PARTISAN!

At Marxism 2026, Socialist Alternative attempted to define their line on the party question. Joey X was left with more questions than answers.

If Socialist Alternative’s (SA) annual Marxism Conference has anything to show for it, it certainly succeeds in the spectacle: hundreds of Marxists across the country converging on the prestigious Melbourne Showgrounds, eleven simultaneous talks covering each and every topic. But what Marxism has in spectacle, it has an inverse ratio in regard to the theoretical content of the talks and debates, particularly the rather confused and at times contradictory articulation of SA’s view on party-building. How do we fight for Left Unity? What is the Socialist Party? Unfortunately for those outside of Socialist Alternative, we are left with more questions than answers.

Across this breadth of panels and discussions, SA advances a model of party-building that attempts to fuse revolutionary politics with organisational breadth by separating them into distinct layers: a politically concentrated cadre core and a broader, more heterogeneous mass formation oriented toward activity and recruitment with an active neglect for political education. Ultimately, this separation is unstable. Organisational form does not merely transmit politics from leadership to membership; it actively produces and reproduces political content. As a result, the contradiction between revolutionary leadership and broad formation is not resolved by this model, but continuously re-emerges within it.

Partyism and its discontents

The first talk on the party building, ‘What do revolutionaries say about Left Unity’, supplemented by a 2013 Marxist Left Review article, ‘What kind of organisation do socialists need?’ by Corey Oakley, instantly revealed a gaping hole between what SA says and what SA does. The speaker began the talk by stating that the goal of left unity seems like common sense: the many socialist groups that currently exist are invisible to actual politics, and it is a logical goal to want to unite these forces into a single organisation. But it was made clear that having a united socialist organisation is not enough; the theory and politics matter just as much as the unity itself, if not more. Why build a party that will be a vehicle for anti-Marxist politics? What is needed, then, is a unity of revolutionaries who can agree with the basic programme of Marxism.

Fundamentally, the politics espoused in the first half of this talk and the politics of Communist Unity (CU) are nearly identical. The supplementary article states that:

Nor do we consider that a regroupment of the revolutionary left in Australia necessitates some ‘half-way house’ that will evolve into a more programmatically united organisation in the future. Instead, we think it is both necessary and possible to unite the genuinely revolutionary currents on the Australian Left on the basis of a clear and uncompromising Marxist program.

The differences emerge rather in practice. SA remains open to unity on the basis of a clear Marxist programme based on the self-emancipation of the class and internationalism against what they call “socialism from above”, which has taken the form of social democracy and Stalinism. There is no mention here of state-loyalism, which is the dividing line for organisations like Communist Unity with regard to regroupment.

What one was left wondering, though, is the question of what Stalinism actually is, how we detect it, and why Stalinism is toxic to communist organisations. Certainly, the history of the 20th century gives ample grounds for hostility. Large sections of the international communist movement were subordinated to the strategic needs of the Moscow bureaucracy. But the Communist International no longer exists. Contemporary organisations nostalgic for the 20th century do not receive marching orders from Beijing, nor does Beijing appear especially interested in directing them beyond symbolic diplomacy.

When we speak of a regroupment, that which we exclude must be scientifically defined and articulated. CU is against unity with state-loyalists (those who support one’s own ruling class and their programme over that of the proletariat) because history has shown us that unity with these forces has always led to the destruction of the revolutionary left. State-loyalists will always have a material advantage over the left; their classical position within union leadership and parliament gives them connections to the state, financial boons, and the capacity to be more active within politics. In the final analysis, they are loyal not to international communism, but to the state.

Within the talk itself, there was also a not-so-hidden critique of CU’s politics. The speaker argued that there is a tendency on the revolutionary left to overemphasise programmatic unity. A programme, we were told, could be theoretically perfect and the product of genuine democratic debate, yet still achieve absolutely nothing if it remained disconnected from any living movement. In short, possessing the correct programme does not automatically propel an organisation to victory.

Taken at face value, this observation is unobjectionable. No serious Marxist believes that a document alone can substitute for class struggle or mechanically transform a small group into a mass party. The difficulty is that this critique misrepresents CU’s actual position.

Programmatic unity is not treated as a magic solution to the party question, but as the organisational basis upon which revolutionaries can act together, debate openly, and revise their politics through collective experience. A programme provides clarity on fundamental questions while creating the conditions for internal democracy through factions, amendments, and strategic debate. Without such a framework, politics becomes informal and personalised, shaped less by collective clarification than by the authority of established leadership layers. The real question, then, is not programme or movement, but their relation: practice without a programme is blindness; programme without practice is sterility. Marxists require both.

The talk ended with an overview of Victorian Socialists (VS), which SA considers successful in establishing socialism as a part of political life, achieving better electoral results than any other socialist electoral formation since WWII. But they make it clear that not everyone in VS are revolutionaries; there are many Stalinists and reformists within VS, the very people Oakley has warned us against uniting with. Why, then, are these layers present within VS?

The answer given is that participation in a joint project, bringing together those with more and less developed politics, will tend to draw the latter towards the former. Through shared activity, debate, and experience, those holding “incorrect” positions can be won towards revolutionary Marxism. This argument contains a truth. Political consciousness is uneven and subject to change, and joint struggle can clarify ideas. Marxists should not fear engagement with politically mixed layers.

Yet this contradicts SA’s own position. If common activity with reformists and Stalinists within the same party can progressively win them towards revolutionary politics inside VS, then the categorical denunciations of unity with such forces made earlier become far less absolute. If political collaboration can transform consciousness, then unity with these forces is evidently not toxic in itself. The real question becomes the terms on which unity occurs, who leads it, and what political structures govern it.

In practice, VS appears as a broad formation justified by a revolutionary wing within it. Reformists and Stalinists are acceptable as long as they enter a project in which SA can exercise political authority. This is not a rejection of broad-party politics, but a particular form of it: broad unity under revolutionary management.

This may be a defensible position. There is nothing inherently illegitimate about such a tactic, but it should be stated plainly.
One cannot insist that unity with reformists and Stalinists is inherently degenerative while celebrating a project built on precisely such a unity. You cannot have your cake and eat it too.

What is the Socialist Party?

The next talk, “Building from the bottom up: the new socialist party in Australia”, while extremely well attended, was lacking in theorisation of what the Socialist Party actually is. The talk itself was an almost auto-erotic endeavour; much was said about how “awesome” the party was, how it was a rupture in Australian politics. The CPA of old may have been nailed to the cross of Eurocommunist liquidationism, but rejoice, “he is not here, he has risen!”, and not just here, but across the world: Die Linke, Your Party, and Zohran Mamdani.

But our work is not yet cut out for us: “At arms comrades! There are doors to knock, shopping centres to table, votes to place, but leave your books at home; maybe you can read some Marx before bed.” This, it seems, was the function of the talk: not to broaden people’s understandings of their own organisation, but to energise the cadre of the Socialist Party for another year of action, action, action! The plan for VS is to massively expand in every capacity, except education.

When the floor opened up, mainly consisting of independent VS members, they too spoke about how many doors they had knocked on, how many fliers they had handed out. Not a single question was asked outside of my own question. I noted how there was no talk of education, and I asked how important political education is in building VS and whether there should be an expansion of it in the future.

The answer given was that the actions themselves were a form of political education. Branch meetings discuss current events, and members were encouraged to listen to the Party Line Podcast, the unofficial podcast of the Socialist Party. This was not a particularly convincing response. Political activity can develop experience and confidence, but activism alone cannot substitute for systematic political education.

Any mass socialist party requires more than enthusiasm and activity. It requires structures capable of developing the political capacities of its members. Reading groups, lectures, educational courses, and internal theoretical debate are not secondary additions to party-building; they are conditions for its democratic functioning. Without them, political knowledge becomes concentrated within a small layer of experienced cadre while the broader membership remains dependent upon their authority. Said education must engage with a wide breadth of tendencies and thinkers, encouraging critical thinking rather than dogma.

This is not simply a cultural issue, but an organisational one. A party whose members lack the theoretical tools to critically evaluate strategy, history, and programme will inevitably reproduce an uneven relationship between leadership and rank-and-file. Discussion of current events is not the same as political education, nor can podcasts replace rigorous collective study. Activism may teach members how to organise, but it does not necessarily teach them how to think politically beyond immediate tactical questions.
In the words of Wilhelm Liebknecht:

Yes, gentlemen of the bourgeoisie, we want to destroy ignorance, we enemies of your culture! Your culture is precisely the opposite of culture: it can save itself only by condemning the people to stupidity, by brazenly withholding from them the treasures of true culture, by closing the temple of education to them. To open this temple to the people, that is our endeavour.

A socialist party worthy of the name cannot treat education as the monopoly of a small leadership layer. Political education is what allows members to participate meaningfully in democratic decision-making, develop strategic independence, and reproduce the organisation beyond a handful of experienced organisers. Without it, branches become dependent upon a small number of cadre, responsibilities remain unevenly distributed, and burnout becomes inevitable.

There is clearly a layer within VS that understands this problem. After the meeting ended, several independent members approached me to discuss the question of education further. In conversations with SA members, I was told quite directly that if people want education, they should attend the events SA already runs. When I suggested that this effectively funnels people into SA’s recruitment pipeline, I was told that this was precisely the point.

As stated earlier, there is nothing inherently incorrect or morally objectionable about SA using VS as a recruitment platform. The issue is not intent, but clarity. SA appears to operate with two conceptions of party-building. The first is presented to unorganised activists and the broader public: VS as a broad, electoral socialist formation, akin to parties such as Die Linke, open-ended and not sharply defined between reform and revolution.

The second is internal: VS as a contradictory but ultimately transitional formation, guided by a revolutionary core whose task is to recruit the most politically developed elements into SA itself, which will serve as the base for the future mass party.

This dual structure has clear organisational consequences. If systematic political education is not developed within Victorian Socialists itself, but instead left to ad hoc initiatives or outsourced to SA—often concentrated in inner-city branches—then the result will be an uneven and polarised membership. Branches with experienced cadre may initially flourish, but their activity will rest heavily on a small number of individuals, with limited capacity to generalise knowledge or distribute responsibilities. This is, in every instance, a recipe for burnout.

Branches lacking such cadre, by contrast, will struggle to develop at all.

Education cannot be treated merely as a recruitment pipeline into one sect or another. It is a structural necessity for the functioning of a democratic party. Without shared political formation, the gap between leadership and membership widens, and authority becomes concentrated in informal networks rather than subject to collective control. Systematic education is therefore indispensable, not only for raising consciousness, but for sustaining internal democracy and preventing the drift towards bureaucratic centralism.

Which way for the Socialist Party?

The last talk I attended was on democracy and revolutionary leadership within a socialist party. The position advanced by SA differed little from the Trotskyist organisational tradition. The party must be explicitly revolutionary, with no space for reformism. The leadership of the party is the most capable layer of the vanguard, with a bird’s-eye view of the class struggle which the membership is incapable of having. Said leadership is justified less by formal democratic procedure and more by its political capacity.

Democracy is treated as an instrument rather than a virtue, a tool whose scope expands and retracts depending on conditions. Factions are treated with suspicion; temporary groupings around specific debates are tolerated, but long-term factions are seen as an illness. The presence of factions implies that one of the groupings has “incorrect” politics, which may lead to a split.

In abstraction, this organisational formula is not new. It is characteristic of many Trotskyist and post-Trotskyist organisations, including SA. Its limitations are also historically well established. The prohibition on permanent factions has never prevented splits; if anything, it has intensified them. By denying the legitimacy of internal opposition, disagreement is forced to express itself as rupture rather than debate.

This dynamic is reinforced by a particular self-conception of leadership. When the leadership of a sect is understood as the bearer of the correct line—as the vanguard in an almost axiomatic sense—the possibility of all other forces being correct is ruled out. If the leadership cannot be wrong, then dissent can only appear as political regression. Under these conditions, organisational discipline does not secure unity so much as defer crisis. The history of Trotskyism bears this out. Despite repeated attempts to enforce theoretical unity through organisational discipline, the movement has been marked by continual fragmentation.

The idea that, at any given moment, there exists a single objectively “correct” political line is philosophically and organisationally untenable. It presumes a level of certainty and closure that is incompatible with the uneven, contradictory, and developing nature of class struggle itself. In practice, such a “correct line” rarely emerges through open and sustained political contestation. More often—particularly in the context of small sects—it is consolidated through the authority of an existing leadership, with dissent treated as deviation rather than as a necessary component of political clarification.

This does not mean that all positions are equally valid. Rather, it means that correctness is not established abstractly or once and for all. It is tested in practice, through struggle, and through the capacity of a given perspective to orient revolutionaries effectively within changing conditions. The closest we can come to a “correct line” is a politics that advances the independent organisation, consciousness, and activity of the working class, bringing it materially closer to the possibility of communism. Such a line can only be worked out through open, democratic debate, with room for disagreement on a permanent basis through the organisation of factions.
We again arrive at the intense contradiction that appears when one moves from the conference hall into their local VS branch meeting.

The actual organisation does not resemble the model party articulated, and this is not something SA is unaware of. But fear not! It is in the safe hands of senior SA cadre and their friends. Because, at the end of the day, the composition of the party does not matter, as stated before; politics drive organisation. As long as SA’s politics—be they the left-populist charade or the post-Cliffism they actually believe in—is dominant, it will all be okay.

What is neglected here is that organisation too can drive politics. Organisations shape what politics can be realised and reproduced within themselves. Were VS structured like a standing army in all its bureaucracy and anti-democracy, this would naturally encourage bureaucratic and anti-democratic politics, regardless of the intentions of the leadership.

SA’s contradictory logic is not static, because the conditions in which it operates are not static. Pressures from within and without will act upon this structure, intensifying its internal tensions over time. If it is maintained, it is unlikely to remain stable. Either the organisation will be pulled towards greater political ambiguity in order to sustain its breadth, or the gap between leadership and membership will widen as a coherent core seeks to maintain direction in an increasingly heterogeneous formation.

In either case, the result is not a step towards a mass party, but a reproduction of the same ouroboric cycle that has plagued the socialist movement for decades.

What is needed for VS to have the potential to become a mass party is systematic political education, a Marxist programme, and a very clear line on what politics are acceptable. Those who wish to manage the affairs of Australian capitalism should not be allowed in, lest we recreate the historical drama of 19th-century social democracy, only with fewer corpses and no lessons. If this entails, in the short term, a contraction in membership among those not yet convinced of revolutionary politics, then so be it.

As Lenin argued, the task is not expansion at all costs, but the patient development of a politically coherent and capable organisation—better, fewer, but better.