PARTISAN!

Edith Fischer, Brisbane

In her letter in the last edition of the Partisan (Partisan #2, September ‘24), Comrade Olding of the RCO’s Melbourne section argued that the material produced by the organisation is too verbose and theoretically abstract, and that our output must be refined in order to appeal to working trade unionists and the broader potential base for a mass communist party. I think this approach is not only wrong: it reflects a dangerous economistic tendency that needs to be repudiated.

I will say two things on the matter. Firstly, the problem of RCO members being unable to communicate the ideas of the organisation in text or in person is not a problem of the organisation’s politics being too theoretically high minded or our output being too sophisticated. It is a problem in the confidence and political experience of the comrades involved. In Brisbane, RCO members have produced simple, easy to read flyers that clearly communicate our political line, and have communicated these views with ease. Militants and workers in the struggle are not idiots, they are perfectly capable of understanding our perspective. Comrade Olding’s orientation would see us treat the working class as uneducated children in need of carefully manufactured messaging. This populism masks a deep elitism – the workers do not understand our orientation, we must dumb it down

The economistic orientation is unmasked by Olding herself within her own letter. Workers do not need expositions on the nature of value, she says, they want to hear about how to democratise their trade unions. But we do not fight to democratise the trade unions for its own sake. We are not syndicalists (perhaps Comrade Olding is!), nor are we vulgar trade unionists. We fight to bring the working class to power as a ruling class. In order to accomplish this task, the working class must educate itself in its historical task and class program. The task is to show to the working class why they must care about the debates within the social and natural sciences, about uneven exchange and the patriarchy of the wage, about constitutions and republics and monarchies. The fetish for economistic class struggle reflects a lowest common denominator politics, not communism!

Comrades should reject the dumbness of dumbing down. It enlightens no one, and clarifies nothing. Of course materials, where it’s necessary, should be short and to the point. This does not mean liquidating our politics, nor treating the working class like they are children.