Dear Rising Tide attendees,
We are the Revolutionary Communist Organisation. We believe the Australian socialist movement is hopelessly divided into numerous dogmatic sects. In this state, we are less than the sum of our parts. We fight for the re-unification of the socialist movement into a single democratic communist party. We are drawn from a variety of socialist tendencies and life experiences, and we are unified by our democratically drafted program to seize power and smash the capitalist system.
We support direct action. Rising Tide offers an opportunity for people to express their frustrations with the system and their despair of ecological collapse. It offers people a chance to connect with others who feel the same way. People at Rising Tide feel they are taking the fight directly to the system, rather than sitting at home.
But this is not real direct action. The “momentum model” tries to pressure the ruling class to act from the outside as a social minority. Will “climate-conscious”, “green” oligarchs really act in our best interests? We believe that workers can take power directly in revolution. Rising Tide’s actions barely affect the coal port. With no mass movement, more radical action like train-jumping just gets people arrested for no benefit.
We support a green economy. The planet is dying. Rising Tide is right to demand an end to fossil fuels.
But capitalism cannot be green-ified. Capitalism does not use fossil fuels because it is more cost-efficient than sustainable energy. Capitalism uses fossil fuels because it allows capitalism to move away when workers in one place get too demanding. Solar panels, wind farms, and batteries can’t be moved as easily. Capitalism isn’t just a system of profit; it is a system of class exploitation.
We support mass action. Rising Tide’s experiments in deliberative and direct democracy help teach people that they can run society themselves. The Protestival atmosphere reclaims public space against enclosure and commodification. The only way for the working class to take power is through their own self-organisation and action.
But this is not mass action. Inside Rising Tide, “activist” technocrats and small business owners are given more space and time than anyone else. They spread the lie that the system can be reformed and that our job as poor people is to help them solve the problem for us (and let them profit off it). How can this space be democratic if we let in profiteers like this? We believe that our movement needs to include more workers, more disabled people, and more unemployed people and fewer capitalists and technocrats. We believe that we should decide our politics and our strategy for ourselves, without outside interference, and that we should drive out the capitalists.
We are scared about the future. Every day, it feels more and more that the world is ending and that there is no hope. Bush fires, floods, and drought hurt our communities and our families and are getting even worse.
We need a plan. Waiting for the climate apocalypse to wake people up, or for the green politicians to come in and save us, is not going to work. Capitalism can survive every crisis that it creates as long as we are not organised. We need our own positive vision for social transformation. We need a revolution.
We need communism. Only a world without classes, where production is planned globally, democratically, and according to genuine human need can stop the never-ending ecological catastrophe.
We need a mass communist party. We need to organise to win a majority to revolution. We need to educate each other on how capitalism really works, and what it takes to abolish it. We need a real mass movement rather than a small minority. We need strikes and blockades that actually wins things for us. We need independence from the oligarchs, technocrats, small business owners, and their media apparatus. We need to organise the entire proletariat including coal miners, workers, unpaid workers, renters, the disabled, the unemployed, and young people. We need to reclaim physical and mental space for ourselves. We need our own politicians to agitate others and obstruct the state and its repressive institutions. We need to act in our own collective interests and not in the interests of the exploiters. We need unity of the socialist movement and the proletariat under a common platform.
-Central Committee of the Revolutionary Communist Organisation (RCO)
PARTISAN! 