PARTISAN!

Porco questions how the RCO can intervene in Australia’s sectarian Left, and what form this intervention should take.

What happens after the election?

It seems plausible that Labor will form a minority government in this upcoming election. Perhaps the Liberals will. Nobody should trust polls these days. The RCO should have only one question on its mind: What role will the Left play for the next three years?

The Left’s current trajectory, is making us more irrelevant, more of a clique and less aware of our own failures. The Left absolves itself of any historical task with ideological justifications and pitiful blame shifting. The Left doesn’t understand itself.

Why have we gotten to this place? Well no one really knows exactly, anyone who is confident about one single cause is either deluding themselves or lying to you. Nevertheless, in the context of Australia there are some generalisations that can be made. Australian activists are often working on models from other countries and are a little vague on what their comrades actually believe or how they became socialists in the first place.

Because of this, often you will find that discussions about “the Left” in Australia fall inevitably into discussion about the United States, or Europe, and disregard the real collection of groups, institutions and individuals that actually exist on this continent.

The RCO has set itself the project of intervening in the ‘movement’ of the left. We want the sects to break bread together, work out their differences — enough —hug, and then build a party with us.

But this party will not spontaneously develop. No Socialist party ever has. This project will have to be chipped away at for many years. It will have to be developed within the cities, in regional towns and throughout the Pacific where people are very concerned about the threat of climate change and rising sea levels.

What movement?

The sectarian left is not a movement. They are the losers of history. They cling to some romantic idea of a past revolutionary period. We live in a totally different world from even 10 years ago. We are all blindsided by the rate of change. Politics has become deeply repulsive to most working class people.

We have insulated ourselves from the world, created obnoxious strawmen out of every political tendency, even within our own traditions, and ultimately all we have to show for our liquidation into centre-left parties and weird subcultures are intricate mythologies and conspiracy theories as to why we aren’t able to succeed and why the working class doesn’t trust us.

The RCO will gain new members over the next three years. Many of them will be young, inspired and “radical” new leftists. We should consider carefully how we prepare them for the future.

Selling the mythology of the Left to another generation could be fatal to our organisation. This mythology of betrayal and unfair contingencies has done nothing to further our cause. We would rather tell self congratulating stories about how the Left was once the agent of world history, rather than introspect into why we can no longer make that claim.

This continent deserves more than Third-Worldist guerrilla posers and pseudo-Trotskyist tailism. This continent deserves it’s own politics. A politics which is aesthetically unique, creative and for lack of a better term, pacific. This region must be organised with a consideration of the conditions it faces in particular.

The international working class should always be primary for communists, but if we fetishise this abstraction too much we run the risk of focusing on a working class over there, rather than the working class here.

We are in a recession. We have had negative per capita growth for 7 quarters. Homelessness is on the rise. Wages continue to basically stagnate. Except for the police’s, of course.

The communist party we want may not be able to be built for a decade or two. Are we ready to think on those time scales? How much revolutionary patience do we actually have?

What is to be done?

The Left should be humbling itself to the study of Australian society as it is. Only once we are able to act in a way that is independent to the news cycles and crazy-making information deluge of capitalist society will we be in a position to begin our intervention.

We need to research the Left. If we had numbers on our approximate manpower, lessons individual organisers had learned in the recent past, and communications and campaigns which had been fruitful between organisations we might have more to say about what we need to be doing. If this information was easily accessible and interpretable by every member of the RCO, we might see rapid growth. We could draw meaningful tactical conclusions about how to recruit new members and what to teach them.

Do we even know what the average new leftist wants to learn about?

We need a “Workers Inquiry” in the socialist movement. We need hard data on where people are at, why they joined the left, what they do when they’re not organising, and what they think does and doesn’t work.

If we plan to intervene in a movement of socialists, we need to radically increase our understanding of what these socialists actually think. The Left relies too much on assertions, innuendos and wish casting and not enough on actual research that isn’t just for someone’s PhD thesis.

We will never be able to restart our struggle from a fresh position. We must use the tools we have in our hands. Considering this, capitalism has provided us with phenomenal infrastructure to actually poll the “Australian” Left and it’s own unique oddities. Why doesn’t it seem like we’ve used it?

The mythology of the Left has caused many organisers to become complacent. All the email lists and fishing at rallies for new faces has been used for the pitiful cause of “movement building” rather than assessing why people actually become radicalised. We don’t really know why they do other than vagaries. We can do better. It may take some years. But data and analysis are the first step. Not interventions in these decrepit “leftist” spaces.

The road to an American [Australian?] socialist movement surely lies over the debris, or around the rotting off-shoots of, this fetid jungle of sects. –
Hal Draper, 1973, Anatomy of a Micro-Sect