r/AustralianSocialism

Ewan Tilley lays out a framwork for understanding cadre development through four sites: Internal political education, fraction work (labour organising), community organising and faction participation. Should socialists adopt the framework? How do socialist organisations develop their cadre today and is it sufficient?

"What is the best approach to developing a revolutionary cadre? Ewan Tilley presents a common framework."

"The cadre development framework is not a curriculum. A curriculum specifies content to be transmitted from a knowledgeable instructor to a developing student, and the transmission model of political education is precisely what the organic framework refuses. The cadre is not developed by being taught the correct positions on a defined range of questions. They are developed through political practice in the three sites the main text identifies, with internal political education functioning as the analytical framework through which that practice is understood and developed rather than as the primary site of formation itself."

"Cadre development is not only the cadre’s individual responsibility. It is the party’s collective responsibility, and the party that treats cadre development as a matter of individual political will rather than of organisational conditions has misunderstood the organic framework’s central argument. The cadre is produced by the party’s political life, and the quality of that political life is determined by the party’s constitutional architecture, the richness of its deliberative processes, the seriousness of its fraction work and community organising, and the vitality of its factional contention. A party with an impoverished internal political life produces impoverished cadre regardless of the formal education programme it maintains."

I won't go as far to say it makes the majority of the population outright petite bourgeois, but the system of superannuation objectively changes the way capitalism here works & has heavily diluted the class struggle. Abolishing superannuation and definancialising the economy is therefore a #1 priority for the construction of Socialism.

This is one of the big reasons why Australia needs a New Democratic Revolution, you cannot have an exclusively proletarian revolution in these circumstances. Unity around a left-nationalist cause of breaking the hold of foreign ownership, hostility towards monopoly-capitalism & so on is the only realistic path forward.

Cross-posting from a medium article I just published. Would love feedback. I'm working on a much more comprehensive articulation of this position, but I wanted to get something out there now in order to garner immediate feedback in order for me to refine my own position. I'm an Australian socialist, though this framework is intended to be applicable anywhere, at any time.

Thanks to any who take the time to read.

The Need to Make Decommodification Central to Socialist Politics

_______

The left does not lack fighting spirit. It lacks a shared understanding of what it is fighting for, and capital exploits this every single day.

Every major tendency on the left is, in practice, pursuing the same project. The union that wins a shorter working week removes hours from the wage relation. The campaign that wins public housing removes shelter from the market. The socialist government that expands healthcare removes medical provision from commodity exchange. The cooperative removes a workplace from private appropriation. Each of these struggles removes something from the commodity form: time, shelter, medical provision, productive capacity. They share identical structural content, conducted by people who do not yet recognise each other as participants in the same project. That mutual blindness is what allows capital to treat each tendency as a separate target, concentrating its resources against each front in turn while the others stand aside.

The goal that makes this recognition possible is decommodification: the progressive removal of essential goods from the commodity form and their reorganisation under democratic, collective governance. This is what every left tendency is already doing (even if unconsciously-so). Making it explicit, adopting it as the shared criterion against which every struggle is assessed, is the only basis on which the left can function as a coordinated force rather than a collection of separate targets.

When capital launched the neoliberal offensive, it faced a fragmented left where each tendency defended its own gain in isolation. The miners understood the attack as an attack on miners. The health workers understood it as a health policy dispute. The council tenants understood it as housing policy. Capital concentrated its full force against each front in sequence, and the rest of the left treated each defeat as someone else’s problem. We were outmanoeuvred not because we were weak in aggregate but because our aggregate strength never materialised as aggregate strength. A left that understands the decommodification criterion knows that every attack on a decommodified institution is an attack on the shared project, and responds with the full weight of every tendency, because every tendency has a direct stake in the outcome.

The deeper failure of the postwar period was one of consciousness. The working class that held free healthcare, public housing, and free education understood those gains as government services rather than as won rights in a continuing struggle against the commodity form. A class that understands free healthcare as a government service accepts its erosion as fiscal adjustment, because governments adjust fiscal policy. A class that understands it as a portion of working-class life removed from the commodity form through struggle resists its removal as expropriation, because expropriation requires a response proportional to what is being taken. The postwar left built institutions without building the consciousness that would have defended and extended them. A conscious left builds both simultaneously, because the gain and the understanding of the gain are both necessary components of the project.

Now to the question many will rightly press: what about revolution?

The Soviet experience, and that of every major twentieth-century revolutionary state, reveals two structural problems. First, the vanguard party form concentrates authority for seizure and has no internal mechanism for redistributing it afterward, because every decentralisation in conditions of counter-revolutionary threat is treated as an invitation to overthrow. Second, these revolutions occurred in economies compelled to participate in the world commodity market to maintain their own reproduction, which required maintaining the wage relation and reproducing the commodity form under structural compulsion. The revolutionary state arrived at power in a commodity-organised society with institutions built for seizure rather than for democratic governance of production, and found itself administering exactly what it had intended to transform.

Prior decommodification addresses both problems by the same mechanism. Capital’s capacity to fund and sustain counter-revolution comes from accumulation within the commodity form. As production is reorganised around need, the surplus that finances counter-revolution is progressively removed, weakening the threat that justifies concentrated authority. The post-revolutionary state, arriving after substantial prior decommodification, governs a society already partially transformed, with democratic governance capacities already built and a class that understands what it holds. The revolutionary moment consolidates what has been built rather than attempting to construct socialist relations from scratch in a commodity-organised society, which is what every historical revolutionary state was forced to do, with predictable results.

The inevitable charge of gradualism mistakes the logic. Gradualism treats each reform as a destination and accepts the commodity form as permanent. The decommodification orientation treats each gain as a platform from which the criterion immediately generates the next demand, because each gain shifts the conditions for the next struggle: a class not paying for healthcare has more time and money; a class without student debt is less financially disciplined by capital; a class housed securely can sustain longer industrial action. And because rollback is understood as a direct attack on the shared project, every tendency responds to it with the full weight of the movement rather than leaving the affected sector to defend itself alone.

Only decommodification can serve as the shared focal point for every leftist tendency, from social democrat to revolutionary communist. Only through decommodification can we build the stable parallel institutions required for the actual transcendence of Capitalism.

Labor is trying to present itself as a defence against the far-right politics of One Nation and the Coalition. But Albanese has no answers to the housing or the cost of living crisis and is actively fuelling the racism.

The Bread & Roses caucus of the recently formed NSW Socialists, properly constituted under the party’s rules, is an aggregation of independent minded, non-aligned, non-doctrinaire socialists from diverse tendencies within the broader movement for socialism. Its composition reflects the depth and breadth of the movement as well as a general belief that being a member of one political party at a time is sufficient to meet requirements. I joined the NSW Socialists for the same sorts of factors that motivated another 1,000+ people to join the initiative in the first six months – enough to enable registration with the NSW electoral commission. The yawning political gulf to the left of Labor, the undeniable rise of fascism, an ongoing live cast genocide, the ongoing vulnerability of Australian workers to still dominant neoliberalism, the attack on our democratic institutions by agents of a Zionist state, a rise in racist brutality, the convergence of multiple ecological polycrises  – all combined to create a common sense of political urgency. The list goes on; the time seemed right. 

I assumed that the gravity of these conditions had dispensed with the sectarianism and fractioning of the Australian left that has characterised the last few decades. The initiative of Socialist Alternative to form the Victorian Socialists, with others, was a positive and most welcome development. I think it highly likely that those who joined in NSW took a similar view. Sadly, ingrained habits die hard, as we know.

My denunciation as a Stalinist at the NSW Socialist pre-selection meeting, described starkly by Clarrie Lewis, is risible and barely worth attention except for the light it throws on the mind set of those lodging the allegation. Accusations of Stalinoid-thinking against non-conformist socialists is an exhausted bogeyman, evidence of magical thinking and an open declaration that building a broad, mass-based party for socialism is beyond the political acumen of the NSW Socialist Alternative members charged with the task. 

That means that actually existing socialists, from every tendency, must take up the project if it is to have any real chance of success. Socialists outside the ALP within the NSW community, non-aligned socialists within the NSW Socialists and those thinking it is time to try a new approach are urged to get in touch with the Bread & Roses caucus to participate as democratic equals in an inclusive and safe project to build socialism with Australian characteristics.

A launch party for the caucus is scheduled for Friday 12 June. Details at this link. Come and meet us.
https://labortribune.net.au/letters-to-the-editor/

With the two electoral socialist parties not merging, and definitely not dissolving into the other, I just wanted to ask why one wouldn't join SAlli? Are the issues present in VS (anti-stalinism, factions, others ive missed) also present in SAlli?

Also, what if SAlli and VS/socialist parties allowed for dual-membership specifically between their parties exclusively, would there be any benefit to this?

Launched recently. Includes the AusCP, Eureka Initiative, UMP (United Muslims for Peace, NDLCA (New Democratic Centre of Australia), NAILS (National Anti Imperialist Liberation Solidarity), ROSY (Revolutionary Organization of Students and Youth) and the NSW wing of Anakbayan so far.

"Socialist Alternative leaders in the new electoral front want to ban caucuses from identifying with the party in public. NSW Socialists member Clarrie Lewis – writing in a personal capacity – argues this is a tipping point in defining the organisation’s democratic culture."

"The labour movement in Australia needs a socialist party capable of combining unity of purpose with confidence in its own members’ political initiative.

If NSW Socialists – and the broader Socialist Party project – hopes to present itself as a serious electoral and working-class alternative, it will require a political culture that encourages organised participation, not one that restricts it unnecessarily.

The Bread & Roses caucus represents one attempt to contribute to that broader project.

The outcome of this discussion will help determine what kind of socialist party develops."

I'll try keep this short as I tend to ramble.

I was having a yarn with a bloke on a construction site the other day. Basic shit "housing prices are fucked etc etc".

This dudes in his mid 50s and he starts blaming the Chinese labourers and immigrants for coming to Perth and taking up all the rentals.

Now in Perth our construction industry is wild ATM. Huge influx of work, massive need for skilled labour. Meanwhile this same industry can't keep up with the housing demands so as everyone knows - rents sky rocket and real estate prices boom.

I gave a rudimentary explanation of land banking to him and suggested that instead of punching down(immigrants), he should punch up (profit driven developers)

The moment wasn't the time to try to convert this old fella into socialism, but he responded in a positive way that I was not expecting. It took me by surprise and I've been pondering it for a while.

I'm a little worried about voicing this opinion, but I'd like to hear everyone's views. Do you think we as socialists have a branding issue? Is part of our issue that people see us as "blue haired leftist reactionaries"?

Is it wrong to want to appeal to the masses if that requires framing class issues with a masculine edge? "Punch up" wasn't something I've ever said to someone when I've tried to convince them to join the socialist party.

Is it diluting the overall cause by trying to convince someone who is never going to be a queer advocate that a socialist stance is actually a more traditionally masculine stance than that of someone just siding with capital that already has all the power?

Are there any Sunshine Coast based Socialist orgs at all? I’m aware of the queensland socialists and have recently joined, but it seems like most events happen in Brisbane.

Also would like to try cultivate at my work more of a pro union culture, does anyone have any tips or even sources that may help give some sort direction? Very new to this and would like to learn more about it :)