PARTISAN!

The following theses were adopted by the Central Committee of Communist Unity as part of the official relaunching of the organisation on May Day, 2026.

1. Since 1991, the international liberal order, the chief defenders of imperialist capitalism, have proclaimed that communism is dead. In some sense they are right. These past decades have placed an unprecedented challenge before our movement. Throughout the decades following the collapse of the Soviet Union and the triple defeat of reformist social democracy, Stalinism, and the Third World, the Communist movement has been profoundly isolated in almost every country. This dominance of capitalist ideology not been achieved through police batons and bullets, but through the systematic marginalization of our movement in political, economic, social, and intellectual life. With the workers movement entering into a period of prolonged downtown, and the unifying centre of the Soviet Union destroyed, Marxism retreated into the political wilderness.
2. Despite several great upsurges in the class struggle, and some heroic interventions by revolutionary militants, the communist movement proved unable to truly assert itself once more as a revolutionary factor. Its inability to provide proof that it could ensure any victories did not meet the same fate of the Soviet Union, and a profoundly undemocratic culture reduced it primarily to a farcical minority trend in capitalist society. Isolation has only reinforced the worst traits within our movement. Marxism, once a vital intellectual movement that was intimately connected to the class struggle, retreated into academia and sectarian dogma. The ‘ruthless critique of all that exists’ that Marx called for was forgotten  in favour of the ideological reproduction of small, isolated sects.
3. The overwhelming feeling of defeat that has infected the left since the 1990s has seen political liquidation into liberalism as the horizon of communism seemed to drift further away, as well as the calcification of a bureaucratic layer of sect leadership. Already-existing sectarian tendencies were worsened, and the communist program, instead of serving as a basis of critique and struggle for higher unity, devolved into a sacred idol to be fought over by various party regimes.
4. Despite brief periods of mass struggle and growth, no sect has managed to reach the point where they are able to seriously influence either national or international politics outside of brief moments of popular upsurge.
5. This has pushed the socialist movement into an increasingly narrow niche. Each sect seeks to define itself as unique and different but is unable to break with the broader liberal paradigm. Socialist politics has become artisanal, each tendency, and organisation narrowing itself to appeal to a small pool of potential recruits.
6. This sectarian culture emerged as a fundamental response to the already existing political isolation the socialist movement. In the wake of the fall of the Soviet Union, the overwhelming impression of the communist project amongst workers was one of failure, stagnation, and anti-democratic rule. When the left did manage to gain a modicum of political power, it was undermined by undemocratic, unprincipled manoeuvring, and a dependence on bourgeois liberal trends for political support.
7. Despite the mass protests of the 2010s, the socialist movement has been unable to build mass revolutionary parties. In the Arab Spring, the socialist movement was unable to seriously respond to the mass mobilisation of workers and youth. When the question of democracy and state power was posed, the sects were too small, too isolated, and too cowed to push the struggle forward. They had not earned the leadership of the working class, and nor did they have the mass base or organisational apparatus necessary to wage a struggle for power.
8. The failures of these past decades pose the question of the party more clearly than ever. Until a revolutionary mass party is forged, there will be no proletarian mass movement. There is no spontaneous crisis, nor eruption in the class struggle that will lead to the defeat of capital without the conscious action of the proletariat as a revolutionary class struggling for power. A class that is aware of its task and can prepare itself to become the ruling class and commence the struggle for communism.
9. As Hegel once remarked “the owl of Minerva flies at dusk”. The lessons of the defeats of the last four decades have seeped into the memory of the proletariat. Revolutionary theory is the memory of the working class, the culmination of our experiences and defeats. However, this revolutionary theory is only now being reclaimed and resurrected.
10. In the years since 2008, the culminative lessons learned have begun to be internalised into the workers and socialist movement. As the Butcher Trump exposes the naked face of capitalist irrationality on  the world stage the tasks facing the working class are clearer than ever.
11. A new generation of socialists, workers, and militants are entering the field. These are the children of neoliberal capitalism that have seen the failures of the world built on the corpse of the communist experiments of the 20^th century. The message of communism’s death has fallen on deaf ears as they look to the past to seek the road forward to a better future. Yet these militants have not emerged onto a blank political slate.
12. A cursory analysis of the international communist movement today is not an optimistic one. Over the past several years several major international and national organisations have collapsed due to a variety of reasons. Sex scandals have rocked groups such as the Committee for a Workers’ International, International Socialist Alternative, and International Socialist Tendency, while others have seen fierce fighting over entrenched bureaucrats fighting against insurgent minorities with blatantly undemocratic methods. Other tendencies such as the Revolutionary Communist International, and International Communist League (Maoist) have seemingly grown, but a thorough investigation reveals deeply entrenched anti-democratic cultures and sections that are often only skin-deep.
13. None of these trends have learned the lessons of the last four decades. Neither have they successfully advanced a program of regroupment, nor have they seriously advanced Marxist theorisation of the current epoch and seriously fought for a political break with the post-Soviet liberal order. Instead of formulating a common program for the international class struggle, these sects have each been built in opposition to democratic principles and in favour of sectarian shibboleths. Democracy is the Light and Air of our movement, in our own organisations as much as in broader society.
14. The far left in Australia fundamentally has failed to build this alternative vision. The socialist left today in Australia is dominated by a series of sects that rely on manoeuvring within the broader Labourite framework of Australian politics rather than working to forge a revolutionary proletarian mass party. There are at least 24 separate socialist sects in Australia today. Every one of these groups have their own newspaper, their own competent, committed, and capable organisers, and yet, for a young socialist who wants to get organised in Australia today the options that lie before them are hardly compelling. At least two organisations, Solidarity and Socialist Alternative, have no serious theoretical disagreements yet define themselves through their opposition to each other. The ‘official’ communist movement has welded itself to the labourite-liberal order. Why should people declare themselves to be socialist when all they see of the movement is a variety of squabbling sects, each of which fails to offer a genuine alternative to the political hegemony of liberalism.
15. Every election cycle the socialist left will duly line up behind the ALP and the Greens beneath the banner of whatever electoral front is currently having the most success. Currently that is the Socialist Alternative backed Socialist Party whose watchwords are “People before Profit”. This is a wholly meaningless phrase. Which political force in liberalism would not at least verbally claim allegiance to this concept? What class line does this push forward?
16. These projects rather than being the development of the historical need for the working class to forge its own political party are limited artisanal political efforts. The Socialist Party is a political project fundamentally tied to the needs of Socialist Alternative as a sect. This is the fundamental limitation undermining its ability to seriously develop and expand its reach.
17. The destruction of artisanal production was one of the great advancements of capitalism, it unleashed the creative power of human industry and thought, yet now the forces wishing to further unleash these powers have fallen into the most inefficient form of development for this struggle. The task that faces us today is to smash this artisanal division of politics and unleash the combined force of the socialist movement in its own interests. This is not only doable but the task which must be completed before we can seriously start the struggle.
18. The lesson of the past forty years is that we cannot wage the class struggle through isolated divided organisation seeking to define themselves not on what they stand for but rather their differences with everyone else. Instead, we must forge a united communist party, and fight for what the proletariat needs if it is to take power.
19. The reason Communist Unity exists is simple. The riddle of history remains unsolved; it is the duty of the proletariat to solve it. For the proletariat to do so it must have a unified world party, one organised on a maximally democratic basis. We are fighting for the construction of the Australian section of that party. One united around a program for workers’ power and the construction of the dictatorship of the proletariat.
20. The historic impasse of the last four decades is ending. We are moving from an explicitly counter-revolutionary period into a new epoch of pre-revolutionary crisis. The communist movement must step forward to advance the proletarian banner in every field the interests of the world working class.
21. Despite all the slings and arrows that history has thrown at the communist movement, communism is not dead.  The historical movement for the end of class society and the liberation of humanity from the shackles of need and oppression lives and marches on. But for it to triumph it must unite, not on the basis of papering over differences, but through the most resolute criticism and struggle.
22. Capital’s power comes from the fact that it is the most well-organised class in human history. The entire world system is organised to crush the proletariat and defang its capacity to take up its world historic mission. This society cannot be overthrown through a single blow. It will take decades of struggle, a struggle with a coherent international strategy, guided by a definitive international centre. This cannot emerge from a myriad of splintered groupings but through the forging of a single international, one that can transform the world proletariat into a class for itself. One that can storm the gates of heaven, and end humanity’s pre-history.
23. It is this goal that Communist Unity has pledged itself too, and it is for this goal that we will fight unerringly to unite the communist movement, to merge it with the workers’ movement, and to build a democratic workers’ republic in the Pacific.
24. To every communist in Australia, we call on you to unite behind the revolutionary banner of the Communist Unity. To the communists of Aotearoa, we call to unite across the Tasman to smash the chains of ANZAC Imperialism and free the Pacific from the oppression we have forced upon them. To the toiling masses of the Pacific, we call on you to raise high the banner of democracy and socialism. To the workers of the world, we raise the clarion call of revolution. The call of democracy, freedom, and socialism.

We have been nothing; we shall be everything.

Communism Lives!

Real human history begins and society leaves behind the realm of necessity. In the realm of freedom people will become rounded, fully social individuals, who can for the first time truly develop their natural humanity.

This is what we want to achieve. To win that prize we shall overcome all obstacles. – Draft Program of the Communist Party of Great Britian