PARTISAN!

Steve M.

Congratulations on the latest issue of Partisan, which arrived in the post yesterday. It’s the first hardcopy version I’ve seen, and of course the first under the rubric of Communist Unity. It looks very professional indeed.

Here, some initial responses to one of the reports of the 2026 Fourth General Conference of the RCO, View from The Mountain. It is difficult to unpack the first (Critiquing perspectives at the conference), as it would take an inordinate space to deal with its all its rather pointless and abstruse incoherence. And I leave aside the third Spartacists for Communist Unity as I don’t have a worthwhile critique of it, and generally concur with it. Compared to Critiquing perspectives at the conference, however, View from the Mountain is far more concrete and meaningful from a programmatic and strategic perspective, as it doesn’t attempt to shoehorn programmatic perspectives into abstract categories such as ‘actionism’ (which most people familiar with the term understand as a school of performance art originating in 1960s Vienna, and most certainly a species of abstraction dredged up from “a sea of undefined terms inherited from long-dead traditions”).

Given the especially appalling state of the left today, Communist Unity at least is a positive recognition that something must be done!

Let’s start with agitation:

The Spartacists’ purely agitational strategy (ie, lacking in mass theoretical education), alongside their proposal for a purely oppositional programme (ie, without a vision for communism), will not succeed in reconstructing the socialist movement and the workers’ movement.

The working class is in its current state because its everyday needs, for decades, haven’t been met, and struggles for these haven’t been conducted with anything resembling a winning strategy, if at all. In fact, most ‘opposition’ to the bosses attacks has been designed to smother real opposition.

An examination of every pre-revolutionary or revolutionary period in history will show that the insurgent masses rose up not because they’ve received an adequate ‘theoretical education’ but because they can no longer go on living as before and realise in the struggle itself that to change their situation they must go beyond the routine and resort to more radical measures. If properly led toward a revolutionary situation, i.e. with a leadership that can show by example, and teach by examples the lessons of past struggles that have won and lost, then they stand the best chance of winning. Revolutionaries must work with what they’re presented with, not whether the working class is sufficiently abreast of Althusser’s, Poulantzas’ or some other ‘Marxist’ worthy’s obscurantism. ‘Mass theoretical education’ is a rank idealism.

The Spartacists’ application of Trotsky’s transitional programme method will not produce the cadreised mass base that is necessary for a communist party to survive and grow in the long term. It instead produces a constituency within the working class that is motivated by emotional or moral resentment and kept together only by the activism of a small militant sect.

How on earth does application of the Transitional Program produce a ‘constituency in the working class that is motivated by emotional or moral resentment’? Does the author attempt to show how this might arise specifically in the case of the Spartacists applying it? Of course not. Working class anger and resentment, and daresay a hatred of the capitalist system, are never to be discounted but on the contrary must be fostered, even if it begins in small pockets of the working class, which it often does.

Working class anger and resentment are absolutely necessary pre-conditions for making a revolution. During insurrectionary periods, all manner of violence and ‘excesses’ are conducted against the rulers and their lackeys, and the task of a revolutionary leadership is to channel the pent up anger and fury into a torrent that successfully smashes the bourgeois state to take power. The Bolsheviks, who to date have been the only successful communists on earth, were very adept at this.

So, what is the Mountain’s actual problem with the Transitional Programme? Surely it’s goes deeper than it somehow creating angry and resentful sects? What does the Mountain propose instead? A minimum and maximum program, as in classic social democracy, with it’s the sewer socialism of minimal bread-and-butter reforms accompanying a maximum program, primarily for ‘revolutionary’ credentialing and phrasemongering, dusted off for Sunday speechifying for the socialist society in the bye and bye?

It should be noted also that a transitional demand approach was mooted by Karl Radek at the Third Congress of the Comintern (without controversy), nearly 20 years prior to the Trotskyist movement’s formal adoption of the Transitional Programme, the founding document of the Fourth International. The whole point of the Transitional Program is for revolutionaries to put forward, in full knowledge that capitalism cannot grant them, demands that the working class today would nonetheless support as being in its core best interests. And when led by revolutionaries in the struggles for them, the working class comes to the determination that to gain and retain them it must take power. The Bolsheviks had a pretty good transitional demand, ‘Peace, Land and Bread’.

The author doubts that it’s ‘possible for a defensive struggle by workers in a key industry to spread spontaneously to other sections of the class’. Of course it is, and plenty of instances exist to show it.

In Australia, the example of Clarrie O’Shea is a case in point. In 1969, Clarrie O’Shea, Victorian leader of the Tramways Union was jailed by John Kerr for ‘contempt of court’. Immediately, strikes across key sectors of Victoria broke out, and the next day the state was under a general strike with almost all essential services shut down. The Victorian strikes were led by leftwing unions who defied the hidebound Victorian Trades Hall Council, with the Labour Council of New South Wales also opposed to it. In contrast, the Labour Councils of WA, SA and Queensland called their members out in solidarity, along with key Labour Councils in Newcastle, Wollongong and Canberra. Tasmanian unions defied their own Trades and Labour Council and went out in a general strike.

One therefore could hardly characterise this outbreak of defensive strike action, which sent shockwaves throughout the country, as being led by ‘broad and pre-existing penetration of the class by communist militants’. Yet it won and made anti-strike laws a dead letter for 20 years. But we’re told that national coordination is needed (and there was in 1969, despite obstacles) and even ‘international coordination’(!) before successful defensive struggles can be carried out. If ever there was a paralysing Waiting for Godot moment, this is right up there.

Other Australian examples of strikes spreading spontaneously include the NSW 1917 general strike, which also originated with tram drivers; and of course the strikes that broke out following the sacking of the Whitlam government in 1975. Individual circumstances determine if a strike spreads or not, and of course a revolutionary leadership of the working class most certainly would co-ordinate strike action on national and international levels – at will.

This continual agitation for ‘theory’, which is on a par with the likes of a Gerry Healy or a David North, culminates in:

The Mountain believes it is possible for a mass communist party to exist which has hundreds of thousands of members in Australia, and in which each of these members is meaningfully engaged in scientific practice.

Ye gods. If a mass (revolutionary) communist party in Australia were to have hundreds of thousands of members, ie, conditions were such that it acquired such a mass base and if it wasn’t vying for power, then something is dreadfully wrong. The Bolsheviks had approximately 300,000 members when they took power in the Russian empire of ≈165 million. Most of the Bolshevik membership was accrued in the months and weeks prior to them taking power in October 1917. Not years. Months and weeks. If the cadre of a mass party of the size of hundreds of thousands in Australia, with its 25 million population, were busy contemplating their navels being ‘meaningfully engaged in scientific practice’ instead of making revolution, then that party is doomed to never making one. Some strong advice: study less ‘theory’ and more history, especially of successful and failed revolutionary opportunities. Please.

Defining what constitutes the working class often has been a vexed issue, especially in those countries that have steadily deindustrialised over the last 4-5 decades (the US, Australia, UK and many parts of Europe). The Marxist definition of the proletariat has always applied to those who live by the sale of their labour power. So one is curious to know the source of the author’s claim that “Spartacists define the proletariat only as those employed in large workplaces under ‘industrial’ conditions”.

However, blue collar workers in key sectors still exist even in the so-called ‘service economy’ countries. Public transport, postal and freight, wharves, electric power and water utilities, mining, construction, steel, oil, agricultural and health sector workers form strategic parts of the Australian blue/pink collar workforce.

For a communist party to have any hope of making a revolution, it must win the lead-ership of at least one of these key workforce sectors. The author states, ‘A strike by meat packers could potentially extend spontaneously into a strike by steel workers, but not a strike by hospitality staff or houseworkers.’ Maybe. For example, the Oakland (Califor-nia) General Strike in December 1946 grew out of retail clerks (mostly women) striking to organise a major downtown department store. Taking place in the context of the massive strike wave that swept the US immediately following WWII, this action gained wide sup-port in the city and turned into a two-day general strike involving about 50,000 workers. And this was in the period of the AFL and CIO (backed by the CP) trying to enforce an extension of the wartime “no strike” pledge. One can never predict the spark that sets off a conflagration, and no amount of ‘theory’ will help.

The focus of communist penetration into the working class must be on its key strategic sectors that can shut down the whole economy. Nonetheless if a group of hospitality staff or retail clerks approached a revolutionary party with a proposal to form a communist caucus in their union, would the party turn them down? Never.

Parenthetically, a component of any communist program for such deindustrialised countries would be re-industrialisation, based on economic planning and exploiting the highest levels of technology, including nuclear power.

Not mentioned anywhere here is how communists actually would go about winning the allegiance of the working class, which begins with the understanding that the current leadership of the working class is a class-collaborationist misleadership that must be ousted. For this to occur, implanted communist militants must be the best trade unionists, the best defenders of their working colleagues, and the best at exposing the betrayals of the current misleaders. Most of this happens in the heat of struggle, but communist workers must always be on the lookout to recruiting to communism the natural, authoritative leaders in the class itself. Above all, they must present a program that can link logically and coherently the issues of the day to the need for the working class to take power.

Which brings us to the Labor Party question. On the one hand, the Mountain advocates transforming ‘the Labor party into a democratically organised united front of the entire working class’ – in other words a Kautskyist ‘party of the whole class’; on the other, there’s a ‘plan committed the RCO to quadrupling its cadre membership within two years and for pressuring the entire Australian ‘left’ into the Socialist Party in the third year. What would the aim of the Socialist Party be then? To enter the Labor? To what end? Perhaps to split it, heaven forbid? Of course if there were a radicalised left wing of workers or a union affiliated to the Labor Party that wanted to split in the interests of the working class, then a serious entry would be on the agenda of the day. Otherwise, this is nuts.

sad example of revolutionaries entering the Labor Party with all the best intentions to push it to the left is the fate of Nick Origlass and Issy Wyner who followed a long road trying to “transform” the ALP into a revolutionary party. They reached a dead end, abandoned their revolutionary pretensions for ‘advancing democracy’ and seats on Leichhardt Municipal Council. The ALP is the final resting place, a graveyard, for revolutionaries.

The strategic approach to the Labor party, as with all mass reformist parties of the working class, is to remove it as an important, if not the most important, obstacle to revolution. That means taking every opportunity to undermining it politically to split its mass base from the pro-capitalist/imperialist leadership and winning its base over to a revolutionary perspective. And yes, that occurs not from having a ‘better’ theory but from struggle. And from struggle, successful or unsuccessful, comes understanding, experience and lessons learnt, which first and foremost must occur in the cadre that aspire to lead the working class to power.

As history has shown, the day the dominant reformist working class party loses its base to the revolutionaries is the day of revolution. It will happen quickly, on the heels of an acute unresolvable social or economic crisis that’s pointing society toward revolution and where revolutionaries successfully intervene with a program to cut the gordian knot. As is often ascribed to Lenin, ‘There are decades when nothing happens; and there are weeks when decades happen.’

The collapse of the liberal order is occurring everywhere and the coming period will be of defensive struggles. In Australia it is clear that there’s no influx of refugees and asylum seekers who’ve been the victims of Australia’s rulers’ own depredations, plunder or war in its target countries. Consequently, there’s not the same growing rightwing movement based on anti-immigration as in the EU/UK/US, etc. However, there’s still a growing far-right movement here, with Hanson at its head, that still hates anyone with ‘alien cultural values’, the new form of racism used by the UK/EU/US far right. The all but defunct Liberal Party most likely will fade away and its rump will join the Hansonites, as happened with the Nationals.

Presently in Australia, the repression and attacks on the working class emanates mainly from the state itself, with the ALP government implementing ‘hate speech’ legislation that would make Orwell blush, and of course its smashing of ‘misbehaving’ trade unions like the CFMEU. More will come, because the western imperialists are striving to shore up their tottering 500-year rule over the globe. That won’t leave ‘The Lucky Country’ unscathed, because when Australia is roped into the coming US war on China, we’ll see its rulers really go after any working class resistance. And the ALP and sell-out trade union leaderships will be their most fervent and able servants. These are pointers in this country to the liberal order being dismantled. Could any principled communist enter the ALP under such conditions? Of course not.

In reference to the first quote above, why this fixation on ‘a vision for communism’? For good reason Marx and Engels denounced as unscientific the utopian socialists’ wanton detailed prescriptions for their future ideal society. Marx and Engels were always careful not to specify how communism would appear other than as a classless society in which the work required from an individual would be trivial and freely given (as in ‘from each according to his ability to each according to his needs’). In short, this talk of ‘a vision of communism’ is simply utopia mongering. One quote of Marx’s from the execrable Critiquing perspectives at the conference is valuable here, never critiqued but still used as a cudgel: “every step of the real movement is more important than a dozen programs”.

And what of the Spartacist ‘proposal for a purely oppositional programme’? If the Spartacist tendency’s programme were purely oppositional, would they bother dissolving their organisation and joining the RCO to build a communist movement and eventually a party?

Yet later we’re presented with:

’The Mountain develops a proposal for what the entire socialist movement should be doing right now – rather than just what the RCO should be doing. This will require time and discussion. Nonetheless, and drawing on comrade Mike Macnair’s Revolutionary strategy, I believe that this proposal should be: build a real opposition!’

With such ‘theory’, ‘opposition’ appears to boil down to ‘one rule for me and another for thee’, so it’s hard to know exactly ‘what the entire socialist movement should be doing right now’. Is it Arthur or Martha?