Communist Unity in Oceania: The Future of Socialist Organizing in Australia

You can learn a lot about the health of the left by asking one simple question: what happens when people disagree? We sit down with three organizers from Communist Unity to talk about building a mass communist party in Australia with open factions, democratic debate, and real programmatic unity and why that approach is so rare in practice.

We trace their organizational roots through Socialist Alliance-era regroupment attempts, youth reading groups, and the split-and-merge history that shapes Australian socialist politics. From there we get concrete about what a communist program is supposed to do, how you shorten it without gutting it, and why women’s liberation, trans liberation, and control over social reproduction belong at the center of revolutionary strategy. The conversation also tackles their intellectual influences, including CPGB-style programmatism, while rejecting the idea that your bookshelf should stand in for political analysis.

Then the plot twist: the Spartacists in Australia approached Communist Unity to merge, entered as a minority, and accepted unity on the basis of a shared program with the right to argue for changes. That opens into a wider map of the Australian left, the limits of “activism,” faction bans, and why hidden internal fights burn people out faster than open disagreements. We also zoom out to Australian political economy and the Voice referendum fallout, “national cohesion” rhetoric, One Nation’s protest appeal, and how mandatory voting and preference ballots reshape popular front politics compared to the US.

If you care about communist organizing, socialist strategy, anti-sectarian unity, and how movements actually build power, this one will give you a lot to argue with. Subscribe, share the show with a comrade, and leave a review with the biggest strategic question you want us to tackle next.

Musis by Bitterlake, Used with Permission, all rights to Bitterlake

Transcript

C. Derick Varn 0:01

Hello, and welcome to Varmblog. And today we're doing one of my forays down into politics and Oceania, particularly, I think Australia today. We've had Australian comrades and Nufi comrades. Kiwi. Newfi's fucking New Finland. What the hell is happening? I'm getting my Commonwealth completely confused. What happens when you're an American? You don't care about geography at all. Anyway, that's uh completely irrelevant to anything we're about to talk about. I am talking to Communist Unity, uh, three representatives of communist unity. I'm not talking to the whole thing, obviously. That would be weird. Today, about their recent conference, what socialism looks like down in Australia, and we will talk about your merger with my favorite group of like the ultra sect, the Spartacus League, which is not an ultra sect in Australia, apparently, at least not anymore. So wanted to talk about that. I am looking through your general conference document for 2026. I have skimmed it, it is 104 pages. So what it just for our mostly North American and European listeners, what is communist unity and where do you guys come from as far as your your strategic and ideological bend?

SPEAKER_05 1:34

Just real quick before we do that, I'll just do a really quick acknowledgement of country. I know that's maybe not as big of a thing in the states, but over here it still is. Like say that Comrade Mueller and I are speaking from Canberra, which is the lands of the Nunuwa and Nambric peoples. Comrade David here is speaking from Melbourne, also known as Nam, which is on the lands of the Wunderi Waiborum peoples. And I'd like to pay my respects to elders, past, present, and future, and acknowledge that sovereignty has never been ceded. Beyond that, I think the best thing to do would be to turn this over to my two comrades on this panel who are members of the Central Committee and definitely have a lot more organizational experience.

SPEAKER_03 2:11

Yeah, so I can I can talk on the history before the sort of orientation. So Communist Unity, I mean, to me personally, I joined in 2023. This is sort of even even to that sort of small organization, it feels like sort of the dark, the mysterious, misted past. So there was a group in Australia, is a group in Australia called Socialist Alliance, which is a previous attempt at kind of left regroupment, quote unquote. It involved at the time the Democratic Socialist Party, which tell me if I'm wrong, comrades, was like a trots group. Not really sure what their vibe was. It was um to yep.

SPEAKER_04 2:56

It was essentially like it was sort of the the the official Canonite group in Australia for a while. In fact, it was originally called the SWP, but over time it became it became a little bit strange in that by the end there were some factions of it that were vaguely approaching like a Martiite position. So it was sort of muddled in the era of alliance between between sort of those positions.

C. Derick Varn 3:29

Yeah, and then classic trot and Marciite defenses trot for those of you. Yeah, yeah, pretty much.

SPEAKER_04 3:37

Well, well, Canonite specifically, because these guys were because these guys were and are very enthusiastic about Cuba and you know, sort of have some of the other quirks of of sort of canonite Trotskyism.

C. Derick Varn 3:50

So there was a Canaanite group in Australia when the Canaanite group in America, I guess, technically still exists, but it's like four 90-year-olds. Yes. Okay, interesting. Go ahead.

SPEAKER_03 4:01

Yeah, and so they did an electoral sort of pact project with I think only socialist alternative at that point, which is our cliffite sect, who are the largest group in Australia. So they have some 700 members now.

SPEAKER_04 4:20

Um that's SOLTS, I believe, was involved in Alliance. I I believe the the other main partner in Alliance that that sort of large that sort of remained in Alliance for a little bit was was the ISO, which I believe was the official Cliffight organization at the time. But that sort of mumbled to me as well.

C. Derick Varn 4:43

Okay, so just my audience knows because the fine reports of Trotskyism has been lost here. Uh Trotskyism has, with the exception of the Grantite, aka the RCI slash RCP, asterisk. How many damn RCPs does it need to be on asterisk? There's three in America. RC. I don't want to call the whole continent. So we have the the the SWP assault, which is different from our assault, which has a completely different origins, which has also totally confused me. Weirdly, my primary experience with Australian communists comes through high-profile former assault members like Tataza and Elizabeth Humphreys and people like that. And I'm surprised it's only 700 people, but I don't again, I don't think I'm thinking about the scale difference in our population because we're yeah, you know, we're 320 million. So roughly about 26, 27 million.

SPEAKER_03 5:50

Yeah, I think historically the Communist Party of Australia was per capita the largest communist party in the West or something. That feels right, yeah. Yeah, in the Anglosphere, okay, not the West.

C. Derick Varn 6:02

The accursed Anglosphere, got it.

SPEAKER_04 6:04

Okay, and I believe that would have been that was the the the sort of hey and the heyday of that was obviously the 40s.

SPEAKER_03 6:12

But yeah, so they had this electoral pact that sort of fell apart after socialist alternative withdrew because I mean, actually, we hear all kinds of different conflicting versions of that story. But anyway, in classic fashion, a trot group set up an electoral front and then liquidated themselves into it, and thus we had a socialist alliance and the DSP Democratic Socialist Party, it doesn't exist anymore. But Socialist Alliance had a youth group, a youth reading group in Brisbane, which is the um sort of capital city of the state of Queensland. And this youth group started heading in a slightly different direction politically than the rest of the organization, apparently. Was was there for all this, but this is just what I remember. And that group was called, oh no, sorry, they they were heading in a different direction. A socialist alliance head kicker came down from Sydney or something and berated them all furiously in a meeting, and all the, you know, I think early 20-year-olds or what whoever it was at the time said, screw this, we're leaving and formed Unite. Unite then sort of splits died and became and went in two directions. One of those directions are the group that would become Anarchist Communist Mian Jin, which is uh the indigenous word for Brisbane, and are now part of the Anarchist Communist Federation of Australia. And another the other half would unite with a high school reading group in Melbourne called the Collective of Leninist Youth, and thus you had the Revolutionary Communist Organization. We've now renamed ourselves Communist Unity.

C. Derick Varn 8:03

And why did you rename yourself Communist Unity?

SPEAKER_04 8:08

Mainly because I think the old name was not really adequately representative of our politics, in that initially the the group that sort of split off from a line from from you from Unite was a group that that uh was not initially sort of a clearly McNairite or partyist sort of group. It was originally sort of much more vague in terms of its politics and a fair bit more inclined towards like sort of direct action, sort of ultra-leftist ultra-leftist positions. So, for instance, the the first publication of that organization was was called direct action. And and so ultimately the old name ended up being a bit of a relic of that period, one which sort of didn't really tell you about what our organization actually wants to do or what it uh what its actual orientation is. So eventually, fairly narrowly actually, we we voted to change it uh in January.

SPEAKER_03 9:12

But yeah, to speak a little bit more about that orientation, now we've given the history lesson. So the point of communist unity is to essentially reun or not reunite rather, but to unite the kind of socialist movement into a single mass communist party that's democratic and multi-tendency and united under a program, programmatic unity. And as part of that, I guess there's lots of little sub-goals or sort of goals that are inherently included in that. We aim to kind of get rid of the culture of sectarianism, which you know extends beyond just the fact that there are lots of different separate organizations. We also, at last conference, we really had an orientation, or well, some of us did, and this is sort of I think what was addressed somewhat in Christina and Anthony's article on the conference that was published in Partisan, against against activism, what we call activism, which you know is sort of a pejorative that's launched in many different ways. We kind of meant it both in the way that like Paolo Friere and the way that Bordiga mean it. So just you know, unthinking, stupid, constant activity, which we see as part of sectarianism. Yes, that's our goal.

C. Derick Varn 10:28

Um unthinking, stupid, constant activity seems to be a perpetual problem. Um and I think it's it's hard. I mean, in the United States it feels hard because we're having one crisis after another. It seems like it might be slightly calmer down there in Australia these days, anyway. How did you derive your your program? I mean, it do you have a program yet? And if if you do, how did you derive it?

SPEAKER_03 11:00

We do have a program. It used to be much longer. We shortened it dramatically at conference without losing really any of the political content. We shortened it from what 64 to 1784 pages. I actually have a physical copy here somewhere, a little mock-up, so it's actually hypothetically hand-outable. In terms of how it's derived, it's kind of a creature of the founders of the organization who drafted it up basically just based on discussion, inspired by, I believe it was inspired quite heavily by the CPGB Communist Party of Great Britain-provisional central committee, McNair and McNair and um Jack Conrad.

C. Derick Varn 11:42

Yeah, Conrad, Jack Conrad's organization.

SPEAKER_03 11:45

But then kind of adapted to fit the Australian context a little bit more, and also obviously in relation to that organization's program being a little bit more solid on women's liberation and trans liberation. But yeah, and then I think since we've gone through, I would say, like two sort of serious conferences, which was the 2024 one and the one we just had, it's now been subject to kind of more democratic contestation. But I think you could say the program has more like legitimacy, quote unquote. But yeah.

C. Derick Varn 12:22

How influential is the weekly worker slash the work of the communist party for visional committee of Great Britain? I asked that because I've always find it interesting that a group of about 40 people, you know, has inspired movements way larger in the other parts of the Anglosphere. You know. So how did that how did you guys get interested in that? What what what prompted an interest in that from other forms of communist organization? Yeah, I asked that because one of the interesting things about the the CPGB, and I did a study on their on all their founding documents way back, is they didn't change their constitution at all. So they're still actually kind of working under the same constitution as most of the communist the the formerly common turnline communist parties in in Great Britain. But their program is very different. And I was gonna ask you, like, you know, what in why did that become relevant to you in Australia?

SPEAKER_01 13:31

Anyone can answer.

SPEAKER_04 13:33

Well, this seems to me to be uh question that I suppose we'll have to answer as best as we can without her.

SPEAKER_03 13:43

Well, I can answer the historical element. The the weekly worker itself doesn't actually have much influence in the founding of the group except indirectly, because it was really founded when that reading group that would split off to draw to become the RCO read Cosmonaut. Um, okay. It was actually apparently they got to McNair very late. But in terms of weekly worker article influence these days, it's hard to say. I mean, personally, I don't really look to the weekly worker for kind of you know what I think on a given topic necessarily. I'm not against it. Um I don't think it particularly guides the way our publication is structured either, except in that the weekly worker, I mean, delights in commenting on the rest of the left, and I agree that that's important.

C. Derick Varn 14:32

That makes sense. I mean, actually, it does make sense. Cosmo has a has a broader purview. I mean, I I read the weekly worker partly as a gossip man for how the UK left is disintegrating at any given time. And and also for the I I do find McMahon McNair's historical articles and Conrad's historical articles to be quite useful.

SPEAKER_03 14:54

Rev Strat is a revolution strategy, is a is a major reading for us.

C. Derick Varn 14:59

Okay, yeah.

SPEAKER_03 15:00

Yeah.

C. Derick Varn 15:01

It's interesting that you found Cosmonaut first as a person who, while not a part of Cosmonaut, was has been around that orbit since before it was founded. Cosmonauts interesting because it it seems to pick up on the social republicanism part of McNair and the willingness to like look at the entire purview of communist history and just say, like, we're not kicking any of this out. Like, even we're gonna everything from ultras to I mean to Nambi Pamble, almost liberty shit, liberal shit. We're gonna be willing to to engage with it in some kind of uh array. Now there's kind of multiple publications around. I mean, cosmonaut, there's also Marx's Unity groups, uh, Light Nair, which is much more specific, but also does the historical work. So it's interesting that got to you first. So, okay, how has it been wrangling former trot groups into these alliances since most of them have the same post-1921 faction ban that almost all successor groups of the Bolsheviks do.

SPEAKER_04 16:25

Well, I I think sort of the the interesting thing about the Spartacy measure is that uh we were not the ones who who reached out to them, they were the ones who reached out to us.

SPEAKER_01 16:35

Holy shit.

SPEAKER_04 16:36

Yeah, yeah. So that's that's sort of the surprising thing. And the the sort of conditions by by which measure was was achieved uh were were also quite incredible in that they it sort of what were put forward by the Spartacists in in sort of the negotiation surrounding that were were not really like you need to change your program in order to sort of compromise with us in this respect. It was much more the case of them them entering us and knowing that they would be a minority and accept uh and and sort of accepting the uh and and accepting unity on on the basis of the CARE program and on their on the basis of their their right to agitate to change the program. And so in that respect, I think it was it it was sort of almost uh uh a sort of unmitigated or I'm not quite sure what the right word would be there, but like a no-thrills sorting anything. It wasn't sort of like a comp it was other than sort of logistically speaking, which is uh is a bit of a different matter. It was it was not a sort of politically complicated budget in terms of the demands for forward.

SPEAKER_05 17:56

Yeah, it was practically the furthest thing from what you would usually see in larger groups, which is just effectively a smash and grab, right? But uh when it comes to broader groups more generally, I think we do have to temper a bit of caution in thinking that this is easily replicable to other sects, especially larger sects. And that gets us to the broader political landscape of what effectively cliffist uh groups there are within within the country. I think um when it comes to other Trotskyist groups, I mean the RCI has cynically set up a small tiny group in Australia now in the past couple months, but they don't seem to have really have any traction starting right now. But you will see the pro uh the proliferation of Cliffist and what people in like you know lots of Cosmo or weekly work groups would say we would say post-Clifists, because they just essentially adapt anything that was taken oppositionally to the USSR to the present day, which I still don't know how you can call yourself a Trotskyist after 1991, but here we are.

C. Derick Varn 19:02

That's what got me Green Bank Nair way back in the day was why we spell Trotskyist after 92. But go ahead. Yeah.

SPEAKER_05 19:10

Yeah. So with Socialist Alternative, it's about 700 members to uh roughly between 90 to 100 so far, full cadre members, etc. Their main opposition is not an act, in fact, alliance, it would be a group known as Solidarity. And to explain the distinction between two, theoretically, it's almost there's almost nothing to tell between the two of them. They're virtually the same. It's that these emerged out of a split within the Australian sections of the British SWP. So the original British Cliffhast SWP had um it expelled two senior members of its Australian sections, and I believe a couple of others, but the main two were people called were two guys called Mick Armstrong and Sandra Bloodworth. And these we don't know all the details about what happened, but you can essentially imagine that most of it was personal related in the same way that most of these there was a political element, which was that the ISO, which is now Solidarity, um, funnily enough, much smaller than the socialist alternative.

SPEAKER_03 20:20

They're actually about the same size as us, 80 people-ish. Was they had this thesis. I think the line was like the 90s is the 30s in reverse, with the logic of the 1990s, was this period of revolutionary buildup, now that the Soviet Union had gone and there was more social contestation, and the people that were expelled, Mick Armstrong and Sandra Bloodworth, I think probably had the correct line of, no, that's stupid. We're actually very much in for the opposite. Uh yeah, sorry, go on, Christina.

SPEAKER_05 20:50

Yeah. So as a result, we have two groups. One is much smaller than the other, whose politics nowadays, as compared to the 90s, don't actually map on to be quite antagonistic, but they are the most oppositional in terms of any sectarian gripe, gripes you could have between two groups. Like they will refuse to attend each other's events. You know, they will always be if they're in some kind of event which they do have some measure of voting, they will always be the ones to point out and argue and vote against whatever the motions there would be where the um events if they're doing like joint tabling or whatever will turn quite hostile. But that is effectively the pond we swim in. And I would be really overoptimistic to say that there's something akin to what happened with the Spartacus League that will happen anytime soon with those two organizations. So really what we see as the as the areas with sort of greatest movement have either you know they operate around ML or ML adjacent circles, or they have a much more Open and multi-tendency socialist sort of conception, even if they might not have open factionalism with their organizations. There's a lot of internal diversity despite the fact that they have a single line that you can't contest.

SPEAKER_03 22:15

And on the on the sort of way that Unity with the Spartacists went, yeah, I mean, they really did come to us. I mean, we had done a brief period of joint work in sort of a faction we've set up in the Socialist Party, which is a kind of new electoral front sort of front created by socialist alternative. It's now kind of veering off the tracks and becoming more than a sort of electoral front. It's kind of become a kind of party formation project in a bizarre way. I mean, what's funniest about this is you read some of Socialist Alternatives founding documents and they're railing against kind of neither reform nor revolution, broad left parties, and then have gone and created one. Um you know, with the and the explicit logic when you ask their members about this is yeah, but we're like a revolutionary faction in that party, even though we have a majority on any on everything. So, you know, it's we can we can have it both ways, is their logic. But really, this has come from the international leadership, the International Communist League of the Spartacists. It's them who have kind of pushed this reorientation after their sort of guru whose name I've forgotten passed away. James Robertson. James Robertson, thank you. And it it's sort of I'm I mean, I think it was after that happened that they then joined the DSA, tell me if I'm wrong, and gotten involved in your party in Britain. And we were, I mean, very surprised. I mean, we were expecting, you know, that there was political willingness, but there would be sort of roadblocks. And and I mean, there were some. There was at a point in a point where the Spartacist kind of got a little bit cold during the Unity project and then immediately, you know, switched. But I mean, the there's no way that this is a kind of um smash and grab, as in history, as Christina referred to, because I mean they've given the communist unity full control basically of all their Australian assets.

SPEAKER_04 24:05

Oh wow, okay.

SPEAKER_03 24:06

Yeah. So if it was a smash and grab, it's not a very good one.

SPEAKER_04 24:10

Yeah, no, it's yeah.

C. Derick Varn 24:13

It's uh when when you had Sparts joining the DSA, I I when I learned about that, I was almost spit out my T.

SPEAKER_04 24:25

I think having read their their sort of at least external facing documents uh about sort of their their position in DSA, it seems to me that their their their position towards DSA is much closer to something like say the ALP down here, because they also relatively recently tried to do uh an intervention into the Australian Labour Party. So so where I very much do not think that uh they they have any sort of smash and grab orientation towards us in the RCO slash communist unity. There's sort of the the the stuff that they the the the the documents uh relevant to the sort of the DSA intervention for them indicate to me that it is still sort of a a more hostile entryist project where they they aim to sort of split the left off from DSA. At least that's sort of the impression I got from from reading the articles in like Workers Hammer about it.

SPEAKER_03 25:20

Whereas they view us as part of the revolutionary left vacillating on certain topics that they think we're more reformist on or whatever. Yeah, yeah, exactly.

SPEAKER_01 25:29

Interesting.

SPEAKER_03 25:38

You start out, I mean, yeah, it's nice.

C. Derick Varn 25:40

I'm generally flustered because I've dealt with Sparts since I was a teenager.

SPEAKER_04 25:45

And well you're not learning being flustered like that. It it certainly sparks some interest down here.

unknown 25:50

Yeah.

C. Derick Varn 25:51

I've even dealt with I mean, I I was associated with with two different I've never formally been a Trotskyist, but I was associated with two different Spartacist League splits, the the International Bolshevik Tendency and Platopus Philadelphia Sunday. And who hate me a lot, but I uh you know that for a while we used to say that who needs Cointelbro when the Sparta exists. So like the I've I've only seen them be reasonable for the last two years, and I am like a little bit shocked. Um but I guess this does tell you something about the nature of sex because it does seem like this was largely driven by by a few very old people who were in the center of leadership, you know. Similarly with like the Cannonites, yeah. I mean, you know, I think technically the USWP may still exist. I know Pathfinder books still exist.

SPEAKER_04 26:57

It does still exist. It is very bizarrely gone in the direction of being Zionist. It is bizarrely gone in the direction of Zionism. Wild. Okay. It has a couple of it has a couple of international affiliates, both called the Communist League in Britain and Australia, which have also gone in that direction, but neither of which I think are particularly substantial at all. They the I believe the militant actually is still publishing in in the US.

C. Derick Varn 27:28

Yeah, I think it is. I just the last time my encounters with Canaanites is that they were here, they were ancient. Like, you know, they would show up to your thing, and you're like, wow, you're a generation and a half removed from me, and I'm you know, well in the middle age. But I suspect they're very tiny. I suppose this gets into those some of the things with the one of the the implications of what what I was talking about with Neokoskyism and and McNair is McNair's group has actually always been quite small. Uh the the count the CPGB provisional committee hits way above its weight in members, just as the amount of effect it's had. And I think part of its effect here is a historical accident. The reason why I say that is we were reading it to get the dirt on the British trots because most American Trotskyist organizations after the 1990s actually come from the British variants who came in during the alter-globalization movements. Our indigenous trots, I mean, excuse me. I shouldn't use indigenous because that makes it sound like they're they're first peoples. Our our national Trotsky Trotskyist groups were mostly stagnant after the 1980s. They didn't really, you know, they were mostly in 50 people, uh very stale of central committees, it hadn't changed in 30 years, that sort of thing. With that, it was like Trotskyism.

SPEAKER_05 29:00

Yeah. Well, Trotskyism in sort of like Commonwealth countries was effectively the same as say new communist or Maoist movements in the United States. Roughly sketch. Yeah, so it does make a lot of sense that this would be an alter-globalization 90s thing that especially comes from Britain as like it as like an import. And that and that's also true to some cases here. There was never really a major Maoist movement here in Australia. You had the CPGBML split from that, but I mean their numbers are almost nothing nowadays, and they are pretty much remembered with the legacy as being.

SPEAKER_03 29:35

I mean the CPAML.

SPEAKER_05 29:36

The CPAML, sorry. They're effectively remembered about as much as you know, anti-CPA strike breakers and scabs.

C. Derick Varn 29:45

Yeah. That well, that it's interesting about the states because we if you look at like the countries that have big Maoist influences and their youth communist movements, and you look at countries that have Bitrotsky's influence and youth communist movements, we weirdly had both at different times. So the the issue that you had is that the that the Shackmanite and Draperite Trotz all entered the socialist party, which self-dissolved in the middle of the 1960s. And then so some of the largest Trotskyist tendencies that weren't aligned to the to the SWPUS became either the Socialist Party of the United States, the the S the SP USA, or the forerunner to the DSA. And after the ISO self-exploded here over sexual harassment and sexual misconduct scandals, and also it being enforced because there was a million-dollar, a several million-dollar publishing industry built on top of it, every Troziist group seemed to enter into the DSA again. And also kind of with the with with the exception of Reform and Revolution Caucus, and I guess Spectre Magazine lose their identity. I mean, one of the things about the the post-cliffites here and the cliffites here, and I think calling a post-cliffites is actually probably accurate, is they gave up Trotskyism as soon as the organization was gone for the most part. Just like, you know, mixed the wildly variant on where they went when the ISO collapsed here. And it's interesting to compare that to Australia because sometimes I do think, you know, we have a similar weird relationship to Great Britain. But I have always wondered why Australia didn't have more of a Maoist movement, because you do have you know strong Indigenous peoples uh movements and you, you know, in your in your country, you're you're you're a settler state too. And usually Maoist politics adjusts itself to that particularly well. So I why this is wild speculation and kind of off topic, but why don't you why do you think there wasn't ever a large Maoist movement in Australia?

SPEAKER_03 32:12

Well, I think uh just to go back to something you said earlier on the ICL's sort of international kind of leadership that are redirecting the change. Um, I don't actually think it's quite as old as you would expect. I mean, we met a couple of them as they came down for our conference of observers. And that there was something weird, I don't know the exact specifics that happened in the ICL where a bunch of Quebec nationalists joined the ICL at some point, I think, in the past 10, 20 years and sort of got a lot of influence. And a lot of those guys, I mean, we met one of them, they seem like 40s, 50s rather than you know, being, you know, 60s, 70s, uh, 80s communists. They seem a bit younger. But but anyway, as to why Maoism didn't take root, I'm not sure. I mean, I think that it's possible that the because the you know, we had the classic thing of after Sino-Soviet split, our kind of Ofcom party, you know, split into kind of a Maoist-aligned wing and a sort of Stalinist, whatever you want to say, aligned wing. My understanding is that they were just so busy sectarianly bashing each other that they had no time to like recruit, you know, in in, I guess, you know, indigenous youth or students or whatever. And also, I think even in the 60s, 70s, like I don't think you could say that Indigenous Australians were like integrated into like mainline capitalist life enough to for that contact to really exist with uh with sort of like communists based around kind of industrial workers and students. I mean, we still had the stolen generation, which for your viewers who might not know is you know, a bunch of indigenous kids stolen from their families and you know, basically sold off to white families. I mean, the the sectarianism got so intense that when so we uh had a union in this country called the Building Builders Labourers Federation, the BLF, which was kind of um its New South Wales branch. I don't know how well your viewers know Australian geography. It's the e it's one of the eastern states. I'd encourage you to pull up a map while we're explaining the New South Wales branch got taken over by a Communist Party militant and basically turned into kind of a cooking house for the Communist Party. I mean, it was still very like, you know, there was very little explicit Marxist rhetoric. They were doing a lot of, you know, sort of, you know, Marxist humanism. They had this ideology they spread of the quote, moral responsibility of labor. But anyway, so the New South Wales branch gets taken over by the Communist Party, leads a bunch of really militant strikes, and these strikes are in solidarity, you know, against apartheid in South Africa, you know, against like, you know, oh sorry, with the environment, like against development in the Coral Reef, all that stuff. And a CPA M CPA ML member, i.e., a Maoist, was a secretary in the leadership of the BLF and collaborated with the government in smashing the union, the New South Wales branch, because they were CPA. And like smashing to such an extent that like eventually the BLF had to like run off with their union list and money because they got put into administration and banned, or I don't remember the specifics. So I just think they were too busy, you know, wrecking each other to you know, recruit to for a big Maoist movement.

SPEAKER_04 35:36

I think I'll I'll perhaps that'll tell that. And sort of I'm a bit vague on this particular period of history as well, is that I think at least to some extent, some of that sort of energy in opposition to to sort of communist officials was more taken up by by I think Trotskyism in Australia than it was Maoism. More so than it was in the US, where it was proportionally a bit. Where proportionally both Maoism and Trotskyism sort of flourished a bit in that period. I think it was more sort of on the on the Trotskyist side here.

SPEAKER_05 36:17

I will say with what at least when it comes to nowadays, you may see a bit of a of a bridging beyond that gap between sect terror and squabbles that you know mean Maoism has no drag amongst communities that you would think would be most open to that kind of politics. You have a couple of groups, but they they they don't necessarily draw from the same reservoir as you would say, like split from official communist parties or anything that you saw in the classic era of the Maoist groups of the 60s and 70s. It's more like you had through, so for example, another group that we're we frequently chat with is a group called Red Ant, the Red Anti-Imperialist Collective, which originally started as a Marciist-Trotskyist group that effectively you could imagine as like the PSL if it was 10 times smaller. And with all the same weird things of the PSL, in which you kind of have like a tiered hierarchy of people's people's verbiage, honestly, like you go closer and closer towards leadership and they go from sounding like Marxist-Leninists to sounding like weird, there's you know, all these weird little remnants of dropspeak within how they talk. That was the case. What they found is that they were picking up so many young, either indigenous or migrant community peoples who were more attracted to just classic Marxist-Leninism than you would see for phenomenals you have with Zoom-Stalinism and whatnot. And they found that that was a that was an existential threat to their majority. So the Marxist leadership of the organization split to go and found a group called. Yeah, lovely. And so you have you have a a very ecumenical Marxist Lundinist organization now running around, which has people that you can work with quite well, and also ones that you could describe as quite sectarian, but sometimes people who some yeah and yeah, sometimes people who are one on one day and on the other.

C. Derick Varn 38:21

That's fair. I I feel like sometimes I am ecumenical one day and the next day I'm a Reddit sectarian of the most.

SPEAKER_05 38:27

Yeah.

SPEAKER_04 38:28

But uh you do also I mean uh to for a little bit more context, Red Ant is sort of the original Red Ant was very much in the sort of tradition of our DSP. Um it was sort of the the DSP split over the issue of socialist alliance, over sort of liquidating into socialist alliance. One part of that split eventually merged with the Cliffites. One of those splits uh was the revolutionary socialist party, which later merged with socialist alternative into socialist alternative, which is why socialist alternative alternative will nominally allow you to believe in a degenerated worker state theory.

SPEAKER_03 39:08

Um, it's very interesting to have this claim that they support kind of unity that is as long as you're not a Stalinist or a reformist, they have all these sort of members who are from the old DSP who are kind of allowed to say what they want and they can't get rid of them. It's it's quite interesting.

SPEAKER_04 39:25

They're they're allowed to like wear cha t-shirts and say that the cesar is a degenerated workers. Literally, literally, one of the main people mainly like does that in terms of uh sort of the DSPs in in historics. But anyway, a bunch of those people eventually left SALT because they they didn't like being being in that organization for for a number of reasons, and they formed Red Ant. And then eventually they could their own organization to take the funds and form Red Spark, which is the the Red Ant splinter.

SPEAKER_03 39:58

There's a lot of trot spotting you can do in Australia, yes, yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_05 40:03

Which maybe brings us back to what was mentioned at the beginning, which was you've said that your main interaction with a lot of Australia people in the Australian left is people who are disgruntled, either former salt or salt adjacent kinds. Where I mean, what I'll say about that is we in our Congress Unity, whatever. There is a phenomenon we like to call salt derangement syndrome. Because it's the biggest organization on the left, you see a lot of accusations drawn towards what you would honestly find to be incredibly exaggerated, and it honestly comes from in most cases from like a position of people who feel actually traumatized from being handed a pamphlet once and being said, would you like to join our organization? Yes. So that yeah, that brings us towards more sort of our position. It's that you know, there are genuine reasons to be against a group like this. It's like highly undemocratic and it's internal organization. It has a, you know, it has tendency to tail whatever's the most popular like demonstration action that day. Like one day it could be, you know, go and go and assault a Tesla because Elon Musk and Donald Trump are evil, or you know, the next it would be strike for climate or for Palestine, which is a recurring thing every few months. And what we've you know, not to be too speculative, but uh when it came to sound uh to setting up first Victorian socialists and now just the Socialist Party because it's expanded to all of the states, socialist alternative may or may not have a sharp divide nowadays between those who feel quite invested in that project because it is actually quite successful for what it does, although it does sort of really only sell itself to about 5% of the electorate of young people who would vote for the Greens Party. But that still feels, you know, in your myopia of being on the left, that still feels like uh momentum. Versus the inner leadership, who still like if you could describe the strategy by extrapolating uh you know what they've said in the past for and you know how they go about themselves now, it seems to be like the classic Cliffus thing of like if you know you you push for society-wide reforms within an electoral party, you watch, and your members watch as they fail, and then you know, once they're all angry enough because of that, you go and split off the ones you feel like they can commit to a real revolutionary stance now. Rinse and repeat effectively. And that also applies to the strategy of revolution they seem to have, which is push reforms and watch them fail, and then step three is like question mark, question mark, question mark, and then step four, you know, the revolution has come.

SPEAKER_03 42:56

I mean, I I think these are really the political stakes in Australia, and I think it's why our organization sends kind of a lot of the sects sort of off the edge mentally, is because although, yeah, we present ourselves as a unity project, we're also the only group in Australia that's actually interested in saying no, our strategy should involve being openly revolutionary from day one, but not in like this kind of way that people imagine after you know they take like Marxist values tests that you know you it's either reform or revolution, you know, you can't you can't do both. By which I mean in the sense that like if you're revolutionary, you don't do electoral politics or you don't do trade unions.

SPEAKER_04 43:35

An ultra-leftist.

SPEAKER_03 43:37

Yeah, yeah. I'm I mean, you know, this is what's this is what's weird about us, uh it at least in Australia is is we're both the ones trying to say you have no right to exist as a separate organization, but also like we should do revolutionary rhetoric and strategy and tactics.

C. Derick Varn 44:00

So the the the interpretation of revolutionary Marxism in Australia is similar to what it was in the United States before 2012, which is no electoral work whatsoever, not even like oppositional or abstentionist electoral work or anything like that. Is that is that like the comma position?

SPEAKER_03 44:23

Or no, but sorry, but what I mean is the other sects think that's what the position of being a revolution think that position is, is that you paint yourself as kind of the revolutionary in contrast to the rest of the existing left, you must be an abstentionist.

SPEAKER_04 44:40

This I think was and this I think was demonstrated by sort of socialist alternative's previous position on elections, which which was in fact that uh up until its formation, up until the formation of Victorian socialists, the socialist alternative believed, and they say this verbatim, that there was no point in running in elections in Australia. No point whatsoever.

SPEAKER_03 45:01

And then in 2017 they completely flipped.

SPEAKER_04 45:03

And yeah, and in 2017 they completely flipped, and now elections is one of the main things that they do.

C. Derick Varn 45:14

Not to make this a referendum on Trotskyism, but as far as like cliffhite and cliffhite-related organizations, many such cases. Well, yes. They had a large influence through through their relationship, well, through their strained relationship with the IST on the Historical Materialism Conference, Haymarket Books, the ISR, uh the International Socialist Review, etc. etc. And that gave them kind of a large influence. And then we had our own version of Salt, which is confusing because they're not Cliffites, they're militant, and the militant there is not the same militant as a militant published by the SWP.

SPEAKER_03 46:46

But we we have a derf of names, it's really kind of can I just say social alternative members uh hate the SALT acronym?

SPEAKER_05 46:54

And bizarrely, the one they prefer is SA, which is quite positive, not the best one you could have for a child who's actually but ties the British ones.

C. Derick Varn 47:05

Yeah, oh yeah, that's yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_05 47:08

But I but there's a bunch of reasons why SA doesn't have great associations, but yeah, but I think um with with the socialist party that maybe steers us out of talking about the sex round here to more like the the yeah, the the broader political economy here because you know it would be very early to just talk about that the entire time.

C. Derick Varn 47:30

Uh yeah, I mean, yeah, I was gonna but uh but how can you give me a general feel for where the left is in Australia? The last the last time I was talking to an Australian comrade, we were talking about the recognition of country, formal vote. I think how many years ago was that like three?

SPEAKER_05 47:49

Oh, the voice referendum that was about two and a half years ago.

C. Derick Varn 47:52

Okay, yeah, so right before that. And I got I got a lot of the you know, trying to explain what was at stake there for in Australia for to an American audience and a and an well to an Anglophone audience mostly in the Northern Hemisphere. But what are the what are the stakes right now and how is the rather the broader Australian left a raid around those stakes? Because I suspect my audience knows next to nothing.

SPEAKER_03 48:23

Well, so to to paint a map of the socialist part of that where we are irrelevant to wider society. I mean, it's not even like the DSA, where you know, I mean that there's not much relevance, but like, oh, in New York, there's like a lot of people, you know, they hold these big social events, they get involved in like electoral projects, and they have, I think you could say, like, a level of impact that maybe leads to success or failure of electoral projects, whether that's a good or bad thing. But they do that. Whereas in Australia, we don't really, the most that we are relevant is that we have blocks at rallies sometimes, for which I mean you can see which ones are the sort of reds, and obviously there's 12 different red groups and none of us are working together. In terms of wider society, I mean the stakes that are happening right now are that after the voice referendum, which just to sort of for those who don't know, there was a referendum put forward by the Labour government on having a body added to the constitution, which wouldn't have had any formal legislative power at all, but sort of had the power to advise on issues relevant to Indigenous people, and it would be stocked with kind of indigenous elders, and you know, you can the kind of left of the Indigenous liberation movement quite rightly pointed out that they all would have been kind of like the most bourgeois and kind of most conciliatory of the Indigenous leadership. But anyway, on that, the left was extremely confused. You basically had the kind of sort of liberal left that wanted, you know, inclusion of some sort, whatever, and thus supported the voice. There was sort of a nine more with the indigenous nationalist elements, the what was called the progressive no, which was the idea of you know we oppose the voice on the grounds that it's kind of assimilatory, which would have which is certainly true. And you know, the argument was that the process that had been laid out decades ago was that it should be a treaty before a voice. And we did there is no treaty in Australia so far. I think Victoria has one in its state, but there is no federal treaty at all, and most states and territories don't have one. So after this, what one of our comrades, Edith, who would have been on today and unfortunately is not feeling well, um, I think pointed out and has been basically proven utterly correct, is that progressive no sounds great, but a no vote winning the referendum completely gives credence and justification to those in Australia who think that the process of kind of liberal multiculturalism has hit, you know, its justifiable end. And I think that it is completely true that the recent kind of like strengthening of the right in Australia has been a sort of downstream of the no vote winning that referendum. And this kind of right wing has taken a couple of forms. First of all, it's meant the Liberal Party is gone, it is split into now a kind of mainstream bourgeois but vaguely socially progressive wing, which is also really climate conscious. That's something that's very strong in Australia. Climate politics are a really strong indicator. And these have these people have become what are called the teal independents, which are independents not formally in one party, but who are all funded by the same climate billionaire, one of Australia's handful of billionaires.

SPEAKER_04 51:51

Teal being a mix of blue and green, obviously.

SPEAKER_03 51:54

Yes. And the others who are just more traditional conservatives and have thus become increasingly reactionary because of sort of social polarization. And that's all led into the growth of one nation around Pauline Hansen, who's been a kind of reactionary sort of demagogic figure in Australia since the 90s. The stakes are then around that, are that now there is this kind of increasing, and this is classic, and uh, you know, you will know all about this, is oh, the right is rising, we kind of need to unite against unite to fight the right, you know, this kind of popular frontist crap. Yeah. And just then there's stakes there because in our organization, we passed a motion basically thinking that actually Pauline Hansen would not win. We don't think that unless something major changes, that the alt-right will really succeed in Australia for various reasons. Whereas, you know, a lot on the left are panicking uh and are just totally selling out as a result. Yeah. Uh anyway, I've talked for a while. But yeah, that's that's to me, I think, the current stakes.

SPEAKER_05 52:59

Yeah. Maybe maybe to sketch just the what we mean by the battle lines here. It's Australian politics the longest time was dominated by the Liberal National Coalition, which is the coalition of Liberal Party, the National Party. This has been de facto with a couple of exceptions.

SPEAKER_03 53:14

Seven bourgeois and rural bourgeois combined. Yeah.

SPEAKER_05 53:18

With with with some exceptions, such as in the uh 80s and to in around the early 2010s, they have been the hegemonic like party of order ever since the end of World War II. They were the ones that essentially set the political weather for the majority of time. And they reached their sort of um apotheosis under John Howard during the 2000s. Uh but over the course of 2010s, you saw personal what what effectively started first as personal spats between different successors to Howard that wanted to control the party, say a guy named Tony Abbott and also someone named Martin Turnbull. That degenerated to such a point where no real significant force could lead the party, which was then taken over by a guy called Scott Morrison, who was who was mercurial enough to win in 2019 off of climate-based reaction to a lot of um major demonstrations causing stuff like coal blockades, which actually caused um quite quite significant flak against a lot of the environmental movement. Now, after he won, his momentum disappeared almost instantly because of the 2019 bushfires, which I'm sure made world news around that time, and was essentially a lame duck. Yeah. And was essentially a lame duck for the next three years, essentially, until in 2022, Anthony Albanese, who had not so much blared the party because the Labour Party had already gone through that process. But even stuff like um, we're no longer going to tell people that we're taxing your investment homes or whatever, that's the scale of like, you know, sort of defanging anything that stank of radicalism within the Labour electoral pitch. They won a one-seat majority, uh, although no other party could come close to that to you know, one seat of an absolute majority in the chamber. And that persisted despite the fact that the voice referendum was defeated quite handedly a year later. I believe it was like a two, like a two to one no to yes. Yeah. And so everyone going into 2025 had this view that, especially with just the reaction to Trump's victory, that like there was going to be a washing out of the of Labour from power, which for a majority of reasons, but you could say the mainstream one would just be to say that people were very shocked by Trump in general and did not want any of that, either direct coercion from the US or any kind of replication of that politics here, clung for dear life to what seemed the most stable thing, which was to re-elect the Labour government.

SPEAKER_03 56:06

They got the biggest material I think they've ever had in history.

SPEAKER_05 56:10

Yes. The biggest majority for Labour, the second biggest majority for a party in post-war history. So it's about 94-ish seats. So what actually happened was the liberal nationals, in spite of the press stories that they were, you know, gunning for the leadership, they could take back parliament, they lost a good 15 or so seats to either independence, outright flips to labor, or just vote splittings that made it so that really the party is now on its last legs, effectively. They break up into the like the nationals and liberals are splitting and getting back together because they realize that that would be an even worse idea every every other week. And what you've seen is, although this isn't reflected in the composition of parliament, the rise of what's known as Pauline Hansen's One Nation, which is the classic petty bourgeois reaction party, which also draws a lot of strength from either small business owners or blue-collar districts who and you go out and interview these sorts of people who are like labor to one nation, or you will ask them, you know, what are their, you know, what are their beliefs? And they have de facto not very changed that much. They still believe in many, you know, of the progressive social or like economic beliefs that they once had when they were still diehard red. But it's just that they think that either Anthony Albanese personally is dislikable, whereas Pauline Hansen is a political fighter and whatnot, and that's respectable. Or it's just that the state of housing or cost of living in general is downstream of multiculturalism as a policy, and that when you have an address addressing of that question, you can apparently solve all these problems. So right now, one nation polls at between, I want to say 25 to 30 percent. David would be best with the numbers. I'd say 20 to 25 percent. 20 to 25 percent, which looks like almost European in how you could narrativise it. But it's our view within the organization based on what was passed, that this is not a pathway to a majority because they there is just the electoral math, would have would, you know, you would have to bend reality to have that kind of a thing occur. The only way there would be a conservative reaction winning out right would be the Liberal Party somehow gets its ship together and can unite around an anti-immigration populist alliance. But for a number of reasons, especially because the people that still vote for him would say on polls consistently that they would never support even entering an electoral pact with one nation. So that for for more or less, it's our view within the organization that there will be a consistent period of labor's dominance or political hegemony over society, but that that doesn't necessarily mean a stable one. There will be lots of outrage, and especially even if just by entropy itself, the Labour government will be unpopular enough to have some kind of electoral contest at some point in the future. But for the time being, that doesn't seem too that doesn't seem too salient. So in spite of the fact that the polling looks especially bad for center-led progressivism within the country, it doesn't necessarily map on to what political outcomes there might be. The most you will see either is instead of a rise of the right or a fascism, you will see like the entrenching of very authoritarian measures by liberal incumbents. Maybe not as bad as in, say, the UK, but already with things like you saw with the response to the Bondi terrorist attack, you see a general toughening of state response to what looks like threats to national national cohesion. And that's a that's emerging as a term more and more now, especially this year, that this is damaging to our national fabric, therefore we have to some state governments outlawing you know, even the most tame of pro-Palestinian slogans to be thrown at rallies.

SPEAKER_03 1:00:27

I I think also one thing I just want to add, just really quickly, sorry, I know we've gone on for a while here. Compared to America, I mean, I think in Australia, I think this is something that people internationally don't really catch. We basically have the kind of union legal and institutional framework of Mussolini's social republic, in that we have a court system that is basically arbitrarily able to decide when a strike is legitimate or not, and therefore on that basis just seize union funds. Um, I mean, you know, the the parts that's similar to everywhere as union density is decreasing, it's primarily in public servants, etc. But I mean, I think, you know, that the left here isn't even doing the kind of base building tenant organizing stuff that you get in America, which of course has a bunch of problems and is in many ways very riotist uh in the way it's done. But we don't even have that.

SPEAKER_05 1:01:20

Yeah. Especially because unlike in America, landlordism isn't really a big corporate thing, it's actually the bulk of it is made up by individual entrepreneurs or people that view that having an investment home is the best way to leverage whatever meager income that they do have. So tenant organizing is a bit different and also a bit more difficult in those cases. But as was said, there is the long shadow of a labor movement that is completely pliable with the interests of state power.

SPEAKER_03 1:01:53

It's very cooperative.

SPEAKER_05 1:01:54

And and really, it's a very difficult question to even start thinking of what it could look like outside of that or beyond it, because of just how pervasive it is.

SPEAKER_03 1:02:05

Yeah, I mean, in Australia, it was our labor movement that really supported the white Australia policy, which for those who don't know is a huge anti-migrant kind of institutional framework throughout the mid-20th century, which basically didn't let anyone who was not kind of Anglo, and maybe if you were lucky, if you were European, you got in into the country. It was the Labour Party that that really forwarded that as part of you know a kind of labor protection strategy rather than the Liberal Party. This is our history.

SPEAKER_05 1:02:35

Yeah. Now that ended in the 70s, and there's been a sort of you know a progressive liberal consensus in politics ever since, but one that obviously doesn't go any way towards resolving the interests of actual people. But when it comes to one nation, especially, as I mentioned earlier, just the politics of national cohesion and the rhetoric around that, you also see that a lot in how One Nation pitches its strategy nowadays. Like Pauline Hansen cut her teeth, well, first and foremost, in sort of opposition to any sort of indigenous rights, but also in anti-Asian migration hate, essentially. And then in the 2010s, when she re-emerged back onto the political scene after a like you know, decade and a half hiatus, it was anti-Muslim hate. And now even that's shifting towards we can all get together, hold hands, and sing Kumbayar as Australians in one big harmony or whatever, as long as you're not indigenous, I guess. In which case you're just a rent seeker.

C. Derick Varn 1:03:37

Lovely. It is interesting then that you that we do see this trend uh outside of the United States, although I I do I am hesitant to see it as a long-term trend because in the US it looked like we were heading into a similar quasi quasi-retrenchment. I'm not gonna say authoritarian, but retrenched liberalism, it was pushing back on certain basic civil rights issues that we saw under Biden. But they lost, and it looks like they may lose in the UK relatively soon, too. But then I think about the Liberal Party seems undefeatable a bit in Canada, partly because as soon as they start to lose, Trump opens his mouth and then they start winning again. And Macron seems to be completely undefeatable, even though he is basically a major uh a minoritarian ruler at this point, since he does not have his own party, doesn't have significant pull in the parliament, he doesn't poll well. I suppose what it uh what I find interesting, and maybe to ask how this applies to an Australian context, is despite the calls for popular frontism, which we really did see in from 2016 to 2020 here in the United States, that it hasn't been able to deliver on the one thing it was supposed to deliver, which I mean it helped get Biden re-elected, but then immediately brought everything back and worse than when it you know got booted out the first time. I say now as like Donald Trump isn't even has is like hiding counterterrorism information from local governments in response to the Iran war, which may or may not be a war, it may be a special military operation because there's no such thing as irony in the fucking world. Uh and isn't a legal war here anyway, because we haven't had a legal war here since World War II. We go to war without our own legal framework, weirdly. So how did how do you argue against the popular front in face of people perceiving true or not that there's a ascendant right? Because you know, my argument has been clearly it doesn't work. We are already back here again, but you know, you haven't had that experience in Australia. So does it make arguing for that a little bit more difficult?

SPEAKER_03 1:06:30

Well, I think that our kind of politics around the popular front is slightly different to other places because we we don't have a first past the post-electoral system. And we also have mandatory voting, so you don't have the kind of problem that the Democrats have where the reason the Popular Front doesn't work is because you can't mobilize working class voters to turn out, so then you don't win a majority. And although we don't have a fully proportional system because the House of Reps has a kind of has a preference system, but it's a one-member preference uh electorate preference system, so it's kind of you know, it ends up being in left versus right polarizations. But nonetheless, I mean, uh, you know, uh you you can't make the argument so much that um that voting for a left candidate is a problem in Australia because eventually your preference will flow to a Labour candidate who will these days probably beat the right-wing candidate. Yeah, but the calls for for the popular front less around electoral politics and more around like rhetoric in trying to recruit people. So, you know, the Socialist Party will sort of do this thing about this classic thing of like you you kind of wedge someone on the issue they care about, and hypothetically you then gradually pull them over to more left-wing positions, which of course never happens, so that you don't kind of alienate them, and so that you can or like the way you kind of undermine the base of the right is by kind of explaining to workers why immigration is not the problem. Which, of course, in my opinion, brings the classic problem that a lot of people for you know, kind of I mean, you know, there's all these kind of books about the authoritarian personality, whatever, they they kind of want the the autocrat, the Paul Enhancement autocrat. It's not actually about addressing the economic concern, um, it's about something much more comprehensive than that, and you can't do that by just sort of being like, well, it's the billionaires of the sort of fucking your housing rather than the immigrants.

SPEAKER_05 1:08:28

Yeah. Um and I I think especially because it like when you say to them, you know, your guy won't win, there's no way to implement the policies you want. I think that's actually part of why they're there in the first place. It's registering an electoral protest far more than any expectation that you will see some kind of um autocratic retrenchment occur in in your favor, which is why you know support for one nation may seem incredibly vast, but at the same time, it operates on very shallow premises that I think people will just register as protest.

SPEAKER_01 1:09:05

Yeah.

SPEAKER_04 1:09:09

Yeah, I I think sort of this is sort of touching on what what Mile was talking about, the there's sort of no real equivalent to sort of the the the debate within DSA about there's no uh at the very least, no, no, no exact equivalent and and I would argue sort of no real equivalent to the the debate within DSA about sort of the democratic ballot line or and whether we use that or not, and and and sort of the nature of a of a dirty split or what have you. Sort of the most even the most sort of popular frontist or conciliatory elements of the socialist left would would would would generally uh uh agree that that the the like You can't run in the Labour Party. Yeah, you you don't run in the Labour Party, you you don't even really run in the Greens, right? That a separate ballot line is is at the very least not tra is at the very least not detrimental because it can't because we we both have mandatory voting and mandatory preferential voting. So they're so you you you really don't have a choice about about choosing to to eventually give your labor or your vote to labor or not. You you have to do it. Otherwise you you you have to do it unless you're willing to put the liberals above labor, which obviously no one on the left is willing to do. But but yeah, so so there's really no sort of equivalent to that debate, equivalent to that debate within DSA.

SPEAKER_03 1:10:39

Yeah, so I I guess to kind of try to fully answer your question, uh it is very different. But so the the debate, yeah, takes the form of like kind of like classic, you know, I guess I would refer to it, and I mean this disparagingly, kind of like Judith Butler-esque coalitionist politics on the left, where it's like, we'll say to kind of the Palestinian diaspora what we need to say to get them on side, we'll say to like this group what we need to say to get them on side, we'll kind of let queer people have their own politics, whatever that means, and we'll all get along. But there is no coherent of a positive united vision at all. That's the real thing for us that we're fighting against.

SPEAKER_05 1:11:22

And electorally, as I mentioned earlier, it's kind of the squabbles over frankly 5% of the electorate who are young Greens voters, which the Greens party picks up about 10 to 15 percent, depending on if it's going really good or going mediocre. And of that, it's either people Gen Xs who used to vote for a party called the Australian Democrats in the uh 80s and 90s, but that liquidated. It was this kind of liberal populist political alliance that you know yeah, eventually liquidated within the Greens movement. That's people essentially like my own mother. But yeah wedging wedging issues such as Palestine and anti-racism are the main ways you appeal a popular front rhetoric to people, but it doesn't actually take up a let's support the Labour Party in any of these things. It is really how best can we cohere a frankly a really small portion of the electorate, which it eventually has their preferences flow to a Labour candidate regarding.

SPEAKER_03 1:12:32

But but it's an it's an astonishing strategy. I mean, David, you you you'll I I don't know if this was the interaction you had or someone else in Melbourne. I mean, apparently when one of our members, because we're active in the socialist party as a faction, as I mentioned, when asked, you know, when we're door knocking, okay, how do you get someone to kind of like how do you convince someone? Apparently a socialist alternative cadre told us that we should tell them we're the greens on steroids. Um I'm not sure how that's supposed to make you seem like a different party than the greens. Well, yes, yes.

SPEAKER_04 1:13:05

This wasn't an interaction I had. It was, I believe, an interaction someone else in Melbourne had. But yeah, sort of the this framing of ourselves as as sort of the activist left, but more activistic. Yeah, yeah, yeah. A part of a of a whole left that includes the Greens and Labour. Even though we're not voting for them, we're still sort of partners, we're we're still sort of kind of independent partners of them in that in that sense. That's sort of, I think, the the manifestation of popul that that's sort of the fundamental manifestation of popular front. Yeah, in this country. Yeah.

SPEAKER_05 1:13:42

Or sort of like the Greek.

SPEAKER_04 1:13:44

Sorry. And and and sort of to as an add on sort of the the the numbers involving the socialist party here, the socialist party in its best election results yet, uh, has gotten 1.5% of the vote in the most progressive state in the country. So that's sort of the scale we're talking about.

SPEAKER_01 1:14:02

Yeah.

C. Derick Varn 1:14:03

Yeah. Well, it's a little bit confusing when you talk about America because the PSL is the only party we've had actively running a national candidate of their own in a while. Our communist party doesn't, the CPUSA doesn't anymore. The I don't think the Socialist Party USA did either. The DSA doesn't. Yeah. Uh, I think since Mimi Mimi Solchik died, I don't think they've they've run on. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. As a as a former socialist party fellow traveler. Um, and the the greens are the greens here, but our greens are particularly notorious for you know stunts. Uh, but nobody the last time a a left of the democrats party got more than two percent of the vote was the greens and under Nader. 2000, yeah. Yeah. In 2000. And the the only socialist parties ever got with most we've ever gotten is one percent. What confuses it all is like the the internal DSA members within the Democratic Party problem, which is its own problem because they're not even necessarily cadres, they're just endorsees and depending. So it's hard to know whether you count them or not.

SPEAKER_04 1:15:34

Um, yeah, it's whereas frankly here that's a long it's sort of the whole problem of of uh of political parties in the United States is that sort of the the very basic forms of discipline which which are number one available and number two accepted as normal in Australian politics, that being that if a politic that a political party gets to choose who is running on its own ballot line and the political party is allowed to expel its members uh are not really present in American politics.

SPEAKER_03 1:16:06

Um, I mean that the Labour Party is sort of renowned internationally, at least those who know it as one of the most iron disciplinarian parties in the world.

SPEAKER_04 1:16:16

If you vote if you yeah, if well if you vote against the party line on one vote, uh that's it. You're out.

C. Derick Varn 1:16:25

Yeah. And our party, you know, our electoral parties don't kick people out, and our other political parties. It is a stretch they say they're electoral. So although constitutionally, we're not a we're not a parliamentary system, we're some weird third thing.

SPEAKER_05 1:16:48

So something from the full liberalism almost.

C. Derick Varn 1:16:51

Yeah. We reread Montesquieu and we're like, let's try that. And we don't understand it.

SPEAKER_03 1:17:01

So we we do have the the kind of uh problem that it that you know Americans do share, which you know I would kind of identify as the Sanders and AOC problem. In that, so for example, social again, it's shocking that socialist alternative are doing all of this, but their rhetoric around what the socialist party is trying to do is get a single socialist elected to parliament. And for this, they have chosen a sort of internet micro celebrity called Jordan Vanden Lam, also known by his Twitter account as Purple Pingers, who got kind of became a micro celebrity because he would do like Instagram videos or whatever of him like in a squat talking about you know how you know cool squatting is, etc. Um, and it is cool. But I I mean, and then the these ostensible Marxists will turn around and say, Well, we want a socialist Pauline Hansen, which for a reference is the equivalent of saying we want a socialist Donald Trump. I mean, you know, this kind of We have such people, just so you know. Oh, yes, yeah. I mean, but but not in the MAGACOM way, in sort of, you know, you know and it it the the logic really is class, same as the Sanders and AOC problem, that we will replace kind of any real kind of mass programmatic politics with a demagogue who you can kind of unite behind as your guy who, you know, oh you could get a beer with or whatever. Um and that's how we're gonna push something. But but of course, and obviously we do have some basic discipline, but the problem that we have is okay, but if if Jordan Vanderleammer became elected to parliament and we have a party of 2,000 members nationally, and essentially no robust disciplinary systems that's run by a kind of trending ever greaterly towards rightist sort of sect, and something goes wrong, like he he betrays the line, or something comes out about him for whatever reason. I mean, I'm not accusing him of anything at all, but this just happens, you know, in in politics. We are we're fucked, we're so vulnerable if that happens. Yeah, so that is a similarity.

SPEAKER_05 1:19:14

Yeah, absolutely. So, yeah, that that that rhetoric does pop up a lot, and especially after say someone like Zoro Mandani won first the primary, there wasn't so much noise after he won the mayoralty for some reason. I think that's because that looked like more of a progressive victory to begin with. You know, there was the like, you know, how how can socialists learn from Mandani's experience? And it basically boiled down to wish casting the idea that we had the kind of canvas or ground game that he had during the electoral things. Um, like any attempt to politically diagnose what his phenomenon meant and how it would affect in a government was lacking in every sense of the term. Like, say, for example, there was a meeting held that we attended here in Canberra where they were talking about him as a person to learn from, but this was like the day a day or two after his first meeting with Trump. And when that topic comes up, you know, members of Socialist Alternative would essentially just say, Did you see that, guys? Like, like stuttering for about five seconds before saying, like, I just don't even have words. Like this is the sort of thing I would expect uh to come out of the words of my own mom who I love, but she is a former MADO in Trump won, might as touch in Trump too, believes anything that Trump won was stolen and that narcissism is the worst problem in American politics. What and you know, all that sort of stuff. Not someone I would not expect this out of someone who wants to try and cohere a cohere sort of socialist strategy. Like if you ask me on the same thing, I would say it's it's very clear that these are two people, Trump and Mamdani, who want to de-escalate from other things that they have going on around them that they really need to not escalate to the point of outright war between their two respective offices.

SPEAKER_03 1:21:15

Yeah, I mean that that doesn't fly. Socialist alternative was so deeply confused about the Mamdani stuff because they were they were ostensibly opposed to it and wanted to kind of use it as an opportunity to talk about, you know, oh, reformism bad, revolutionary Trotskyist or whatever, politics good, while running the exact same show that he is.

SPEAKER_04 1:21:35

I don't know if you've seen this this yet, Milo, but like the socialist alternative, at least on the campus of my university, has been putting out posters with sort of advertising its what is socialism events, which it runs at the start of every year. And and on those on those posters, on those posters are are Marx, Lenin, Luxembourg, Mamdani, and Hassan Pika. Oh god, yeah, it is so profoundly shamed. Can you send me a photo of that? I'll send you a photo of that later when I when I get this. Oh my god. That's what they're running now. That is what they are running now.

C. Derick Varn 1:22:14

Um Dear Oceana, do not listen to the Americans. We will betray you. No, oh during during during the when they'll betray you, Australian.

SPEAKER_04 1:22:25

When Mamdani won won the primary, I remember in in sort of the VS group chats where they were where where they were there, they they had like a somewhat sensible perspective about it. They had the uh the sort of they they sort of laid out some reasonable like correct criticisms of Mandani, putting aside the fact that they were doing that they are doing the exact same thing. And and now that Mamdani is the big hot thing, they have dropped it entirely.

SPEAKER_03 1:22:54

Yeah, so I think so cynical, so optionist.

SPEAKER_05 1:22:58

So clearly like yeah, there's there's there's not really uh an attempt to, once it comes out of the public attention, engage with an issue to understand what's really going on behind the surface. Like because you know, being a university student, you're gonna get that when you talk to a lot of members of our groups. But at the at the university, especially last year, there was a vice-chancellor who essentially has full plenitentiary powers delegated to them, was in the process of cutting all, you know, like 800 academic positions, including casual staff, who, as of recently, were no longer being paid. The classic things that you would see in virtually any academy nowadays that vice-chancellor was ousted after a prolonged, you know, sort of battle between virtually everyone within the university or within sort of Canberra's progressive electorate, who were just fed up with it. They brought in a new vice-chancellor as an interim who effectively continued the exact same things, just much quieter, which is honestly one of the most tried and true tactics you'll see in history. You bring in a you know, you bring in a bull in a China shop that smashes everything, and then when they're ousted, you bring in someone who talks about peace and unity and moving on from things while they're doing the exact same thing. And when I brought this kind of explanation up to someone then, because this person was heavily involved in trying to get the original vice chancellor ousted, she was like, I'm sorry, are you defending her?

SPEAKER_03 1:24:31

I mean, I mean, Derek, I I think what you're seeing is that um, because you know, I know I I have listened to a couple of the episodes of the this podcast, uh, more than a couple, a handful. The sort of um, we are at the beginning of the process of getting really pissed off with the rest of the left that you've sort of gone through and come out the other end of. You know, all commies in our early 20s, you know, sort of, you know, all we want to do is complain. It feels good.

SPEAKER_04 1:24:56

Yeah, I'll get out of that poster.

C. Derick Varn 1:25:00

As long as you don't do the why left the left post or the left of capitalism move, which is my favorite left command slash ultra move, because I'm like, okay, what else is there though? It's like I'm like left is a relative term. Is there something like when you were the left of the common turn and we could kind of pretend that the common term was communist, that stance made sense, but now it's just you know a way out. So yeah, it makes sense. If you're in your older 20s, you're gonna be mad at other leftists. And I think you know, the danger on one hand, uh, young people have way more energy than me. I'm old, like uh you know, uh spike keeps me looking relatively young, but like you know, I I am closer to 50 than not. And I've been doing I've been doing this left shit for 20 years. And I started late, actually. I started in my mid to late 20s. What is frustrating is that some you've burned through so many people and that's what you don't want your org to do. And what to tie this back to you know your unity organization a little bit, but why I believe why I am not anti-faction is faction battles that are open, is embarrassing as they are, and as seemingly bike back backbiting as they can appear to be, are still better than when those are hidden batbitting fight faction battles that are around personality cults within an organization. Yeah. And you know, I deal with this in unions too, where we, you know, uh our teachers union kind of sort of has factions, not really. But there are factions de facto, and with a faction ban, you just have uh the stakes become higher, and the all-or-nothingness makes it where people are even more backstabby. It's just not obvious to the general public. Yeah, and that burns people out, just eats through new people.

SPEAKER_03 1:27:12

I mean, socialist alternative, who as said has 700 members, their their turnover rate has been at least twice that. They go through first-year students like nobody's business, they burn through them so fast. Yeah. I mean, the kind of organization we're talking about is one where you know, we we have you know heard stuff now that like if you try to join and you're a full-time worker, they will ask you to become at least part-time, or else you're not really eligible to be a cadre. Or, you know, and and they're famous. I don't know how common this is with truck groups, again, quote unquote truck groups in the US, but they do this classic thing where they will get their students' degrees to at least double in length so they can keep doing student politics.

SPEAKER_02 1:27:56

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 1:27:57

So, you know, they'll deliberately they'll tell their like members. Members to go down to like two or one course a year rather than the stand which is sorry, a semester rather than the stand which is four, so that you can extend it out. I mean, you know, it's classic.

SPEAKER_04 1:28:10

Yeah, but it's a seven-year undergrad development. People make jokes all the time about them being in like year seven and a 10-year undergraduate degree or what have you. Yeah.

SPEAKER_05 1:28:21

Yeah, that that makes sense. With the with the factionalism, definitely, you also see, and this is especially elucidated within our organization sometimes, because while it might not look like there are many internal factions, that's not for lack of trying. And that's mostly just on the account of, well, a fact of one being a very young organization, but two, what you have, what happens when you have open factions is unlike in the cases where you're a clandestine group looking to either plan a split or you know take over an organization, that coheres people in such a way far more than a political line ever would. You don't have to actually sort out the contradictions in your own camp if you are working towards great opposition to some internal enemy. Now, like that's not for want of people wanting to try and organize different factions, say around like psychotic planning or being left communists. In fact, like I would consider myself the closest to the left communists within the organization politically, even though I don't think I am one. I can get into that way later. It's that coordinating yourself as a left of the party center or different to it on political questions has in many cases been either consumptive or differences in reading groups because it's very hard to do that kind of stuff when really what an openly factional organization demands is that you embed your politics within a group rather than hold it to very solipsistic beliefs of your own.

SPEAKER_03 1:30:28

I mean, the state we're in is that we we've been criticized before because in our reading group on the classics of Marxism, we dare to read Bernstein. Not because we support Bernstein, but because you need to know your fucking history. Because you know, if something's in your reading group, you must obviously support it.

C. Derick Varn 1:30:49

That's yeah, that's not yeah. As a person who makes reading group reading lists for for groups that you can't support all the things on the reading list in it be and be a coherent human being. Um, I find that sort of uh laughable. But it is funny, I mean, because there's a lot of misunderstandings about early communist history that come from the fact that people just won't read the original sources, they'll read tertiary sources on them, you know, like Alan Wood's opinion of Ted Grant's opinion, of Trotsky's opinion on what on the Kotski and Lenin debates like. And those things, you know, the the those almost Hamoodic level of interpretive commentary is useful. It's just not you know, it's not useful if you're not willing to look at the primary text.

SPEAKER_05 1:31:44

And also, just to be completely honest, the primary text doesn't also dictate reality, like yeah, like members of our organization aren't what people pejoratively or positively call neo-Kalskiists. In fact, I think within our organization of nearly 100 people, there's only really one or two people I could actually describe or they who would self-describe themselves as inspired by Karkatsky, and like you know, you know, that's a very difficult thing to hold, but I I I assume just like when you're outside of a group like ours, conflating your bookshelf and your your your analysis with your norms is pretty much the biggest mistake you can make. And it's also the most pervasive one.

C. Derick Varn 1:32:37

Yeah, it is it is incredibly pervasive. I often think of it as Protestant brainness, but unfortunately, it's not it's it's not unique to the Anglosphere or to Protestants, so I can't really do the whole cultural explanation and be a bad historical materialist.

SPEAKER_03 1:32:57

We're the most Catholic socialist group in Australia.

SPEAKER_04 1:33:02

I I think with with regard to factions and the socialist party, I think one important development that uh that that has sort of come about as a result of our intervention is that a lot of it is that there's sort of this this desire among like a lot of a lot of both a lot of the socialist party both inside of and outside of socialist alternatives. Because the independents in the socialist party are are related to socialist alternatives, right? And really quite substantially so on average. There's there's there's kind of this really like anti-factional attitude that you see among a lot of these people.

SPEAKER_03 1:33:45

Especially because they tend to be ex-greens.

SPEAKER_04 1:33:47

Yes, yes, yeah, they tend to be ex-greens as well. There's sort of this attitude of uh you you should sort of don't don't sort of bring out the don't sort of bring out these questions that that could divide us, don't sort of risk the the the the temptation of a split by sort of making clear political difference by by sort of exposing political differences or anything like that. There's sort of this aversion to that and sort of the sense that the the the political difference itself is a danger, and the politic exposing them is a danger. And you see this in like in in in your party with the Courtman faction as well, uh, I think is another uh section that demonstrates this.

SPEAKER_03 1:34:26

Well, I think something that's uh added on to that as well is especially because a lot of these people come from the X-Greens, is kind of this logic that although kind of political decision making internally can kind of decide broad principles that specific policies should basically be drafted by internal party technocrats through kind of like like uh what's the word, like focus group uh marketing techniques to just whatever gets the best vote. Um yeah.

SPEAKER_05 1:34:51

And I mean, this is why when we do do our interventions, we're like we're usually quite averse to anything looking like a fist fight on the conference floor, right? Because we know what happens in situations where you do that sort of thing. It's that you you don't end up defeating the tendency you think is capturing an organization, you just end up empowering something directly to its right, which has all of the ideological infrastructure of the rest of society and their political parties to go, well, you know, there's so much sectarian infighting here, we just need to expel all the bad assholes in the movement, and then we can get on and do real politics. Like that's the end result of being just brutally sectarian, you know, even though you're still participating in the same front.

C. Derick Varn 1:35:48

Yeah, it is. Uh there's one issue I I want to bring up because it was in your in your conference, and maybe it's a good one to end on, but it's one that's specific to Australia, and that is the struggle for liberation of the people of uh Papua, Papua New Guinea. And we have an equivalent to it in the United States, which would be Puerto Rico and Guam and American Samoa, and probably so the US Canary Islands. I can go on, but no, the US Virgin Islands, not the Canary Islands, we don't have any things there. Because we have we have these Commonwealth that even most uh people in the states have totally forgotten exist, like completely, but and and weirdly they don't come up that much even in indigenous struggles, which is also its own interesting thing. Puerto Rico does, but the others I mentioned are often just completely forgotten. How did that vote go? Uh and how is that issue viewed both on the Australian left and in Australian society in general?

SPEAKER_03 1:37:10

Uh it's viewed with irrelevance, first of all. Uh but and yeah, you're I mean similarly, I mean, I I don't remember the last time I heard an Indigenous activist refer to Papua at all. Maybe it's better down in Melbourne, David?

SPEAKER_04 1:37:25

I don't think so, no.

SPEAKER_03 1:37:27

Yeah.

SPEAKER_04 1:37:29

Well in Melbourne you will occasionally you will okay on occasion see like West Papua flags at process. Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_03 1:37:35

But that's that's that's funny because that's West Papua, so technically it's a struggle against Indonesia rather than you definitely do not see PNG flags.

SPEAKER_04 1:37:45

Yeah, indeed.

SPEAKER_05 1:37:46

If Papua is brought up all it will be West Papua, not yeah, because no one wants to no one wants to stain what they think is important with memories of when Papua New Guinea was a protectorate of this country. And it's just assumed that like you know they had their independence and everything sorted itself out. But I mean, to point even to just today, there's been security treaties signed in just the past few weeks which effectively merged the police forces of Papua New Guinea with that of Australia. So from the analysis of many of our comrades, there almost there is almost no distinction to be made between these two different national boundaries because they are subject to the same impositions.

SPEAKER_03 1:38:28

Yeah, I mean it went the way the vote went, the way the vote went on the floor is there was universal agreement with essentially the kind of substance of it, which is that you know we should seek to organize communists in PNG and West Papua. Just in Oceania in general, we should forge more connections, we should try to recruit people and to support kind of a national liberation struggle. Uh, most of our members would, unlike the Spartacists, potentially, uh although that's kind of unclear, there might be kind of some humming and hoing about what national liberation, supporting national liberation would be. You know, whether that's a kind of like, you know, communist struggle with kind of national liberation elements, or whether that's a national struggle, you know, with national bourgeoisie or with tribes. You know, whatever. I mean, there are barely any domestic bourgeoisie in in PNG, it's mostly tribes people. But the the main thing is my uh the main opposition to the motion was primarily led by myself personally, in in and it wasn't opposition so much as I generally opposed and I try to promote this culture to any kind of taking a stance on stuff like that without a strategy for actually achieving your goals. I find this kind of like, oh, it would be great if this happened. Anyway, I find that sort of stuff very bad culturally for an organization. And the essentially what I told the comrade who drafted it up and the conversation we had at conference was kind of like, okay, I mean, how are we recruiting people here? I mean, what's also funny is I think this is like a common dynamic in Australia as well, where it's kind of like, oh, we should recruit, we should have more members in regional areas. But unfortunately, the strategy of sending city dwellers to regional areas often has the opposite effect. It just sort of doesn't go well, it's very silly. Yeah, exactly. So I, you know, I'm don't think we should just send, you know, white Australians over to PNG to recruit Papwoods if it gets a bad idea. So that was the main thing, is you know, what is our strategy for achieving this? I think it was amended to quite explicitly become an aspirational thing rather than something we aim to do anytime soon as a result of that.

SPEAKER_05 1:40:41

I mean, I wish we had enough money to rusticate people, right? I mean, because I I I come from I come from the rural areas having moved here to the cities, and I mean it's very understandable trying to get that kind of organization going. It's just, yeah, there's maybe it's too early to tell because we are still quite young and swollen. There are people who outside of the major cities do have some impact. But on the Papua New Guinea thing, this was something that I I essentially spoke at that conference with the exact same concerns of like, okay, we need to do this liaising, but who are we even interfacing with? And what my worry was was having all these statements, it looks declarative without being without really much clarity, and that you know, it'd be great if we could ref like help refound the Communist Party in Indonesia or something like that. But there are whole that dozens of cultural reasons why that even in spite of it being de facto banned by just a draw banned by the state in Indonesia, that you couldn't have that emerge within youth politics there. It's like, you know, I'm and and this gets back to what was mentioned at the beginning about like um an opposition at conference, this idea of actionism, it was called activism or actionism. I not to have coined the term, but to have put that in the article, which is where people are running with it. It's not to say that like you just want to do protest action all the time and have constant momentum. Though that's certainly a part of it. It's that really you are letting the 24-hour news cycle dictate everything that you make your normative claims and your positive program. And not to disparage the Sparta says, because I do believe they have you know even more than just the aspiration to want to respond to those sorts of things. They have done, they have done things. But it's like when when when what you put forward as an alternative program is an assessment that there is a global rise of the far right and that there is imperialism and militarism on the rise, that's that's great to have in your analysis, but it like again, it gets the thing of like, do why do we eschew even a minimum like uh statement of programmatic unity in the face of that? It's like, okay, we have an immediate thing to react to. But really the the the problem being is that you either spread yourself way too thin or you end up looking like a bunch of hypocrites because you don't actually end up affecting anything within the things you claim to hold dear to yourself.

SPEAKER_03 1:43:23

That's what I wrote about in the weekly worker worker as well. Yeah.

SPEAKER_04 1:43:28

I think that's sort of to sort of bring this uh to the term. Don't worry, it actually wasn't it's pretty relevant. Wasn't very attention, actually relevant.

C. Derick Varn 1:43:51

Okay, I guess this brings me to uh uh where we can talk about your program, like some of the key planks and how you want to go about implementing them. And that's gonna just my broad question. This will be our final one for the for the session today.

SPEAKER_03 1:44:11

Cool. I guess we can answer that in the in the three parts of the question. You've answered it, one each. So, in terms of its key planks, it now has uh 17 kind of points, which are then you know, have like you know, sort of more specific stuff underneath them. Yeah, and you know, there's a bunch each of those points is like a headline, you know, like for for workers' democracy, for control over production, for women's liberation, for gay liberation, for religious liberation, etc. The key planks there are the way that we kind of envision this program is this is how the pro the whole program taken together, if implemented in full, is a dictatorship of the proletariat. It over all aspects of life. We, I think in comparison to a lot of sort of similar programs, we really emphasize, or at least I do personally, the women's liberation element, because for us that's part of workers seizing control over the reproduction of daily life rather than it being left up to kind of you know capitalists and you know patriarchs, etc. Yeah, I I think I think that's a good summary. We we want to, you know, we can't socialize the entire economy straight away, but we can essentially put the economy with all meaningful respects into our hands, us being the workers.

SPEAKER_02 1:45:41

That's the other two parts of that question.

SPEAKER_04 1:45:43

Yeah, the next two parts. Remind me what the other two parts of the question is.

SPEAKER_03 1:45:48

Implementation was one.

SPEAKER_04 1:45:49

Yeah, implementation and maybe there was only two, but whatever.

SPEAKER_03 1:45:55

Just go.

C. Derick Varn 1:45:57

Okay, let's go with implementation and yeah.

SPEAKER_04 1:46:01

Uh well, I I guess the main thing to say there is that we have the orientation of the strategy patience in the sort of uh well, well uh actually I I should talk about first sort of the strategy of regroupment, which I think at this point is largely focused on the Socialist Party as uh as a prospect for both regroupment and sort of revolutionization. Uh so currently like we don't see sort of the the main outlook for for for real unity as being like more mergers on the lines of of what we got with the statusists. I think there's there's generally uh an acknowledgement that that was that was probably uh uh a bit of a what do you call it? Uh a bit of a fluke. Yeah, a bit of a f- well, I was looking for something a bit more interesting to say than fluke, but but yeah, yeah. Something, yeah, it's not something that's going to happen again. Is it uh a white whale? Is it isn't that what you call it? Something like that. It's not something that's going to be replicated mostly. A black swan. A black swan, that's what it is. A black swan, yes. It it's not something that's that that we're that we're probably going to see like happen over and over again until we have a party. What what what instead we we think it is sort of more likely and a sort of more more out a more realistic strategy is winning the socialist party to revolutionary politics and to parties and winning it to sort of winning it to a revolutionary program, preferably our program, uh, and then winning for the socialist party uh hegemony over the entire legal left, and therefore sort of sort of making forcing the other, and through that forcing the other groups to either join the socialist party or render themselves completely irrelevant by sort of winning hegemony for the socialist party. So that's that's sort of our strategy for recruitment, which obviously in order to implement the program, we have to have parties who implement the program. Sort of in in terms of further implementation, but beyond that, I think what you're looking at is sort of our strategy for the power. And our strategy for the power is a strategy of patience whereby whereby the Socialist Party takes power once it has demonstrated that it has the support of a majority of the population and the confidence of the working class. And uh, you know, this can be demonstrated in a number of ways. Uh it could be demonstrated through it it could be demonstrated through the uh bourgeois state ending elections because they know that an electoral victory of our party would be inevitable. Uh yeah but the the decent is that that we would need a majority of the population that we would need majority support in order to implement the program. And that uh that once that is demonstrated once that is demonstrated the party would undertake some sort of insurrection to abon to abolish the bourgeois and to over overthrow the bourgeois state. Uh that's essentially my conception of it.

SPEAKER_01 1:49:24

So and in some ways it's a it's a 1918 Bolshevik program.

SPEAKER_03 1:49:30

Yeah, yeah. Yeah. I mean, we were explicitly refer to the kind of electoral strategy we want the Socialist Party to adopt as a Bolshevik electoral strategy. There's a lot of specifics there that are sort of currently being ironed out because we're a group that only really started in 2022. You know, so for example, next conference we're probably likely to debate the specifics of that electoral strategy. I, for example, I'm quite abstentionist, sorry, obstructionist, which I know you've spoken about before, Derek, and others less so in fact we have some. left comms who kind of lean towards abstentionists in some ways. You know, and then the specifics of what our trade union strategy is, I think there's there's a lot of questions there, at least for me personally, because a big part of the conference and sort of the faction of the RCO that I sorry Commerce Unity now that I'm part of, uh which sort of we at least for now colloquially call the mountain as a sort of joke on Robespierre's faction in the French Revolution. Is we don't want our activity in kind of economic struggles, whether that's you know tenant organizing trade unions, whatever, to be just a sort of more militant form of left laborism. We actually do want to somehow really connect economic struggles to the revolutionary horizon. We are not quite sure what that looks like yet, I think, or at least I'm not. And also that definitely can't be done kind of through the current unions because of how sort of moribund they are. It would require the formation or at least the restructuring of kind of new unions, which I don't mean red unions, although that is a debate in the RCO as well. So there's a lot of big questions on that strategy so far. But yeah, I think broadly you could argue it is inspired by the Bolsheviks. And to some extent by kind of the SPD, although there's a lot of criticisms there.

SPEAKER_05 1:51:15

Yeah. I mean maybe this gets around to where I register like not outright dissent, but like um a request for either clarity or that people think this through a bit more. And that's saying when for example we were reading revolutionary strategy as a reading group in my city a a big portion of time when they were talking about you know the strategy at patience I was like how do you even register that majority it's not like a 50% you get a 58% plus one and then all of a sudden let's let's get out the barricades right. And I think um this is with personal correspondence for someone who I know knows Mike McNair who says that he would be tweaking bits of revolutionary strategy to say that that might include stuff like an international majority because otherwise that looks very weird. You'd just be rehashing what the SPD would be advocating for. And I guess what I what I what I mean to get by that is to say the the programmatic struggle struggle for a majority of society to then which you can implement your program. I'm I I think in my view is part of a problem I have sometimes with like like a partyist tendency within the left which is to overcorrect from economism to be you like almost the political arena determines downstream almost everything that you can struggle for. I'm not accusing that directly of people of comrades to my left and right but I think there are some very difficult questions that are going to have to be asked as like especially if signs of momentum towards even the mass party stage start emerging. And I would be lying if I said I knew how to start answering them. Like one example I've had in my head is maybe you just include the maximum as as another thing like way more up in front to say that like this is the minimum of like what we expect a like a social society look looks like and you can in ways that like say someone like Phil Neal does like you know cast that back onto the present to say this is how the industrial landscape has been transformed and that's how the communist horizon has shifted its um you know its its material bases.

SPEAKER_03 1:53:29

And so I think I think there's there's definitely consensus that the idea of launching a revolution in Australia even if we had a majority without the backing of a revolution in at least one nuclear armed state would be ridiculous.

SPEAKER_05 1:53:43

Yeah. But that's not what you get from say the Cliffists which I mean one of their big pamphlets introducing Marxism which is like the thing they get all their young uns to read and read once and that's pretty much the only thing you ever end up reading in full there's there's a lot of really weird things that if you read it directly makes it almost look like they're supporting the idea that capital is still a monopoly capital and that you almost have like the Engels and Kautsky thing of you can just take control of the political sphere and the economy has already sorted itself out towards a socialist mode of production anyways. Which I find insane yeah it it goes to say that it goes to say that a strategy for majority does have to check itself beyond what we've already established. And that'll be a constant process of learning from new people we on board.

C. Derick Varn 1:54:36

But suffice to say that we understand very well that the contours of class struggle have shifted dramatically from since programmatism was the main thing of the left to to register I have a similar worry about revolutionary strategy which I I tend to agree with but I when I read I've done two reading groups when that one was recorded and you can find it somewhere okay it was with an Irish man that we like to yell at each other but there there are some I I also thought that there was an overcorrecting against economism that has been made in some of these McNairist circles almost to like a political determinism to the point of weirdly agreeing with ultra leftist like end notes communization theorists but from a completely different perspective that the labor movement was actually a political correlation like directly and I do think that need that means we need to clarify a strategy of patience like sincerely we have to do that. The other thing is there are a couple of things where I'm like we don't have time like like you know I'm not saying that climate change is going to kill us all in the next five or ten days or even even the next generation necessarily but we are running out of time to to intervene. Yeah and so you know there's that and this is for another conversation but I find it interesting Christina you bring it up I also thought we needed to add a maximalist position back to the 2D to the program structure. Yeah that that we needed immediate demands and the activists can go we needed a we needed a minimum a minimum program of unity and then we needed a maximalist or at least an orientation if not you know I don't know how you do a max program that's you know that's almost a button I I mean I I I think you know we the maximum is a key part of the communist unity program.

SPEAKER_03 1:56:56

I mean I think it it it should be fleshed out more in detail I agree because I am concerned about you know you can get the SPD thing where it kind of becomes irrelevant. But I I will say I I think um the kind of CPGB thing which I would agree is also an error which I think funnily enough McNair stated quite explicitly in his recent arguments with in the letter section of Weekly Worker with a Spartacy member where it's yeah it's struggle in trade unions is kind of you know not a big deal we should focus on political issues. I think that my problem with this is I think that basically that is an attempt to deal with the concern that I laid out just then which is how do you link program to economic struggle? And I think that that is reneging the need to answer the question. I think we do need some way to link them together. I just personally don't know what it is. Yeah.

C. Derick Varn 1:57:43

Yeah well it's nice to discover a movement that is that that I have some sympathy with outside of the outside of the United States and it doesn't sound like you're in a whole lot better of a situation than us. But it it does sound like you have different problems the DSA's relationship to the D to the Democratic party is not something you're gonna argue about in perpetuity forever.

SPEAKER_05 1:58:11

Well I mean frankly frankly having having left electors who are either endorsees or cartres would frankly be a good problem to have in this sort of situation because you don't even have that here.

SPEAKER_04 1:58:22

Yeah that's true we may have it soon we we may have it soon depending on how the state election in Victoria goes maybe we may get a couple of what what would be equivalent to your state senators one or if we're lucky.

C. Derick Varn 1:58:36

Yeah we are pushing for one here in Utah and I have publicly stated a few times that while I support him doesn't mean you're gonna campaign for him I'm not canvassing for him fuck that uh but I'll give him money which I actually don't like doing because uh he's still a fucking Democrat but but I he's he's a union brother too so I kind of have to and but I think there's a rat's ass chance in hell he wins I mean this is the problem that we have like like with our problem with the Mamdani strategy is actually somewhat similar to yours is that we're so highly federated people are trying to pull a strategy that worked in New York that there's no pathway for in some states here. Yeah you know I live in the you know confusingly since America in in the late 90s decided we were gonna reverse the quote color associations for the entire fucking planet and change red to conservative and blue to liberal which it is liberal but but anyway I live in one of the quote redest states in the country so you know we have I live in an urban area that is fairly liberal there are a few socialists here and there are even less now than there used to be in some ways because we are where Charlie Kirk got shot um so even though there are still I mean there are a lot of social i i don't think there's been a decline in the numbers there's been a decline of the number of people who are willing to to actively associate with left wing organization in certain areas so we are not repressed by the state we don't have that problem i that would imply that we were effective but it it it is interesting here and that's a lot of the US to be quite frank that I think I don't maybe I should ask you guys this because this is a problem that we have in the US that may be particular to ours uh usually it's not a problem to have your communists concentrated in a major urban area you know if you have a relatively democratic system but we have a federalized system of 50 states where the communists are basically in two New York and California to some degree Washington state and to some degree Oregon although Oregon's also full of literal Nazis so it's you like it's the best state in the union for that it's so yeah is if you just want to watch white people go to retire and fight each other or politics that's where you go and then people try to extrapolate on the entire US yeah it's weird because there's a lot of people like Portland's the future of America and I'm like no it is absolutely not it is like but anyway but I do I I sometimes wonder if the the this this kind of American problem is actually it is a way into the problems you have because like we don't have any electeds either and we have way oh well I shouldn't say wasted we have attempted to learn how to organize by failing to get candidates through for three fourths of a decade here in Salt Lake and maybe we'll get one through I I I you know strategy of patience and all that but it is an interesting comparison problem. It's also interesting because and I think you know for my American listeners listening who tuned out as soon as we started talking about Australia and like didn't know who anybody was very American yeah you guys know all our shit it is amazing to me that I hear people in like Cairo who can talk to me about the mayor of New York and I'm just you're forcing us to none of this you're in job it's not my choice.

SPEAKER_05 2:02:43

Yes well we do we do in the organization try to keep people in touch with what's going on in say China or the UK and there's a lot of that but yeah I mean it's just one of those things. If I might sort of sort of say what I think about sort of the one of the problems of of sort of DSA federal and the fact that DSA has like a couple of profile very strong sections and and a lot of uh and a a lot of otherwise relatively weak ones sort of what what comes to mind for me there is that I I think that there's a truth about sort of running a discipline that DSA that that DSA has continually failed to accept which is that if you are not able if you are not solely responsible for your candidate being elected if you are not solely capable of ending that candidate's career by removing your support from them which which DSA is not able to do to basically any of the people that it elects any of the people it elects either as independence or on the Democratic outline but that that issue is is separate to this DSA alone could not end Mandani's career right Mandani has an independent base separate from DSA which he could use to run as mayor even without DSA support if you don't have that then I I think that even New York and and LA slash San Francisco even those sections of the DSA if you don't have that I don't think you should be running camp I I don't think you should have uh elected officials without without responsibility or frankly if you don't even have a single pen pusher who has any way into controlling the implementation process of what an elected would be doing I know Mamdani's political team is actually a lot savvy than I expected but in the majority of situations where when you have the left pitching we just need to have a thousand Zoro Mamdanis bloom across the country or on the opposite extreme you have we just need to recreate the the Italian base unions and whatnot and then that'll that'll solve all our problems.

C. Derick Varn 2:04:58

The crucial problem of having people within the state apparatus who are amenable to understanding of what the goal is beyond the immediate election cycle or the or the floor vote within a chamber it's it it's one of those things that you have to square or otherwise you're going to end up in a situation where your only constituency is the independent major party people that elected you I mean you're speaking to the to the choir on this one because this is my major problem with the with both the DSA and even some of my fellow McNair friendly people is uh trying to implement it without an independent organization I'm not even saying it has to be a party but one that actually controls I don't know a borough a whole borough of a city you know not even a city council just a borough that could actually prove that they could hold a cadre accountant candidate accountable in such a way that if they removed their endorsement it would be a removal from office because people were loyal to the organization then that's my big deal and I'm with you I think we waste a lot of energy on this you know to give you guys some feedback what I'm doing I got told in my chapter to either take over the the the the labor committee which in a chapter of 150 people only had like five people in it are let it go on indefinite hiatus so we could do electoral work and and then when I said well what were you guys doing it's like we were trying the salt and I was like no one's hiring in America right now are you solving like same problems and also your salters all have bright DSA signs on their social media under their real name so and used on all so it's gonna it's gonna stand out so you know and since then I've like not been as active as I've wanted to be actually because I've had to deal with my own union stuff but I find it interesting because uh it's not because like the the chapter is like horribly opportunist or anything it isn't like it's not like we're dominated by like democratic party hack in fact in Salt Lake what are they gonna do? Like like there's no like there's like two NGOs they could go to after they leave us what are they going to do um so it it seems to be a a pernicious problem and uh you know I you guys talked about a lot of the cosmonaut and I don't want to keep you forever we've been talking for over two hours but I I do want to talk about briefly the other neo Kalskiists in America which are the the the bread and roses Eric Blanc Ackerman people now if you don't demonstrations don't know who those people are more power to you but I know you guys follow our politics so you probably do and what what I have seen those people be is postcliffs without even that guard for you know I mean for example those factions do do they do some good work on labor and whatnot but so I'm not slagging them off entirely but they will you know tell us we have to stay loyal to the Democratic party and formally endorse Biden you know early and that that they they baffle me because I don't know how they read McNair's book and and like came away with that as a strategy.

SPEAKER_05 2:08:58

Well what what's fascinating is we uh funnily it's funny you mentioned the the yeah you want to know the funniest thing because so the the main theorist of socialist alternative here the the post-cliffy group mick armstrong is a huge fan of Lenin rediscovered which baffles us it feels like it's completely counter to their understanding of of uh 1917 yeah but I mean the the the closest thing socialist alternative has come to a theoretical critique of ASEO communist unity whatever was an article they published in Marx's Left Review which is their big paper runs with theoretical journals yeah with runs with hate market I think you can find their bookstores everywhere they their thing was they basically lumped Mike McNair and Eric Blunk into the same paragraph when talking about this and then zombie kortskyism was their article. Yeah zombie kortskyism is the name of the article and it's bad for a number of reasons but the main thing is to say that like they Eric Blonk is put forward as the expression of what we believe funnily enough and you know just an example of the the political like torsion that we're talking about here the postcliphists here are attacking someone who sounds like a postcliffist in your country over issues that the postcliffists hear by Chinese whispers from a debate that was over a hundred years ago and because we because someone dares to even talk about Karkovsky like um even when they're talking about his mistakes like you know it's it either looks incoherent or you have non-revolutionary politics but but yeah I mean our position on this is basically that you know we recognize that Kautsky was important for Lenin's development but we got Lenin in a divorce is kind of our position.

SPEAKER_03 2:10:51

And Eric Blanc can keep Kotsky yeah all he wants.

SPEAKER_05 2:10:56

Yeah I feel like Eric Blanc like read Lenin Rediscovered and then decided that he liked post 1917 Kotsky which is you know it's like yay Gorlet's program let's that's gonna make everyone happy like anyway where can people find out about you if they're interested and find any of your documents or anything like that so basically everything's on the website which is revcom org.info that also contains a link to partisan which is partisanmagazine dot what is it partisan partisanmagazine.org that's basically everywhere I mean we're also like you know on Twitter and Instagram but I mean you know that's just basically reposting articles and statements which you get put up on partisan anymore there there is a social forum discord we can maybe give a link to but there is also a publication known as the Labour Tribune uh which is essentially a people within the labor party who are committed to revolutionary politics and have a lot of experience in union work and also comment quite frequently on AL And politics from a Marxist perspective. And I think those guys are just as important in some cases as the project that we're trying to do. And that sets us apart from all the groups on the left and even talking to people who have anything to do with the Labour Party whatsoever. Where that's very rare, apparently.

C. Derick Varn 2:12:16

Yeah.

SPEAKER_05 2:12:17

But yeah, I think that's covering all bases.

C. Derick Varn 2:12:20

All right. Well, thank you for coming on. And thank you very much.

SPEAKER_05 2:12:25

It was great coming on, yeah.

C. Derick Varn 2:12:27

Yeah. And I'm glad we got to do some comparisons between our our two national projects. Particularly just because um I want, you know, if we're gonna force you to deal with our bullshit all the time, we should at least kind of know yours. Yeah, like this is yeah, I mean, Australia maybe is a little far away, but we don't even like Americans only recently started paying attention to who the president of Mexico and the Prime Minister of Canada were. So baby steps, baby steps. We'll get that's gradualism, David.

SPEAKER_03 2:13:06

We have to throw the Americans in right away.

SPEAKER_05 2:13:10

Yeah, all right.

SPEAKER_01 2:13:11

Take care. Thank you. Thank you very much for this.