme that members accept as the basis of activity, not agreement around theoretical shibboleths.

If you read through its (overlong and over-detailed) programme and other documents, you will realise that the CPGB Draft programme and its politics have been a major influence. However, there are concerning leftist flourishes, such as wrong calls for a split in Australia’s peak union body, the ACTU and incorrectly describing the Australian Labor Party as the “primary party of Australian capitalism”.

But, unlike almost all other groups, the comrades, when queried on such matters, engage positively and are keen to develop their politics. A healthy culture.

The RCO is for the “strategy of patience”, as outlined in its ‘Theses on revolutionary strategy’. This for them means charting a course against left and right opportunism: “Right opportunists within the workers’ movement promote a strategy of ‘coalitionism’. This tendency seeks to forge alliances with bourgeois and petty bourgeois parties to form governments to advance workers interests,”

Meanwhile, left opportunism is

… represented by the ‘strikist’ tendency of the workers’ movement, [that] poses the general strike as the primary weapon in the arsenal of the proletariat … [where] the spontaneous activity of the working class will give rise to explosions of class struggle during which revolutionaries may lead an insurrection.

These political ideas will be very familiar to readers of the Weekly Worker.

A further indication of the RCO’s politics comes from a post on social media in November 2023: “Four books that had a major influence on our politics”. It posts images of Capital by Karl Marx, Revolutionary strategy by Mike Macnair, History and class consciousness by Georg Lukács and Imperialism in the 21st century by John Smith.

The RCO emerged from a study group in Brisbane of comrades who had in part been through the failed Socialist Alliance experiment of the then Democratic Socialist Party. After an interregnum in direct-action, eco-anarchist groups, they identified the need for a partyist culture for communism. The comrades encountered a group of high school students in Melbourne who had established the ‘Collective of Leninist Youth’. These groups merged to form the RCO two years ago and have grown to around 70 members.

Conference

The conference saw open debate among delegates and non-delegate members of the RCO. It also granted speaking rights to non-member observers, including your correspondent and two from the ‘post-Cliffite’ Socialist Alternative (SAlt), which is the largest and noisiest far-left group in Australia.

An impromptu debate between myself and a comrade from SAlt took place on the question of elections. SAlt is the dominant group in a ‘sub-reformist’ electoral coalition called Victorian Socialists, whose platform is practically indistinguishable from the left-liberal Green Party.

When pressed on the need for a revolutionary group to have a revolutionary programme - and an election offering connected to this programme - the SAlt comrade celebrated the fact they have none and were guided by “where we can get most traction as an organisation”. Their opportunism was thus laid bare for the RCO comrades to see.

However, it was a serious oversight of conference not to develop ideas around the forthcoming federal election, due by May. Victorian Socialists work is one thing, but comrades must focus on high politics to inform their activity. How to approach the ALP? What to say about the Greens? What demands do we put to ALP ‘left’ candidates?

A motion to change the name of the organisation to Communist Unity was set aside, with a group of comrades to work with the incoming central committee to recommend a new name and work towards a possible socialist unity conference in 2025.

It would make sense to change the name, not only to drop the tautology of ‘revolutionary communist’, but to adopt a name that promotes the central task of the group - unifying communists around a democratic programme fighting for a partyist culture on the left. The RCO is in discussions with the ‘third worldist’ Red Ant collective, which is a tiny splinter from the Democratic Socialist Party. Unity with them on a principled basis could be a catalyst for a name change.

The comrades did vote to change the name of their journal from the anarchistic sounding Direct Action to The Partisan, reflecting its struggle for a partyist culture in the Australian socialist movement. It needs to turn this journal - online, in print and in social media - into its primary weapon for propaganda, debate and organisation.

The delegates debated a wide range of topics over the two-day conference: the nature of imperialism and of the Chinese state; organisational tasks; women’s oppression; the climate movement; the national question in Australia; sexual freedom; electoral work - to name a few.

A motion on “actually existing socialism”, moved by an impressive comrade with what I would call ‘left Stalinist’ politics, wanted to commit the group’s perspectives to “defend the continuation, deepening and export of these socialist projects” (emphasis added): namely China, Vietnam, North Korea and Cuba. Do the comrades really want these dead-end projects exported?

The comrade happily accepted an amendment to only refer to Cuba, (an opportunist dodge to get the politics through, while avoiding debating North Korea) and accepted an addendum referring to Cuba having a “local dictatorship of the proletariat”. Really? A rushed discussion did not allow for clarity on this matter and it seems the comrades are lumbered with this motion. Why it is in the perspectives document is beyond me. There are no plans for any activity based on it.

There is much to be admired in the group, but it also has serious shortfalls - some unavoidable, but many may be overcome through experience. One positive is the youth of the group - I doubt they have many members over the age of 30. But this also means a lack of serious experience and no real historical ties to the workers’ movement or its culture. It includes members from a range of political backgrounds - and none. This means it can attack the question of unity from a partyist perspective and has junked the sect methodology of agreement around theoretical questions that plagues the socialist left.

The comrades, however, suffer from a chronic over-formalism and a pandering to campaign ideas without any purchase whatsoever. An example: despite the age of the comrades, the conference has committed the RCO to organise a formal ‘Young Communist Caucus’ for all under the age of 26. Looking around the room, that would include at least half the membership.

On top of this, the comrades wish to form a youth organisation named “Red! Socialist Youth Front” - with whom, it is unclear. There are also plans for Red Workers Clubs, an Anti-Imperialist Solidarity Front, a Red-Green Front, a Communist Women’s Front as part of a Women’s Liberation Union, and an autonomous group, ‘United 4 Ecosocialism’.

This all smacks of aching inexperience, substitutionism and putting the cart way before the horse. This playing at partyism, and debating contentless united front organisations that emerge not from the material reality of the struggle, but from the heads of the comrades themselves, does not do them any favours.

Anarchistic

Further, elements of the group seem not to have moved past anarchistic ideas of organisation. A small organisation of under 100 does not need an elaborate structure. Indeed, mass parties can be strangled by over formalism. While their subjective motivation is democratic, the result is a bureaucratic straitjacket. A hallmark of anarchism.

There was a motion for an RCO convention to meet every two months to effectively police the work of all other committees, including the central committee. The proposal was for this convention to be a delegate body from the cells. It is concerning enough that an organisation of this size has delegate structures for its conference - including from formal caucuses from “specifically oppressed groups” within its rules - but to introduce layers of oversight smacked of anarchistic distrust of the organisation’s culture, and a very concerning inwardness and excessive formalism.

The amendment on rules and structure also included a proposal for conference to have delegates carrying mandated voting instructions from cells in a signed code of conduct. What is the point of meeting to debate if you have instructions on how to vote from your cell?

The proposal, from a comrade who has recently come from the direct-action ecological movement, was thankfully defeated. But there are lingering traces of anarchistic sympathies in organisational matters, with delegate systems and mandates, which are wrong in principle and completely unnecessary for a small organisation trying to build an open, partyist culture.

What is also of concern is the acceptance of a ‘discipline and control commission’. Such commissions were the bureaucratic weapons of secret factions in ‘official communist’ parties and have been misused in Trotskyist groups too. While the comrades’ desire for democracy is commendable, they have gone completely over the top with rules, committees, delegate systems and empty proposals for mass organisations.

Further, a culture of ‘two-minute democracy’ where, although the mover of motions had seven minutes, rejoinders had just two minutes each - a for-and-against structure - and a policed debate, where heckles and ‘facial expressions’ such as eye-rolling are not allowed. Of course, a more rigorous, open press would allow for the real differences to be explored and provide the background for conference debates, rather than pinched two-minute soundbites (on subjects that are often peripheral at best).

Three trends

Basically, there were three political blocs: a majority called the Marxist Unity Circle, which broadly has what you could call ‘Marxist Unity Group and CPGB-inspired’ politics. Then there is a small third-worldist Stalinite group, which defends “existing socialist experiments”, while another trend is more from the anarchist and direct-action ecological movement. A six-strong central committee was elected, containing all of them - four comrades reflecting the majority view, plus one comrade each from the ‘Stalinite’ and ‘anarchistic’ trends.

All this paints a very mixed picture. The comrades are earnest and serious - a welcome change. But they are clearly an isolated discussion and propaganda group, with little experience of engaging with the working class movement.

Conference agreed a programme that is more than 26,000 words long (twice the length of the Draft programme). Further, it passed a perspectives document (more than 5,000 words) that included many irrelevant matters. It also agreed a document called ‘Charting the course’, which was more like an ‘action list’ (nearly 6,000 words), and finally a ‘Theses on revolutionary strategy’ (nearly 5,000 words). On top of this, there are four other documents totalling more than 10,000 words - far too much even for a fully established party, let alone a small pre-party group.

This just creates confusion, ambiguity and ‘revolution by conference motion’. While rejecting the programmeless opportunism of most of the left grouplets, the RCO has gone too far the other way. It has set itself far too many ‘Potemkin village’ projects and included too many empty campaign and organisational ideas that simply will not be completed.

However, central to its project is an emerging understanding of partyism that is healthy. Over the next year, the RCO needs to focus on just one or two things - and get them right. It needs to declutter its agenda, look outward and engage with the workers’ movement through its press to give them something to cut their teeth on.

Its main priority should be professionalising The Partisan and developing communist journalism. The RCO should aim to transform it into a weapon that becomes compulsory reading on the Australian left, which has no serious journals to debate programme, strategy and tactics.

The most important thing, however, is that the comrades are thinking and are open to debate and a partyist culture. That alone sets them apart and gives them a chance of building something worthwhile.