Who We Are
The Communist Caucus has established itself in order to struggle for democracy and socialism through the Socialist Party. The Socialist Party is our party - we are fighting to make it into an effective weapon for the working class. We outline the following principles with the view of uniting all communists, Marxists, revolutionary socialists, and worker internationalists into a single party. They are advanced with one aim, and one aim alone - to realise the dream of a socialist revolution in Australia and beyond. It is a dream we share with millions of workers and toilers across Australia, the Pacific and Asia.
What We Fight For
A Mass Socialist Workers Party. We want the Socialist Party to become the party of the Australian working class.
The Communist Caucus understands that without a Party, the working class has nothing. We believe that the Socialist Party, by drawing together the existing socialist movement, can transform itself into a mass party of the working class, with a firm base in a reforged and rearmed workers movement.
Together, we would cultivate a popular basis for revolution by running militant socialist candidates for public office—while simultaneously organizing grassroots institutions of working class power. We would create party-affiliated press, community services, cooperatives, and defensive organizations. Within the labor movement, we would fight the existing labor bureaucracy, build militant and democratic unions, and strive to win these unions to socialist politics. We can win hundreds of thousands of workers to our banner through tenant organisations, women's and youth organizations, and mass campaigns for democracy and social welfare. Through a mass socialist educational movement, we can reforge Marxism as an intellectual tradition and forge a solid link between intellectuals and workers. As we nurture a vast ecosystem of socialist-allied institutions, our Socialist Party will simultaneously become a mass movement: a party-movement.
This is only possible if we stand firmly on our own feet. We must assert a singular political vision for our party, and make clear that our goal is not simply to win a socialist in office - it is to bring the working class to power. We will begin by working tirelessly to build the party - to recruit to it, to campaign for it, and to agitate for it in all spheres of the existing socialist and workers movements.
A Class Struggle Party.
We want a Socialist Party that goes beyond electoral campaigning.
In order for us to begin the long struggle for power, we must forge our party into a vehicle for socialist revolution. That means organising as a democratic mass organisation, with local sections, clear expectations and avenues for membership and participation, and systematic internal political education. We need to develop a comprehensive department for overseeing propaganda and agitation, develop our own class struggle, socialist press, and put power in the hands of the membership through delegate elections and a democratised leadership structure.
Importantly, we need to be ready and willing to fight on the streets as well as at the ballot box. The Socialist Party must develop its industrial wing, as well as establishing a firm basis amongst tenant groups, student clubs, and youth organisations. The Socialist Party should be ready to commit to long term organisational efforts amongst the working class - we need a party of organisers, militants, propagandists, and agitators - not “activists”. We will begin by helping to organise party branches, local committees, trade union sections, and study groups around the country, by advocating for the establishment of a party paper and political bulletin, and the organisation of a national curriculum of political education for Socialist Party members and supporters, in short, to organise with all members of the Socialist Party in the direction of building our party into a party that can make a revolution.
Programmatic Unity.
We want a program to guide the Socialist Party’s political work.
If we are to win, we must learn to act with greater unity and determination. We want a disciplined, self-reliant organization that is run democratically by its rank and file members. What holds parties together is agreement on final goals, not minor immediate tactical concerns. This approach is called programmatic unity: unity based on common struggle for essential political goals, rather than on dogmatic purity or vague slogans that obscure our true objectives. Acceptance of a political program with specific demands on the state is how the first mass socialist parties succeeded in winning the working class of their countries by the millions. A program provides direction on the political demands that will establish socialism and democratic rule by the working class without prescribing a narrow tactical route.
The Communist Caucus works towards adopting a minimum-maximum program for the Socialist Party, as opposed to the current laundry list of policies. We view both the ‘minimum’ and ‘maximum’ program as essential and intertwined. The minimum program refers to the party’s comprehensive platform: the policies that it will immediately implement upon taking power to establish working-class political rule and place society on the path of a socialist transition out of capitalism. The maximum program refers to the results of this process: a world free of the market, borders, classes, and all other oppressive structures that exist under capitalism—in a word, communism. Uniting behind a common program will give our organisation direction and coherence, a sense of purpose that will bind us together in the long struggle for power. And it will allow us to put forward an ambitious, comprehensive path to the realisation of our common dream - working class power.
We would like to make ‘program acceptance’ the basis of Socialist Party membership. Acceptance does not mean agreeing with everything in the program. It simply means being willing to fight for the program as an expression of the movement’s democratically-elaborated aims. Members would have the right to organize for specific changes to the program at conference. Members will be free to publicly voice disagreement with any majority decision, as long as they can accept the decision as legitimate and assist with its implementation. This is the true meaning of democratic centralism.
Electoral Agitation.
We want to use elections to agitate for socialism.
We believe that the electoral platform is not just for campaigning around current issues. It is a platform for the promotion of socialism. Our campaigns should be agitational and propagandistic - they should constantly advocate for a common program of democracy and socialisation. With a Program as the clear basis for membership, the link between programmatic concerns and electoral agitation becomes immediately obvious. Through agitational parliamentary campaigns, we can unify struggles over worker conditions with the concerns of tenants, of women, of immigrants and indigenous communities, and with young people and students. We can expose the middle class vacillating of the leaders of the Green and Labor Parties, while winning their voters and their members to socialist politics.
In parliament, we believe in the Bolshevik use of electoral tactics - combining electoral agitation with struggles in the streets, an uncompromising attitude to the ruling order and the bourgeois political parties, and the use of parliament to agitate for socialism. Australia must catch fire with communist agitation - with the slogans of democracy, peace, and socialism on the lips of millions of workers. We will begin by fighting to put disciplined and tested socialist activists on our ticket, and making sure that every one of our candidates is prepared to fight for socialism in the streets and in parliament. We will also work to establish a nationwide political education program for candidates and campaign managers.
Nationwide Struggle.
We want socialists to begin a nationwide struggle for political power.
Often, we are told to think small, and socialists accept this logic by confining themselves to isolated local campaigns, assuming that this is where ‘real change happens.’ Yet despite our backwards federal system, Australia is not a loose union of independent colonies. It is a modern nation state, defended by a modern police and military. Even local police are armed, trained, and integrated by the federal government. The struggle for working class power stretches beyond this or that state-wide struggle. It reaches to the federal government, and Australian capitalism’s alliance with international imperialism. Local organizing is an indispensable foundation of our movement, but it will be infinitely more effective when it is connected to a nationwide, pan-Asian, and global vision for working class revolution.
The Communist Caucus will work to forge the Socialist Party into an effective, centralised nationwide organization. We want to overcome state-level parochialism by emphasising a single nationwide political identity for the Socialist Party. It is also why we want to focus on the nationwide political campaigns - in the House of Representatives, in the Senate, in the streets. By conducting principled agitation in the halls of parliament, socialists can deliver a common message to every corner of the country. While we use the federal government as a bully pulpit, our candidates could also use their public profiles to support state and municipal organizing efforts. Federal, state, and local struggles—strikes, electoral campaigns, and mass demonstrations—will all be fused together in one grand movement that demands nothing less than a working-class, socialist revolution.
Fighting Imperialism.
The Socialist Party should be the foremost opponent of imperialism, militarism, and the police-state.
We recognise that the world today is characterised not by rival imperialist blocs vying for are division of the world, but by the relative decline of US hegemony and its struggle to stay on top. The American Empire was forged through blood and iron, and will not give up its dominance through other means. Trump has been happy to give everyone a reminder of this. From genocide in Palestine, to the kidnapping of Maduro and the rampage in Iran, the neocolonial world is under increasing threat by the US as it continues to use its position to wring every advantage it can. The ultimate target of the increasing American aggression being China, the biggest challenge to US hegemony. Forging unity of the international working class must be on the basis of opposition to the main enemy, the American Empire, and its attachés.
Australian socialists have a duty to stand firmly against militarism and police tyranny, beginning with a clear opposition to the imperialist designs of our own state. In the core of the imperialist world-system, any socialist program must firmly oppose imperialism and support the emancipation of the oppressed people of the world - in word and in deed. This means taking a defeatist stance against our country's wars, including those engaged by proxies and through military alliances like NATO, the Quad, AUKUS, and ANZUS, as well as cruel economic sanctions and military and diplomatic cover for colonial occupation, police repression, and ethnic cleansing.
But a defeatist stance against imperialism must exist alongside a revolutionary commitment to politically-independent international action. A lasting transition to socialism in any one country is impossible, and the working class can only emancipate itself on an international scale. The decline of much of the socialist movement in the 20th century into variant forms of nationalism and popular frontism —from the official communist ‘national roads to socialism’ to the earlier capitulation of social democracy to ‘defense of the nation’ during WWI—have equally led to strategic dead-ends and tragic defeat. Though the working class of any country must first of all ‘come to terms with its own bourgeoisie,’ domestic reforms are only partial victories for an international class.
In addition to opposing our own imperialist ruling class's political ambitions, socialist must consistently attack the international economic order that places billions in debt-slavery and structural poverty. It is our duty to attack the expressions of and the causes of uneven development - uneven exchange, international debt bondage, the power of multinational corporations, and the protectionist policies of the imperialist powers.
The socialist movement takes a leading role in expressing this international character in several ways, such as coordinated international strike action — like the historic May Day strikes —fiercely combating anti-immigrant chauvinism, and organizing to defend and extend the civil liberties of the migrant working class. As its far-reaching political objective, our party should commit to building fraternal ties with class-independent socialist parties towards the horizon of a reforged Communist International.
With every tool available to us, we must erode the political, cultural, and physical hegemony of world-imperialism. It is insufficient for socialist legislators to rhetorically criticize excessive military spending. They should be bound by our program to force a genuine public confrontation over the matter by refusing to vote for military, police, national security and intelligence budgets. We must oppose every single dollar going into the pockets of the war profiteers and arms industries. By building a genuine and disciplined party infrastructure, Socialist Party members would be on the forefront of a nation-wide confrontation with the imperialist state, exposing the interconnectedness of imperialism with capitalist barbarism - at home, and abroad.
As we wage immediate struggles against repressive apparatus of the state, from the police forces to strike breakers, a socialist vision requires concrete, programmatic commitment to alternative, radically democratic political institutions, recognizing that abolition is impossible without the working class taking state power into its own hands. The racist militarized border regime will be replaced by an open border, with complete freedom of movement for all peoples and universal citizenship for residents. The armed forces of international capital—the prison industrial complex, police, and the military—will be replaced by a democratic and popular militia defined by the combination of political, social, and economic work, the right to bear arms, the sovereignty of the working class, universal service and military training, and a rigorous community control coexisting with the democratic rights of members.
Fight the Monarchy.
The British monarchy, and its colonial constitution and parliamentary system, are the bastion of capitalist and landlord power - of oligarchy. We want to overthrow them.
The Australian constitution is a colonial remnant - a system largely imported from Britain, forged by agreement of squabbling colonies. There can be no question of submitting to a political order that exists to divide and conquer the working class, that slices up the government and divorces it from the will of the people—that is set in stone and almost impossible to amend. Indigenous people cannot win sovereignty under a constitution designed to facilitate their elimination; women cannot be free under a constitution written before they had the right to stand in elections, and working people cannot be free under a constitution that enshrines private property and places strict limitations on nationalisation of industry. No one can be truly free if they are forced to bow to a reactionary constitution written by the dead. We want socialist leaders to erode the popular legitimacy of the Australian state through combative political agitation: never bowing to the old order, and always acknowledging the need for a working class revolution in this country.
The socialist revolution will not base its legitimacy on the laws of the colonial, monarchist constitution. We will base it on a democratic majority mandate for socialism. This majority may be expressed by the popular vote of an election, but it does not have to take that form if the state represses our ability to contest elections. We stand for the right of the working class to take power by any means necessary. To win a socialist republic, millions of working people must be mobilized in their workplaces, at the ballot box, and in the street. We recognize that the capitalist class relies on the minoritarian rule of the existing political order, and they will not give it up peacefully. The working class will need its own self-defence organisations to protect itself from the inevitable violence of reaction, and the Socialist Party must be willing to carry out its democratic vision however necessary. We also recognize that we must fight for the democratic rights of enlisted soldiers in the Australian Defence Forces. To complete a successful revolution, we must win a decisive section of the military rank and file over to our side.
Build a Republic.
Our aim is a democratic, socialist republic in Asia and the Pacific; a union of socialist republics that raises the red banner from Tokyo to Islamabad, and from Beijing to Christchurch.
We fight the political system to win a democratic socialist republic in Australia and the Asia-Pacific, establishing a multiracial and multinational democracy ruled by the toilers of society. Forged in revolution, this continental republic will strive for the global liberation of all working and oppressed people. We desire the widest possible geographic scope for such a state so that it can most effectively carry out this mission, but this can only be achieved on the basis of equality between peoples and nations - we are opposed to all forms of national chauvinism and sectionalism.
Immediately upon taking power, socialists will implement a sweeping minimum program to cement working class political rule. We will need to destroy every institution that denies the people an authentic popular democracy, abolishing the Senate, the Governorships, the High Court, and the Cabinet. The antiquated federal system will be abolished. We will implement direct, universal, and equal suffrage. Supreme power will rest in the hands of a popular, unicameral assembly elected by proportional representation. Delegates will be recallable at any time and will receive no more than a skilled worker’s wage. All parties that accept the laws of the new revolutionary order will be free to operate. Local organs of government will have a wide degree of autonomy. Unrestricted freedom of speech will be guaranteed to all. The socialist republic will put political power and economic resources into the hands of indigenous communities, forging a new, multinational socialist democracy on the basis of a Treaty.
Our broader economic program will include unimpeded labor and union rights, a massive reduction in working hours, public housing for all, and a truly universal welfare state that provides for all citizens from cradle to grave. We will create programs to reduce the power of bureaucrats and teach administrative skills to all workers. Worker self-management will be encouraged to the greatest extent achievable in every industry. Large industry will be placed under collective ownership early on, and we will progressively socialize the rest of the economy as we build our capacity for democratic economic planning. We will pursue crash course programs to address the ecological crisis and establish resilient forms of production, distribution and habitation. Climate refugees will be welcomed into our republic with open arms.
With the shackles of the old order broken, the working class will finally have the power to remake society on egalitarian lines. In cooperation with the global socialist movement, we will move closer with every passing year to a fully liberated classless society: communism. Communism abolishes money, class distinctions, racial discrimination, the patriarchal family system, national boundaries, oppressive gender roles, the mental/manual division of labor, and all other forms of social oppression. It is a society truly based on the principle “from each according to their ability, to each according to their need,” where humanity collectively plans its economic activities through a free association of labor. Communism brings freedom to both society and the individual and will be the true beginning of human history.
If you are a member of the Socialist Party, you accept the above points of unity, and want to join us in the struggle for a mass socialist workers party, and a democratic republic, join the Communist Caucus!