PARTISAN!

Unity talks have been raised amongst several Marxist organisations in the UK. Ruben Sol reports.

Recently there has been promising progress towards the unity of Partyist groups in the UK.

Comrades will likely be aware of Prometheus magazine’s series of articles on the party question published following their return from inactivity in 2024 and merger with ‘The Partyist’ — a new partyist communist magazine (hence the name) founded in the same year. This series interrogated the need for a party in the UK, what type of party it should be and how such a party should be formed. This series brought submissions from a range of UK partyist groups and communists. It went beyond events held by the ‘party time’ series of discussions, which were more vaguely focused, concentrating and putting into dialogue various UK partyist groupings.

This led to a meeting on joint work being organized, initially pitched as for reading the Marxist Unity Group (MUG) reader. However, in this meeting between Talking About Socialism (TAS), the Communist Party of Great Britain Provisional Central Committee (CPGB-PCC), Prometheus Journal, Why Marx, and Revolutionary Socialism in the 21^st Century (RS21), the prospect of unity talks was raised. At the time of writing, two discussions have taken place between the CPGB-PCC, TAS and Prometheus, with RS21 attending the first meeting as an observer. RS21, however, will not participate in the current unity talks due to being a relatively new group and not having a set position on the party form, meaning they did not have the same basis for unity as the other groups .

The rest of the parties, with the exception of Why Marx due to overlap with the other groups, have had 2 online sessions (set to be expanded to in person talks) with the eventual goal of a conference on a binding principle (according to Comrade Jack Conrad of the CPGB-PCC in the weekly worker), wherein all of the groups would be bound to uphold the democratic decisions. These regrouped and strengthened partyist forces would then have a strong foundation to advocate for wider socialist dialogue, regroupment, joint work, and eventually organisational unity. This process has two stages — unifying and strengthening of the partyist movement, then unifying the entire socialist movement.

However, there are still concrete issues to be resolved in these talks. In their statement on the talks, TAS lays out 6 points of discussion focusing on the internal structure of the future organisation, how it should deal with comrades who would undermine their project (such as those that support the imperialist war in Ukraine), and the strategy for the engagement with the wider movement. However, these seem promising, and the talks look likely to succeed given the interest and commitment of all current organisations involved and the later prospect of unity with RS21.

These unity talks are certainly an exciting development, being an application of the strategy of maximal unity of the socialist movement and the partyist strategy in the UK, where the situation of scattered left sects is similar to that in Australia. However, the immediate parties involved are a different matter. In the UK, having many partyist groups of very similar orientations, the prospect of organisational unity between these groups is a self-evident question. In Australia there is but a singular explicitly partyist formation, the Revolutionary Communist Organisation (RCO). Much of the socialist movement is found in the other sects, which follow a strategy of indefinite growth of their own grouping to the detriment of others, unifying in the revolutionary situation, where the spontaneous action of the workers will recognize their line as correct. These sects can focus on various niches such as the student movement or various trade unions seeking to distinguish their politics and appeal from the other sects. Justifying their theoretical unity as maintaining their organisational cohesiveness, (and as a defence of their own reproducing leaderships) they are unwilling to agree to immediate unity. Likely they will only adopt partyist perspectives and embrace a unification process though the demonstration of programmatic unity, wider engagement with them and their publications, and the growing relevance (hopefully) of the RCO as an anti-sectarian sect.

Thus, from these unity talks we should pay attention not just to the basis and strategy of a unity conference, but also to the concrete perspectives for orienting to, and winning, the wider socialist movement to the communist party. While the RCO would likely willingly enter unification processes with any other partyist groups that emerge, or engage in significant mergers in which we would retain integral democratic rights and not be subordinated to state loyalists, we are not currently at this stage. These talks, their successes, failures, and lessons will hence be a lesson for the future, however immediate or distant it may be. For our comrades in the UK we hope that their unification progress can prove successful and that they carry forward the fight for a communist party with renewed vigour!

Acknowledgement: This article draws on Statements/ chronology from Jack Conrad, Why Marx and TAS, as well as statements of the Prometheus editorial board and the Weekly Worker.