Ruben reports on a panel hosted by the Platypus Affiliated Society on which RCO member Anthony Furia was a speaker.
The Revolutionary Communist Organization (RCO) was invited to speak on the recent platypus panel on imperialism on Saturday December 2nd. The Spartacist League of Australia, and the Solidarity grouping were also invited to speak. For those who do not no , Platypus is a left group established in 2006 that seeks to dissect the so called ‘death’ of the left and work towards how a new left can be built , that organizes study groups, talks and forums mostly in the US, but also here with their Melbourne section. Central committee member Anthony Furia spoke as the representative of the RCO with, Neil F. speaking for the Sparts and David Glanz for solidarity.
The Panel underlined the ongoing persistence of the spectre of sectarianism on the Australian left. The Spartacists largely brushed the character of imperialism beneath the rug, instead focusing on sectarian insults against the other groups present , in attacks on the RCO’s “Maximalist verbiage” on imperialism while apparently doing “no real action” and in attacks against solidarity as providing “cover” to “left- bureaucrats” in participating in an anti-AUKUS front. Instead the Sparts proposed their project to “Drive the AUKUS supporters out of the ALP” a project of entryism into the Bourgeois Party, ironically concealing their opportunism behind an ineffectual initiative into the undemocratic hull that is the ‘Labour’ Party. The sea of sectarianism swelled with members of the Spartacists, Bolshevik Leninists, and the erratic Maoist Author dent, turning their microphones to the Audience and attacking other groups for supposed failures of revolutionary leadership. I commend the unity of the Bolshevik Leninist and Spart unity in their 2 shared statements, however we must struggle for not for a unity of sects that engages in inconsequential actions, but for a unity of the advanced masses that can build a mass workers party.
Solidarity engaged more with the prompt; however, this was from a perspective of great power politics, and featured a denial of the character of imperialism as a division between the periphery, core and semi-periphery, and the relations of extraction under unequal exchange. This was furthered in the assertion that the periphery lacks capital investment, not that it is exploited, and rejects the material basis behind imperialism as established in Lenin’s famous pamphlet and expanded by theorists throughout the 20th and 21st centuries. However, solidarity’s engagement in real work in union organising against the imperialist war in Palestine, and in union organising and strikes underlines the ongoing relevance of the left and the need to merge socialism with the workers movement.
Anthony’s talk brilliant expanding on the essence of imperial exploitation that benefits both imperial core capitalists and workers, and about the nature of the welfare state as funded by the exploitation of workers in the periphery and semi-periphery as the core of Australian Imperialism. Despite being attacked with bizarre questions (one decried the RCO as being ‘idealist’ for calling capitalism vampiric in our program preamble), Anthony was able to effectively communicate the RCO’s doctrine of Programmatic unity as the solution to the crushing sectarianism present at the talk. Additionally, Anthony being at least 40 years younger than the 2 other panelists was an illuminating metaphor for (in my opinion) the correctness of the RCO’s line of unity and building a mass party counterposed against the old sectarianism that serves as an ulcer upon the victory of Communism.
PARTISAN! 
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