PARTISAN!

Anthony Furia writes a response to articles appearing in Red Battler No. 2 which critique the RCO’s position on communist strategy.

In the January edition of Red Battler, the publication of the Spartacist League in Australia, two articles mention and mount a critique of the Revolutionary Communist Organisation (RCO). The first (titled Abolish the monarchy! For a workers republic!) is a reproduction of a speech given by one C. Bourchier at a speak-out organised by the RCO against the king’s visit in October, which criticises the RCO for supposedly “falling in behind the ALP” due to our Queensland election statement, and alleged refusal to fight for the leadership of the working class. The second article (titled CFMEU takeover: “What the f**k happened?”) is a critique of the RCO’s ‘intervention’ into the Defend the CFMEU movement, based on a misunderstanding of our aims when engaging with such a movement.

Both articles illuminate a stark distinction between the strategy of the RCO and the Spartacist League. A distinction that, in responding to these critiques, can be illustrated clearly and directly, instead of being danced around haphazardly.

C. Bourchier in their speech on the need for a republic alleges that the RCO falls short of establishing the need for revolutionary republicanism due to our failure to recognise the main enemy as the “current leadership of the working-class movement”. Supposedly, this is illustrated in our Queensland election statement, where the RCO encourages communists to preference Labor and the Greens above the Liberal-National Party (LNP) in areas where there are no socialist candidates running.

This should not be a controversial position to hold – the Spartacists themselves have consistently accused the RCO of “revolutionary phrase-mongering”, so why the fuss when we offer a concrete approach to the election? Because it interferes with the current project of the Spartacists: entryism into Labor and the ACTU to force a split. Regardless of whether directing our 30-odd Queensland members to preference Labor ahead of the LNP is significant in bolstering the power of Labor over the working-class movement (it isn’t), what is betrayed here is the Spartacist strategy. That is, their belief that, in going directly to the (organised) masses in terms of the unions and ‘working class movement’ of Labor, presenting them with the sacrosanct ‘correct line’ and program, they can build themselves a communist party by splitting the working class from Labor.

This, in addition to being wholly typical of a Trotskyist sect, is putting the cart far before the horse. With what cohered communist forces will the Spartacist League intervene into Labor? With what mass base of organised cadres and workers? None. The Spartacist League, an organisation of at most 50 or so active members (this is a generous guess), aims to split the leviathan Labor Party through intervention with a ‘correct theoretical program’. When first approached with an offer by the Spartacist League to conduct joint work on this project of Labor interventionism, we were, to say the least, perplexed. The Australian communist left is a fragmented, disorganised mess. Yet we were supposed to break the working class from Labor, from a bourgeois workers party with immense capital and bureaucratic control, before cleaning up our own backyard? This seemed not only tactically impossible but strategically unwise.

It is entirely possible that the Spartacist League will gain, or perhaps even already has gained, members and fellow travelers thanks to this intervention. There is no doubt that there are communists and workers within and around Labor who desire organisation and direction, and there should be a coherent response to this from the communist left in Australia. The RCO should indeed be seeking, when it can, to organise cells within Labor and around it – in unions controlled by it, and branches with communists in them. But this cannot be the central basis of our strategy when we are wholly devoid of a unified communist party; of a communist left capable of cohering itself and preparing for a break with Laborism.

This same common organisational error of emphasising a particular tactic (intervention into Labor) and elevating it to a strategic level (splitting the Labor party) is repeated in the second critique elevated against the RCO. Based on our ‘intervention’ into the CFMEU struggle, the first paragraph of this critique (not the first paragraph of the article) is semantic. Such a paragraph argues that the RCO was wrong to identify the obvious, well-documented connections between CFMEU leadership, fascist sympathisers, and organised crime. For a group so intent on splitting the working class from its bureaucratic leadership, it is fascinating to see the Spartacists so keen on defending such a leadership from the most levelheaded and reasonable of criticisms. These affiliations are statements of fact and contributed to Labor’s justification to place the CFMEU into administration. The notion that communists must demonstrate they have ‘something to offer’ the union struggle by uncritically backing the class-collaborationist leadership of the CFMEU is absurd, particularly given the RCO’s clear call for an immediate defence of the CFMEU from the threat of administration.

The next three paragraphs of criticism leveled against the RCO reveal, once more, the central claim that the RCO failed to propose a “strategy to break the working class from their left Laborite misleaders.” As luck would have it, the Spartacists themselves do propose such a strategy! How convenient for the communist left.

The truly problematic content here comes in the penultimate paragraph, in which the Spartacists (in troublingly vague terms) highlight how their“concrete path of action… struck a chord among broad layers of construction militants at different times because, while always guided by the final socialist goal, it was grounded at all times in a materialist appraisal of the shifting balance of contending class forces.” Ignoring the somewhat crude use of ‘materialist’ to simply describe ‘understanding current events’, it is only fair to ask; why did the Spartacists fail to prevent the administration of the CFMEU? If their program was so perfectly centred on breaking workers from “the death grip of their Laborite misleaders” what happened? Could it perhaps be that the Spartacists are not of an adequate size to effect immense, mass-political change? Could it perhaps be that for any intervention into something such as the Defend the CFMEU campaign beyond one aimed at recruiting sympathetic layers to be successful, it would have to be waged by a mass-mobilised, cohered left?

Yet if this were the case, it would endanger the entirety of the Spartacists’ strategy – it would mean a shifting of tasks; a reorientation. If one believed that the crucial task was the formation of a communist party partly precisely in order tobreak the workers from Laborism, then perhaps one would be focused on the conscious construction of such a party. On the construction of such a party instead of say, on intervention as a singular sect in a sea of sects on a ‘program’ that really exemplifies a fetishised tactic into a movement far beyond the scope or ability of any such a sect. The work of the RCO is precisely this reunification of the communist left on a revolutionary program – the reconstruction of a communist party. Yes, Labor is one of the most significant roadblocks to workers power in Australia – yet some roadblocks are further along the road to power than others.

Attempts to go ‘directly to the masses’ – to organise a party on the basis of a single sect intervening into the class and the class alone, have failed historically and continue to fail every moment that Socialist Alternative, Socialist Alliance, Solidarity, the Spartacist League, Red Ant, Red Spark, the CPA, the ACP, and the RCO (to name but a few) continue to exist. We cannot hope to split workers en-masse without a communist party, without organising ourselves first, without clarifying our positions, priorities, and orientation through debate and discussion, and unifying based on a revolutionary program.

Relevant context:

“Abolish the monarchy! For a workers republic!” in Red Battler No. 2

“CFMEU takeover: “What the f**k happened?”” in Red Battler No. 2