Points of Unity

We are communists. The capitalist mode of production has brought humanity to the brink of catastrophe. Only the communist movement - the real movement to abolish the present conditions of life and secure a society without the state, markets, classes or money - can save humanity from the tyranny, hunger, poverty, despair, boredom and anxiety of capitalist existence.

We are committed to revolution. Only revolutionary class struggle can overthrow the capitalist mode of production. All attempts to reform this system, to alter its innate logics or subvert its own structures, simply end in the reproduction of the system itself. In order to make a revolution it is necessary to smash the entire apparatus of the capitalist state and replace it with new forms of collective life based on the power of the working class.

We are committed to an ecological society. Industrial capitalist civilisation has brought the biosphere into a profound metabolic crisis. We recognise that the ecological struggle must be on the forefront of a revolutionary agenda. Indeed, it is only through fundamentally reorienting our relationship with the earth - and abolishing the profit motive - that we may live in a humane future at all.

We are internationalists. There is no national capitalism. There is only a singular world market, composed of many capitalist firms (and cartels of firms) and national, sub-national and supra-national institutions, all driven to maintain the dominant mode of production and govern it in their interest. Even as they predate upon each other, and even as nationalist antagonism re-emerges in new and vicious forms, the international character of the system persists. As the capitalist system is global by nature, it follows that any response to it must be the same. We are opposed to militarism and war, to imperialism and empire, to border controls, and capitalist extraction and exploitation. It is necessary for workers to stand together across borders and organise an international movement of the exploited.

We are against sexual and gender oppression. Despite rapid changes in the dominant modes of production and social reproduction, the patriarchal form of life persists. Its symptoms - the degradation and exploitation of women and the prevalence of homophobia and transphobia - persist with it. This is despite the integration of a minority of women and queer people into the liberal-democratic political project. Indeed, this integration is simply another innovation on the patriarchal form - one that maintains the fundamental structure of patriarchal oppression. We recognise that only a total revolution in the dominant mode of social life - and a revolution in social reproduction - can end the oppression of women and queer people.

We are against racial and colonial oppression. In the course of its development, capitalism has created a system of racial hierarchies. The nation-state system, with its attendant border guards and detention centres, serves to divide and weaken the working class, allowing for the regulation of the labour market to the benefit of capital. It is to this purpose that racial oppression is turned, serving to mantain servile working conditions of undocumented workers and recent immigrants. This same racial system is used to justify wars of imperial domination and extraction, and the repression of political dissidents and the expansion of the security state. In Australia and other settler-colonies, this system of race, border and citizenship is built upon another racial order, that of the colonial dispossession of indigenous people. This dispossession, both historically and contemporarily, lays the foundation of capitalism’s existence as a world system. 

We know that the “old left” cannot save us. The alienated and isolated political left is incapable with reckoning with the now decades-old dissolution of social-democratic working class political institutions. With the eclipse of organised labour, and the decline of the traditional parties of the working class, the political left has become disoriented, engaging in little more than rearguard actions accompanied by only vague talk of revolution. The only way out of this malaise is through a renewed study and development of revolutionary theory, and through a real analysis of the contemporary composition of the working class - alongside real engagement with the proletariat as it exists now - in struggles over conditions of life, within and against the capitalist mode of production.

We are fighting for a party of revolution. We remain committed to the notion of a revolutionary party, guided by a shared political line and made up of revolutionary cadres capable of both theoretical debate and political action. However, it is evident that no party of this kind currently exists, nor is one on the verge of emerging. Only the encounter between the proletariat's revolutionary, emergent institutions and an authentic revolutionary communist politics and analysis can generate such an organisation. We seek to aid in preparing the ground-work for that encounter.