PARTISAN!

The following is the text of a speech delivered by comrade Pauline Slaughter at Marxism Fringe 2026 in response to the question of “What do we mean by communist unity?” .

We mean the reforming of a communist party whereby the current sects and tendencies of the communist movement find their expression not via independent groupings competing with one another for recruits, but instead via internal factions of a mass party.

The struggle against capital is, to be optimistic, decades long. The proletariat as a class is not yet capable of becoming a ruling class. It will be long and miserable work for decades to build up the class and the party. Our task is to build a communist party.

The task of the party and the communist movement is to build industrial unions, cooperative associations, tenants and housing organisations, party press including sectional and regional publications, worker committees on healthcare, welfare and education, a red-green ecological movement, women and youth organisations, social and cultural clubs, intellectual circles, mutual aid societies, and organisations of the nationally oppressed. It must build roots in the factories, the schools and the working class neighbourhoods.

It will be from these bases that we shall create a red fortress to conquer power. Yet these things do not emerge spontaneously, they require a revolutionary consciousness forged via extensive agitation and education.

The proletariat does not yet have a party that is capable of bringing it to power. The task of the socialist movement when it does not have a party is to build one. This party will not emerge via some single sect out manoeuvring the others, or one group having the most pure ideas which the workers movement sees and flocks to in the millions as if they are inspired by divine providence. When it comes to building the type of party we need, Comrade Sarah G in red flag says it best when she writes “A mass revolutionary worker’s party will come about only through the fusion of many different currents and tendencies of revolutionary politics”.

What we mean by communist unity is a unity that can last the decades long struggle ahead of us. We don’t mean a united front that lasts two protests then ends with everyone screaming at one another creating personal grudges between leading Marxist cadres that lasts decades. We don’t mean a unity where it’s clear that everyone hates each other’s guts. We mean a unity that will be capable of enduring.

Just over a year ago the Adelaide Communist Collective split from the Australian Communist Party which was itself a split from the Communist Party of Australia, which itself was a split from the original Communist Party of Australia that renamed itself after the original party dissolved into the SEARCH Foundation. Red Spark split from Red Ant, and Socialist Alliance after withdrawing from the Victorian Socialists in 2020 has recently refused to unify with the Socialist Party. This begs the question, how do we actually maintain unity once we have it?

It is only possible to maintain the fusion of various tendencies that make up a party if the smaller tendencies don’t feel as if they are going to be kicked out for disagreeing with the majority. Thus the immediate requirement is that those who form this unity must not feel that they are going to be purged. Beyond not being purged, there must also be a basis for them to express their views. The party will have its position which represents the majority opinion, yet, minority positions must not be hidden away, but instead allowed to be published in the party press with it clear that they are factional positions.

Factions exist within a sect or party whether the members of those sects or parties wish for them to or not. If factions are banned then really what this creates is one open faction that is the centre. Those who disagree with this faction are forced into the sidelines and cannot organise openly. They cannot critique decisions made by the centre and must operate in secret. The secrecy is what leads to the splits, not the faction.

When a faction is forced to remain secret –lest it face accusations of factionalism and be purged— that faction is denied the ability to persuade comrades to its positions. Its propaganda exists in hushed conversations between individual members and not in the party press. The faction that emerges rivalling the centre faction is typically not cohered on a clear line of agreed political principles, instead being an amalgamation of vague contradictory tendencies that would not merge if they did have a commonality in their suppression. The short lived Brisbane sect “unite” emerged in this manner, originally being a faction formed around general opposition to the position of the central leadership of Socialist Alliance. Yet, it was not formed on any cohered line of political agreement and once purged the faction became a sect, which lasted a few years before unite itself split.

The Australian Communist Party has followed a similar path having two notable splits from it: The first being the Black Peoples Union, and the second being the Adelaide Communist Collective. The ACP, as you’d expect, bans factions. In fact the ACP has the party police in the “Control Commission” which is elected by the Central Committee to “Protect the unity and ideological purity of the party, and to fight against hostile influences and against factional activity”. The Control Commission like the sect it was a part of is deeply embarrassing and considering the state of the ACP has obviously failed in its duties. It’s when party organs like this deny factions their expression that splits occur. The ACP in rule 4 of their constitutions says “it is the right of a party member to participate freely in party discussions” yet this participation must be ideologically pure and non-factional.

The alternative to this is to have open factions. By open factions we mean that members of the party are given a chance to present their views. The party’s press does not ban or suppress the articles written by factions. Factions being open means that a factional struggle occurring at conference has as its consequences, the loss or gain of support of a faction based on the strength and popularity of the positions held by given factions. The direction of the party is determined on which faction or factions in coalition have a majority. Thus defeat is a chance for reflection and re-organisation, not a basis for a purge. There exists now a possibility of partial victories in which a debated and negotiated position between factions can be reached. This allows for a real unity between comrades in a shared political struggle.

We’ve covered two key points, one that factions always exist within a sect or party, and two that the way the sect or party responds to these factions will determine whether or not factions stay within the party or leave.

Open factions themselves have prerequisites beyond merely not banning them. When you allow factions you are also allowing for factional fights over the direction of the organisation. This means that winning or losing these fights must matter, democracy must actually count for something.

The Australian Communist Party does not allow factions, but if it did it most likely wouldn’t have any. The National Party Congress, which is the highest body of the ACP, elects delegates either by another state or district conference, or directly by their branches. Yet members already in leadership and thus of the centre faction are granted ⅓ of the number of delegations to the National Party Congress. There are also a bunch of arbitrary rarely explained delegate restrictions such as you have to be a member of a union, this one applies even if you’re unemployed and resulted in Adelaide delegates not being able to vote at the ACP national congress. A decision on the question of changing the name of the ACP occurred at this congress, the pro name change group lost this debate, however the name change went ahead anyways with various ACP cadres kicked from the organisation for opposing the name change. Within a year of this the Adelaide Communist Collective split from the ACP. Worse yet, the ACP had bled members across the country and now is practically non-existent. Attempting to hold on by the centre and purge all opposition killed the entire org.

Beyond what’s already covered, the other reasons for the split of the Adelaide Communist Collective are resolvable issues in an organisation where the leadership are accountable and must defend their position from open political disagreement. The reasons the Adelaide Communist Collective cites for their split are in their own words:

• “An irreparable culture of liberal egoism”
• “An institutional lack of accountability”
• “Lack of ideological clarity and direction”

All are issues that are resolvable in an organisation that allows open factional debate and democratic control of the organisation via its membership. It would grant ACP cadre the ability to hold their central leadership accountable, to polemicise and organise against a culture of liberal egoism and the factional debates would grant theoretical clarity regarding the direction of the organisation.

If we recognise that a vibrant internal democracy and open factions prevents splits, thus we reject the system of hidden factions, then we must also discuss theoretical education. Factions here have two aspects. The first is that they bring forward lines of disagreement, by bringing forward these lines and debating them they develop those involved in the debate.

Much of the works the left today reads are debates from earlier periods of our movement:

• What Is To Be Done?
• Two Tactics of Social-Democracy
• “Left-Wing” Communism: An Infantile Disorder
• Reform or Revolution
• Critique of the Gotha Programme

The second aspect is that education is a prerequisite for factions. There is often a broad critique of the communist movement that “they waste our time reading old dead men”. On the part of Communist Unity, we plead guilty as charged. How can we expect someone to argue for or against the direction of their organisation, or hold leadership accountable if they are not educated to a high enough level to question the direction of the organisation. Not being educated enough to question the organisation doesn’t prevent someone from leaving the organisation, someone can be incapable of articulating a critique of the current direction of the organisation but still leave on the basis of a vague feeling of unease regarding the organisation’s direction.

Educated members within a party also spare the party of one of the alleged risks of open factions. That being what if a bad faction wins out? What if the opportunists, reformists, perfidious Trotskyites or vile Stalinists take power? Factions to win people over have to publish their views, thus their views have to be open to critique. Both the faction publishing their views and the faction critiquing them are laying themselves bare to the party and the class. Whilst I would not argue that a faction with an incorrect position cannot win a majority in a system with open factions, it must be obvious that banning factions doesn’t solve this issue, but instead leaves you more open to this problem since the majority faction does not have to justify itself to the entirety of the party and the class.

To talk specifically on reformism, comrades need to be cautious regarding unity between reformist and revolutionary socialists, the question lies in their relationship to the Australian capitalist class.

Socialist alliance for example has a program that would not be possible to implement even if the working class had a majority in all levels of parliament, the only way to implement such a program would be via revolution.

Yet it is not explicitly a revolutionary program, it does not tell the class of the only means to actually implement the program they are to fight for, despite this we’re in favour of unity between Alliance and the Socialist Party and would advocate for the inclusion of Socialist Alliance in a reforged communist party. The Socialist Party itself has this problem and it’d be obviously absurd to reforge a communist party and exclude the Socialist Party.

The basis of our answer to this question should be on democracy. Can we openly fight against reformist tendencies and does unity require us to suppress our organisations democracy? In the reformist quasi-socialist party that is, or perhaps was, Your Party (UK), it was the reformist wings that at every instance sought the suppression of open revolutionaries. Via the partially successful attempt to ban socialist sects from joining the party and the silencing of the minority left wing of the Central Executive Committee.

In the Democratic Socialist of America it is not uncommon for the reformist wing to attempt to attempt some political maneuver to suppress the political influence of the revolutionary wing. Recent examples of this include DSA Los Angeles, where reformist caucuses attempted to change voting rules for the delegate election who’d be voting at an upcoming DSA Convention. In NYC the DSA right attempted to overturn an election to an anti-war working group. The leadership cliques that form around figures who are not beholden to membership and take on the role of an almost intelligentsia class above the rest of the party are always a danger. Yet the reformist section is the one who is the most anti-democratic, since unlike other forms of undemocratic leadership they must be able to prove themselves capable of suppressing revolutionaries in the rank and file so that they can secure coalitions and alliances with bourgeois parties.

The abolition of the sect form and the reformation of a communist party is a necessity. The basis and requirements of such a party is clear. No class in history has been defeated peacefully or quietly. The evidence of all of history points to this fact, if we wish for the 21st century to be the one where the proletariat emerges victorious then it is our task to forge a party capable of overthrowing the capitalist world order.