PARTISAN!

The end of January 2025 saw a split in Adelaide’s communists: the Adelaide cell of the Australian Communist Party (ACP) has split to form the ‘Adelaide Communist Collective’. What caused this? What’s going on in the ACP? Anthony Furia investigates.

On the 31st of January, the Adelaide Cell of the Australian Communist Party (ACP) released a statement announcing their disaffiliation from the ACP and Community Union Defence League (CUDL, the ACP’s front organisation). The newly renamed Adelaide Communist Collective (ACC) named three (very vague) tensions with central leadership as the cause for this split; “an irreparable culture of liberal egoism”, “an institutional lack of accountability” and “lack of ideological clarity and direction.”

There has been no public response from the ACP, and they have not responded to Partisan’s request for comment as of writing. However, Casey McEwan, current General Secretary of the ACC and founding member of the ACP (as well as a former member of the ACP’s Central Committee from late 2023 to January 2025) was willing to discuss the issue of the split with Partisan. Together, we reconstructed the basis for the split on the three reasons listed in the ACC’s statement, to arrive at a picture remarkably similar to the events behind the split between Red Ant and Red Spark – albeit with crucial differences, and a particularly Marxist-Leninist (Stalinist) undertone.

For a significant period of time before the split, members of the (bizarrely secretive) national leadership had demonstrated a pattern of behaviour that the ACC alleges epitomised a toxic, emotional response to challenges to varying political proposals, or indeed to political proposals opposed to their personal perspective on the direction the ACP should be taking. Seniority was leveled against alternative proposals, and members were, according to Casey, “bullied and brow beaten” into submission.

These sections of the leadership of the secretive central committee (members Casey would not name, and whose names are not public knowledge, nor even common knowledge within the organisation!) were often protected from critique by other members of leadership, ultimately further cementing an unhealthy, undemocratic organisational culture enforced by the ACP’s own clearly apparent lack of democratic structure.

This calcified leadership of seniority and personality would, as is always inevitably the case, reach its tipping point in an extended debate surrounding tactical concerns. Tactical concerns that were, certainly, emblematic of broader political differences, but nevertheless tactical concerns. Indeed, the debate that would ultimately shatter the ACP and destroy the confidence of Adelaide membership in the organisation is almost comical in its unoriginality; should the ACP change its name?

This question was presented (and then answered in the affirmative) by those sections of leadership that Casey highlights. The specifics are wholly unimportant, but for the sake of transparency, they centered around the removal of certain ‘negatively connoted language’ from the name (such as ‘communist’). Casey was opposed to this change and stated as much in an article published in the ACP’s internal publication (only active in the lead-up to congress, though our requests to read the article and the publication were rejected by the ACC). In response, two comrades would publish articles allegedly aggressively criticising Casey, and defending the proposal to change the name. At the 2023 congress (held at the end of the year), the proposal was, allegedly, soundly rejected. Despite this, the same elements in the central committee pushed the proposal again towards the end of 2024, and, according to Casey, went so far as to attempt to stack sittings of the nine-person central committee to push through a proposal to reconsider the change of name.

This bureaucratic game of rigging meeting attendance and pushing behind the scenes for a name change culminated in the melodramatic false resignation of one of the ‘toxic personalities’ behind this push – in a desperate and embarrassing attempt to personally guilt the central committee into supporting the proposal. When comrades attempted to craft a resolution to ensure that false resignations could not be used as an unprincipled political shock tactic into the future, they were accused by the grouping within the central committee of perhaps the single worst crime a Stalinist can be accused of; factionalism. The basis for such a damning accusation was a document containing the proposal that was, according to meta-data, created by Casey six months ago. Even if Casey had openly and actively created the motion with another comrade on the central committee, this should not be considered some sort of unholy crime or act of total treason. To do so is bureaucratic-centralist absurdity; and the very fact that ‘factionalism’ as an accusation holds such weight within the ACP reflects a decaying, anti-democratic centralist political core.

Regardless, Casey was immediately cut off from central committee communications and placed ‘under investigation’ by the ACP’s ‘control commission’. The member who presented the actual motion resigned on the spot, sharing a resignation letter calling out the history of unprincipled behaviour and personality politics within the central committee epitomised in this very incident. The central committee attempted to suppress the distribution of this letter, deleting it from communications channels whilst the ‘general secretary’ of the ACP Bob Briton blocked meeting procedures when it was due to be discussed. Yet such a letter was read and discussed by the comrades in Adelaide regardless, just as those associated with Casey were also placed ‘under investigation’ for factionalism.

As a result, the control commission joined the next meeting of the Adelaide cell remotely and immediately suspended cell leadership, deriding membership for reading the letter and leaving the Adelaide cell in total limbo with no leadership (typically appointed directly by the central committee) and multiple central members under fictitious, absurd investigation for factionalism.

Left in such a state, isolated from an already mysterious national leadership and with little to no contact with other cells across the country, the cell determined a singular course of possible action; split and continue the practical political work as they had done before an artificial catastrophe. Thus, bringing us to the current moment.

The events that took place in the ACP/ACC are events which have taken place numerous times before. An overly bureaucratic, entrenched leadership cultivated a toxic culture of personality politics in the face of absolutely no structural opposition and ultimately came into conflict with its own membership over a self-fulfilling paranoia surrounding splits, factions, and simple debate within the organisation.

The ACP is, over its short history, one of the most notoriously anti-democratic contemporary sects of the Australian left. The nine-person central committee is elected on a slate system, is responsible for appointing local positions, and minimises communications to broader membership. Cells rarely if ever communicate inter-state, and other than the representative to the central committee in one’s respective state (and Bob Briton) the membership of the committee remains largely unknown even by members.

Some will readily decry this as simply a result of “Stalinist anti-democratic organisational culture” – indeed, the history of Marxist-Leninist parties and their respective organisational cultures are certainly partially responsible for the ACP’s aversion to public debate, disagreement, and particularly ‘factions’. Yet this is not a purely cultural phenomenon (and certainly not one that ‘Trotskyist’ sects are free from, their endless history of splits is built upon bureaucratic centralism). The very structure of the ACP made a split of this sort a matter of time, irrespective of the particular ideological basis of its politics.

The structure of the ACP is certainly not one that other sects on the communist left can claim to be wholly free of. Socialist Alternative, for example, still runs national elections on a slate system. Its central leadership is unclear, and it keeps most of its events controlled in debate and disagreement. As is similarly the case with Solidarity, or the CPA, or the Spartacist League. If nothing else, the aversion to factions (either principally or in practice) remains a unifying tenant of a bureaucratic centralist organisational structure, one modeled on the rigid theoretical agreement of a sect or anti-democratic communist party, not on the programmatic unity of any democratic mass communist party.

This is not to wholly equate the structures of other sects to the ACP’s, a notoriously bad case in a sea of bad cases, but rather to point out that the events and issues that split the ACP should not be dismissed. The ACP did not split because it chose the wrong sacred historical legacy to worship at the altar of (Stalinism over Cliffite Trotskyism, over Council Communism, over Cannonite Trotskyism, over ‘Leninism’, whatever that may entail). The ACP split because of a concrete crisis of structure, one exacerbated by an exceptionally bureaucratic system, yet one with a core similarity in almost all sects of the Australian communist left to date; dogmatic theoretical unity over democratic programmatic unity.

Sooner or later, a tipping point is reached. A sect reaches a certain size, and can no longer ideologically reproduce itself, perhaps a project/front it begins stretches out of control and subsumes its politics, or leadership calcifies and pushes members to the edge politically and personally. Whatever the reason, members split or peel away, or the sect itself loses its communist political identity and becomes some other monstrosity altogether. The project is weakened or lost, and others begin the construction of their perfect alternative as a result. Such is the history of the sect form, and its present. There is no future for it, for a strict theoretical unity, that is also a future with a communist party. With a mass working class party. With a successful revolutionary struggle.

Comrades on the communist left, within the RCO and outside it, are encouraged to reflect on the experience of the ACP not solely as the result of exceptional circumstance but as a cautionary tale of the sect form. A form that reduces the political to the personal, isolates leadership from membership, and humiliates and embarrasses itself and those involved in its maintenance.