The Partisan Editorial Board introduce Partisan! #6.
What kind of party for the Left? We at Partisan and in the RCO ask ourselves this ad nauseum. In this issue, we go over issues the left has with party-building, and an excellent article by Mila Volkova explains the RCO’s strategy toward the issue. Included also are excellent reprints: firstly, The Problem with Vanguards by Andreas Chari, and For Aboriginal Soveriegnty by Gary Foley. Chari’s essay is an exploration into what form the communist party takes. Foley’s 1988 speech is important because he declares that “the only sort of Australia” he can imagine Indigenous peoples living harmoniously within and alongside is a Socialist Republic that where “racism, sexism and exploitation have been eliminated”. It is a kind of radical black liberationist politics that is bereft in the Left of today. But before that, he tears into the Left of his time, asking, “What the hell are you mob doing?”
What are we doing? Not a lot, if you bounce between the social media accounts of different socialist sects. Maybe they showed at Invasion Day rallies on January 26th (many of the RCO’s members did, and this issue includes a flyer that was circulated by comrades), maybe they posted infographics, maybe they bravely declared from their keyboards that “the colony will fall”. But ultimately, as Alyssa Duane argues in her piece, we focus too much on posturing and ‘storm chasing’ activism. We at Partisan and in the RCO repeat til the cows come home that the communist movement needs to be united into a single party with a Marxist program. This is why we call ourselves ‘Partyists’ – since we support a single, united, Communist party. We aren’t coalitionists, so we don’t think the communist movement should exist as a broad coalition of everyone’s own separate sect(s).
Only by moving out of the sect form can communists win any real political legitimacy in this country (or anywhere, really). And only by regrouping the communist movement, by engaging with the mass movements and militants, can we come together to collective grow out of permanent sect-ism. Arguing for a Partyist program is a bit tough, since most of the Left are only ostensibly interested in a party. In the worst cases (see: the Communist Party(ies?) of Australia), they already consider themselves the legitimate party of the movement. These are myths and misconceptions that can only be done away with through serious political struggle.
Communists should be where the class is, more or less. This is why communists argue not only for engaging in workplaces to organise workers directly there, but also to engage with workers wherever they are radicalised and politicised: at rallies, in public and political life, in classrooms, on the street, so on. We have to engage with all unions, not just special left-ish ones. Lenin argues succinctly in Left-Wing Communism that communists must not shy away from organising within reactionary unions, or split the union movement to form their own special ‘red unions’. This simply leaves the working class at the mercy of reactionary and bureaucratic trade union officials. Martin Greenfield’s article, which appears first in this issue, makes a similar argument.
However, we cannot focus all our effort on engaging with workers in the workplace. Such a limited, workerist perspective belies an elitist fetish for ‘the ideal working class’ – more often than not, it is an imagined, special kind of worker that is placed above others. So this means we should engage with all workers in all industries, not just ‘blue collar’ workers, like nurses, teachers, fast food workers, retail workers, so on. We aim to build a mass party of the working class, armed with a Marxist program. This means we must engage with the working class as a whole, not just specific sections of it that we value above others. But it also means we have to engage with the rest of the left. We cannot simply “go straight to the masses”, such is the strategy of militant sectarians. This is the strategy of serious communists and party-builders.
Workers will not be won over by ultraleft verbiage, empty platitudes or high-horse sloganeering. When they see a divided and politically unserious communist movement, they are not won over to communist politics or to a communist program. This is why we must unite the movement and build the party – without that, nothing else really matters. As much as we want to pretend that we can win workers over en masse through the merits of our individual groups, we are representatives of a broad movement, not our own separate entities. So the acts of one reflect on the acts of all, whether we like it or not.
We apologise for the lack of a January issue, and hope the high quality of this issue makes up for it.
-Partisan Editorial Staff
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