Marxism Fringe saw comrades coming together for discussions and debates about Marxism and Marxist strategy. Revmira clarifies questions around the RCO’s strategy and Partyist politics.
The Revolutionary Communist Organisation recently hosted an event called Marxism Fringe, a trio of talks held the day after Socialist Alternative’s Marxism conference. I hosted one of the talks, Towards a History of Partyism, a discussion on the historical roots of the tendency that the RCO defends and operates within. The debate afterwards included the question: how does the RCO and the partyist tradition ensure that the right-wing and reformist elements in the party don’t betray the working class? The answer I gave of ‘we don’t know’ was unsatisfactory, but also wrong.
The debate also exposed many of the political ideas that the sectarian left has internalised when debating with or engaging the RCO. This is partly due to a refusal to engage honestly with other sects on a mass theoretical level. Yet in turn, the RCO always bears part of the blame for our lack of reply or attempts to engage with the sects honestly.
On the question of the minimum program
The defence of the minimum-maximum program is often seen as an easy goal by many sects who fall under the Trotskyist umbrella. Their conception of the minimum program falls within the Trotskyist myth that Steve Bloom describes as such “that the coming Russian revolution would be limited to the establishment of a bourgeois-democratic republic, and that a “minimum program” was therefore needed to develop the demands working people would make on such a republic1”. Their conception of a minimum program and ours are so far apart that we end up talking past each other. This resulted in the argument that The Road to Workers’ Power was a program putting forward piecemeal reforms, rather than a revolutionary document putting forward the bare minimum required for working class power.
The demands put forward in any one section is not necessarily revolutionary on their own, but when taken together it reflects a direct assault on capital. Furthermore, The Road to Workers Power must be understood as two things; it is the factional proposal of the Partyist faction of the communist movement, and it is a ‘Draft Program for a Communist Party in Australia’. Engagement, debate, polemics, the struggle for unity in action and words – all of these are vital, and will fundamentally shift the positions held as the fight for the communist party emerges and deepens. This is the dialectic of class struggle. The program is not some invariant document handed down from upon high.
The question of the right and reformists
The opening of Luca Traven’s review of Zombie Kautskyism is a great example of missing the point entirely with the Partyist perspective on classical social democracy. On a practical level, the article, much like Red Spark’s increasingly long review of the same book, functions as a covert polemic against the RCO. This is because most sects utterly despise engaging with other sects because that requires acknowledging their theory as a potentially valid counter view.
The article claims that “common to these contributions is an attempt to rehabilitate Kautsky and historiographically reverse the rift which defined his era – the painful schism between revolutionaries and reformists that took place during the First World War”2. From this remarkably succinct claim emerges the argument that the RCO stands for the same kind of unity as the SPD (Social-Democratic Party of Germany): unity with traitors.
This claim is wrong. The Partyist tradition has always understood itself as an offspring of the Bolshevik or Leninist tradition. This can be seen in its origins in The Leninist, which waged a factional struggle against the very kinds of liquidationism the RCO is accused of supporting. Nonetheless, our engagement with the Marxism of the Second International and defence of the orthodox (and so far, the only successful) strategy of Marxism means that we are painted as defenders of the monstrous traitors that ‘Leninist’ faux-history has warped them to be.
Socialist Alternative’s positions reflect what Mike MacNair calls the negative critique of the left tendency within the Second International: “that the method of electoral struggle and coalitions – or even the effort to build permanent mass workers’ organisations, as opposed to ad hoc organisations of mass struggle like strike committees – necessarily led to the corruption of the workers’ representatives and organisations and the evolution of these organisations into mere forms of capitalist control of the working class”3. The immediate counterpoint, particularly within the framework of the philosophy of Socialist Alternative, is that the state capitalist Soviet Union was even worse than capital.
The Right, as MacNair has pointed out, will always have material, and political advantages over the left. Their classical position within union leadership and parliament gives them connections to the state, financial advantages and the capacity to be more active in intra-party debates. Humphrey McQueen points out in A New Britannia when discussing the Labor Party that “the expense involved in travel and loss of work meant that conferences, especially those in the federal sphere and the larger states were dominated by politicians”4. Whilst advances in transport and information technology has weakened the dominance of politicians in this arena, the problem remains.
Indeed, in many ways that is a core part of the fight against capital. The forces that we build to negate capital, if not constantly ensured to be under total democratic control and communist discipline, get integrated into it. It’s not something that can be dealt with through lines in a program, only through the mass struggle of the working class. The Soviet Union itself represents this dialectic in practise formed as a revolutionary step into capital. The isolation and lack of economic development that dominated the new Union forced it to integrate into the world capitalist system. This culminated in the USSR negating its own purpose, and in turn its own existence.
The SPD is a perfect example of this dialectic in action, which Socialist Alternative recognises even if not in those words. Part of the counter to this position emerged from the new Bolshevik-style parties of the Comintern (Third International/Communist International), in the form of democratic centralism and the total subordination of the parliamentary faction to the party apparatus. This apparatus in turn was totally subordinated to the currently existing leadership, one which constantly reproduces itself through the formation of self-appointed slates.
In counter to this, the positions put forward by the RCO are more democratic. From The Road to Workers Power:
“In bourgeois parliaments, communist representatives serve as tribunes of the people, engage in systematic agitation, and combine legal with illegal work. All parliamentary factions should be systematically bound to and controlled by the party and its elected leadership, and be drawn from proven and loyal communists. As such, parliamentary representatives will subordinate all parliamentary activity to the extra-parliamentary activity of the party, and combine legal and illegal work consistently.”5
As laid out above, all parliamentary representatives are bound to vote in line with the minimum demands put forward within the program. Any action which goes against the program or democratic decision of the party is breaking discipline, and one would assume for the parliamentary faction would be enough for immediate expulsion. One suggestion that I am partial to is upon election, every party representative signs both their letter of resignation from the party and from parliament which is placed in the hands of the leadership who, if needed, simply date the letters and produce them.
Within the unions, a strategy of mass militant minorities, and a class struggle strategy for the broader union movement rather than a constant run for bureaucratic leadership, will mitigate part of the dangers.
The road to a renewed communist party, and the road to the Australian revolution, runs over the Greens, and through a split Labor. The vanguard of the class will be united, the middling must be won over, and the backwards layer isolated. This will be done through mass education and organisation on a democratic basis. This may go against Socialist Alternative’s strategy and conception of revolution, with a vague spontaneity rejecting the crucial work of long term organising and education required for a cadre left, rather than the activist left. It’s a model far more open to abuse by the right than a principled democratic organisation schooled in the history of class struggle, and the necessity of communism.
The myth of paper unity
Finally, I wish to discuss the argument that our position of unity around acceptance of the program as a basis for common unity rather than agreement creates the idea that we are simply fighting for paper thin unity of bare minimum agreements. We are not.
The argument that the Spartacist League of Australia (SLA) put forward in Red Battler no.1 was that “It [the RCO] believes that by sharing maximalist rhetoric and a lowest common denominator program, the left can unsplinter itself, and from there a revolutionary party can sprout”6. This argument is a common one that our basis for unity is too broad and will simply lead to us tearing apart, often Socialist Alliance is touted as an example of the natural end result of our strategy, but that is based on a misunderstanding on our concept of unity. Yes, comrades have the right to join the RCO and form a permanent faction based on ideological grounds, but unity cannot be paper thin and based on ignoring differences, nor can it be based on unanimity of opinion. The Second and Third Internationals during their revolutionary periods had constant polemics much harsher than many of the ones floating around today, yet they were able to work together. Our position is much the same.
1 Bloom, Steve. “Developing a Revolutionary Program to Unite the American Left” Cosmonaut Magazine, https://cosmonautmag.com/2025/04/developing-a-revolutionary-program-to-unite-the-us-left/
2 Traven, Luca. “Review: Zombie Kautskyism.” Marxist Left Review no.28 (Summer 2024) https://marxistleftreview.org/articles/review-zombie-kautskyism/
3 MacNair, Mike. Revolutionary Strategy (November Publications, London 2008) 45
4 McQueen, Humphrey. A New Britannia: An argument concerning the social origins of Australian radicalism and nationalism. (Penguin Publications, Ringwood Victoria, 1975), 230
5 The Road to Workers Power (Partisan Press, Brisbane, 2024), 19
6 Spartacist League of Australia and Bolshevik Leninists Fuse: Towards the Rebirth of Trotskyism in Australia Red Battler no.1 https://iclfi.org/pubs/rb/1/red-battler
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