Recently, a former member of Communist Unity published a manifesto against partyism on the website of the Red Anti-Imperialist Collective (Red Ant). Brunhilda Olding encourages him to think again.
It is a damning indictment of the international communist movement that Haig Kisherian’s “Partyism and the Limits of Liberalism” was published at all. This is not a response to that article, at least not directly. It is a response to a specific line of argument that it represents.
When discussing the concept of unity across theoretical tendencies, Comrade Kisherian makes the argument that:
If the much anticipated Red Ant merger ever did happen I suspect the entire organisation would get bogged down in similarly circular debates driven by irreconcilable values and perspectives. Get ready for multiple waves of ‘Is China Communist?’ over and over again with absolutely no resolution. I would rather discuss more interesting questions, like ‘what can we learn from China?’1
On the final point, we agree. A growing trend within the left seems to point to the People’s Republic of China as the decisive model for 21st century socialism. This tendency, which J. E. Morain has termed “Marcyism-Losurdoism”2, has emerged over the past few years as part of the backwash of online Stalinism. Increasingly, it has corresponded to a theoretical development across much of the ‘Marxist-Leninist’ and ‘anti-imperialist’ left.
This oftentimes uncritical engagement with China, while seemingly offering it up as a strategic model for revolutionary struggles, fails to seriously engage with the question of the current level and nature of class struggle across the world, including in Australia. Namely the fact that the socialist movement is marginal, divided, and largely irrelevant. For all intents and purposes, in most advanced capitalist countries today, there is no revolutionary movement, and no class vanguard. This is particularly true in English speaking countries.
Any arguments for strategic and tactical work must reflect this concrete reality. When Kisherian asks us to learn from the Chinese model, he is begging the question. We are not a party with state power in a nation of over a billion. We are operating in small organisations during a period of downturn in the class struggle. As such, we are looking for a strategic framework for pre-party groupings in a period of low-class struggle. This is a very different problem, and one that I do not think Kisherian realises he is posing.
One of the most immediate points Mike Macnair makes in his 2008 work Revolutionary Strategy when discussing why the then recent ‘Bolivarian Revolution’ had met with little international support is that:
fundamentally, the problem is that Chávismo offers no real strategic lesson for the left beyond ‘find yourselves a charismatic leader’ […] Bolshevism offered a worked-out strategic line for the road beyond capitalism, whether this line was right or wrong.3
The ‘Chinese model’ poses the same problems: it offers no framework for winning power for the working class in the advanced capitalist countries. Nor does it offer a working model for making democratic, anti-feudal revolutions (as demonstrated in the Philippines, Nepal, Peru, and India).
The socialist movement has consciously taken on the task of the liberation of humanity from oppression, exploitation, and domination. This task is not one which can be taken on lightly or without upholding the highest spirit of self-criticism. As such, we need an approach to debate that does not consist of slamming mutually exclusive dead theoretical tendencies into each other, but on the grounds of the concrete tasks of the moment and the road forward from the present conjuncture.
Now, of course, these debates take the form of clashes between tendencies, because as Macnair correctly argues:
Humans have no guide to action in the future other than theorising on what has happened in the past, and we do it all the time we are awake.4
The task facing us as serious Communists today is to strip away the rhetoric and illusions clouding over the real strategic debate facing us.
So if we are called to find something to learn from China instead of debating on if it is socialist or not (though one could well argue determining if China is socialist or not; will in turn determine the lessons drawn from it) we must ask what lessons are we supposed to take in the current moment and form of struggle.
If we are to look towards China as a model to learn from, we must look at the tactics of the early Communist Party of China, as well as the strategic model it utilized; not the actions of the CPC which has ruled the country for decades. However, there are obvious problems with such a project. The conditions of 1920s China and 2020s Australia are so different that there is no immediate points of comparison for strategic debates, aside from the most bland generalities.
If we are to study any period for tactical and strategic lessons, we need to study those periods most like our own, not only materially, but also in the field of socialist politics.
If we are to survey the socialist movement today it is an objective fact that it is divided, theoretically weak, organisationally and politically aimless, and with no coherent plan to get out of the ditch. We need a strategy! The process of developing one requires a ruthless, unrelenting, struggle to win people over to our politics. With that in mind, I am thankful to Comrade Kisherian for opening this debate, because it allows us to strip away the illusions that often colour debates within the socialist movement.
The dividing line between Kisherian and us is that to quote the manifesto he wrote for the ‘Catalyst Tendency’ (an internal tendency for which Kisherian wrote a manifesto not long before his departure):
It is for this reason that we believe that the current ‘revolutionary strategy’ of the Communist Unity does not work. It does not work because it aims for a ‘majority’ of the population (which in turn means a super-majority of the proletariat) to join in on a communist revolution. But this won’t work because much of the proletariat lacks the revolutionary character necessary for this revolution to work.
This orientation towards revolutionary politics is a minoritarian one and closes itself off from the struggle for a mass party. It is elitist and chauvinist, and rooted in a deep disdain for the creativity, intelligence, and power of the working class. The logic this argument produces is the same logic that suffuses Kisherian’s article: that everyone who disagrees with the author isn’t a Marxist and we can simply write them off. After all, as Kisherian argues later in his manifesto:
If someone can look into the face of climate collapse, genocide, and a collapsing economic system built on extortion and not become a revolutionary – then they probably never will be.
This perspective is limited, myopic, and narcissistic. If the communist movement were to adopt this viewpoint, we would never climb out of the mire we find ourselves in.
If we assume that only those who are already committed to liberation are going to be convinced, we will convince no one. The vision of politics this creates is not a politics of human liberation as the self-conscious action of the working class. Rather it is a Lasallean vision of state socialism, where an enlightened elite introduces socialism through government fiat. It is the logic of the self-selecting sect, not of a Marxist communist.
If you cannot convince other communists of your perspective which Kisherian was unable to do in Communist Unity, then the chances of you convincing the proletariat as a whole is non-existent. If we wish to win, we must move beyond the current level of jousting at shadows and instead seriously think through what we are fighting for, and how we wish to fight for it.
I do not believe that Kisherian is interested in such an effort and for this reason, we can dismiss his critique of our tendency. He is unable to seriously think through his vision of politics as a concrete strategic vision for moving the movement forward. Instead, he tries and fails to debate a vision of Partyism that he neither understands nor is able to seriously critique. In doing so, he is leaving the potential for serious debate on the ground. Hopefully, higher quality revolutionaries will pick it up.
- See: https://redantcollective.org/2026/05/14/partyism-and-the-limits-of-liberalism/ ↩︎
- See J. E. Morain, The Immortal Science of Marcyism-Losurdoism, 2026 ↩︎
- Mike Macnair, Revolutionary Strategy, 2008 ↩︎
- ibid. ↩︎
PARTISAN! 
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