PARTISAN!

What is Partyism, and what does it mean in Australia today? Brunhilda Olding explains.

What is Partyism? Does it matter? What does it mean in Australia today?

There are many questions that have emerged around the strategy, orientation, and political perspectives of the Revolutionary Communist Organisation (RCO) since its foundation, nearly all of which can be boiled down to these three questions.

This is the first of a four-part series seeking to outline the basic political perspectives of the RCO, and as such the first work in this series will tackle the most important and defining topic. What does it mean to be a partyist in Australia today?

What is Partyism?

Partyism at the most basic level can be summed up in a single precept: support for the construction of a mass communist party united around acceptance of a program.

Often this is viewed as elevating organisation and unity to a point of universal political principle. Our critics often accuse us of placing program before politics. This claim must be flipped on its head to truly understand our perspective. The program is the solidification and clarification of one’s politics. Only when political differences are laid out in the open in their most clarified form can their whole truly be grasped.

That is why we struggle for debate on a programmatic level, because that is the only way that the genuine divides in the socialist movement can emerge and be clarified. These debates can only truly be clarified and resolved in open struggle before the proletariat. The idea that a correct program, that correct politics can emerge from the inscrutable debates of theorists within the party is one that we oppose on every level. The working class is not stupid. It is the most creative and powerful force in history, and we believe in being as open before it as legality allows. Political freedom and the subsequent freedom of debate are the light and air of the socialist movement. Only through open debate, and the clarification of ideas; the subsequent testing of those ideas, not merely once but constantly; only through this process of constant struggle can communism truly emerge as the movement of the proletariat struggling towards its own abolition.

Furthermore, this struggle can only be waged if we understand that a party is not a faction. A party is not built on monolithic agreement; it is built off political acceptance of a common program and organisational framework. A faction is a group defined on agreement: in concrete terms it is a tendency within Marxism that has specific political, strategic, and potentially tactical ideas, and membership is defined by agreement with these ideas. A sect is then a faction of the workers movement that establishes itself as a separate party to all other sections.

A communist party (a genuine one at least) is a mass party of the proletariat defined by acceptance of a common program, and constant unrelenting loyalty to the proletariat, and disloyalty to the bourgeois state they exist within. Within the boundaries of the politics of this program, there will be political debates on a myriad of topics. The RCO understands itself to be the partyist faction within the general Australian socialist movement, because we are built off agreement with the principles of partyism, and acceptance of our draft program.

The contemporary partyist tendency first emerged in the United Kingdom around The Leninist group within the pre-dissolution Communist Party of Great Britian (CPGB). The initial struggle was directed against the Eurocommunist leadership hellbent on both politically and organisationally liquidating the party. They failed. The CPGB is no more, but The Leninist was able to forge enough of a pole that they proclaimed themselves to be the Provisional Central Committee of the Party (CPGB-PCC). This group led by Jack Conrad and later joined by Mike MacNair has not been particularly successful, we admit. The Weekly Worker (their publication) is a small newspaper. In the UK there are much larger and more solid political groups defending partyism, having adopted it from across the Atlantic via the Marxist Unity Group (MUG) in the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA).

But it is from the CPGB-PCC that the core elements of our argument flow. Jack Conrad’s 1994 Party, Non-Ideology, and Faction first outlined the importance of fighting against the (both then and now) horrendous sectarianism of the British left and the need to wage the political fight for the Communist Party in Great Britian. Mike MacNair’s 2008 Revolutionary Strategy serves as the more common political justification of the tendency, and further elaboration can be found in Cosmonaut Magazine in the US, in Prometheus Magazine in the UK, Horizon Magazine in Ireland, and publications in Germany, the Netherlands and Poland, and of course in the pages of Partisan Magazine here in Australia.

On a more abstract level partyism more accurately could be understood as the politics of revolutionary optimism.

Whirlwinds of danger are shaking our world. The opportunity for the proletariat to assert itself and to fight for its own interests exists. The capacity to go beyond the cycle of economic and social struggles lies before us. There is a possibility that instead of the demoralising depressing grind of crisis-protest movement-stagnation-next crisis, we can shatter the entire system. But this can only be done if the communist movement, those who genuinely fight for the total and universal liberation of humanity, can unite, theorise, organise, and fight. This will transform our tendency into a genuine social force amongst the proletariat. Then we will be in a much stronger position. Then the potential will truly exist for the twenty-first century to become the “beginning of the real world-historical transition to socialism”[1].

The historic task of Marxism was what Kautsky (when he was a Marxist) described as the “merger formula”, the merging of socialism and the workers’ movement. This cannot be done by a Marxist movement squabbling with each other or tilting at the windmills of long dead icons as the world changes around them. It can only be accomplished by the construction of a genuine Marxist organisation one that sees the world in its totality and from there works down to the local struggles.

There is a common argument that we should build up from local groups into a new party, or into a new workers or socialist movement. The argument that we should start small and work our way up is fundamentally wrong. Jack Conrad summed up our fundamental perspective on these issues in 1994 when he argued that “[r]eal communist work, locally, in workplaces, or in trade unions, is only possible if it is organised by an authoritative centre. Communism takes as its starting point the world, and the world-wide transition from capitalism to socialism. There is nothing parochial about genuine communism. As a matter of principle, it favours the organisation of the working class in the largest possible units. Our main enemy is our own United Kingdom capitalist state, not this or that employer, let alone the town council. Communist parties become local by first being international and state-national.”[2]

Our conception of the tasks of the Communist party could be summed up in two ways. The first is by the rightfully famous summary of the tasks of the SPD during its revolutionary era by Wilhem Liebknecht as to “Educate, Agitate, Organise”. Or by Loren Goldner an American left communist:

A revolutionary organisation today, to conclude, must apply this ‘Hegel-Marx’ sense of the totality to itself. This means first of all a modest appreciation of its own true stature, in the broader global development of the ‘class-for-itself’. It must recognise the primacy of the ‘real movement’ and see its main goal as its own abolition as a separate grouping, once its tasks are accomplished. It must attempt to create within itself the closest possible approximation of the relations of a liberated humanity within its own internal life, which means the deepest possible involvement, above and beyond the indispensable daily tasks of militancy, with analysis of the world productive forces, and first of all of the world work force, to see the maturation of the methods of struggle. It must prioritise ‘internal education’, starting with the history and theory of the revolutionary movement. It must attempt to embrace everything valid in contemporary culture, science and technology, and appeal to those cultural and technical strata who see the need to link their fate to that of the communist revolution. It must acquaint itself with military strategy, in the different traditions of Engels, Trotsky, Makhno, or the Cipriano Meras (a former construction worker). It must prepare, in a word, the groundwork for the takeover of production and reproduction. The better prepared in advance the movement is, the smoother and less violent that takeover will be.[3]

A Brief survey of the current Australian Socialist Movement

As of the time of writing, there were at least 21 groups, newspapers, blogs, and collectives of varying sizes claiming to be Marxist in Australia today. If you broaden that out to include the general revolutionary socialist scene including Anarchists there is at least 25 sects of varying size, quality, and influence over the working class. This is not meant to be a full guide to the Australian left, for that Andy Fleming’s Trot Guide remains the single best effort to do that, but a very brief overview of the current field of play. 

Combined and including the layers of independent but still organised socialists and being exceedingly generous this is perhaps at most 5000 people. If we are more realistic there are 2000 active and combative socialists in Australia.

Most of these socialists are grouped around the general pole of alignment that is Socialist Alternative (more commonly known as SAlt). Socialist Alternative as of writing has between 650-750 members nation-wide. The opaque nature of these groups often makes exact estimates hard. Around Socialist Alternative are the several thousand members of the Socialists/Australian Socialist Party/(no longer Victorian) Socialists. This political bloc is dominated by the theoretical tradition descended from the British Socialist Workers Party/International Socialist tradition as clarified by Tony Cliff.

There are many things that can be said about Socialist Alternative, some of them are even true! Their near total hegemony over the revolutionary wing of student politics allows them to shape the discourse and political orientation of the socialist movement in Australia. Most notably by their political dominance over the Socialists political project.

The Socialists initially formed in Victoria in 2018 as a joint project between Socialist Alliance and Socialist Alternative, while Alliance (wrongfully) pulled out in 2020 the project has managed to grow and expand, and its recent federal expansion represents one of the most important developments in the history of socialism in Australia.

Outside of the SAlt/the Socialists milieu the next three most important sects by size, national scope, and general political impact are Socialist Alliance, the Communist Party of Australia (CPA) (1971), and Solidarity. The history of Alliance was well explained in John Blackford’s article in Partisan #16 “The Socialist Alliance Problem”, but in short it emerged as a project of the post-Trotskyist Democratic Socialist Party (DSP) and International Socialist Organisation (ISO) at the turn of the century. Every other group bar the DSP ended up pulling out from this abortive electoral alliance, and several key cadres of the DSP were expelled to form the Revolutionary Socialist Party (RSP) in 2008, the rump DSP liquidated into Alliance creating the strange situation of an Alliance with no actual allied organisations.

One may well ask, if Alliance is for left regroupment why isn’t the RCO a member? The blunt answer is that our founding members were driven out.

The CPA is an orthodox ‘official communist’ party, originally founded as a split from the original CPA in 1971. With roughly 120 members nation wide they are the third largest sect, and hold several key positions in trade unions, as well as a strong layer of international connections including with the Communist Party of Cuba, and China due to the political legacies of the Cold War.

Solidarity is the fourth largest sect and could best be understood as “orthodox Cliffite” to Socialist Alternative’s slightly heterodox political perspectives, which has created a rightfully infamous rivalry between the two organisations.

After Solidarity the next largest organisations are (roughly) us, Red Anti-Imperialist Collective (Red Ant/RAIC), and the Anarchist Communist Federation (ACF).

Outside of the independent Marxist groupings there also exist a layer of socialists in the Greens and Australian Labor Party (ALP). The most notable grouping is Labor Tribune within the ALP a group which also defends partyist politics, has strong ties with the RCO.

Finally, there is the quite extensive layer of independent ‘militant’ radicals known somewhat cynically as the “swamp”. This milieu is dominated by a radical anarchism with what we would argue is a fetish for anti-politics, anti-fascism, and a rejection of systematic organisation. Whilst their militancy is healthy, we would argue that their lack of strategy fundamentally dooms them. We think that these militants need to be won over and integrated into a genuine Communist party one that can direct this militancy towards revolution, and the genuine class struggle instead of brief street actions.

What then is Partyism in Australia?

The cynical answer to this question is the Revolutionary Communist Organisation (and Labor Tribune!).

The longer answer is that partyism in Australia is the perspective that the immediate strategic task of the communist movement is to reconstitute the Communist Party in Australia. As such all efforts should be directed towards that goal.

When we say the Communist Party in Australia, we do not mean propping up the corpse of the long dead CPA, dissolved in 1991. The wheel of history cannot be turned back. We mean a genuine vanguard party, one that unites the most advanced layers of the proletariat and can wage the struggle for Communism. We consider the scientific name of this party to be the Communist Party in Australia. This is not some formal question, but a fundamentally political one as was outlined in the Theses on Conditions of Entry to the Communist International:

The Communist International has declared war on the whole bourgeois world and on all yellow social-democratic parties. The difference between the communist parties and the old official ‘social-democratic’ or ‘socialist’ parties that have betrayed the banner of the working class must be clear to every simple toiler.[4]

To be a partyist requires struggling for the advancement and development of the communist movement, which is why we intervene into the Socialists. The next entry in this series will expound more on our relationship to and engagement with the Socialists as a political project but the fundamental partyist perspective towards it is two-fold. The first is simple. We want to transform the Socialists into a genuine mass workers party. We want the Socialists to adopt a genuine Marxist program and openly work to popularise it amongst the proletariat.

Partyists fight wherever we can within the socialist movement against liquidationism, we fight against political conciliations to Labourism, it is to fight for open programmatic debate. If we are to solidify the politics of the Communist Party first, we must clarify what the politics of today are. A key part of our strategy is the understanding that at the current level of division and isolation no single sect can go “to the masses” and win them over. Socialism is broadly seen as a joke because of the constant seemingly never-ending cycle of splits, infighting, and increasingly inscrutable differences reducing us to the butt of a (very unfunny) Monty Python reference.

The task that lies before us is transforming communism from a joke relegated to the fringes of bourgeois society into a social force. If we wish to genuinely fight for communism as the model of human liberation, if we genuinely wish to win and secure a better future for our children and the generations after us, we need to treat this struggle seriously and that requires honest debate. It requires facing reality squarely and not indulging in fantasies and false optimism, and it requires reforging a genuine communist party.

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[1] Conrad, Jack. Party, Non-Ideology and Faction. (Partisan Press, Melbourne, 2025), 4

[2] Conrad, Jack. Party, Non-Idealogy, and Faction. 21

[3] Goldner, Loren. Revolution, Defeat and Theoretical Underdevelopment. (Haymarket Press, Chicago, 2016), 151

[4] Communist International. “Theses on Conditions of Entry to the Communist International” in Theses Resolutions & Manifestos of the first four congresses of the Third International eds. Alan Adler, Alix Holt, Barbara Holland. (Pluto Press, London, 1983), 96.