Dear Comrades,

As many of you will now know, a minority faction of Red Ant, calling itself “Red Spark”, has departed from the collective, citing “irreconcilable differences”. We wish to clarify to anyone interested the truth of the circumstances under which this has occurred, and to clarify the basis upon which Red Ant intends to proceed. 

The “Red Spark” faction is led by two founding members of Red Ant who almost exclusively controlled Red Ant until our mid-December conference. Despite being the leaders of Red Ant for over three years and holding strong views on how it was to be run, they failed to construct an explicit structure and direction for the collective, resulting in Red Ant having no constitution, no rules, and few formal procedures. 

Instead, they effectively ran Red Ant according to their own unstated rules, and when members put forward opposing ideas they were accused of being “anti-Leninist” and of being “wreckers”, causing much disharmony and conflict.

This came to a head in our internal December conference, where their unaccountable style of leadership was challenged. Their plan to “build Red Ant” only passed with 50% of the vote, and in the subsequent vote they lost the majority on the governing body, the Political Committee.

In response, the members of Red Spark: 

1. Decried the procedures, and lack thereof, in Red Ant, despite being the very people responsible for them. In doing so they claimed the new governing body lacked any leadership ability or experience, and characterised the general membership as “backwards.”
2. Began, the very day after the conference, organising in secret with the aim of ousting the elected leadership and regaining control over the organisation: creating a parallel party education series, petitioning in private those members they thought they could persuade to their side, and working to gain exclusive control over the collective’s assets, including the bank account, website, and social media accounts. 

When evidence of this was discovered by the Political Committee it was brought to the attention of the membership, and within 24 hours the Red Spark group carried out their plan: they immediately seized the assets and announced the formation of “Red Spark”. (Since undemocratically seizing the bank account, they have unilaterally decided to disburse dues paid by members, but so far haven’t declared what they are doing with donations made to Red Ant.)

In an attempt to cover up what can only be characterised as an unprincipled and opportunistic act, Red Spark is pointing to “irreconcilable political differences” as justification for their actions. We want to make it clear that this alleged irreconcilability was never tested in an open discussion in which they attempted to win members over to their ideas, despite preparations for such a discussion already being underway for our June 2025 conference. Even now they still have not articulated what these irreconcilable differences are. 

We, the majority who remain in Red Ant, including both newer members and the remaining founding members, have been greatly heartened by the solidarity and unity we have generated and sustained among one another at this difficult time. Red Ant remains committed to the two principles that constitute the basis of our unity, and the basis on which we joined Red Ant: anti-imperialism and Marxist-Leninism. 

We believe that political differences in any party are inevitable, but that these differences must be discussed and resolved in a disciplined and comradely manner such that the differences, rather than causing destructive splits, instead strengthen the group, strengthen the politics, and propel the movement forwards. 

Much work will be done in the near future to rectify the errors of the old leadership and prevent an event like this from ever happening again. We will (a) develop a formal set of democratic election processes for use in our upcoming internal conference; (b) immediately adopt an interim constitution and work towards adopting a permanent constitution; (c) immediately put in place standards of comradely behavior; and above all (d) work towards the kind of functional organisational culture necessary to build socialism in Australia. 

You can find our new website here, our instagram here, and our youtube here.

Our project remains the same: to build socialist forces in Australia adequate to our conjuncture in order to bring about the socialist transformation of society here and around the world. 

We extend our hand to those who hold these views and strive for them with discipline and integrity. 

Red Ant Collective