PARTISAN!

The Spartacist League of Australia has sent a letter to the Revolutionary Communist Organisation (RCO) calling for unity and stating their desire to join the RCO. Partisan publishes this letter in full below.

Dear comrades of the RCO,

We are living in a fast changing world where the international working class and oppressed are facing deepening attacks and reactionary winds as the US rulers fight to shore up their declining global position. Australia will not be an exception to the maelstrom of the increasing drive toward war, economic chaos and burgeoning reaction. In the face of this, the left stands wholly unprepared and is as small and isolated as ever. We need to change course.

While we are still studying Partisan! No. 11 closely, we welcome how the editorial statement argues against the “broad left unity” that “rejects the centrality of a coherent political program for such unity, accepted and democratically constructed by all involved.” We agree. This approach will only repeat the mistakes of the past three decades which has reduced the left to its current weak and divided state. We also concur with the repeated emphasis on the necessity of the fight to reforge a mass communist party on a revolutionary program. As you point out this cannot happen by ignoring the rest of the left and going “straight to the masses.” We similarly argued against this in “The Crisis in the Marxist Left and the Tasks of the ICL,” Spartacist No. 70. The fight for a revolutionary party can only be achieved by actively intervening to reorientate the socialist movement, “agitating for a communist orientation and organisation.”

It is with this in mind that we send you this letter to declare our desire for the SL/A to join the ranks of the RCO and fight for just this. I am sure RCO comrades already know that we have programmatic differences with the RCO, especially as outlined with Road to party, and we do not renounce our ideas for one second. But as we said in Road to party, “our difference with the RCO is not that we reject the centrality of the struggle for a revolutionary party,” but rather what strategy is necessary to forge it. Furthermore, coming off our recent polemical exchange and subsequent discussions with RCO comrades, it is clear that these differences would be best clarified not as opposing organisations but by fighting side by side and doing common work within a single organisation.

We also recognise that the RCO is not a homogeneous organisation, but rather one which welcomes political differences. Like those comrades already within the RCO with divergent political views, we seek not to split or wreck the RCO but to help build the organisation on a communist basis—which necessarily entails arguing for our ideas for what best advances the RCO and the fight to forge a mass communist party. In turn, we believe we have a lot to learn from RCO comrades who are of differing political stripes and backgrounds.

The left has long been weak and divided. And while the fusion between the Spartacist League of Australia and Bolshevik-Leninist bucked this trend, it has only been a small step to unify the left on a communist program. We believe joining ranks with the RCO would be another step towards communist unity, and would mark the RCO as a pole of attraction to draw in broader forces within the workers movement for the fight to reforge a communist party that Lenin would recognise as his own.

We look forward to hearing from you and discussing the next steps toward how to best effect this.

Communist greetings,
C. Bourchier
For the Central Committee of the Spartacist League of Australia