First Printed: Discussion Bulletin, #6, September 24, 1979.
Transcription, Editing and Markup: Paul Saba
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’Red Eureka Movement’ is a Marxist-Leninist group. We are not a Communist Party and cannot become one until we develop a political program on key questions of the day (e.g., class analysis, nature of the Australian revolution, economic crisis, international questions etc.).
Drafting a program for an Australian Communist Party is an important pre-condition for forming such a Party.
“The program of a workers’ party ... is a brief, scientifically formulated statement of the aims and objects of the struggle of the working class. The program defines both the ultimate goal of the revolutionary movement of the proletariat, and the demands for which the Party fights while on the way to the achievement of the ultimate goal.” (’Short Course’, p.38)
Before we can draft a program we have to do a proper analysis and we have to get organised. Party building is an important task being hopelessly neglected by REM. It has been said many times in the past year that we have to get organised. It has been said both within our own ranks and by our enemies (e.g., the leadership of the CPA(ML)). Every issue of the ’The Way Forward’ states publicly that REM has organisationally collapsed. The eloquent proof of this statement resides in the fact that these attacks are met by silence on our part.
Internally, call after call has been made that we should get organized. A checkup shows that these calls have not been met.
As far as I can work out, REM members appear to be involved in various broad, united front activities (e.g., radio 3CR in Melbourne) and doing good, work there, but there is a terrible neglect of Party building. I feel that united front activities and Party building have to go side by side. Otherwise the energy put into united front work is dissipated.
To carry out Party building efficiently we need at least the following:
+A regular ’Discussion Bulletin’, e.g., one every 6 weeks.
+ An end to our neglect of publicly exposing the class enemies leading the CPA(ML)
+ Study of Party building.
A study of Lenin’s efforts to build a Communist Party in Russia is valuable here. In “One Step Forward, Two Step Backward” Lenin said: “In its struggle for power the proletariat has no other weapon but organisation”. In the split between the Bolsheviks and the Mensheviks in 1904 Lenin defined the position of the Mensheviks as “opportunism in matters of organisation”. “Lenin considered one of the gravest sins of Mensheviks lay in its underestimation of the importance of party organisation as a weapon of the proletariat in the struggle for its emancipation”. (’Short Course’, p.50), At the time this was the main difference between the Bolsheviks and the Mensheviks.
It has to be said that in matters of organisation REM displays the same opportunism as the Mensheviks. This has to be seen as an important ideological question.
(June 1979)
History of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union – Short Course, Chapter 2.
Stalin, Foundations of Leninism, Chapter 8.
Lenin, One Step Forward,Two Step Backwards.