As part of her fundamentals of partyism series, Brunhilda Olding explains what communist unity might look like.
The three preceding articles in this series have outlined the basic strategic and political vision of Communist Unity, how that vision manifests itself within the Socialist Party, and the role that struggle plays in the fight for unity.
What does the unity of communists look like?
This is the question that sees the most ridicule from the sectarian movement. The common claim is that we want to see everyone from the communist left to Stalinists under the same roof marching together, or that we want to pull a Socialist Alliance, and drag the left together into a politically and programmatically incoherent broad party unable to determine if it stands for reform, or revolution or maybe something in between.
So what’s the truth?
When we say we want unity around a common program we mean more than just simple unity of words, we mean more than just verbally agreeing that socialism is something nice to struggle for, and the demands raised are good slogans. No, what we mean is that every member of the organisation who accepts the program as the basis for membership, unites behind the democratically made decisions of the organisation and fights to advance the struggle for workers’ power.
This is nothing more than basic democratic centralism. It is the political understanding that the minority has the duty to be a disciplined force, accepting the decisions of the majority, while having the right to politically oppose the decision, and to openly outline why and justify their political disagreements. The majority has the duty to allow the minority their rights to outline their disagreements and organise with the potential to become the new majority in the organisation.
But that’s all remarkably abstract, and purely a discussion on principle rather than a serious discussion on what practical unity looks like. Or at least that’s what a smart critic would argue.
After all, nearly every organisation in the Leninist tradition claims that they operate off this principle, and yet most become dominated by the faction of the bureaucracy, who become dominated in turn by the faction of the leader.
So, allow me to point to the practical efforts that we have used in the organisation to ensure that political minorities have been heard, democratically represented, and indeed in some respects encouraged.
Unity in the concrete
The merger of the Spartacist League of Australia (SL/A) and the Revolutionary Communist Organisation in January of this year was the first serious merger that we as an organisation have undertaken, and it has given birth to the first two serious long-term political tendencies in the organisation. This fusion came from serious political debate between the two organisations, one which has not stopped since the merger.
The SL/A upon its merger formed the Spartacist Tendency within the newly renamed Communist Unity, and through their own delegate strength elected one member to the incoming central committee. This non-artificial form of factional representation is a crucial part of developing a healthy democracy. Factional representation should emerge from the strength of their ideas rather than an artificial schema. Political minorities must be treated as serious political forces and the key mechanism of doing so is a genuinely democratic national conference. This includes the rejection of the slate principle, and an emphasis on the primacy of the delegates as the collective voting body of the organisation.
The delegates as the representation of the organisation must not be bound by the decisions of their cell prior to conference but open to the collective discussion. This ensures that debate is genuine, and that minorities are represented by more than just an imposed quota but can genuinely sway members of the organisation.
This debate however can only happen through ensuring that every member of the organisation is educated, informed, and able to carry the debate out to the highest possible level. This is why a core part of building unity is also the importance of education.
The centrality of education
Education forms an important part of the Partyist project. The culture of the modern left rests upon the creation of intellectually separate political traditions which new recruits are trained into. This undermines serious political debate and theoretical development in the name of reinforcing sectarian doctrine.
Marxist-Leninists despite their well-established theoretical disagreements with Trotsky very rarely serious engage with the theoretical outputs and arguments of Trotskyism as a historical tendency. The level of debate that results from this is fundamentally low-level because it is not a debate between serious political points and programs but tilting at historical windmills that barely manage to stay standing.
To rebuild a genuine communist party and to build genuine unity members must be educated not only on the perspective of the majority but the views of the minority as well. They must be trained in every tradition of Marxism, and through that able to seriously apply it as a method rather than a dogma.
It this perspective which influences our organisational commitment to education, and to building a culture of self-educated committed militants. The victory of communism is the abolition of the division of labour, it is the end of the divide between the leaders and the led, and to that end we commit ourselves to minimizing those divisions as much as possible within our organisation today. That means education, it means breaking the myth that the working class is stupid or limited in their knowledge.
The sect, by the nature of its artisanal form of organisation, inherently limits its educational program, and this in turn limits its members. Both in the sense that comrades are limited to a certain canon and way of viewing the world that they cannot break from, but also their study of history and analysis of events by the nature of the sect form must push for a dogmatic reading of history. Carl von Clausewitz points to the danger of a cursory understanding of theoretical matters: “is not that the writer puts his story forward as proof when it has only a false title, but that he has not made himself properly acquainted with the subject, and that from this sort of slovenly, shallow treatment of history, a hundred false views and attempts at the construction of theories arise, which would never had made their appearance if the writer had looked upon it as his duty to deduce from the strict connexion of events everything new which he brought to market, and sought to prove from history.”1
The nature of the sect form ensures that each generation of militants are less educated than the last. It is part of our principles and organising methods to fight against this trend and ensure that our members are trained to the highest possible extent, not only in theory but in history, so that they truly can in the words of Loren Goldner “apply this ‘Hegel-Marx sense of the totality”2 to their works and efforts.
“If every cook can govern. Every Cook Must write.” This is not a vague aspirational statement but something we place at the core of our political and organisational perspectives. The struggle for communism is the struggle to transform us from atomised isolated workers into complete human beings, it is the fight to abolish the distinction between intellectual and manual labour. We know that this distinction cannot be destroyed until communism itself is reached but genuine unity, genuine democracy, genuine struggle requires that we must at every opportunity seek to transform the working masses into a force able to seriously engage with the political, economic, cultural, and social arguments we are making. This is what we seek to build within our organisation at every step.
The importance of debate
Walking hand in hand with the importance of educating our members is the vital role of serious open debate between those members. As part of that we in Communist Unity have developed a pair of publications for serious debate, discussion, and organisation of our members.
Our primary publication is our magazine Partisan! which we view as a forum for debate, discussion, and deliberation for the entire socialist movement. The road to Unity with the SL/A ran through the debates published in the pages of Partisan! and Red Battler. These debates showed where our analyses differed, they showed where we agreed, and where more investigation needed to be done. The more we debated each other the more we understood each other, and the less unity looked like a pipe dream.
A core part of the sect form of organising is a refusal for serious open debate, because doing so fundamentally requires treating your oppositions view as not inherently wrong. A genuine debate, a genuine polemic requires not only understanding your opponent’s argument but also understanding why they think they’re right. If you view debate purely as a mechanism to shore up your own position you undermine your capacity to seriously engage with the Communist movement as it exists, and through that your capacity to seriously argue for your politics.
The most important part of debate as debate is that it forces the two sides to seriously engage with each other’s ideas, strategies, and vision.
The second most important part of open debate is it allows the working class to engage with the ideas put forward and decide on their own terms. If we believe that the proletariat is the force that can change society through its own conscious efforts, we must treat it seriously and openly debate our strategies for it as a class to take power.
Unity looks like treating each other, and treating the class seriously, and that means openly debating what we stand for to the maximal possible degree.
But debate does not give a licence to step back from action.
As an organisation we operate off the principle of Democratic Centralism. Total freedom in debate, total unity in action.
Once a vote has been taken, and tasks assigned the expectation of unity is that every member will fall together and struggle together. This does not bar us from debating; it does not bar us from open criticism. But unity means the subordination of the part to the whole when the call to action is sounded.
Our secondary publication,The Militant, is our internal bulletin which allows for internal debates on questions which either are of little interest to the class, or in the lead up to our conferences. This platform allows for members across the country to engage with each other and their ideas, and to seriously develop a coherent perspective, and pushes for the development of concrete lines of division; be that over strategic, tactical, theoretical, or organisational points. This encouraged culture of pro-factionalism ensures that both sides of the debate are strengthened due to the necessary intellectual development required to seriously struggle for your ideas. If you are pushing forward a factional perspective as a minority you must seek to understand why the current majority hold their current positions, and more importantly how to convince them of your views.
This inherently requires the political assumption that the members of your organisation are invested in the success of the struggle for communism, and the goals that have been democratically decided upon by conference. By accepting this framework our method of unity builds towards a more effective and coherent form of political struggle. Rather than the current sect form wherein every sect convinces themselves that their opponents are working against the cause.
By building genuine debate and treating comrades as comrades rather than as opponents’ unity becomes more than just a fig leaf but a genuine pillar of the class struggle.
Debate however cannot exist simply for the sake of debate, but instead must be on the concrete issues, and struggles facing us today. Unity was not forged with the Spartacist Tendency through the debate over everything from 1924 to 2024, but rather debate over the concrete tasks facing us today in the struggle for workers’ power.3
When unity is broken
Now the cynical reader may say. “This is all well and good, but what happens when someone in the party crosses the class line, what happens if August 4th4 happens again? Kautsky was all for unity and that ended up being unity with traitors.”
To that our response is twofold. The first is that at the current level of political development, no matter how much particular sects strut around boasting about their size, or difference compared to the rest of the left, as far as the working class is concerned these groups are all the same microscopic irritants on the left of the labour movement.
If Australia declared war on China tomorrow, and Socialist Alternative which today is the largest organisation on the Australian left declared their support for the government, this would be just as meaningless as if they declared their opposition. There are no unions under the political leadership of Socialist Alternative, there are no MPs to cast their vote for war credits. This extends to the entire socialist movement.
Now of course revolutionary groups must have a coherent strategic, programmatic, and political goal, but the sectarian form of organising has warped this to the point that unity is only seen as possible through unanimous agreement of every possible tactical, strategic, and theoretical quibble. But revolutionary parties cannot rely upon agreement instead it must rely upon acceptance. This will create the danger of reformist or revisionist elements emerging within the party, but this is an inevitable tendency.
As the party develops and becomes a serious political force, a ‘right’ of the party will necessarily develop. This tendency will emerge from the privileged layer of the party and class which Lenin identified as the labour aristocracy. These forces will often be union officials, who because of their social role and their connection with the state and right-wing elements of the workers movement will have more resources available to them in their internal fights within the party.
There are no organisational rules that will automatically solve this problem. What is vital is waging the fight against opportunism constantly, and building a genuinely democratic party which subordinates its elected representatives and party officials to the party membership. This requires both organisational efforts to build a genuinely democratic organisation as well as constant political fights. Furthermore, it requires a willingness to go beyond the limits and lines drawn by the most conservative elements of left labourism.
Nonetheless situations may emerge where the right of a communist party either refuses to go along with the decisions of the majority or abuses its privilege to subordinate the majority of the party to their perspectives. At that moment the question of a split emerges, not as an offensive weapon, but as a defensive one.
Even then a split is not something to be embarked upon lightly. Only when the interests of the international proletariat are fundamentally opposed to the party leadership, and they are actively working to purge the membership or break their rights to speech is a split justified.
Is unity possible?
The concrete lesson of the merger of the Revolutionary Communist Organisation and the Spartacist League of Australia is that unity is possible.
On the grounds of a common program for the abolition of class society and cohered understanding of what unites us, we can building a lasting united organisation. As such, we place the question of program at the centre of all discussions over fusion and unity. This is the basis of our unity, and it is on this basis we are building a stronger organisation.
We are not building unity on the promise of a teeth gritted truce, nor are we building unity on the ideal of a collection of various tendencies holding hands and singing the Internationale but leaving their disagreements hidden.
We are building unity on the ground of communism as the struggle for the most unconditional liberation of humanity as a whole.
1 Carl von Clausewitz, On War, 1982
2 Loren Goldner, Revolution, Defeat, and Theoretical Underdevelopment, 2016
3 See https://partisanmagazine.org/2025/02/06/party-first-then-split-the-class/, https://iclfi.org/pubs/rb/3/party, https://partisanmagazine.org/2025/09/12/mountains-out-of-molehills/.
4 August 4th, 1914, was the day on which the SPD voted for war credits to support the German war effort in the First World War. The vote represented the collapse of the Second International and the beginning of Lenin’s struggle to forge the Third Communist International
PARTISAN! 
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