PARTISAN!

The following report was written by Edith Fischer and was presented to the Fourth General Conference of Communist Unity, January 2026.

On Method

Any strategy must begin with an analysis of the present conjuncture, and the balance of forces which this conjuncture produces. An analysis of a given historical conjuncture must necessarily be composed of several distinct layers: firstly, an analysis of the component modes of production, with an analysis given of the forces and relations of production at play.

 This may produce an analysis of the given economic structure, and with it the relevant juridico-political and ideological structures at work in a given historical epoch. Secondly, a given social formation will necessarily compose several modes of production, each with their own interlocking social relations brought about by the contingent historical processes that gave rise to a given society. Finally, an analysis of a given social formation must be placed within a given historical moment, and the balance of class forces, their relative strength, organisation, and ideological make-up must be examined. This is the elementary task of historical materialism.

As such, an analysis of our present conjuncture must compose the following elements:

1. An analysis of capitalism as such, beginning with the relationship between the forces and relations of production in capitalist society, and in particular beginning with a study of the forces and relations of production in the form of capitalism which predominates in Australia.
2. An analysis of Australia’s place in the world-imperialist structure, and the relationship of the Australian social formation to other social formations, and to the world economy as a whole. In particular, attention must be paid to the relationship between Australian capitalism and the imperialist hegemon — the United States of America.
3. An analysis must be given to the existence of other modes of production (such as the squatter-convict and the family-domestic mode of production) and their place in the history of Australian capitalism, and the various modes of accumulation and regimes of regulation that have overseen these developments.
4. An analysis of the class structure of Australian society, and the composition of the three broad class blocs — the proletariat, the bourgeoisie, and the middling classes.
5. An analysis of the role of the state in Australian society.
6. An analysis of the dominant forms of ideology of Australian society, and their relationship to the class structure and the state.
7. An analysis of the political field, and the various political parties and movements, and their relationship to the state, the various forms of ideology, and the class structure.

The following report is not intended to be definitive, and indeed, it is not possible to render a definitive verdict on this matter. The task is to overcome a profound theoretical underdevelopment in the socialist movement that stems from an unwillingness or inability to properly theorise the conditions of Australian capitalism and link this theoretical work with revolutionary activity.

Australian Capitalism: An Outline

The development of capitalism in Australia can be broadly divided into the following rough periodisation:

1. Firstly, a period of state-led colonial development, in which a squatter-convict mode of production played an important transitional role.
2. Secondly, a period of mercantile capitalist development, in which squatter power was marginalised by the liberal colonial-mercantile bourgeoisie and small and medium capital became dominant.
3. Thirdly, a transitional period in which the mercantile-agricultural economy produced its first proletariat in the form of shearers, agricultural labourers, dockers, and labourers. This period coincides with the development of Laborism.
4. Fourthly, a period of industrial capitalism, in which industrial capital became dominant and quickly produced a system of monopoly capitalism. This period saw the rise of the industrial proletariat, and with it the development of a proletarian communism.
5. Finally, a period in which Australian capitalism is tightly integrated into an international division of labour, in which Australia becomes primarily a mineral and service export economy, and is systematically de-industrialised.

The relationship of Australian capitalism to the international division of labour is the central question for understanding the general dynamics of the Australian economy and social formation today. It should begin with a general comment on the composition of Australian industry with regards to the world-economy.

As a whole, Australia produces primary and tertiary goods — that is unrefined and unprocessed minerals, and agricultural products on the one hand, and services on the other. In turn, Australia imports almost all of its fixed capital goods and consumer products — electronics, clothing, and automobiles. Where historically Australia had thriving textile and auto sectors, today these production lines have been largely outsourced, and Australia is now largely dependent upon international markets.

In terms of investment, Australia is a prime site for inter-core investment, and in turn, Australian capital is deeply invested in countries in the imperialist core. In terms of direct integration, Australian firms are increasingly owned by international capital, with significant mergers in the last forty years including the purchasing of significant sections of former state industries (such as Telstra), and the purchase of the Westfield group by the French Unibail-Rodamco.

In terms of imperialist interests, Australian capital is heavily invested in Papua New Guinea, India, Indonesia, and Southeast Asia. Beyond this direct investment, Australian capital benefits extensively from unequal exchange between the global periphery and the global core.

The immediate consequences of this particular relationship to the world economy are that the Australian capitalist class is broadly invested in maintaining the existing balance of power in the world order. In particular, Australian capital is highly integrated, in particular with the United States, who is its single greatest investor. However, Australian capital is more dependent on Chinese trade and a broadly favourable investment market in Asia than even American capital.

The Australian capitalists, torn between Chinese trade and American investment, are trapped in a world that is increasingly divided into mutually hostile blocs of capital engaging in protectionist defence of their national industries. The result is a schizophrenic policy of rearmament and free trade.

The Lucky Country: A Sketch

Australian society is a dictatorship of capital. In every aspect of life, the capitalist class form the dominant class in our society. In turn, the capitalist class also leads the ruling bloc — the cadre of managers, economists, lawyers, and future executives who lead the repressive, managerial, and ideological apparatuses. The dictatorship of capital does not just reside in the state and federal governments, however. It extends across all facets of life — the vast apparatus of bourgeois civil society, social and cultural institutions, and the ideological apparatus of the state all construct a ruling bloc that maintains the class hegemony of the capitalists.

The capitalist class proper is made up of senior executives, owners of capitalist firms, and those who live off substantial stock portfolios. While the haute bourgeoisie — the industrial magnates, financial titans and owners of vast property portfolios are themselves are small class, they are followed by tens of thousands of medium sized capitalists (employing dozens of workers) and hundreds of thousands of small capitalists (all employing only a handful of workers).

Australian society has an oversized petty bourgeoisie. This petty bourgeoisie is composed of three interlinked economic blocs — the traditional petty bourgeois, the petty rentier-speculators, and the managerial strata. However, they find their unity as a class at the political and ideological level — in terms of the relationship to capital, and their general political and ideological role, these groups are largely identical.

1. The traditional petty bourgeoisie consists of the self-employed, independent workers, and artisanal workers. This group numbers in the hundreds of thousands and encompasses both blue collar and white-collar workers. Many of these petty bourgeois are themselves contractors for big capital and the state, this particularly true in construction, and health and social care.
2. The petty rentiers and speculators make up the largest of the three groups. In total, millions of Australians live off the proceeds of speculative assets, and the income derived from the financial markets via the superannuation system.
3. The final group is made up of managers, consultants, technical specialists and bureaucratic cadres. This group largely works for salaries, but their relationship to capital, their payment out of the proceeds of surplus value marks them as a distinct social class. In turn, they are organised against the proletariat in a decisive way — arguably, it is this group that is most clearly positioned to defend the interests of the capitalist class, as their status and incomes are directly derived from the haute bourgeoisie. In Australia, this group is also oversized, with hundreds of thousands working as consultants, middle managers, accountants, and HR directors.

This layer rests between labour and capital and largely lives on the proceeds of surplus value. They are also organised and often employed against the working-class, either directly as landlords or managers, or indirectly, as functionaries of capital broadly. Politically, this class shares a symbiotic relationship to state policy and the ruling bloc, and ideologically they share a petty bourgeois ideology — stratocratic, meritocratic, and petty bourgeois socialism.

The proletariat in this country numbers in the millions. In its ranks are not just those employed in industry, but in services, retail, hospitality, and logistics. It includes workers in the public and private sector, employed by small, medium, and large firms. It also includes dependents and children, people on disability and sick benefit, and pensioners. It includes women who work in the home, and workers’ children. It also includes students in training to enter the working-class — in high schools and technical colleges, as well as some sections of the university students.

The Australian proletariat is internally divided. On the one hand, there exists an aristocracy of skilled workers, often possessing property of their own and skills monopolies that protect them from open competition in the labour market. These workers are more likely to be organised, in particular by the craft unions for both white- and blue-collar workers. On the other hand, there are precarious, unskilled, and semi-skilled workers in retail, healthcare, hospitality, manufacturing, and agriculture. These workers are considerably less likely to be organised and are significantly less likely to own property of their own. This division of the working-class also presents itself along gender, racial, and generational lines.

Ideologically, the Australian proletariat lies broadly under the creaking hegemony of Laborism. The Labor Party still broadly commands the votes and support of workers in this country, allowing them to be the only party that can hold government alone. Beyond the reach of the party apparatus, Laborism remains the organic, consensus ideology of the working-class: reformism, gradualism, bourgeois socialism, corporatism, and nationalism.

It is worth commenting on the dominant ideology of Australian society. Of the ideological state apparatuses, the school remains the primary site of enculturation and ideological production in Australian society. The development of social media has served to somewhat challenge and undermine this process, which has led to recent attempts to crack down on social media use, particularly by children. Alongside the educational apparatus, the traditional bourgeois press remains decisive in shaping political opinion, particularly amongst the petty bourgeoisie.

The dominant ideology of Australian capitalism today is that of progressive civic nationalism — an ideological expression of a desire to defend the project of Keatingism amidst an increasingly chaotic world system and declining profitability. This progressive civic nationalism has a liberal element, a nationalist element, a progressive element, and an imperialist element. The imperialist element, which is not often directly expressed, but is rather sublimated, is mobilised to justify the Rules Based International Order, which is central to the interests of the Australian ruling class.

Our Historical Conjuncture

Since the wave of class struggles of the late 1990s and early 2000s, Australian society has entered an era of relative social peace. While class struggle is of course ever-present, these struggles rarely take on a mass character, and when they do, they are easily recuperated by the ruling bloc and its ideology. This social peace is the product of specific historical circumstances and Australia’s place in the system of imperialism. This social peace has four distinct pillars: widespread home ownership, the superannuation system, the arbitration system, and cheap commodity prices.

1. Australia has one of the higher home ownership rates in the advanced capitalist world and has a disproportionately large class of petty landlords and speculators. With the transformation of housing into a financial asset in the wake of neoliberalisation, workers have utilised property ownership to subsidise stagnant wages. Along with superannuation, home ownership serves as a guarantee that many workers will be able to enter the petty bourgeoisie upon their retirement.
2. The superannuation system binds the working-class, and the trade unions in particular, to the financial markets via the state. Envisioned by its reformist creators as the path to a gradual socialisation of industry, instead it serves primarily to place a section of the wage fund at the service of capital for investment, and to guarantee the embourgeoisement of sections of the Australian proletariat.
3. The arbitration system, which is currently represented by the FairWork Commission and the various state-level industrial courts, is central to the historical project of Laborism — the subsumption of proletarian struggles into the bourgeois state. This system channels labour struggles into the industrial courts, and exhausts economic struggles with legal costs, all the while allowing for the state to directly intervene and prevent industrial action.
4. Finally, the flow of cheap consumer goods, including consumer durables, from the Third World allows for a culture of consumption and entertainment to dominate working-class life, while assuring that living costs do not drive up wage demands.

The world crisis in capital accumulation is beginning to systematically erode the pillars of Australian social peace. Already, housing and living costs are both driving workers into action, with a yearly increase in both unionisation rates and industrial actions. However, it may be some decades before the prolonged crisis of capital development begins to plunge Australian society into violent convulsions in the class struggle.

Where class struggle takes on organised forms it is largely defensive, limited, and effectively contained. Large industrial actions have been effectively banned by the industrial courts, with union leaderships effectively vowed into compliance (where they are not enthusiastic defenders of industrial peace). Spontaneous demonstrations of class rage are few and far between and usually come from the most marginal layers of the proletariat (prisoners, migrant youth, and indigenous people), and rarely take on a mass character. The social movements are largely trapped between a barren legalism and adventurist delusions, and almost always inter-classist in character.

The Australian Labour Party is the only party that can effectively manage Australian society today. The Albanese government, which takes on an increasingly Bonapartist character, has effectively brought the trade unions to heel, expanded the powers of the police and security services, and managed a somewhat successful stabilisation of the economic malaise that afflicts the entire country.

The dominant ideology promoted by this ruling bloc is that of “social cohesion”. This slogan signals the intent of the Albanese government: to rule from the centre and manage the system, all the while suppressing their opposition to the left and to the right. Against this slogan we must direct the communist slogans of class struggle and revolution. Social Peace? No! Social War!

The other capitalist parties do not offer an alternative government to that of Albanese. Australian liberalism, formed in the furnace of the class struggle as the mass party of capital, has effectively collapsed, divided between two distinct factions of capital and petty bourgeois politics. The rise of One Nation, rather than an indication of an imminent reactionary government, is an indication of how thoroughly the political right has been marginalised.

In turn, the progressive faction of capital, represented by the Greens and the reform liberals and Laborites have more or less accepted their position as the left-wing of the Albanese coalition, seeking to influence the government from the left.

We should not expect titanic struggles between capital and labour to erupt in the coming years. Where battles are fought, they will be skirmishes, usually defensive and often effectively constrained by the existing institutional arrangements. However, there is a flicker of a real struggle beneath the surface. Students and workers have both shown in recent years that the ruling bloc fears a real eruption in the class struggle and has been more than willing to use the powers of the state against such threats.

Most importantly, the socialist movement has begun to regroup and grow its forces, albeit in a manner still marked by the dominant trends of sectarianism, activism, agitationism, and Popular Frontism. In a period in which the working-class is on the defensive, it is essential that proletarian, communist forces forge a common program.