Brunhilda Olding, Melbourne
I’m a proud member of the RCO, I will never pretend to be naught but anything else, so take this critique as one born of love first and foremost.
I will be blunt: the RCO is far too verbose. Nearly every statement or article put out is dressed in the most theoretical possible language, and the syntax and phrasing that sounds like it crawled out of the volumes of the Collected Works of Lenin. This is not to say that there aren’t times when we need to be precise with our words and writings. Yet the majority of the time we fail to be accessible with our statements. The vast majority of the working class are not schooled in Marxist theory. Most unionists don’t care to read pages upon pages of theory to say that they should fight for democratic control of their union.
The weakness of the RCO is fundamentally that we are a young organisation. Both in the most literal term, and in the average age of our members, in Melbourne in particular. This fundamentally weakens our ability to go beyond the student and academic bases. We seem to have forgotten the importance of the merger formula, we need both unionists and the socialist movement to truly become the nucleus of the Communist movement in Australia. A Marxist group without trade union militants is nothing more than a discussion circle. We need to struggle to go beyond our image of student academics. This will require an organisation wide discussion, and a discussion that must be held out in the open. If we wish to walk the walk, we claim to talk we need to live up to that.
Our intervention into Unionists for Palestine was a failed mess, not because of the failures of Unionists for Palestine, but because we fundamentally failed to engage with unionists on their basis as unionists, and we failed to break the image we have of students listening to random obscure theory. Every Communist must be more than just a well-read theoretician, they must be a unionist, they must be a worker, they must be leading the charge in their very workplaces to truly be the vanguard we claim to be.
PARTISAN! 