21.05.2026

Sectarianism spawns liberalism

We do not advocate an ecumenical party, nor non-aggression pacts. On the contrary, political debates and political struggles are vital. As a sort of addendum, Mike Macnair replies to Red Ant Collective’s ‘anti-factionalism’

This article is, as it were, an appendix or addendum to my recent three-part series on ‘anti-factionalist’ arguments.¹ It is a reply to Haig Kisherian’s May 14 article, ‘Partyism and the limits of liberalism’, announcing and theorising his break with the Australian Communist Unity group in favour of the post-Trotskyist, ‘capitulator’, and practically Maoist group, ‘Red Ant Collective’.² Though the arguments are largely banal, at around 4,300 words they are more elaborated - and more upfront - than the arguments I addressed in my series.

Haig Kisherian tells us that ‘Partyism’ “argues for an ecumenical communist party, one that allows Trotskyists, Maoists, Hoaxists, Bordigists and everyone else to join under one democratic-centralist banner” (presumably “Hoaxists” is the spellchecker at work on ‘Hoxhaists’!). He says that he joined and has “made a sincere attempt to engage with Communist Unity. I contributed to debates, including being one of a tiny group of Marxist-Leninist voices at the 4th general conference”. However, he found Communist Unity organisationally dysfunctional and characterised by “liberalism” and “degenerative debates”.

The phrase, ‘Marxist-Leninist’, can be used by ‘official communists’, but is more commonly a tag for Maoists, since Maoist parties of the 1960s-80s routinely used it to flag their identification with Beijing (or, later, for some, with Tirana). It is deeply misleading, since the politics are non-Marxist (Maoists do not advocate the necessity of the class dictatorship of the proletariat over the other classes on the road to communism, and advocate people’s fronts, not independent workers’ movements) and anti-Leninist (their ‘Leninism’ would have attracted Krupskaya’s comment in the mid-1920s that if Lenin were alive he would be in prison).

Red Ant are not orthodox Maoists: they do not maintain the thesis of Soviet imperialism beginning with Khrushchev. But Kisherian does self-identify as “Marxist-Leninist” and Red Ant’s political line is at the end of the day a variant of the Maoist global line of ‘surrounding the cities’: that is, that revolutionary leadership is to come from the ‘global south’ (as Red Ant prefers to call the semi-colonial regimes), not from the proletariat as a global class.

Kisherian’s subheads are ‘In defence of the sect form’, ‘How I learned to stop hating and love the bureaucracy’, ‘Some sects cannot get along’ and ‘A disorganised Trotskyist sect’.

Bureaucracy

The second of these, ‘… love the bureaucracy’, is the central point of his argument, without which the others practically fall to the ground (though I will return to them). Kisherian’s argument is that:

A key assumption of partyism is that communism is a failed 20th century ideology. That its main issue has been the dreaded ‘bureaucracy’. That this is a ‘big problem’ that requires serious solutions. The right for people to form internal factions is considered one big way this ‘issue’ can be resolved. But is this true? Is communism a failed ideology that ‘grapples’ with bureaucracy? Does the Communist Party just need an internal liberal, multi-party democracy?

Communism is a massively successful international movement that has defeated fascism, lifted literal millions out of poverty, destroyed reactionary practices and bigotries, and sent the first woman into space. It still continues to exist as the dominant governing system in China, Cuba, Vietnam, North Korea and Laos.

In the first place, if the second paragraph was truth, it would support banning factions (as ‘official communist’ and Maoist parties do generally). It would not support Kisherian’s further argument in defence of the ‘sect form’. What would follow would be that believers in the existence of “actually existing socialism” (which, shortened to ‘AES’, is how Red Ant characterises China, Cuba, Vietnam, North Korea and Laos³) should join whatever official party is recognised as the local co-thinkers of the ‘AES’ states. I do not know whether in Australia this would be the Communist Party of Australia, the Communist Party of Australia (Marxist-Leninist) or the Australian Communist Party. It would not be Red Ant, which is a ‘capitulator’ formation of Trotskyist origin.

(The original ‘capitulators’ broke with the Russian opposition after Stalin and his co-thinkers’ left turn in early 1929. There have been a variety of subsequent groups which started as Trotskyist, but became convinced in one way or another of ‘official communism’: for some examples, the tendencies of Michel Mestre in France and John Lawrence in Britain in the mid-1950s; the Sri Lankan Lanka Sama Samaja Party in the early 1960s; the Argentinian Partido Revolucionario del Los Trabajadores (Combatiente) in the early 1970s; and the US Socialist Workers Party and its co-thinkers, and the British group of John Ross and his co-thinkers, Socialist Action, in the 1980s. (Red Ant is descended from the Australian co-thinkers of the US SWP.⁴)

Maintaining separate organisations which defend broadly the same political platform as ‘official communism’ is plain sectarianism. What the hell is the point of such organisations except to maintain the status of their leaders and their particular tactical shibboleths? It is also, actually … public factionalism. As far as the broad workers’ vanguard can be concerned, these groups are visibly no more than factions of communism.

Secondly. There is no doubt that the Soviet Union and the east European regimes did fail; that this failure delivered an enormous blow to the idea of socialism - not just in the imperialist countries, but also in the ‘global south’. Red Ant recognise as much.⁵

Kisherian simply hand-waves away this point:

The USSR collapsed due to betrayal from their dreaded bureaucracy, and China will follow soon after! (assuming it hasn’t already fallen due to Dengism).

This is an unfalsifiable claim with alternative explanations. I would argue that the USSR collapsed because it tried to fix its economic issues through political liberalisation. when the moment clearly called for a tactical retreat to some new version of the NEP. I and many others would dispute the idea that China is not pursuing socialism. But, either way, I’m talking to a brick wall here, because the ‘traitorous bureaucracy’ is an unfalsifiable claim. Any communist country with a functional government simply hasn’t failed yet, and any that do fail must have failed because of their bureaucracy. There’s no way to ‘disprove’ the theory, and so debating it becomes a waste of time.

Actually, the theory is perfectly disprovable. Let us suppose that (as US strategists planned) the Soviet bloc had broken up through national contradictions; or that it had fallen through a mass street-and-strike movement bringing in liberalism. Both are perfectly conceivable, but neither actually happened. The Soviet leadership collapsed its own regime and dumped the eastern bloc states, in the hope of overcoming its economic problems through gaining access to the US-led financial and trade system. Some east European states had, by taking distance from Moscow, obtained limited access of this sort in the 1970s (Yugoslavia, Poland, Hungary) and obtained temporary economic growth spurts by doing so. So it is not a hypothesis that the Soviet bureaucracy collapsed its regime, led alone an “unfalsifiable claim”: it is a fact.

Secondly, Kisherian’s argument poses the question: why did the Soviet regime have “economic issues”, which every Soviet leader from Stalin onwards had identified, and which the Gorbachev leadership hoped to solve by perestroika? There is an enormous mass of evidence that the incentive structures of forced collectivisation and the ‘plan’ tended towards the ‘stagnation’ which Soviet leaders endlessly complained of.⁶ Kisherian argues that in the 1980s “the moment clearly called for a tactical retreat to some new version of the NEP”. But the Soviet regime had been experimenting with partial marketisation since Khrushchev and throughout the Brezhnev period. It was the failure of these efforts which led to the perestroika turn and the collapse.⁷

China

Kisherian’s argument for his alternative is, at the end of the day, the survival and prospering of China. I say just ‘China’, because the US now seems to be in the end-game of its siege warfare against Cuba; the Juche ideology in North Korea is pretty pure nationalism, and there is substantial Chinese-style marketisation; and Vietnam and Laos look like ‘normal’ labour superexploitation semi-colonies. In relation to China, the question is: in what direction is China moving? In 2005 I wrote:

US geopolitics in relation to the USSR and Vietnam led in the 1970s to the US making significant trade, financial and technical openings towards China. The result, after the fall of the ‘Gang of Four’, was a major shift, through a NEP-style policy, in the direction of the development of capitalism in China within the political integument of the bureaucratic regime. This development has involved not only inwards investment by capitals from the existing imperialist centres, but also a substantial growth of Chinese capitals.

Under these conditions the Chinese state leadership has around the turn of the century been endeavouring to reinvent the state with a view to managing a cold transition to capitalism without collapsing into semi-colonial status. For ideological forms for this purpose it has drawn both on the long history of the pre-revolutionary Confucian bureaucracy, and on ‘social market’, ‘sustainable development’ and social-democratic ideas current in western Europe. It faces, however, two major contradictions in this project.

The first is that it is not in the interests of the US that China should emerge as an independent capitalist or imperialist power, either strategically - because the ring of US clients and semi-clients round China is not at all identical to the effective subordination of the European powers to the US, so that an independent capitalist China would present a strategic threat to US world hegemony - or immediately - because the immediate solvency of the US financial system depends on sucking Chinese money capital into US money markets. This contradiction is reflected in US ‘human rights’ rhetoric, in US pressure on China to alter its monetary and economic policies in favour of the US and “enforce IPRs effectively”, and in US endeavours to manipulate control of oil supplies and to create a more effective encirclement of China through US moves into central Asia.

The second is that the Chinese bureaucracy remains a descendant of the Soviet bureaucracy, and the claim of the CPC to represent the workers and peasants remains an important component in the internal coherence of the party and in the legitimacy of the party’s “leading role”. This contradiction is reflected both internally in ideological manoeuvres and inner-party tensions in the CPC, and externally in ‘democracy’ mutterings from the intelligentsia and localised worker and peasant protests, of types very traditional in the bureaucratic regimes. The failure of an independent trade union movement to emerge, in spite of massive proletarianisation and growth of a reserve army of labour, and the presence instead of local protests which appeal to honest bureaucrats against corrupt bureaucrats, are the clearest evidence in the considerable obscurity of current Chinese politics that the bureaucratic regime remains in place despite its extensive capitalist overlay.⁸

Twenty years since writing this, I think it gets the dynamics of the situation of China about right and is confirmed by subsequent developments. It seems to me clear that the direction of movement is not towards socialism, but towards China as an imperialist rival to the USA. As yet this involves a much lower level of control of the destination countries of Chinese investment compared to the USA; but this was true just as much of French, US and German investments in Latin America in the later 19th century - competing with the British world hegemon, and offering a more ‘egalitarian’ and ‘progressive’ approach than Britain; but nonetheless needing to enforce debts and property rights and make a return above domestic investments.

Again, the argument that China is moving towards imperialist capitalism is absolutely not “unfalsifiable”. It may turn out to be wrong; but is it obviously wrong enough to bet the future of the international left on its being wrong (as Parvus and his co-thinkers in 1914 bet the future of the international left on German victory)?

Finally on this issue. Kisherian throughout this section of his piece proceeds on the basis that my arguments are characterised by an untheorised hatred of “bureaucrats” and “bureaucracy”. In reality, my arguments start with Marx on the Prussian state bureaucracy in the Critique of Hegel’s philosophy of right [law] and his characterisations of Louis Bonaparte’s political regime in The civil war in France: that the state bureaucracy pursues not the general interest, but the ‘turf interests’ of individual bureaucrats. For myself, going beyond this starting point, I understand the full-time officials of trade unions, political parties, etc, and of states, as a section of the employed middle class - a component of the petty bourgeoisie, characterised by holdings of informal “intellectual property rights”. Their class origins (which comrade Kisherian thinks are decisive) are overridden in most cases by their current situation. It is this class character which produces both the “economic issues” of the USSR (managers and officials lying to keep their jobs, leading to planning failures) and the dynamic towards capitalism, which is produced by deploying market mechanisms to solve this problem.

Kisherian, then, on the question of “love the bureaucracy”, offers merely a politics of nostalgia for the world as it was before 1989-1991. This is a very common feature of the left, in a variety of different forms (left social democrats, for example, imagine a return to the cold war period system of economic management). It is useless as a politics for the future.

Sect defence

Kisherian argues that “Sects largely emerge during times of failure. Conversely, sects primarily decline, once it becomes clear that one organisation in particular has momentum.” He offers no historical evidence of this claim at all. The historical evidence is, in fact, the reverse. Revolutionary crises “lift all boats” and produce a proliferation of left groups of one sort and another. The Second and Third Congresses of Soviets in October 1917 and May 1918 included representation not only from Bolsheviks, Mensheviks (defencist and internationalist) and Socialist Revolutionaries (right and left) but also from a wide range of smaller groups. In Portugal in 1974-76 every Trotskyist international faction and some Maoist ones constructed their own Portuguese organisation. And so on.

Conversely, Kisherian’s argument - for free competition between rival sects with one coming out on top - pays no attention at all to the actual history, in which the unification of groups produces a ‘snowball effect’, meaning the unified group has much more weight. This goes back to the 1875 Gotha unification of the Lassalleans and Eisenachers, to the 1889 Hainfeld unification of Austrian social democrats, and so on; it can be seen in the recent past in the greater weight of the Portuguese Left Bloc, compared to its former components, and on a larger scale and temporarily with Rifondazione Comunista in Italy (destroyed when it entered government).

There is, on the contrary, no example of one of the competing far-left sects ‘winning out’ and becoming the dominant dynamic leadership, leading to a mass party. And this in spite of the fact that comrade Kisherian’s policy - split in order to try out a better tactic - has been persistently attempted, not only in the imperialist countries, but also in the ‘global south’. Plenty of evidence is available for both Trotskyism and Maoism. Red Ant itself is one of the diminished remnants of the Australian SWP, later ‘Democratic Socialist Party’, which at its height imagined it had marginalised the rest of the far left.

Kisharian’s fourth heading, ‘Some sects cannot get along’, argues that “often the debate itself ends up being an unproductive waste of time. The time spent debating whether or not office workers count as proletarian could have been better spent debating a thousand or so more productive and interesting questions.” In reality, however, this debate has real and immediate practical consequences.

The Spartacists, for example, argue for Communist Unity (and in Britain for the British left) to pursue a policy of industrial colonisation, which failed for US Maoists and the British left in the 1970s, and again (more disastrously) for the Fourth International in the 1980s. They justify this line by claiming that office and shop workers are not proletarians. The converse of this point is that the Spartacists’ line rests on an implicit syndicalism - the belief that power must be taken through a general strike or strike wave. The contrary of this approach is that, because the proletariat includes the whole social class dependent on the wage share of output, for the class to be capable of taking power it needs to organise campaigns for law reforms (like the Ten Hour Day Act 1847) and for electoral representation. What superficially appears as an issue of theory (what is the proletariat?) is actually an issue of immediate political choices.

It may be that some comrades who have been influenced by the ‘partyism’ of the CPGB imagine that what we propose is peaceful coexistence between factions. It is not. Mark Fischer made the point as far back as 1996. We do not propose non-aggression pacts, but open political combat on the basis of agreements for common action round a programme voted on and accepted - not agreed - as the basis for common action.⁹

It is this political combat which comrade Kisherian takes to be “autonomy and individualism”. If I compare the left of the 1970s to the left of today, the former was a lot better politically educated - in spite of having much less access to readings than today’s left (which has the Marxists Internet Archive, and so on). Why? The answer is that it was not only the case that the ‘Unified Secretariat of the Fourth International’, in which I was involved, had routine factions (called “tendencies”) and the conflict of the factions led members to read more deeply. It was also that members of the old CPGB, the British Socialist Workers Party and the splinters off it, the Healyite Workers Revolutionary Party, etc, debated with each other and, as a result, education of participants was deepened. The sect view that such debates are a waste of time and everyone should face outwards to the mass of the class produces both dumbing down and the visible political victory of forms of opportunist adaptation to capitalist politics, in the hope of reaching the masses and outcompeting.

Comrade Kisherian claims that the partyists’ advocacy of open debate and freedom of association (factions) is liberalism. The truth is the exact reverse. It is liberalism which conceives the role of political parties as competing with each other to attract the masses. And it is this liberalism which comrade Kisherian’s defence of sectarianism promotes.

1. ‘New proscriptions for old’, April 30 2026 (weeklyworker.co.uk/worker/1583/new-proscriptions-for-old); ‘Socialism requires democracy’, May 7 (weeklyworker.co.uk/worker/1584/socialism-requires-democracy; ‘Break with diplomatic self-silencing’, May 14 (weeklyworker.co.uk/worker/1585/break-with-diplomatic-self-silencing).↩︎

2. redantcollective.org/2026/05/14/partyism-and-the-limits-of-liberalism.↩︎

3. Eg, redantcollective.org/2025/11/29/there-is-nothing-wrong-with-the-left; also Kisherian (note 2 as merely the abbreviation).↩︎

4. redantcollective.org/2023/04/27/the-australian-swps-break-from-trotskyism-and-its-relevance-today.↩︎

5. Text cited above, note 3.↩︎

6. H Ticktin Origins of the crisis in the USSR (London 1992) provides a clear theoretical account.↩︎

7. Eg, M Lewin Stalinism and the seeds of Soviet reform New York 1974.↩︎

8. In a contribution to a CPGB discussion on the ‘Soviet question’, which used to be on a page of this discussion on our party website, lost in a hacker attack some years ago.↩︎

9. ‘Room for all revolutionaries’ Weekly Worker November 28 1996 (weeklyworker.co.uk/worker/169/room-for-all-revolutionaries).↩︎