By Haig Kisherian

 “Power Corrupts, and Absolute Power Corrupts Absolutely”

 “Democracies need opposition parties to keep the ruling party in check!” 

These are all thought terminating cliches. They form the bedrock of liberalism, a theory of power created by 18^th century bourgeois merchants challenging the divine right of kings in European coffee houses. Liberalism had a historical role to play in ending feudalism, but it is now an outdated theory of power.

The experience and practice of Marxism-Leninism in real life revolutionary movements and state building have answers to these cliches: 

“Power Corrupts.” Power doesn’t corrupt, it reveals. A person placed in a position of power will act in a way that reflects the class character they have developed over the course of their life. Bourgeoise governments are set up to place people with a bourgeoise character into positions of power. Proletarian governments largely draw their ‘bureaucracy’ from the proletariat. An otherwise kind and just person doesn’t instantly turn into ‘Stalin’ upon reaching a position of power. Zimbardo’s prison experiment was refuted a long time ago. 

“Democracies need opposition parties to keep the ruling party in check!” This has the opposite effect. Multi-party elections act as an illusory pressure valve for revolutionary anger. The ‘opposition power’ once in control simply continues serving the dominant class. All states under our current material conditions are functionally single-party states. To quote Julius Nyerere: “The United States is also a one-party state but, with typical American extravagance, they have two of them.”

Why am I talking about Liberalism? I am discussing liberalism because its various assumptions and limits have been accidentally reproduced by the Marxist ideology known as Partyism. Partyism is the dominant ideology of Communist Unity, an Australian ‘Pre-Party’ which has recently undergone a name change. Most comrades reading this will know them as the Revolutionary Communist Organisation (RCO). (For any comrades reading this from the United States, the ‘Marxist Unity Group’ within the DSA also share this ideology, as does their associated publication Cosmonaut.)

I have recently defected from Communist Unity because I came to the realisation that Partyism is just a Marxist repackaging of Liberalism. In my time with Communist Unity I’ve come to the conclusion that Partyism misdiagnoses the cause of sectarianism, reproduces liberal assumptions about power, creates a party culture dominated by circular debates, and in turn has produced a dysfunctional Trotskyist sect. For us to organise a proletarian revolution, we need to directly challenge liberalism and its various limits. Partyism instead reproduces liberalism, and cannot mount the challenge to capitalism that we so desperately need. 

Partyism is a framework developed by comrades Jack Conrad and Mike Macnair of the contemporary Communist Party of Great Britain. It argues for an ecumenical communist party, one that allows Trotskyists, Maoists, Hoaxists, Bordigists and everyone else to join under one democratic centralist banner. It calls for giving members the right to continue debate after a decision has been made, to be able to dual card with other groups, and to openly form internal factions with their own publications, while still calling for programmatic unity. 

More importantly, Partyism argues that you cannot go ‘straight to’ the class. You must first unite the sects. The working class is naturally suspicious of division and won’t listen to 57 varieties of Marxist-Leninist organisations all saying largely the same thing. Engaging in class struggle is expensive and – as Partyism argues – we cannot do what we want to do as a series of splintered sects. We must unite, share resources, then act as one after a series of debates. 

If the majority votes to do some sort of weird strategy you don’t like, well too bad! That’s      what the majority voted, so now we go all in. You can disagree, sure, but none of our strategies will work when divided!

This argument worked on me. So I joined and have made a sincere attempt to engage with Communist Unity. I contributed to debates, including being one of a tiny group of Marxist-Leninist voices at the 4^th general conference. I served as the chair for the Melbourne education cell, running meetings and writing the agendas. I am an experienced educator, and I really wanted to run the short course. However Communist Unity’s dysfunction meant I did not get to sit in on the short course until relatively recently. I tried to express my disagreements the ‘right way’. Instead of ‘splitting’ I wrote the preliminary manifesto for the ‘Catalyst Tendency’ (A current focused on organisational reform and a mutual aid strategy). One of our big complaints was about the organisational dysfunction within Communist Unity.  

Despite our best efforts, my tendency was not able to engender any organisational reforms. I eventually, very recently, got to sit in on the short course only to see that it is a mess and requires an overhaul. However, I realised that much like my tendency’s criticisms of Communist Unity’s dysfunction, that my attempts at reforming the short course would likely also be ignored. 

All of this led me to realise that the organisation’s dysfunction is not a coincidence, but reflects the various ways that Partyism as a framework reproduces the limits of liberalism as an ideology. Once I understood this I realised that even if Communist Unity was able to succeed at uniting the sects, that such an endeavour would likely be a catastrophic failure in practice. 

There are three main issues with Partyism as a theory. The first is a misdiagnosis of what causes the sect form to emerge in the first place. The second is the false assumption of communist failure and a Trotskyist fixation on ‘bureaucracy’. The third is that within the communist movement there exist irreconcilable differences which in practice generate degenerative debates. I have seen the way that all of these flaws in Partyist ideology have expressed themselves as a form of fundamental dysfunction within Communist Unity, which is why I ultimately decided to leave.

In Defence of the Sect Form

Macnair argues that the sect form’s material cause is a reaction to a particular set of material circumstances. He points to the ‘Iron law of oligarchy’ in his article titled “Bringing about a Marxist Party”, where he argues that capitalism as it currently exists encourages the proliferation of ‘brands’ with an authoritarian leadership that can maintain brand unity. He believes that organising a group in a particular way – allowing for freedom to form factions, for example – can counter-act this trend. 

Having been in Communist Unity, I can confirm that this does not work in practice. But more to the point that’s not why sects emerge.

Sects largely emerge during times of failure. Conversely, sects primarily decline once it becomes clear that one organisation in particular has momentum. It’s serious and organised, it’s making gains, building numbers, making progress. This builds morale and leads to a network effect where more people are motivated to recruit, to join, and existing cadre are motivated to give the organisation their all. The moment a group stalls, stagnates or hits a wall, then people lose morale. They start looking for the exits. When that happens they will come up with a theoretical reason for why they disagreed with the party’s primary direction, before leaving to form a new group. 

Consider the following thought experiment: think of a large Marxist or socialist organisation in your country that you have strong disagreements with. If you are in the imperial core, odds are that they are stagnating. They’ve hit a wall some time ago and have not budged or grown from that point. Whoever they are, I would like to make the argument that if they had not stagnated then you would likely have already joined them by now. If they had made steady, material progress for the time that you have known them then you would likely be a member right now. 

If you still don’t believe me, let me ask you a question: How big would this organisation have to get before you bit the bullet and joined? 2000 people? What about 10,000? Not enough? What about 100,000? A million?

I promise you there’s a number, and at that point you’ll very reluctantly join. Even if you disagree with their specific approach to socialist politics, you will be forced to concede that – in this particular thought experiment – that their message is clearly resonating with a mass of people and that therefore this is where the proletariat are leaning. If that doesn’t move you, then seeing this organisation initiating strikes and actions absolutely will. Hell, you’ll probably talk yourself into adopting their ideology! 

This is what I mean. Sects emerge during times of failure because people can tell that the dominant organisation they are a member of isn’t going anywhere, so they split. This is a rational and sane decision because it’s infinitely easier to try and pursue a novel strategy with a smaller and more dedicated organisation than with a large, decaying organisation that has a majority utterly resistant to change. Eventually when class conditions give rise to social upheaval, one of the many sects in the petri dish of a nation’s Marxist left will emerge to become the new dominant organisation. 

“OK” say my former Communist Unity comrades. “I hear you, but we will prove you wrong. Communist Unity will grow and eat the other sects and you will join us again!”

You’re right, I would join you again! But I don’t think that’s going to happen. This is because Partyism as an ideology is built around a set of assumptions that are fundamentally Trotskyist in nature. This necessarily limits the appeal of an organisation like this to other Trotskyists. To understand this we need to understand Partyism as a response to a particular view of historical communism as a failed 20^th century movement brought down by the ever dreaded ‘bureaucracy’. 

How I learned to stop hating and love the Bureaucracy 

A key assumption of Partyism is that Communism is a failed 20^th century ideology. That its main issue has been the dreaded ‘bureaucracy’. That this is a ‘big problem’ that requires serious solutions. The right for people to form internal factions is considered one big way this ‘issue’ can be resolved. But is this true? Is communism a failed ideology that ‘grapples’ with bureaucracy? Does the Communist Party just need an internal liberal multi-party democracy?

Communism is a massively successful international movement that has defeated fascism, lifted literal millions out of poverty, destroyed reactionary practices and bigotries, and sent the first woman into space. It still continues to exist as the dominant governing system in China, Cuba, Vietnam, North Korea and Laos. 

So why do the theorists of Partyism speak of Communism like some morose, failed experiment of the early 20^th century? The fundamental assumption is that this is a failed movement, that everything that has been tried before has fallen apart, and that fundamentals need to be questioned. 

The obvious answer here is that Macnair and Conrad are Trotskyists. I’ve been told within Communist Unity that this is not the case, that Macnair is highly critical of Trotskyism (particularly the Trotskyist notion of a transitional program). But having read his works I can’t help but see a Trotskyist on paper. 

The works of both these writers are filled with fear and trepidation of the ever dreaded ‘bureaucracy’, lamenting the loss of directly elected and recallable soviets, despair that communist states professionalised their armies rather than keeping worker militias. “Power corrupts, and absolute bureaucracy corrupts absolutely, so only directly recallable delegates can work!” goes the argument. The USSR collapsed due to betrayal from their dreaded bureaucracy, and China will follow soon after! (assuming it hasn’t already fallen due to Dengism)

This is an unfalsifiable claim with alternative explanations. I would argue that the USSR collapsed because it tried to fix its economic issues through political liberalisation when the moment clearly called for a tactical retreat to some new version of the NEP. I and many others would dispute the idea that China is not pursuing socialism. But either way I’m talking to a brick wall here because the ‘traitorous bureaucracy’ is an unfalsifiable claim. Any communist country with a functional government simply hasn’t failed yet, and any that do fail must have failed because of their bureaucracy. There’s no way to ‘disprove’ the theory, and so debating it becomes a waste of time. 

What I’ve found drives a lot of this hand-wringing about the ever-dreaded ‘bureaucracy’ of ‘deformed workers states’ is a thoroughly bourgeoise-liberal understanding of how states work. To these people, it would seem that ‘power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely’. Hence the obsession with antiquated calls for a worker’s militia – a tactic that very clearly does not work under our current conditions when put into practice. The United States has very high gun ownership and yet they’re still ruled by zionist pedophiles, so I’m not sure why anyone thinks a worker’s militia would provide anything other than an easy way for far-right elements to get easy access to weapons. Meanwhile ‘authoritarian’ China has universal healthcare, affordable housing, a high speed rail system and high levels of trust in their government. There’s clearly a limit to this democratic-procedural understanding of politics. 

I have a much more Marxist understanding. States are fragile, easily overthrown, and paranoid about their survival. Because of this, they will appease the classes with the power to overthrow them. In post-revolutionary communist states the bourgeoisie have had their wealth expropriated, their lands nationalised, and their control over the media restricted. In the absence of a strong bourgeoisie, it is primarily the proletariat that has the power to overthrow the state. AES states have a very strong incentive to set up democratic structures responsive to the proletariat, and are highly motivated to root out corruption in order to secure state legitimacy. Labour strikes are common in AES countries, they always have been, and in many instances these strikes are met with compromise. 

This is not to say that AES countries are perfect. Internal and external class dynamics mean that pressure from the bourgeoise for a capitalist restoration never fully goes away. This requires international comrades to show critical support, to analyse the situation that these parties are in and to make constructive criticisms where necessary. However by shifting focus to the supposedly ‘deformed’ nature of these worker states you distract from this material class analysis, and instead focus on finding liberal-procedural solutions to the ‘bureaucracy’. 

Nowhere is this clearer than in Macnair’s article ”Control the Bureaucrats”, where he correctly identifies the failure of world revolution and imperialist pressure as the reason why the USSR abandoned its Soviet model of democracy. However, Macnair can’t accept a state that defeated capitalism in one country, and developed material gains for the national proletariat as a ‘success’, so instead he defaults to ultra-liberal calls for ‘election and recallability of officials’ along with ways for proletarians to ‘develop power over its full-timers under conditions of bourgeoise rule’. He can’t accept the USSR as a success, and world revolution had clearly failed in 1917 (a state policy of ‘permanent revolution’ was not going to change that), so all he can do is to call for Communist parties that are paranoid about bureaucracy. 

I have seen with my own two eyes the way this fixation on bureaucracy has rendered Communist Unity internally dysfunctional. I won’t be using this article to repeat the debates about the need for a basic division of labour that I found myself repeatedly having in my time with the organisation. What I will say is that the intransigence of comrades on this point made me realise that some disagreements cannot be resolved through rational debate, as they are driven by irreconcilable values and priorities. In this particular case, Partyism is a liberal ideology whereas I am a Marxist, so the debate could not be resolved. Yet the Marxist movement is riddled with similar disagreements, which will in practice lead any Partyist organisation into an endless spiral of degenerative debates. 

Some Sects Cannot Get Along

One of the things that tore me away from liberalism was the realisation that democratic discourse is only as good as the frame of the debate. 

Here is what I mean by this: if you’re in an election where one party is running on a platform of neoliberal capitalism and the other party is running a climate change denier, who is very clearly a corrupt pedophile – then that’s the debate. The debate isn’t ‘how do we address climate change?’ or ‘how do we ensure that everyone has a roof over their head?’ but instead becomes ‘How many homeless people should we shoot?’ and eventually ‘is this guy a pedophile?’.

Is that ‘more democratic’ than, say, carefully vetting candidates to ensure no insane corrupt pedophiles run? Sure maybe. Is that a more effective form of democracy? Absolutely not. 

Herein lies Communist Unity’s issue. Because Partyism is driven by bourgeoise-liberal concerns about procedural democracy, freedom of speech, and the expansion of democracy, it is doomed to repeat the flaws of liberalism. Liberalism doesn’t have an answer for climate denial, misinformation, or large organised and cashed up minorities that believe something really stupid. Because of this it is doomed to repeat liberalism’s pitfalls. 

The Marxist movement is diverse. There are Marxists who support Zionism, who are TERFs, or who are oddly fixated on defining proletarians as only including factory workers. Not all of these perspectives can be resolved through debate and often the debate itself ends up being an unproductive waste of time. The time spent debating whether or not office workers count as proletarian could have been better spent debating a thousand or so more productive and interesting questions. 

Without getting into details, this was the overwhelming experience I had of ‘debates’ within the organisation. The discussions themselves were not focused on substantive ways we can gain, take and hold power. Instead they were circular discussions around bizarre views held by many of the organisation’s members, who in turn found my own views bizarre. We simply could not find a common ground so our conversations often went in circles before failing to resolve themselves. 

If the much anticipated Red Ant merger ever did happen I suspect the entire organisation would get bogged down in similarly circular debates driven by irreconcilable values and perspectives. Get ready for multiple waves of ‘Is China Communist?’ over and over again with absolutely no resolution. I would rather discuss more interesting questions, like ‘what can we learn from China?’

Why do these circular discussions take place? Marxists tend to be rational, so why is rationality in and of itself insufficient? The reason comes down to conflicting values. Working proletarians typically find themselves enmeshed in daily practices and communities that require them to develop values of solidarity, care and discipline in order to survive and thrive within their current class context. For the bourgeoise and petite-bourgeoise, values of autonomy and individualism take priority. 

Virtue ethics philosopher Alastair Macintyre builds on this Marxist framework in his works After Virtue and Whose Justice? Which Rationality? to argue that the disjointed nature of capitalist society creates subjects that are ‘pulled’ between conflicting values, and generates competing moral frames that are incommensurate with one another. If I care about solidarity and my landlord cares about generating profit, we have no common values-based grounds upon which to reach agreement. We want opposing things. 

While I believed in Macintyre’s argument, I nonetheless had hoped that commensurability was possible within Marxism, which is why I held out hope that a ‘Stalinist’ like myself could work together with Trotskyists. I failed to consider that many are drawn to Marxism for reasons alien to my own. I care deeply about the suffering of others; I desperately want to win and build a more caring world. I understand that this requires a revolution that – as Engels argues in “On Authority” – is necessarily ‘authoritarian’, especially in the imperial core. 

Yet I found that many of the comrades I found myself working alongside in Communist Unity were drawn to Marxism for different reasons. For them, capitalism is insufficiently liberal, and they have pinned their hopes for a more ‘liberal democracy’ on an idealised ‘Workers Republic’. For these Partyists what matters isn’t ensuring people are cared for and protected from fascism and imperialism. Instead what matters is that the workers republic has ‘elected judges’ or whatever other ultra-liberal fantasy they choose to entertain. We care about different things, and that makes it difficult to find common ground through reason. It is the reason I look at China and see success, where they see failure. Throw in Marxist ‘TERFS’, ‘Zionists’ and ‘Nazbols’ and suddenly the problem grows tenfold. 

This issue of commensurability produces a very specific contradiction within Communist Unity, one which has led to a major issue within their culture, namely the clash between maintaining ideological cohesion while trying to build a mass party. It is simply not possible to unite the entire radical left, Cliffites will never make bedfellows with Hoaxists and Dengists. A decision needs to be made. When pushed to make a decision, Communist Unity opts for Orthodox Trotskyism.

A Disorganised Trotskyist Sect

To summarise, Partyism misdiagnoses the cause of sectarianism, merges irreconcilable views, and is driven by a paranoid fear of bureaucracy. In practice this has produced a relatively small Orthodox Trotskyist organisation in Australia that is utterly dysfunctional. Any proposal that meetings be cut down and important work be delegated to an elected officer is simply shut down for fear of being ‘bureaucratic’. The ‘pre-party’ is gripped by circular debates. The party majority understands (consciously or otherwise) that adding Marxist-Leninists would likely add only more circular debates, and are effectively chasing comrades with those views away through their behaviour. 

Through denunciations of ‘Stalinists’ at their fourth conference through to me being mandated to explain why ‘Socialism in One Country is reactionary at best’ as part of my short course, it is clear that in practice Communist Unity want ‘Stalinists’ to be a tamed minority at the most. According to their theory, Partyism ‘smashes the sect form’ and creates a reformed communist left. In practice, Partyism reproduces liberalism with all of its flaws and limitations. 

Just to be clear, my problems with Communist Unity are numerous. This article is but the tip of the iceberg for the overwhelming issues that I had in my time with the organisation. However if Partyism held true then the correct line would have been to stay with the organisation, and to use reason to sway my other fellow rational humans to my position through logical argumentation. Failing that, I ought to have persuaded other rational Marxists to join Communist Unity so that I may gain a majority. 

But that’s not how humans operate. Humans are driven by the values and interests that emerge from the material class position they occupy within society. Many Marxist sects reflect irreconcilable views which would only lead to degenerative debate once they co-exist within the same shared space. This is exactly what I saw happen in my time with Communist Unity. This has persuaded me that clear lines are important both in a Communist Party, and in a post-revolutionary Communist State.  

There is no inherent reason why a worker’s democracy has to look exactly like a federation of worker councils, or a Partyist ‘Workers Republic’. Building workers’ power will necessarily involve directly challenging liberal illusions of freedom through ‘multi-party elections’, and will require a class independence that allows the advanced sections of the proletariat to fight oppression without asking for permission. 

Many workers are sick of capitalism, and they can tell that liberal democracy is merely a cover for bourgeois rule. However, decades of propaganda have convinced them that China, North Korea and Cuba are ‘authoritarian regimes’, and they are fearful that a proletarian revolution will lead to a more oppressive world. By calling AES states ‘deformed’ or ‘state capitalist’ we merely reinforce this imperialist propaganda.

The sect that emerges to win power in Australia will be the one that directly challenges liberalism and counters it with a Marxist vision of proletarian democracy. Partyism merely counters liberalism with more liberalism, and as such cannot provide that alternative vision. 

Bibliography

Engels, F. (1872). “On Authority”. Marx-Engels Reader. Found at <https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1872/10/authority.htm>

MacIntyre, A. (2013). After virtue. A&C Black.

MacIntyre, A. (2020). Whose justice? Which rationality?. In The New Social Theory Reader (pp. 130-137). Routledge.

Macnair, M. (2004). “Control the bureaucrats”. Weekly Worker. Issue 552. Found at < https://weeklyworker.co.uk/worker/552/control-the-bureaucrats/>

Macnair, M. (2006). “Bringing about a Marxist Party”. Weekly Worker. Issue 641. Found at <https://weeklyworker.co.uk/worker/641/bringing-about-a-marxist-party/> 

Macnair, M. (2008). Revolutionary Strategy. Radicale Books. Found at <https://ouleft.org/wp-content/uploads/Macnair-Revolutionary-Strategy.pdf>