/leftypol/ - Leftist Politically Incorrect

Anons, I might be about to do something big, and I wanted to ask some other comrades for advice. No I am not about to commit an act of domestic terrorism.

I've spent the last six months working/organising with what's basically one of the most well-known indigenous resistance groups here in Australia. I was asked to write a political program for them. I did. I was hesitant on how receptive they'd be for it, since it's basically "we need to become a Communist party" and has a section specifically devoted to Marxism-Leninism. When I presented it to them I tried to tiptoe around it to test the waters with basic anti-capitalist, anti-colonial talk before plunging in to namedropping Communism and ML.

The waters were very receptive.

Far more receptive than I was expecting or hoped. They asked me to print it out and give them a copy they could "translate into blackfellas language", since I have a rather formal writing style - which they said was good, it meant they could use me to communicate their ideas into coherent statements and policies and translate it to more formal political language.

So I come to you, Anons. I don't really have anyone irl I can share this with to get a second opinion, so I humbly ask you lot to read this and tell me what you think. The people it was meant for liked it a lot, but they're not really Communists, although they were very receptive to the basic ideas once I explained it to them. I framed it through the lens of being a method to decisively defeat colonialism and showing them the link to Capitalism - i.e. the economic mode of production of private property - and why that must be defeated too. Telling them stories of legendary anti-colonial revolutions in Vietnam - they'd never heard of Uncle Ho - also helped sell the idea.

I'm looking for some thoughts and advice on what you guys think. Are there bits I should change, reword, or add? This is not meant to be an outline of policy or an ideological manifesto, but more a broad outline of political ideology, strategy, and tactics.

Just to answer some, what I'm assuming will be questions you might have:

>Who are these people?

Aboriginal Australian activists in the Tent Embassy in my city.

>What's the tent embassy?

In Australia, the colonial powers never actually legally settled any agreements with the original indigenous peoples. Terf Island just said it was all "Terra Nullius" ("land belonging to no-one") and called dibs on all 7.7 million square kilometers. However, there were (and still are) more than 250 indigenous nations in Australia - all of them had defined territorial boundaries, governments, "capital formation centers" (kinda, they all lived in communitarian societies, but they did have farms, quarries, logging camps and fisheries), and permanent settlements with villages and towns. Most nations consisted of a single or a small handful of clans or tribes, but larger ones operated in a confederal, decentralised, horizontal, collective government consisting of multiple such tribes and clans. It's estimated around 1.1 Million people lived in Australia in 1787, the year before Britain arrived.

At no point, however, did the colonial powers ever recognise their sovereignty, and it's still a contentious point in Australian politics today. In the 1970s, some guy went to Canberra (Capital City) and set up a tent he claimed was the "Embassy" of the original aboriginal peoples of that particular spot right outside Parliament House. Clever idea. Fast forward to today, and the embassy is still there, and while sovereignty and colonialism is still a contentious issue that keeps coming up to the forefront of politics, and Embassies have been set up in virtually every major city in the country, they haven't accomplished much. I didn't know there was one in my city until this year, and apparently it's been there since I was 5 months old. But when I started hanging out with them, I found out they want to change that. So I've been helping them.

>Why don't you know any comrades irl?

TLDR I got kicked out of the party I was with in Dec 2023 because some personal events happened and they were worried I'd make them look bad. It wasn't fair, but whatever. Some months later I was advised I'd have an opportunity to appeal the expulsion eventually, and I should join up in organising work on single-issue programs in the meantime. I'm fairly confident what's wrong will be put right soon enough.

Turning the Tent Embassy into a fighting center of working-class, anti-colonial organisation is the best I can do. It has been real work to get this from being a ramshackle group of tents with signs into something even slightly resembling what we want it to be, but real progress is being made.

>What are their goals?

Well, read the program, duh. But in short they want to make the Embassy into a place where people can come to learn about Aboriginal culture and tradition that was almost lost. They want to have facilities they can make money off of to fund the embassy and expand its practical and political activities. I'm reminded of Lenin writing that "tea-houses" run by comrades whose profits go towards funding worker's organisations and communists is a great idea, and their idea of being able to sell modernised versions of traditional indigenous food for the same purposes is basically the same. When I asked them how they intend on defeating colonialism and what the long-term goal is, they described to me, verbatim, Lenin's theory of Dual Power. Almost word-for-word. I think that's why the warmed to me so quickly, I've been able to put into coherent words what they've spent years thinking.

Anons, pls help. I kind of know what I'm doing but I am only one man. I've got quite a couple years of irl organising under my belt, I think I've read a decent amount of M/E/L/S/M, and it's great to actually use them. Putting the theory I've read to use is amazing, though I'm still flying solo and I know enough to know I don't know enough. I'm powering through reading as much of the relevant Lenin as I can to try make up for it. Hence why I come here.