TL;DR: Your Party gathered 800,000 signups in the summer of 2025, reported 55,000 members in December, and had its holding company struck off on 21 April 2026. It has never published a set of minutes. On 3 July three members of its executive were sent letters barring them from a meeting due two days later. On 6 July the committee learned it had been kept in the dark about personal liability. On 12 July fourteen of twenty-four members carried votes of no confidence in the chair, the secretary and the membership officer, and the three stayed in post. On 20 July the official meeting collapsed inquorate. Solma Ahmed, Sophie Wilson and Naomi Wimborne-Idrissi resigned on 14 August, disclosing that party email addresses were by then being offered on condition of signing non-disclosure agreements and that an autumn conference was being planned at which they expected collective leadership to be abolished. Thirteen days later two of them described the year in public. Nothing in their account is a story about 800,000 people failing to become a party. All of it is a story about a leadership preventing them.

Eight hundred thousand people gave Your Party an email address in the summer of 2025. By December the party reported 55,000 members. On 6 June 2026, roughly 150 people travelled to Sheffield for the Connections convention, and eighty of them were still in the room for the final vote. Your Party UK Ltd, company number 16619803, was dissolved on 21 April 2026 having filed neither accounts nor a confirmation statement in the nine months of its existence.

Those four figures are the balance sheet. The argument about what they mean is the subject of Part Seven. This part is about the record, because the record has never been set out in one place, and because two of the three people who resigned from the executive in August have now described it themselves.

A year without minutes

Your Party refused to establish branches for a year. It restricted access to members’ contact information. Its founding conference voted 69 per cent for dual membership, and the Central Executive Committee buried that vote through administrative stalling, drafting election rules that barred dual membership until the CEC approved a list of acceptable organisations. No list was ever published. Candidates were disqualified. Proto-branches went unrecognised. In February 2026 The Many took fourteen of twenty-four CEC seats against the Grassroots Left’s seven, swept all eight officer positions on 8 March, and appointed Jeremy Corbyn parliamentary leader at the first meeting. No official minutes have been published since that day.

What members got instead were the chair’s own summaries. Votes went unrecorded despite repeated requests that they be recorded, and when the minority members began sending their regions their own accounts of what had happened in meetings, they were threatened with disciplinary action for breaching confidentiality. CEC members had no means of communicating with one another, or with the members of the regions they had been elected to represent.

The month the machine ran into the law

Then the machine ran into the law. On 3 July, three CEC members were sent letters suspending them from a meeting due on 5 July. On 6 July the committee learned it had been kept in the dark about a serious risk that its members, and possibly ordinary members, might carry personal liability for an organisation whose legal vehicle had been struck off in April. Seven CEC members who had voted with the majority all year, three of them officers, joined seven others at a special meeting on 12 July and carried votes of no confidence in the chair, the secretary and the membership officer. Three officers and one other member resigned during July. The three who had lost the confidence vote stayed, issuing statements denying that the meeting had been legitimate. The official meeting of 20 July collapsed inquorate. Solma Ahmed, Sophie Wilson and Naomi Wimborne-Idrissi resigned on 14 August, disclosing on the way out that CEC members had by then been offered party email addresses on condition of signing non-negotiable non-disclosure agreements, and that the agendas of the postponed and inquorate meetings carried plans for a second national conference in the autumn at which they expected collective leadership to be abolished. Within seconds of the resignation email being sent, Wimborne-Idrissi was removed from the WhatsApp groups of the region she had represented an hour earlier. The person who removed her was the membership officer, Cassi Bellingham, in whom the CEC had passed a vote of no confidence on 12 July.

The people who had been told they were building a members’ party found they had been underwriting somebody else’s risk.

None of that is a failure of breadth. Every item on the list is a decision by a leadership to prevent the membership becoming an organisation. The 800,000 were not a mood that evaporated. They were a layer that was deliberately not given branches, not given a members’ list, not given the right to belong to anything else, and then blamed for dispersing.

The three put it in their own words on the way out. This is not a superficial tit-for-tat battle between factions or clashing personalities, they wrote, but a rift between bureaucrats whose priority is running a parliamentary party with loyal, unquestioning foot-soldiers at local level, and class-conscious activists striving to build a movement which empowers the grassroots through democratic, transparent, accountable campaigning institutions.

What it looked like from inside the CEC

Thirteen days later, on the evening of Thursday 27 August 2026, Wilson and Wimborne-Idrissi described that year to a public online meeting hosted by Republic Your Party (RYP), a grouping inside the party that came out of the Republican Labour Education Forum. Thanks go to it for allowing Red Mole to share the recording and cite from it. Ahmed was billed and did not appear. Both speakers are still YP members, both were on the losing side, and the meeting was called by a faction. All of that should be said before anything else. What is striking is that neither of them gave a procedural account of what had happened to them.

Wilson served four or five months. She listed the sequence as she experienced it: standing orders first, then extra-constitutional business including the parliamentary leader, then the code of conduct, and then what she called the real issue, the creation of the officers group. She thought a parliamentary leader was probably sensible and said so at the time. She also thought it was unconstitutional. In the first meeting each agenda item was allotted ten or fifteen minutes and each speaker a minute, there was no structure of for and against, and votes were not recorded. She and others kept asking members of the majority to say why they were voting as they were, and could not get an answer. She proposed that the committee meet more often and for longer, on the grounds that this was serious work. The pushback was that long meetings are not inclusive, because members have childcare. She has childcare.

She was clear that this was not a matter of bureaucratic style. The party had been thrown into questions it never debated, sortition among them, and the differences underneath them were political: what democracy means inside a party and outside it, how multi-tendency the party should be, what relationship it should have with community independents and councillors. Organisational urgency was the standing reason not to have those arguments. Underneath the urgency, she said, was fear of a mass membership organisation that would debate these questions and might reach different conclusions from the people currently running the party.

Wimborne-Idrissi described the same machine from another seat. All eight officers were elected by the controlling slate at the second meeting with no input from anybody else. She proposed that each officer share the role with one or two other CEC members, to spread the load and force the reasoning into the open. It was rejected outright. Policies arrived fully drafted. The decision that there would be no dual membership, and the decision about which left groups were too toxic to be given any role, were taken with no discussion at all.

Then she stated the difference, reading it off her own notes because she wanted it exact. Were they building a party based on a grassroots movement engaged in struggle on all fronts to resist the effects of capitalist decline, or a party whose main task is to secure the election of members to local councils and parliament, with branches as foot soldiers to get the vote out. The second conception won. Its holders deny holding it. It explains everything else.

Two speakers at the Anticapitalistas summer university had drawn that distinction in the Spanish state a year earlier, and Part Seven of this series takes up what they said. It matters that it was reached here independently, from inside, by somebody with no interest in the vocabulary.

The numbers deserve their own paragraph, because they change what the balance sheet at the top of this article can be claimed to show. CEC members had no access to membership data. A figure of seventy thousand had been publicly used by the membership officer shortly before the meeting, and Wimborne-Idrissi’s position was that the committee had no way of knowing whether it was true, because no report detailing the source of the data was ever put to it. A member from a branch spanning eleven constituencies said that at his inaugural meeting, he was told the branch had more than 860 members, and that the ballot that followed listed about 300 eligible voters. Branch launches carry a twenty per cent quorum and votes have been extended because the quorum was not reached. Wimborne-Idrissi chaired a launch that drew twenty-five or thirty people in an area that had been turning out fifty, sixty and seventy a few months earlier. So there is a fifth figure in the balance sheet, and it is that none of the first four is auditable by anyone who might be held liable for them. That includes the 55,000.

The branch rollout is the clearest single instance of what this article is about. Launches were announced haphazardly, and in Wimborne-Idrissi’s nearest branch the most active people in the area did not know that a launch meeting had been called for them. She learned of it because a list appeared and she was asked whether she was free to chair one. More than one CEC member had told members that the delay in branches was the fault of the membership, for having voted at the founding conference for collective leadership. The branches that do arrive have no bank account and no control over their own membership lists. Wilson has not been invited to one. Sheffield was not on the list.

The relation between the membership and the leader came up at that meeting in a form nobody had to theorise. Wimborne-Idrissi said that thousands of members are content with top-down control, and that the leader’s iconic status makes many of them reluctant to take any critical stance at all. A member then asked from the floor whether somebody who knows Jeremy Corbyn could go and knock on his door and tell him this was not good enough, because he is the only person everybody respects. Two speakers answered her, one that Corbyn is the last person to appeal to, the other that putting your hope in a single leader is what the Labour Party had just done again. Much of the response beneath the resignation statement itself ran the same way in reverse: the three were saboteurs and wreckers, and should leave quietly so that the rest could get on with electing MPs. A plebiscitary relation to a leader is not a theoretical category. It is a thing people say in comment threads.

Part Six takes the same year from the outside: what the party did with its name in the places where it used one, and what the public registers show about who was carrying the risk.

More to read

Part Five of The Vanguard in Retreat. Part One: The Ladder Built in Midair. Part Two: The Clean Banner. Part Three: Communism at the End of the Rainbow. Part Four: The RCP Has Interpreted AI. The Point Is to Change It..

Sources. Solma Ahmed, Sophie Wilson and Naomi Wimborne-Idrissi, “Why we are resigning from the CEC”, 14 August 2026, together with Wimborne-Idrissi’s covering note of the same day, are the source for the July chronology, the non-disclosure agreements, the autumn conference plans, the threat of disciplinary action over members’ reports and the removal from regional WhatsApp groups. Sophie Wilson, Naomi Wimborne-Idrissi, Nadine Finch for DemBloc and Steve Freeman for Republic YP spoke at a public online meeting hosted by Republic YP on Thursday 27 August 2026, quoted here from a machine transcript of the recording in which speaker labels are unreliable and have been reconstructed from content; Solma Ahmed was billed and did not appear. At that meeting Wimborne-Idrissi dated the suspension letters and the liabilities disclosure to the first week of June; the resignation statement gives 3 July and 6 July, and those are the dates used here. Company facts are from the public register: Your Party UK Ltd, 16619803, incorporated 31 July 2025, dissolved 21 April 2026, no accounts and no confirmation statement filed.

Socialist Worker wants to close the AI data centres. All of them. The demand has the virtue of fitting on a placard and the vice of being aimed at no one. It asks nothing of any union, any council, any government, or any worker anywhere, and it would sweep away in a single sentence the machines that model the climate it means to defend and the ones that let a City bank shave a microsecond off a trade. The strength and the weakness are the same thing. A slogan that undifferentiated will catch a mood. It will also gather, under one banner, people who could never march in the same direction for more than an afternoon.

It feels like the most radical thing you can say. It is also the oldest, and the comparison usually thrown as an insult runs the wrong way. In 1812 the croppers of the West Riding broke the shearing frames at night, and they were neither a rabble nor fools. They ran one of the strongest unions in the country, strong enough a decade earlier to beat Benjamin Gott, the greatest manufacturer in Leeds, in a strike that lasted months, and for years they had petitioned Parliament to enforce the old laws that protected their trade. It was the state that closed every door, repealing those laws and, under the Combination Acts, making the union itself a crime. Frame-breaking was the last weapon of an organised trade after the law had confiscated the rest. They were never confused about what a machine is. They broke the frames that were being used to break them, and they aimed at particular masters, not at machinery as such.

What changed over the century that followed was not that the movement grew wiser about machines. It was that it won back, and then more, everything the state had stripped from the croppers: the legal right to combine, the vote, a party of its own. A class that holds those can fight in daylight over who owns the machine and what it is for, and need no longer break it in the dark.

We know this because we did it the last time a technology became the enemy. In the 1970s the reactor stood where the data centre stands now: a vast, capital-hungry installation, sold as progress, dropped on communities that had not asked for it, and answered by the first genuinely mass ecological movement. Ten thousand people occupied the site at Wyhl in 1975. In Sweden the call to shut down the Barsebäck plant was carried by a hundred and thirty-seven organisations. And the movement was, from the beginning, the same cross-class thing the anti-data-centre movement is becoming: in Sweden the bourgeois Centre Party fought a whole election on opposition to nuclear siting. “The social neutrality to which the ecological debate lays claim,” Hans Magnus Enzensberger wrote in 1974, in an essay the French section reprinted two years later, “is a fiction.”

The revolutionary left did not answer this by standing outside the movement and correcting it, and it did not answer by dissolving into it. It went in to give the movement a class content it did not yet have. When the French section’s Jean-Paul Deléage wrote on nuclear power in 1978 he refused the easy slogan his own side was reaching for. To say “nuclear equals unemployment,” he wrote, “would be to attack the machines alone and not the society that makes them.” His first heading was flat: nuclear power is not an inevitability. The Swedish comrades put it as a method rather than a mood. The fight against building the plants was worth waging, they wrote in 1976, “both as a specific question and as an occasion” to argue for something larger, “a planned economy under the direction of the working class.” Not shut it down and go home. Shut this down, and see, in the shutting, who decides what gets built.

Behind all of it sat one sentence of Marx’s, and it is the sentence the croppers had already worked out with their hammers: the enemy is never the machinery, but its capitalist employment. The movement tested it on the great technological panic before nuclear, which was automation. Four times the Marxist press announced that the machine was about to abolish work, in the mid-fifties, in 1962, in the early eighties, and now with AI, and four times the aggregate forecast was wrong. What was never wrong was the question of who took the gain. In 1962 the electricians of Local 3 in New York met the automation of their trade not by trying to halt it but by striking for, and winning, a twenty-five hour week at the same pay. In 1971 Mike Cooley, a designer at Lucas Aerospace, watched computer graphics gut the drawing office he had trained in, saw a calculation that had taken six months done in under six minutes, and drew from it not a call to smash the terminals but a strategy: organise the proletarianised technicians, turn the concentration of capital into a new power to stop it, and fight for a world in which the same machines could “do all the things which we do now, and an increasing range of things that technology would make possible,” under control. Cooley’s colleagues at Lucas went on to write the most famous document of that whole tradition, an alternative plan for their own factory that proposed building kidney machines and heat pumps where the bosses wanted weapons. The Lucas plan is what “what you’re for, not what you’re against” looks like when it stops being a slogan. It is the frame-breaker’s grandchild, this time with a union card and a blueprint.

Which brings us to the servers. The most serious ecosocialist statement on artificial intelligence yet written is Daniel Tanuro’s, whose theses International Viewpoint published in February. Tanuro is not soft on the machine. He calls it the “hostile force par excellence,” counts the seventeen billion gallons of water the American data centres drank in 2023, and demands a moratorium on the construction of new AI infrastructure. Then read what he does not demand. He does not call for closing the data centres. He writes, in the same document, that “in a non-capitalist world, other AIs could relieve humanity of tedious and repetitive tasks,” that “another kind of digital, public and democratic, is possible,” and that the answer at work is a trade-union veto over the introduction of AI, workers’ control of the workload, and a reduction of hours with no loss of pay. The oldest transitional demand in the file, take the gain as time, sits in the newest theses on the newest machine. Tanuro’s line is a moratorium on new build, workers’ control of the rest, and an honest ecological limit on all of it, because ownership alone will not shrink the footprint. It is to the left of Socialist Worker in everything but the slogan, and the slogan is the only place Socialist Worker is ahead.

That is the trouble with “close the data centres.” It is not too radical. It is not radical at all, because it asks nothing of anyone and builds nothing. It is even less discriminating than the croppers, who at least knew which frames to break and whose. It names no enemy: the City firm and the cancer researcher are equally guilty of running a server. It names no agent: no union, no council, no worker is asked to act. And it gives away the one piece of ground the right cannot follow us onto. There is already a reactionary anti-AI politics, protectionist and technophobic and glad to blame the machine for what the market has done, and an undifferentiated “shut it down” is the exact spot where Steve Bannon and a Unison branch can stand in the same crowd. The anti-nuclear movement was captured that way, by the Centre Party in Sweden and the realos in Germany, and the answer the tradition found was never to drop the demand. It was to anchor it in the unions and in workers’ control, so the question stopped being “machines, yes or no” and became “this machine, in whose interest, decided by whom.”

So the demand is not to close the data centres. It is to stop the ones that meet no need where the homes should go, to put a union veto on the ones already running, to take the saved labour as shorter hours instead of unemployment, to build a public and democratic digital in place of a private and extractive one, and to plan the whole of it inside limits we do not get to vote away. That is harder to fit on a placard. It is also the difference between a movement that wins something and a mood the far right can borrow.

The croppers broke the frames after the state had taken their union and their law and left them nothing else to reach for. We have not been stripped that way. We have unions, a vote, a century of the argument already won, and the most advanced machinery in human history humming in sheds outside towns that need houses. To reach for the hammer first, while we still hold everything that was taken from them, does not honour them. It is cruder than they were, and it volunteers us back into the defeat that was done to them.

Sources. Daniel Tanuro, “Theses for an ecosocialist critique of artificial intelligence,” International Viewpoint 616, 9 February 2026 (the water figure corrected here to gallons, per the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, 2024 United States Data Center Energy Usage Report). Jean-Paul Deléage, “Énergie nucléaire et transition au socialisme,” Critique Communiste 23 (May–June 1978), and the resolution of the Swedish section (KAF) reported in Inprecor 59, 30 September 1976: both translated here from the French. Hans Magnus Enzensberger, “A Critique of Political Ecology,” New Left Review I/84 (1974), p. 10, translated by Patrick Camiller, reprinted in French in Critique Communiste 7 (1976). Mike Cooley, “The Proletarianisation of White-Collar Workers,” The International (IMG), January–February 1972. The automation forecasts and the 1962 electricians’ settlement are drawn from Red Mole Guide 16, The Fourth Forecast. On Wyhl and Barsebäck, Inprecor 23 (April 1975) and International Viewpoint. On the croppers’ union, their defeat of Gott, and Luddism as a targeted trade struggle rather than blind machine-hatred, E. P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (1963), and E. J. Hobsbawm, “The Machine Breakers” (Past & Present, 1952).

Data centre expansion right now is wasteful even on capitalist terms, not just by ecosocialist ones: the UK and Wales already have more computing capacity than any credible forecast says is needed, and specific proposals (Brick Lane, Livingston-Dunfermline, most of the Welsh AIGZ sites) serve financial speculation or political boosterism rather than any social need.

The programme: public ownership of hyperscale compute, community and worker control over siting, a public register of water and energy draw, no new fossil generation built to serve data centres, worker veto and shorter hours over AI-driven job losses, and above all a moratorium on new construction until social need is demonstrated, burden of proof on the developer, not the objector. 

That last demand is deliberately not the same as the SWP’s ‘shut down AI data centres’: it is fully as confrontational for nearly every data centre actually being proposed, but it doesn’t call for closing the ones that clear the bar, like ECMWF’s AI weather model, which is roughly 1,000 times more energy-efficient than the supercomputing it supplements.

The argument is grounded in the socialist movement’s own history (Kidron’s 1950s casebook on automation, never anti-technology, always about who controls it) and in live cases: Cymru’n Codi’s Welsh campaign, the Pontyclun planning fight, and Daniel Tanuro’s 2026 ecosocialist theses, which concede that ownership alone doesn’t resolve AI’s ecological footprint.

A parallel warning: opposition to this industry is not politically uniform. The Pro-Human AI Declaration unites Steve Bannon with a teachers’ union under a slogan vague enough for both; ‘shut it down’ risks the same thing from the other direction. What a movement is for has to be argued, not assumed from what it’s against.

Monday’s final plenary at the summer school of ACR (Anti-Capitalist Resistance, the England and Wales organisation of the Fourth International) in Darsham closed on data centres, and I said there what needs saying here. Nobody at the tech conference I was at a few months ago, not the institutional investors, not the forecasters, can explain the data centre boom. It is, to use the phrase I reached for on the day, ‘this bizarre tulip economy about building data centres.’ The reference is to tulip mania, the Dutch bulb-trading bubble of the 1630s, when a single rare tulip bulb could trade for more than a skilled craftsman earned in a decade before the market collapsed within weeks. Run the industry’s own ten and twenty year forecasts out to their most extreme demand scenario and the world already has as much computing capacity as it needs.

Pete had asked the obvious question a few minutes earlier: some comrades at another summer school this year took the view that the right response to a data centre is to burn it down, so what did the panel think of that. My answer wasn’t a defence of the hardware. It was that the waste is real and the argument still has to end up somewhere programmatic, because a demand that stops at ‘no data centres’ can’t be built on easily, and a demand built on ‘why do we need this one’ can.

Another comrade added something sharper than either slogan on the table: the government does not know what the country’s biggest data centres are being used for. A freedom of information request to the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology, asking who was using the largest sites and for what, got the answer that the department did not hold the information, reported shortly before the department itself was dissolved. Their point mattered because ‘data centres’ has already become political shorthand specifically for the current generative-AI hyperscale buildout, and the sharper question moves past who should own this to whether it is needed at all, a question of evidence that an ownership slogan alone lets the state duck.

Which is where the NPA-Anticapitalistes gets it right: a moratorium until social need is demonstrated. The target is the burden of proof, currently resting on the community objecting, reversed onto the developer proposing. A data centre training weather models or coordinating a public health system would clear that bar without difficulty. Most of what is actually being built would have to earn its permission instead of receiving one by default, which is the whole difference. NPA-Anticapitalistes’ own branch in Isère has already put a version of this into practice, co-signing a petition for a moratorium on a 200MW AI supercalculator under construction in Eybens, alongside Extinction Rebellion, Greenpeace and half a dozen other Grenoble-area groups. ‘NO NEW DATA CENTRES UNTIL THE NEED IS PROVEN’ will never fit easily on a sticker. ‘Moratorium now’ does, and it is already the position of comrades in Isère, even if only for one project so far.

The clearest illustration I gave on Monday wasn’t Wales, it was Brick Lane. A data centre proposed for one of the hottest, most water-stressed sites in London, which I called on the day ‘the most insane place in the world to put a data centre,’ makes no sense as a computing decision and total sense as a financial one: it sits close enough to the City, London’s financial district, that ‘milliseconds are worth millions’ to the high-frequency trading firms it serves. Livingston and Dunfermline are the same story without even that excuse. Scotland already has more computing capacity than it needs, and the data centre being built between the two towns is, in my own phrase from the plenary, ‘a plank of public sector love for business’ rather than a response to any social requirement at all.

Four days later, Cymru’n Codi (Welsh for roughly ‘Wales rising’), a Welsh political organising group, published a comment on their Substack that could have been drafted from the same argument without ever having heard it: megawatts, acreages, the difference between a moratorium and a review, closing with a list of conditions no data centre developer in Cymru is currently required to meet.

Wales now has Artificial Intelligence Growth Zones, AIGZs, UK Government-designated areas where planning and grid connection are fast-tracked for AI infrastructure investment, across the north and south of the country, and since May a Plaid Cymru-led government has backed them as hard as Westminster does. Adam Price MS, Cabinet Minister for Enterprise, Connectivity and Energy since 13 May, told the CBI in his first public remarks in the job that Wales wants to be one of the easiest places in Britain to invest, planning and grid connection cleared by government rather than contested by communities. A party that spent a generation arguing devolution meant Wales deciding its own future is now the government clearing the path for capital to decide what gets built on it.

Cymru’n Codi’s own figures put a number on the same waste I described from Brick Lane and Scotland, and the topline ones check out. Wales had 154MW of data centre capacity in 2024, the highest outside London, against London’s 1,048MW, both figures from DSIT, the UK Government’s Department for Science, Innovation and Technology, confirmed in the Senedd’s own research briefing of 31 July. The Senedd, Wales’s parliament, calculates the UK Government’s own projection for the South Wales AIGZ alone, over 1GW by the early 2030s, at thirteen per cent of Wales’s entire 2024 electricity capacity, none of it answering a computing need that the industry’s own forecasters, on Monday’s evidence, don’t believe exists either.

The site-by-site figures turn out sturdier than an earlier pass through this piece gave them credit for, once traced to the Senedd’s own PDF rather than the news summary of it. Cardiff’s two developments are the planned Cardiff East campus at around 150MW, and Vantage’s Newport CWL1, oddly counted under ‘Cardiff’ in one of the briefing’s own summary lines despite operating from Newport, at 148MW. Newport separately gets a planned Microsoft site at around 200MW. Bridgend’s figure was never a stated megawattage at all: Vantage’s planned CWL4 campus there is described only as ‘approximately four times the capacity and size’ of its Newport campus, which is where the widely repeated ‘around 600MW’ comes from, a multiplication, not a measurement. Anglesey’s 349MW appears in the same Senedd document without clarifying whether it refers to the data centre’s IT load or the battery storage system on the same site, which the planning documents for Prosperity Parc specify as BESS capacity rather than compute.

‘Land and expand’ is a phrase used by Democracy for Sale, a British investigative newsletter, to describe how the tech firm Palantir won a £1 NHS contract in 2020 and turned it into a seven-year, £330 million one: get an initial foothold through, then make the next phase nearly impossible to refuse. Cymru’n Codi borrowed the same phrase for the fight in front of them. The applicant behind the proposed data centre at Mwyndy Cross, near Pontyclun, is Maska Group, a developer and asset manager with London and Manchester offices which trade press confirms has not previously built a data centre. Local reporting also names Talbot Green Developments in connection with the site, a company based in Aylesbury and ultimately owned in New Zealand, which is why one objection to the scheme wasn’t really about data centres at all: the profits, whatever they turn out to be, were never going to stay in Wales. That is not a detail. That is the entire economics of speculative infrastructure, stated plainly.

Red Mole’s own casebook on automation, drawn from seventy years of the press of the Fourth International, the international Trotskyist movement founded in 1938, and collected this year as Red Mole Guide 16, supplies the argument’s other half. Four times since 1954, the movement forecast what a new machine would do to work, from Lyn Marcus on the servomechanism to Winfried Wolf on the West German robots that could feel warm from cold, and every forecast was serious, well-researched, and wrong about the outcome in one direction or the other. What decided the outcome was never in the forecast. It was whether the workers affected were organised to take the machine’s saved time as time.

Wolf’s 1984 report from Volkswagen is the clearest case. West German metalworkers, organised in IG Metall, the engineering and metalworking union, struck for seven weeks that year against robots that could replace between four and ten workers each. Under capitalism, he wrote, the gain from that machine arrives “as massive unemployment instead of a shorter workweek for all.” IG Metall’s strike didn’t stop the robots. It won a phased reduction in the working week instead, the one outcome across four forecasts that the Fourth International’s own record shows organisation actually secured.

The fourth forecast is being made now, and the casebook closes with the ecosocialist theses on AI of Daniel Tanuro, a Belgian agronomist and long-standing writer for the Fourth International’s press, published in International Viewpoint, the Fourth International’s English-language magazine, this February. Thesis 27 lands where every other document in the casebook lands: trade union veto over the introduction of AI at work, workers’ control over the workload, “reduction of working hours without loss of salary” against layoffs. That is the demand this piece has been building toward, and it belongs alongside the workers’ and community inquiry I argued for on Monday: not a survey after the planning decision, but a standing right to ask what a given piece of land is actually needed for before anyone builds on it, garden, housing, industry, whatever it turns out to be.

The obvious response is that public ownership settles the rest of it: expropriate the hyperscalers and the ecological question becomes a planning question, decided democratically instead of by a share price. But that isn’t quite right either. Thesis 32 refuses exactly that comfort. “Replacing capitalist property with collective ownership,” Tanuro writes, “in and of itself, would not be enough” to bring AI’s material footprint within what the planet can sustain. Public ownership answers who profits from the data centre. It does not answer how much throughput a plan is entitled to authorise once profit stops being the constraint, and Red Mole has not settled that question either.

The same evasion happens in the opposite direction too, and reading Eko’s own campaign page rather than the coverage of it makes the gap sharper, not softer. ‘Billionaires like Elon Musk and Sam Altman are racing to see who can conquer AI first,’ the pitch runs, promising to stop AI being used ‘just to make the rich even more filthy rich.’ Eko’s own tagline is ‘people and planet over profit.’ The demands that follow ask for safety standards, liability for AI companies, a ban on training AI on children, and a verifiable off-switch: matters of regulation and liability. Who owns the compute and who captures the profit, the target of three paragraphs of billionaire-baiting in the pitch itself, stays outside the list of six.

A sentence loose enough for Steve Bannon, Donald Trump’s former chief strategist and a signatory, to sign alongside a teachers’ union cannot by construction contain a class analysis, because naming one would cost half the signatories. One comrade at the same Monday plenary, unnamed in the transcript, warned that the venture capitalists Peter Thiel and Marc Andreessen, and Curtis Yarvin, the blogger who argues democracy should be replaced by a form of corporate rule under a national CEO, are using AI to advance an anti-democratic political project that treats democracy itself as the obstacle. The Pro-Human AI Declaration is close to the mirror image: opposition to AI mobilised behind an answer decided before a single worker signed it, the anger real, the demand regulatory. It stood at 679,663 signatures when this was drafted, seventy thousand short of the round number the campaign is chasing, a serious figure for a petition and a modest one for a movement. Even inside the AI-safety milieu this isn’t landing as serious either. PauseAI, a campaign group pushing for a halt to frontier AI development, said the declaration ‘goes the way of crypto regulation, slow, reactive, captured by incumbents,’ a pattern no petition reverses.

Being against billionaires settles nothing on its own. The German socialist August Bebel called antisemitism ‘the socialism of fools’ for exactly this reason: a hatred of finance and ‘rapacious’ wealth that never touches capital as a social relation, only personalises it into a villain. Hitler’s National Socialism built an entire economic doctrine on the same move, splitting capital into schaffendes (productive, coded German) and raffendes (rapacious, coded Jewish) forms, and left German capital’s actual power completely intact while doing it. What replaces the billionaire, the market’s own discipline, the nation, or the working class, was always the only question that mattered, and it is the one question the declaration never asks.

Cymru’n Codi’s own conditions for the Senedd do something a national slogan can’t: they price the externality before construction starts rather than after, developer-funded rather than bill-funded, audited annually rather than taken on trust. The one thing missing from the list as published is enforcement with teeth: statutory inspection instead of self-certification, and a community’s right to walk the site with the inspector instead of reading the report afterwards. That, to be fair to Cymru’n Codi, is exactly the demand they end on.

None of this, Welsh, Scottish or English, touches the harder problem thesis 32 leaves standing. A planned economy still has to decide how much compute the world actually needs, not only who owns the servers that supply it, and nobody in this argument, Tanuro included, has said how a democratic plan sets that number rather than backing into it from whatever capacity already happens to exist. I said at Darsham that the AI question is at one level a totalising, existential one, closer to shouting at clouds than to leafleting outside a Tube station, and that the task is finding the agitational form underneath it. The workers’ and community inquiry is that form for the land, and a moratorium until need is proven is that form for the industry as a whole. Nobody at the plenary, least of all me, had an answer for the form it takes for the compute itself.

Postscript: Shut the data centres?

Necessary context first. The Socialist Worker placard in question carries two demands, not one, in two different registers. The headline is sweeping: ‘Shut down AI data centres,’ no qualification, no exceptions. Underneath it sits something closer to a hope than a demand: ‘Water, energy and land for public need, not corporate greed,’ which names an outcome without specifying who delivers it, through what mechanism, or against what resistance.

The letter below was sent in response to the headline, on the view that the subline doesn’t answer the question the headline raises. ‘Your slogan,’ it argued, ‘mistakes the machine for the master.’ The problem is ownership and control, not computation itself, and the socialist answer is democratic control of AI, public ownership of its infrastructure, shorter hours without loss of pay and protection against redundancy, not a call to shut down technology that could, under workers’ control, be socially useful.

Dear Socialist Worker,

Your slogan, “Shut down A.I. data centres”, mistakes the machine for the master.

The issue is not that computers can process information, or that automation can reduce necessary work. The issue is who owns these systems, who controls the data, and who gains while workers and communities carry the costs in jobs, energy, water and land.

A socialist response should demand democratic control of AI, public ownership of its infrastructure, shorter working hours without loss of pay, and protection against redundancies—not a blanket call to shut down a technology that could, under workers’ control, be socially useful.

We should fight corporate AI, not retreat from technical progress.

Duncan

The strongest case for the SWP’s approach doesn’t need borrowing from anyone in this argument to make. Four points, at minimum, deserve to be taken on their own terms rather than answered before they’re stated.

1. Urgency outruns precision. The industry is building faster than any movement can develop a fully worked-out ownership programme, and a demand that waits for the theory to catch up arrives after the concrete is poured. ‘Shut it down’ is legible and actionable this week; a moratorium pending proof of social need requires an adjudicating body that doesn’t yet exist and a definition of proof that doesn’t yet exist either.

2. A blunt demand recruits where a qualified one doesn’t. Most people encountering data centre politics for the first time will not be won by a sentence with a subordinate clause in it. ‘Shut it down’ asks nothing of the newly angry beyond agreement, and that is precisely what a slogan, as opposed to a programme, exists to do.

3. It concedes nothing to capital’s framing. A moratorium implicitly grants that some future data centre, once need is proven, would be legitimate, which hands the industry exactly the opening its public relations departments are built to exploit: prove the need, and the objection disappears. ‘Shut it down’ makes no such concession, and there is a real argument that none should be made to an industry this dishonest about its own resource use.

4. The ecological crisis changes our programme. Nothing in the automation debates of the 1950s had to reckon with a planetary limit; the argument over who owns the machine was the whole argument. An industry burning water in drought-stressed regions to train models nobody asked for is not obviously the same problem as a car plant automating its assembly line, and a slogan that treats it with more alarm than an older generation’s automation debates did may simply be right to.

Whether these four points settle the question is separate from whether they deserve to be raised, and the ecological point in particular runs into a specific cost the slogan doesn’t name. The European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasting currently takes six hours on a supercomputer to produce the world’s most accurate forecast. Google DeepMind’s AI model, GraphCast, trained over four weeks on 32 machines, now produces a comparable ten-day forecast in under a minute on a single desktop, a figure ECMWF’s own machine-learning lead, Matthew Chantry, has described as roughly a ‘thousand-fold saving’ in energy, in Financial Times reporting picked up by the German press. That is close to the strongest possible case for keeping some AI data centres running: less resource use than the method it supplements, for a public good with no capitalist mechanism attached at all. Traditional numerical forecasting still outperforms it on the rarest, most extreme events, so it supplements the supercomputer runs rather than replacing them, but ‘shut down AI data centres’ draws no line between the two. Radiology diagnosis support makes the same shape of argument without the same weight of published numbers behind it yet, which is an honest gap, not a settled one. Simply shutting the technology down would not even be true to the Luddites, who were skilled trade unionists breaking the particular machines used to break them, not machinery as such.

The opposition to this industry is not one thing either, and this piece has already made that argument about a different slogan. The Pro-Human AI Declaration united Steve Bannon with a teachers’ union under a sentence vague enough for both to sign. The same test applies here in reverse: a slogan that names no exceptions can be carried by a NIMBY objection to a specific planning application exactly as easily as by an ecosocialist one, and ‘shut it down’ does not by itself distinguish a resident worried about house prices from a comrade worried about the grid. The distinguishing test matters here, the one that separates those two, and a moratorium tied to proven need supplies it in a way a bare shutdown doesn’t.

None of that is answered by pointing out that the small print exists. What actually needs saying runs the other way from how slogans are usually defended: they deserve more time spent on them, not less, because compression is a form of selection, and what gets selected is a political choice with consequences a five-thousand-word article doesn’t have to carry. A slogan that only says what it is against costs nothing to agree with and commits to nothing once the shutdown, if it ever happened, is won. What a movement is for has always mattered more than what it is against, and a first slogan is exactly where that gets decided, not the last place it gets addressed.

“In the 1930s, those who refused to resort to invective in the Stalinist style reproached first the Left Opposition and then the Fourth International with a fundamental lack of realism. Not all of Stalin’s decisions, they said, could be endorsed, and building socialism in a single country entailed contradictions; but in the given context, they maintained, there was no alternative, and the duty of every revolutionary was to defend the Soviet leadership unconditionally.”

So wrote Livio Maitan in this article from the November 1988 issue (no. 11) of Bandiera Rossa, in a special section headed “Towards the new generations” marking the fiftieth anniversary of the Fourth International’s founding, as Gorbachev’s glasnost was exposing the scale of Stalinism’s failures. Writing at a moment when history seemed to be vindicating the Trotskyist critique, Maitan drew up the balance sheet of sixty years of struggle and made the case for why revolutionary internationalism remained essential. We republish his article on the anniversary of that 3 September 1938 gathering at Alfred Rosmer’s home in Périgny, a Parisian suburb, where, under threat from Stalinist assassins, delegates from a dozen countries launched the Fourth International. Many thanks go to Dave Kellaway, a friend and colleague of Livio, who corrected this Red Mole translation. 

The Fourth International in Today’s Struggles

In the 1930s, those who refused to resort to invective in the Stalinist style reproached first the Left Opposition and then the Fourth International with a fundamental lack of realism. Not all of Stalin’s decisions, they said, could be endorsed, and building socialism in a single country entailed contradictions. But in the given context, they maintained, there was no alternative, and the duty of every revolutionary was to defend the Soviet leadership unconditionally. When the USSR then made an essential contribution to the defeat of fascist imperialism in the Second World War, the “realistic” argument appeared enormously strengthened. Subsequently, the reconstruction of the USSR from the ruins of war and its rates of economic growth throughout that period were cited as further proof of the correctness of the choice made at the end of the 1920s. It was seen as a further condemnation of those who had criticised it and had thus deserved the defeat they suffered.

Today, sixty years on, a very different overall balance sheet is possible, starting from the very denunciations and admissions of the Gorbachev leadership of the Soviet bureaucracy (a first balance sheet had already been possible thirty years ago, starting from the Twentieth Congress of the CPSU and Khrushchev’s criticisms of the “cult of personality”). The substance — forgive the schematic summary — is that what was built in the USSR was not a socialist society, even within the borders of a single country, but a society that has very little to do with socialism as Marx, Lenin and the leaders of the October Revolution and of the Communist International at its foundation conceived it.

Certainly, there has been no restoration of capitalism, and in this sense some fundamental conquests of the revolution have not been swept away. But power is in the hands of a bureaucratic caste which enjoys enormous privileges and constitutes an ever more serious brake on the development of the productive forces. The most glaring example, on the economic terrain, is agriculture, which has still not overcome the catastrophic consequences of the forced collectivisation of the early 1930s. More generally, bureaucratised structures and management have prevented the creative potential of the workers from expressing itself, producing distortions, bottlenecks and paralysing contradictions of every kind.

There is hardly any need to recall, moreover, that Stalin bore the principal responsibility for the tragic military failures of the first year of the war, which brought the USSR to the brink of defeat. He had decapitated and disorganisied the Red Army with the bloody purges. Also he based his policy until the very last day on the assumption that Hitler would respect the non-aggression pact signed in August 1939. The situation could only be turned around once the people of the USSR, and first of all the peasants, grasped what Nazi imperialism meant and threw all their forces into the victorious counter-offensive.

No less correct have proved the criticisms of Trotsky and the Left Opposition on the terrain of international politics. The subject is addressed in other articles in this special issue. It is enough to recall here the critique of the sectarian and irresponsible policy of the Stalinised Comintern and the German Communist Party in the crucial phase of the struggle against Hitler. It was one of the essential factors in a historic defeat from which, in terms of anti-capitalist political consciousness, the German proletariat has still not recovered.

The battles of these decades

Trotsky, the Left Opposition and the Fourth International did not counterpose merely generic programmatic assertions to Stalinist political choices. Anyone who wishes can verify that from 1923–24 onwards, at every moment when problems of decisive importance were on the table, the Opposition put forward alternatives in concrete political terms. It did not neglect the conjunctural framework and tactical requirements. This was the case, for example, during the battles against the bureaucratisation of the party, for a correct approach to the problems of industrialisation, and over policy in the countryside. The same holds for its international choices. What is even more important, our movement never confined itself to criticism and denunciation, but took a direct part in the struggles, despite the hard blows it suffered and the persecution of its militants.

We were defeated, in the sense that Stalin succeeded in imposing himself both in the USSR and in the international communist movement. But we were not the only ones defeated. The Soviet masses were defeated: the exercise of political power was torn from them, and they paid, dramatically and in every sense, the price of Stalinism. The workers and peasants of all those countries on which the Stalinist leadership imposed a policy and a form of organisation that led to catastrophic defeats were defeated too. As for the “victors”, there are not many left who still care to claim certain “victories”.

The reality is that, from a general historical standpoint, the great battles begun in the aftermath of the First World War are still in full swing. Who will be the victor in the end is by no means predetermined. But revolutionary Marxists, in the light of experience, can lay claim to the fundamental validity of their critique. Beyond all the errors and all the contradictions, their battle has been fought in the right direction. That is why we are determined to continue it.

The question now arises of the context in which the construction of an international workers’ movement is situated today. Without ignoring what is happening in other regions of the world, we must underline that the most important event of recent months is the crisis convulsing the Soviet Union from top to bottom — the bureaucratised society that seemed ever more sterilised by the caste of old men who dominated it.

New possibilities in the countries of the East

We were always convinced that the “ice age” in the USSR would not last forever, because we believe in the underlying truth that the dynamic of social forces is, in the final analysis, more powerful than all structures and political apparatuses, and even than the most systematic police repression. We ourselves are astonished by:

• the depth of the wave that has shaken the Soviet Union in so short a time

• the breadth and level of consciousness reached by broad layers of the population

• the intellectual and political courage of the vanguard groups now taking shape

• by the strength of certain mass mobilisations.

A new historical phase has effectively opened, with a dynamic of anti-bureaucratic revolution. This revolution will not, however, be completed by Gorbachev, nor by any bureaucratic leadership group. Our international press has amply explained the reasons, and we shall not return to them here.

Gorbachev is in fact proposing a new version of peaceful coexistence. More precisely, he speaks of a “peaceful conception which necessarily requires cooperation”. In his view, “it falls to history to judge the merits of each particular system. History will make the choice. Let each nation decide for itself the best system, the best ideology.” The underlying idea is that capitalism still has an entire historical phase ahead of it, and that one must therefore wait patiently for history’s verdict.

From this standpoint one can only abandon any perspective of overthrowing capitalism, and hence of revolutionary struggle on a world scale. At the same time one is led to evade the historic choices of the international workers’ movement. The communist parties, or what remains of them, are consequently induced to carry their neo-reformist course through to its conclusion, and the question of relaunching any international organisation does not arise. The Italian Communist Party (PCI) has understood the message well, and its leaders are among Gorbachev’s most enthusiastic supporters.

All this indicates that the battle for internationalism and for the construction of a revolutionary International will continue to be very difficult in the USSR. It will be no less so in the countries of Eastern Europe, where for decades the bureaucrats presented their subordination to the Moscow bureaucracy as “internationalism”, and where the political disorientation is far from being overcome. Those who have a real understanding of the meaning of internationalism, and of the need to give the workers’ movement an international framework, amount only to very small nuclei.

Internationalism in the capitalist and dependent countries

The internationalist battle is also very difficult in the capitalist countries of Western Europe, and all the more so in North America and Japan. Dramatic events of the past decade — the China–Vietnam war and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan — have caused deep disillusionment and demoralisation, first and foremost in those sectors of the workers’ and internationalist movement that had committed themselves to solidarity with Vietnam. The hammering of the bourgeois media, which seeks to relaunch the values of capitalist society, has wrought real destruction. The bureaucrats of the workers’ movement have often capitulated before this offensive, which went hand in hand with attacks on living standards and on workers’ conquests and rights. When any perspective of overthrowing capitalism is renounced, and the idea that it will last indefinitely is accepted, not much room is left for internationalism, and any project of international proletarian organisation looks like the residue of a bygone era.

The panorama is more encouraging in other regions of the world. In Latin America, the victorious revolutions in Cuba and Nicaragua are engaged in a courageous struggle against imperialism, while other revolutionary movements are shaking the colonial regimes in their countries. Internationalist ideas retain their power of attraction, and internationalism itself keeps a real meaning.

Cuba and Nicaragua have given shining examples of this. But not even the leaders of these two countries share the conception, fundamental for us, of the dialectic of the three sectors of world revolution. While they have helped and continue to help revolutionary movements in other countries, they have not posed, and do not pose, the problem of building an International. More particularly, the Cuban leaders are largely inspired by a campist conception which has led them to unacceptable positions, such as approval of the Soviet intervention in Czechoslovakia and support for the Polish bureaucracy against Solidarność and the revolt of the working masses.

What role does the International play today?

In this context, our battle for the internationalist principles that were at the origin of our movement, and for the construction of a mass International, is more necessary than ever, and we shall continue it whatever the difficulties.

Does this perhaps mean that we hold a self-proclamatory and narrow conception of the International, as our adversaries and critics claimed fifty years ago and as some still maintain today? The decision to found the Fourth International was dictated neither by an abstractly self-proclamatory concern nor by conjunctural considerations or perspectives. Rather it was the conviction — founded on many experiences — that it was necessary to provide a programmatic and political answer to the crisis of the workers’ movement and to the problems that crisis posed. It was dictated by the conviction that only an international organisational framework, however limited, would make it possible to:

• maintain the indispensable links between the existing revolutionary groups,

• ensure the continuity of Marxism and Leninism

• confront the new problems that would arise

• and — what counts most — to commit the forces thus gathered to the battles of the workers’ movement in the various regions of the world.

It was a necessary historical task, and one that we have, in substance, fulfilled.

To conclude: we never argued that the revolutionary mass International would be built with our forces alone. From the debates of the 1930s to the resolutions of the last World Congress in 1985, we have explicitly maintained that this International will arise from the convergence of different revolutionary currents and movements. Our project was not the linear growth of the organisations that had joined first the Left Opposition and then the Fourth International. Today this approach is more valid than ever,. If we defend the existing International with the greatest tenacity, and fight to strengthen it, it is precisely because it represents an irreplaceable instrument for advancing towards the formation of a qualitatively superior International: the revolutionary mass International.

Source: Livio Maitan, “La Quarta Internazionale nelle lotte di oggi”, Bandiera Rossa no. 11, November 1988, pp. 16–17.

Two SWP Zoom meetings, eight weeks apart, both on Iran. The first, in the middle of the uprising, was Anne Alexander alone, on imperialism and revolution in Iran, past and present. The second, after Israel and the US started their attacks, was Alexander again with Simon Assaf, on Trump’s war on Iran and resistance from below. Watch them back to back and the same tradition speaks twice and does not quite say the same thing. The gap between the two nights is the argument.

Take January first, because it is the SWP doing the thing Red Mole has spent a good deal of time saying the SWP no longer does, and doing it well. Alexander’s subject was the uprising, and she treated it as what it is: a stage in a long revolutionary crisis of the regime that took power in 1979 and then strangled the revolution that made it. The hopes of 1979, the anti-imperialist demands, the reaching towards a more equal and democratic Iran, were, in her words, crushed by the consolidation of the regime Khomeini set up. She walked the sequence of it: the Green Movement and its ‘Where is my vote?’ in 2009, the fuel revolt of 2019, and then in 2022 the Woman Life Freedom rising after the police murdered Jina Mahsa Amini. The slogan the streets had found for the whole predicament she quoted back: down with the oppressor, whether the dictator or the king. And she named the thing most of the anti-war left will not, that Iran’s regional alliances, with Assad in Syria, with Hezbollah and Hamas, were built not to push the region towards liberation from Washington but to serve the interests of the Iranian regime itself.

‘The only regime change that matters is the regime change that we do ourselves.’

There was no campism in the room. Ask Stop the War about Iran and you get the regime laundered into an anti-imperialist bastion, its opponents recast as assets of the CIA, the Woman Life Freedom rising quietly folded away as a colour revolution. Alexander did the reverse. She credited the Iranian activists she had spoken to, insisted the movement was no puppet of Washington or of the exiled Reza Pahlavi, warned that his calls from exile put people into the street to die without offering them anything, and drew the line that the whole tradition of socialism from below exists to draw: ‘the only regime change that matters is the regime change that we do ourselves.’ The difference between the SWP and the Morning Star on Iran is the difference between that sentence and its absence.

And the analysis had grain to it, the kind that comes from actually reading the thing rather than the wire. She went back and re-read the 1978 to 1979 revolution and pulled out the detail that matters: the crackdown began in January 1978, the protests ran for the best part of a year, and the movement only became unstoppable in the autumn, when the oil workers struck and broke the state’s grip on production. She reached for the Iranian historian Peyman Jafari on why Woman Life Freedom stalled, that it never got the organised working class at its heart, that a generational gap opened between the young in the streets and the older workers rooted in the workplaces. She had the Syrian comparison ready, the way the Assad regime filled the squares of Damascus with workers dragooned by their bosses because no organised working class had moved early enough to stop it, set against Egypt in 2011, where the state-run unions were called out to defend Mubarak and simply refused to come. Call it what it is: a serious, class-first reading of a live revolution, and the opposite of the anti-imperialism of fools. Red Mole should say so plainly before it says anything else.

Then came March, and the bombs, and the framework tilted.

‘If the regime survives, then the US and Israel lose.’

The March meeting was not about the Iranian people rising against their regime. It was about the United States and Israel making war on Iran, and the change of subject changed everything. Alexander held her line: the Iranian regime serves Iranian capital, she said, played a directly counter-revolutionary role in Syria, and none of the states of the region offer any alternative to imperialism; Trump runs a regime too, and none of them are legitimate. But Assaf, opening, reached for a formula Alexander in January had not needed and did not use: ‘if the regime survives, then the US and Israel lose.’ He called the regime unprogressive in the same breath. Both things at once. The theocracy is our enemy, and its survival is our victory.

Hold that sentence up to the January light and the fault shows. In January the subject was the Iranian masses, and the regime was the thing they were fighting. In March the subject became the American war, and the regime slid into a new part, the vessel of anti-imperialism by default, its survival standing in for a defeat that was really the empire’s and not the people’s. Nobody defended the regime. But the measure of the war had quietly moved from what the Iranian working class might win to whether the regime outlasted the bombing, and those are not the same measure, and the second one has the regime doing the resisting.

It is a small wobble on Iran, and small for a reason: Iran is the easy case for this framework. The aggressor is unambiguously Western and the Iranian masses are themselves in revolt, so ‘defeat the American war, and the revolution from below does the rest’ more or less holds together. The trouble is that the same framework does not stay on Iran. Set the March meeting against the SWP on Ukraine and the wobble becomes a fall. There the anti-Western state is the aggressor, the nation resisting invasion is cast as a NATO proxy, its demand for weapons to defend itself becomes a provocation, and ‘neither Washington nor Moscow’ resolves, in practice, into neither Washington nor Kyiv. The same instinct in both: defeat the main enemy in the West, subordinate the concrete struggle to it. On Iran it lands near the truth, by luck of the geometry. Turn to Ukraine and the same instinct lands on the wrong side of an invasion.

In Iran and Ukraine: Stand with the oppressed and their own capacity to resist

The Fourth International answer is not a splitting of the difference and it is not more anti-imperialist heat. It is the thing Alexander herself supplied in January and the framework could not keep hold of in March: that imperialism is real and asymmetric, that you stand with the oppressed and their own capacity to resist, the oil workers, the strikers, the women in the streets, against both the empire and the regime, and that you never let the survival of a state stand in for the liberation of its people. Defend Iran against the bombing without defending the theocracy; defend Ukraine against the invasion without defending Zelensky. The asymmetry is the whole point, and it is exactly what the symmetry of ‘all states are imperialist, main enemy at home’ keeps dissolving.

None of which should be pushed too hard, and here is the honest limit of it. On Iran under American attack, Red Mole and the SWP would very likely march down the same street, sign the same statement, try to block the same arms shipment. The divergence is latent, not operational; it surfaces only when you set the two Iran meetings side by side, or set Iran beside Ukraine, and watch what the framework does with its subject once the aggressor changes flag. Perhaps that is too fine a distinction to build a faction fight on. It is not too fine to notice, because it is the same distinction that has put some of the most careful readers on the British left, people who read a revolution as closely as Alexander reads one, on the wrong side of Kyiv.

Alexander closed the January meeting with a British consul in Tehran in 1907, writing home in a panic about the Constitutional Revolution: a spirit of resistance to oppression, and even to all authority, is spreading throughout the country; the leaders are unknown. She read it as the fear every empire and every dictator feels when ordinary people begin to organise themselves, and she is right that the spirit is still alive in Iran. The question she left hanging, the one the March meeting reopened without meaning to, is whether a politics built above all to name the empire can always keep the people in focus when the empire is the one doing the shooting.

On 20 June a conference in London adopted a statement under a slogan that reads like settled wisdom: ‘No to militarisation and conscription. Welfare not warfare.’ Stop the War now asks its supporters to carry a model resolution built on it into their union branches, and a petition is going round that warns the government’s new military ‘gap year’ pilot is the thin end of the wedge, the precursor to bringing back the draft. The branch secretary photocopying it for the September meeting is not a campist ideologue. She is doing what the labour movement has always done with conscription, which is to refuse it.

And she is half right, which is the difficulty. The slogan answers a question, and the question it answers is not the one being asked in Kyiv.

Strip the issue to its bones. Can the working class be conscripted by a bourgeois state, even in self-defence, even with the bombs already falling on its own cities? Put that way it sounds like a matter of principle with an obvious socialist answer. It is not. The tradition the model resolution claims, the tradition of Engels and Jaurès and Debs, gives a different and more uncomfortable answer, and the cleanest statement of it was set down in a private letter six weeks before its author was murdered.

The letter behind the slogan

Almost nobody who quotes the formula has read the paragraph around it. On 9 July 1940, weeks before his assassination, Leon Trotsky wrote to Albert Goldman, a leader of the American Socialist Workers Party who was drafting articles on conscription for the party press. Goldman sent a draft formulation. Trotsky sent it back corrected, and the correction is the whole document.

Goldman had written that once conscription is made law the party ceases to struggle against it and turns instead to fighting for military training under workers’ control. Trotsky struck the concession out. He would not let it stand on the record that the movement had ever opposed conscription as such. He declared himself unequivocally in favour of compulsory military training and of conscription, and then set down the line that survives him.

“We are absolutely in favor of compulsory military training and in the same way for conscription. Conscription? Yes. By the bourgeois state? No.”

Read what the ‘No’ attaches to. It fastens to the state, not to the conscription. We cannot entrust this work, Trotsky wrote, to the state of the exploiters, any more than we hand them our schools; military training is a part of education, and we no more boycott the one than the other. His instruction to Goldman was exact: do not record us as fighting conscription, record us as fighting, without let-up, the capitalist state that commands the army and bends it to the advantage of the owning class. The enemy was the officer caste and the people behind it. Never the call-up itself. And in the same breath he slammed the pacifist exit shut, insisting that opposition to the war keeps its revolutionary content only by denouncing pacifism without mercy: we are against this war, and we will have it anyway, until we are strong enough to overthrow the class that makes it.

So the activist who lifts ‘By the bourgeois state? No’ and waves it as a refusal to defend has turned the man inside out. Trotsky was settling how revolutionaries fight inside a conscript army they fully expect to enter. He was not asking permission to stay out of it.

The argument was older than Trotsky, and larger

The Trotskyists inherited this question. They did not invent it. For two generations before that letter the conscription argument ran through the whole of the socialist movement, and not once did it turn on conscription in the abstract. It turned on two things. Whose war. Whose army.

The dominant answer, before 1914, was the armed nation. Friedrich Engels wrote Can Europe Disarm? for the German party in March 1893, in the thick of the Reichstag’s debate on the Military Bill, and argued that the staged reduction of service terms by treaty was the road that led from the standing army to a militia, to the people in arms. He was nobody’s pacifist. He backed universal conscription and was ready, when the moment demanded it, to argue for revolutionary war on the Napoleonic model. The demand reached back further still, to 1848, to the fourth of the Demands of the Communist Party in Germany: the universal arming of the people, armies that would be workers’ armies in the same instant. Jean Jaurès gave the idea its fullest expression in L’Armée nouvelle in 1910. Against the long-service professional barracks, against the caste, he set a short-service citizen militia on the Swiss pattern, the reservist with his rifle at home, a force built for defence and clumsy for aggression. He said the thing his opponents could not believe a socialist would say, that the workers’ movement should not seek to undermine the army but to democratise it, to make soldiers of the citizens and citizens of the soldiers.

Not everyone swallowed it. Rosa Luxemburg turned on Jaurès directly, named his politics chauvinist and petty-bourgeois, and charged that by arming the eastern departments against Germany he had stripped the armed nation of its democratic content and aimed it across the Rhine. The fault line was already cut, years before the guns. The armed nation could be a school of the people or it could be an instrument of the fatherland, and in August 1914 the German Social Democracy chose: it voted the war credits, and ‘national defence’ became the alibi for an imperialist slaughter that fed a generation into the mud.

The refusal, and what it was refusing

Against that capitulation stood the socialists who would not touch the bourgeois army at all. They are the model resolution’s true ancestors, and they are worth meeting properly. In the United States the Socialist Party met at St Louis in 1917 and bound itself against the war and against conscription in the same resolution. Eugene Debs climbed the bandstand at Nimisilla Park in Canton, Ohio, on a sweltering Sunday in June 1918 and told the crowd what he thought of a war declared by the masters and died in by the men: if war is right, let it be declared by the people. Federal agents were working the audience for draft cards as he spoke. He went down for it under the Espionage Act, ten years, and ran for president from a prison cell in 1920, polling the better part of a million votes. In Britain the refusal wore Independent Labour Party colours. Fenner Brockway and Clifford Allen, both ILP men, built the No-Conscription Fellowship and threw it against the 1916 Military Service Act, won the conscience clause, and then watched the founders march off to Pentonville and Walton. Some sixteen thousand men refused to serve. Their convention filled a Friends’ Meeting House, which is the kind of room this argument has always been had in.

A complication I would not edit away, because it is the honest part. Not all of that refusal rested on the character of the war. The absolutists in the Fellowship, many of them Quakers rather than socialists, would not bear arms for any state in any war whatever, and the British movement never did cleanly separate the political objector from the religious one. The anarchists carried the refusal furthest, and then met the test the others were spared. In Spain the columns of the CNT began as voluntary workers’ militias and were ground, under the weight of a war they could not afford to lose, into the conscripted discipline of a regular Popular Army with its ranks and its saluting restored. Where that leaves the principle is something the tradition has argued over for ninety years and has never honestly closed, and I am not going to pretend a single article closes it now.

The hinge Lenin supplied

What separates Debs in 1918 from the Ukrainian socialist in 2026 is not courage and not principle. It is the war. And the man who insisted on that distinction, against every temptation to collapse all wars into one grey imperialist mass, was Lenin.

In the polemic against the Junius pamphlet in 1916 he refused Luxemburg’s implication that the epoch of imperialism had abolished national wars. National wars by oppressed and colonial nations were not only possible in that epoch, he wrote, they were inevitable, and only a sophist would erase the difference between an imperialist war and a national one on the pretext that the one can pass over into the other. In Socialism and War the year before he had drawn the line plainly: a just war is one that defends a people from enslavement, or frees it from a yoke. The category that mattered was never the mechanism of mobilisation. It was the class and national content of the war the mobilisation served.

Set the two wars side by side and the slogan on the London leaflet falls apart in the hand. Debs faced an inter-imperialist bloodletting in which the American worker had no stake but his own death; refusal there was revolutionary, and ‘the main enemy is at home’ was the whole of wisdom. The Ukrainian worker faces an imperial army of conquest whose victory means, concretely, the liquidation of every union, every feminist circle, every socialist paper in the occupied zone. These are not two intensities of one situation; they are opposite situations. A politics that cannot tell them apart has stopped being internationalism. It is a category error with a banner.

Rayner Lysaght and the example of Ireland

An objection that needs meeting directly is the one raised in one of the exchanges that prompted this article. Connolly himself, the argument runs, warned against subordinating the class struggle to the nationalist project; 1916 proved him right by ending with a theocratic bourgeoisie running Ireland in the interests of British capital; therefore the Irish parallel cuts the other way. D. Rayner O’Connor Lysaght’s The Republic of Ireland, the most rigorous account the Irish FI tradition produced, does not support this reading. Connolly’s decision to fight was made from his class analysis, not against it. With the Second International collapsed, Irish labour stood — in Lysaght’s account — as potentially the only organised force prepared to attack the war in a way that might open a socialist Europe; the Rising was chosen even without the expected German arms specifically to isolate the right in a revolutionary situation. That is the reasoning of a man who sees a class opening, not of a man abandoning class politics for the green flag.

What destroyed the socialist content of the Irish revolution was not 1916. It was what came after: Connolly’s successors in the ITGWU withdrew labour from the national struggle and severed the republican movement from existing socialist thought. The Free State gave the bourgeoisie the colonial bureaucracy it wanted because the working-class movement abandoned the field — not because Connolly entered it. A strategy of revolutionary abstention from national liberation struggles does not protect the left from bourgeois capture. It simply performs the surrender earlier, more cleanly, and with a clearer conscience. Connolly was executed by the British state not because he made a nationalist error. He was executed because he was a class enemy of British imperialism, and the state knew the difference even if some of his inheritors do not.

The question that is actually being asked

Here is where the collective-choice instinct has to be handled with care, because it is half of an answer and the dangerous half. It is tempting to say that conscription in self-defence is a matter for the workers of each country to decide for themselves, democratically, as a collective act. Tempting, and wrong in the way 1914 was wrong. If the justice of a war were settled by the vote of the workers caught inside it, the German Social Democracy could have pleaded that its members chose the fatherland, and the plea would have to be honoured. The character of a war is an objective matter. It is fixed by who is doing what to whom, before any ballot is counted, and no show of hands in Berlin in 1914 or anywhere since can turn a war of conquest into a war of defence.

What the working class does decide, what is genuinely and only its to decide, is the form the defence takes and the hands that control it. That is the whole of the terrain, and it is enormous. Who is called up, and who pays to stay home. Whether a soldier is rotated out or left in the line until he breaks, and whether martial law becomes the cover for gutting the right to organise. This is precisely the ground the Ukrainian left fights on, and it is not asking the question the model resolution answers. Sotsialnyi Rukh does not demand an end to mobilisation. It demands that the oligarch’s son be called as readily as the labourer’s, that the worker in uniform keep the rights of a worker, that the burden of a just war stop falling on the people least able to refuse it. ‘No to conscription’ is no answer to that. It is not even in the same conversation.

September, and the difficulty the leaflet papers over

Which returns us to the branch meeting, and to the genuine difficulty the leaflet papers over. Britain is not Ukraine. There is no army at the Channel. A fight against British militarisation, against a Treasury pouring billions into rearmament while welfare is cut, against a recruitment drive dressed up as a youth opportunity, is a fight inside an imperialist power against its own ruling class, and on that ground ‘welfare not warfare’ is a perfectly good revolutionary slogan. The trouble begins the moment the same four words are asked to cover Kyiv as well as London, the moment a resolution written against the British state’s war drive is made to read as a verdict on whether an invaded people may defend itself. The word ‘conscription’ does different work in the two mouths, and the model resolution runs them together as though the distinction were a quibble. That is no quibble. It is the only thing that has ever mattered in this argument, from the Reichstag in 1893 to the Ukrainian trench. Whether the British left can hold that distinction, or whether it will keep mailing the aggressor’s comfort to the victim under the frank of solidarity, is not a question a genealogy can settle. It is a question of whose war, and whose army, and the movement has answered it both ways before.

TL;DR: On 24 August Caitlin Johnstone published a piece arguing that if you are a Westerner your only job is to oppose the abuses of the Western empire, not Iran, not China, not Russia, Cuba or North Korea. It went into the Spotlight Socialist Network group chat that morning with the note that it was controversial but had some truth in it. The exchange ran for eleven hours. By half past one the following afternoon the author was out of the group, and by a quarter past three anybody who defended what he had said was being told they would follow. Three days before Johnstone published, a Hong Kong court convicted Lee Cheuk-yan and Chow Hang-tung of incitement to subversion, the offence being the organisation of candlelit vigils for the dead of Tiananmen. Lee is sixty-nine and was general secretary of the Hong Kong Confederation of Trade Unions until the state squeezed it out of existence in 2021. Posting the ITUC statement in the chat drew silence, then an emoji. The list has no exit condition, because membership is conferred by Washington’s hostility and that hostility does not lapse.

On Monday 24 August, Caitlin Johnstone published a piece under the title “It’s Obnoxious For Westerners To Criticize The Targets Of The Western Empire”. The operative sentence runs: “If you are a westerner your ONLY job is to oppose the abuses of the western empire. Not Iran. Not China. Not Russia, Cuba or North Korea.” Underneath it on X the replies came in. Amen. Amen. Well said. Well said. Well said.

A doctrine fitted into a hundred and twenty-five characters. It went into the group chat of the Spotlight Socialist Network that morning with the note “Controversial but there is some truth to this.” The exchange ran for eleven hours. By half past one the following afternoon I was out of the group, and by a quarter past three anybody who defended what I had said was being told they would follow me.

Three days before Johnstone published, on 21 August, a Hong Kong court convicted Lee Cheuk-yan and Chow Hang-tung of incitement to subversion. The offence was organising candlelit vigils for the dead of Tiananmen. Lee is sixty-nine and was general secretary of the Hong Kong Confederation of Trade Unions until the state squeezed it out of existence in 2021; he has been held since April of that year, five years and four months. Chow is a barrister who conducted her own defence and has described being restrained in handcuffs built to cause pain. They face ten years each, and the sentencing has not yet been listed.

I put the ITUC statement into the chat at six minutes past two on the Monday afternoon. Nothing came back. Nearly three hours later I put it again, this time as a question about the jailed trade unionists, and the answer arrived in under a minute: “Not another target of US Imperialism being thrown into the mix. Are you only an expert on places where the West wishes to change the regime or something? 😂”

Temper had nothing to do with that. The position had been set out in full over the preceding hours and it holds together on its own terms. Workers in states that Washington has marked should not be encouraged to move against their rulers, because the vacuum would be filled by a puppet. Solidarity acquires a geography. It runs to workers whose governments are allied to the United States and stops at the border of the states that oppose it. The emoji is what that border looks like when a sixty-nine-year-old union man is walked up to it and somebody asks for a ruling.

The list is doing the work here. Iran, China, Russia, Cuba, North Korea, and no exit condition attached to any of them. Membership is conferred by Washington’s hostility, and Washington’s hostility does not lapse, so nothing that happens in the world can move a country off the list. There is no future in which a Chinese trade unionist becomes supportable. Not after a ceasefire, not after a change of administration in Washington, not ever. That is a peculiar result for a doctrine which presents itself as a question of timing, and more peculiar still for one that most of the people repeating it would say they hold provisionally, subject to conditions, in the current conjuncture.

The question that produced the removal was put at four minutes to five. If workers in China or in Iran organise against their government, do you support solidarity with them. It was asked again in different words a minute later, and again in relation to the Hong Kong convictions. Across the eleven hours and the hundred-odd messages that followed, the thread moved to Gallup polling on Ukrainian war weariness, to the Odesa trade union building, to Crimea, to the proposition that Russophobia is akin to Hitler’s hatred of Jews. Nobody refused the question and nobody argued it down. It had nowhere to land. Answering yes dissolves the geography. Answering no has to be done out loud, in front of a few hundred people, some of whom are new.

In August 1968 the Soviet leadership announced that it was suppressing “counter-revolutionary forces which have entered into collusion with foreign forces hostile to socialism”. Every component of that sentence was available in the chat on Monday. One contributor held that the Iranian protests of this spring were a Mossad and CIA operation. Another, more carefully, that they were small and leaderless and “turned violent, seriously so. In a manner that any government would inevitably feel forced to respond”, adding that the Islamic Republic had acknowledged some of the grievances as legitimate. The careful version is the one to watch, because it concedes everything a defender of the repression needs and nothing that would cost the defender his self-image. There were people in 1968 who wrote those sentences about Prague, and they were socialists, and most of them were sincere. The verdict in Hong Kong came down on the fifty-eighth anniversary of the tanks going in. Nobody in the chat mentioned it and there is no particular reason why they should have; anniversaries are not arguments.

The same operation ran on the history. I had said that after Iraq’s invasion was thrown back, Tehran faced a choice between peace and an invasion of its own, and that Israel resourced the second. Two people answered by producing 1980. One posted a link to the Wikipedia article on the Iraqi invasion of Iran under the words “So Iran invaded Iraq?” The other wrote, accurately, that in 1980 it was Iraq, then a client of Washington, that invaded Iran. Both statements are true. Both of them change the subject, because the war had a second half. Iraq invaded in September 1980. By May 1982 Iran had retaken Khorramshahr and cleared its own soil. Saddam then offered to pull back to the international border, using the Israeli invasion of Lebanon that June as his cover for wanting out. Khomeini refused him. On 13 July around a hundred thousand Iranians went over the border towards Basra, and six weeks later some twelve thousand of them were dead and the line had not moved. That was the choice I was describing, and Israel was arming the side that made it: seventy-five million dollars of anti-tank guns and shells in the first year of Operation Seashell, and a further hundred and thirty-six million through Yaakov Nimrodi in 1981 for Lance and Hawk missiles, contracted with the defence ministry in Tehran. The state now held up as the reason no westerner may criticise Tehran was, at the time, one of Tehran’s arms dealers.

The obvious reading is that the men posting 1980 at me had never read past the first year of the war. That is not quite right either. A true fact about a different year, produced in place of an answer, is the emoji with a footnote attached, and it takes less work than reading does. Red Mole is running the reply in the archive series: the JRCL Political Bureau’s statement of 22 July 1982, written nine days into the Basra offensive by socialists who had defended Iran against the Iraqi invasion and would not follow it across the border.

Several people intervened during the evening and hardly any of them on the politics. The objection that carried was about tone, and it was put with real feeling by a member who wanted to know why a chat that should be bringing people in had spent a day making them feel stupid. She is not wrong about the effect. Anybody who has sat in a branch meeting watching two men re-fight a 1953 split has felt exactly what she was describing, and the impulse to say take it outside is decent. It also does work that its author never intended. By Tuesday lunchtime the case for removal had been relieved of any duty to show that the politics were mistaken, because disruptive was doing the job instead, and the administrator making the case could open by saying that she likes a good debate. Which she may well.

The argument ran past midnight. By the following lunchtime the group had been closed to member contributions, so that the only way to answer anything said in it was a private message to the administrator. At eight minutes past twelve she noted that I had been chucking around my redmole links again. Two minutes later came a list of phobias with my name attached to it: Palestinian-phobia, Islamophobia, Iran-phobia, Russia-phobia, China-phobia, and a trend. Then, at 12:14, the charge that I had shown my hand with “but the middle east couldn’t survive without US intervention”. That is not a sentence I wrote, or anything close to one. What I had asked was how the American bases were to be got out of the region at all while the Iranian and Arab bourgeoisie went on ruling it, since the only force capable of doing the getting out is the workers and oppressed masses of the region. None of it could be answered where it was said.

I was in a university café in Manchester, halfway into a beetroot and sauerkraut toastie, typing the correction to her privately because private was the only direction left. My second message went at 12:17:02. Hers went into the group ten seconds after it, opening with the thought that she likes a good debate as much as the next person and closing with a proposal to remove the imperialists. Objections were to be sent to her privately. Mine had already gone, forty-five seconds early, and was about something else.

She answered at nine minutes past one. “Give me a break. You said as much and Im wise to you now.” I wrote back that I had said the opposite, and that of course I do not support the American bases remaining, which was a repeat of what I had already said in the group on Monday, when saying things in the group was still possible. Thirteen minutes after that she produced the quotation. “What does it mean for the US to leave the region? How does that happen without supporting the workers and oppressed masses to overturn the capitalist elites across the middle east? Because if the US bases closed tomorrow, the Iranian and Arab bourgeoisie would continue their current opppression.” Then, on its own line, “Really?” Then, “Don’t fucking gaslight me.”

She had gone and found it. The passage calls for the workers and oppressed masses of the Middle East to overturn the capitalist elites who rule them, and it was produced as proof of imperialism by the person producing it. There is nothing in that to argue with, and that is the difficulty. Said as much had already done its work: the charge no longer needed the sentence to exist, because wise to you had changed what kind of proceeding this was. Somebody who has been detected does not get to produce evidence. His evidence is part of the concealment. Don’t fucking gaslight me, said to a man asking to be quoted accurately, is that rule spoken out loud. The sentence and the refutation of the charge are the same sentence, which ought to settle it and does not.

At half past one she posted the passage into the group, tagged to a member who had complained the night before about the tone of the argument, with a line under it: “Earlier comment by Duncan 👆”. I was removed at 13:31. Not knowing that, I carried on for another two minutes, setting out to her that those rulers belong to the same capitalist system as Washington, and that the most effective way to be rid of the bases is to be rid of the rulers. Her last message came at 13:33. “Not interested in anything you have to say anymore. Good bye.”

What happened next took place in a group I was no longer in, and reached me the same afternoon. The announcement went up at 13:38. Two minutes later somebody asked why, and whether I had behaved badly towards anyone, and two people liked the question. The answer at 13:44 was that I had been pushing imperialist crap for a long time, and that suggesting the middle east can’t rule themselves was the last fucking straw.

Then the passage was read. At 13:54 the member it had been tagged to quoted it back into the group and said what it says, that I had been advocating supporting the workers and oppressed masses to overturn the capitalist elites across the middle east. Three people liked that. Just after two another member wrote that varying socialist opinions in a socialist network are healthy and that he had seen nobody promoting imperialism the day before, having disagreed with much of what I said without finding any of it offensive. Three likes for that as well. A third quoted my line about not supporting the bases and told the administrator directly that she had it wrong and that I am not an imperialist. At seven minutes past two a fourth member offered that I sounded as though I could well be an infiltrator. Infiltrating a socialist WhatsApp group in order to argue for jailed Hong Kong trade unionists would be a long game played for a very small prize, and nobody asked what the point of it would be.

The argument went on for another hour and it went badly for the prosecution. Two members took apart the inference that expecting bourgeois forces to fill a vacuum amounts to wanting them there, one of them noting that believing a thing will happen is not the same as wanting it to.

The defence put up for me was gentler on the other side than I would have been. There is no vacuum. The Arab and Iranian bourgeoisies rule those countries now, and the American bases are there to keep the region safe for extraction, with the local rulers co-opted into the arrangement and conducting themselves as partners in it, because what they want out of it is money. Both sides spent the spring calling each other the great enemy and both swallowed that to get at it. On 18 June, at Versailles, Trump and the Islamic Republic signed a preliminary agreement that reopened the Strait of Hormuz, unfroze tens of billions in Iranian assets, and carried an American pledge to work with regional partners on a fund of at least three hundred billion dollars for Iranian reconstruction. Close every base tomorrow and the same class owns the same oilfields and jails the same trade unionists, which is either an argument for getting rid of the rulers as well or an argument for doing nothing at all, and the group never reached the point of deciding which.

At ten past three, with the exchange running that way, the group was closed to all but admins for the second time that day. A minute after the door shut came “pausing to catch up”. At 15:17 the charge reached its final form. “Duncan expressed a view that middle eastern countries were incapable of governing themselves and needed imperialist intervention. Thats an age old imperialist white supremacist view that I will not tolerate in this group. He has been removed as a result. Anyone persisting in defending that position will be removed.” Then, on its own line, “no ifs no buts”. Three people liked it.

Note what had to happen to the charge to get it there. On Monday I was an imperialist. By Tuesday lunchtime I was an imperialist who had said a sentence I had not said. By a quarter past three the sentence had become a white supremacist view, and defending the man who had not said it was itself an offence carrying the same penalty. The charge is that I believe the peoples of the Middle East cannot govern themselves. The position it was issued in defence of holds that if Iranians brought down their own government the result would be a Western puppet, because Washington would install one and nothing Iranians did could stop it. Somebody in that exchange has a low estimate of what the people of the region are capable of, and it is not the man who was removed. The group was reopened immediately afterwards, which is the part worth sitting with. It was safe to reopen.

At nine minutes past seven the member who had asked what I had actually done wrong came back at length. He agreed entirely about opposing white supremacy and about opposing imperialism, could not see how anything I had written came into either category, said he did not know me or my politics and had found my position strange, and asked whether somebody would explain how what I said supported white supremacy. The answer at 19:15 was the passage, posted for the fourth time in six hours, tagged to him, under the words “Read this and let it sink in.” By a quarter to eight one contributor had assigned me to a social-imperialist trend whose evasions and doublethink were sophisticated, and another had recalled that my attack on Professor Marandi was awful.

The attack on Professor Marandi had happened eight days earlier. On 17 August somebody posted a clip of him taking apart Alan Dershowitz. The administrator commended it to the group as a blistering takedown and a second member called it brilliant. Marandi teaches at the University of Tehran and has been a key resource supporting Iran’s nuclear negotiations; Javad Zarif, Iran’s Vice President until March 2025, thanked him publicly for his services as a liaison with Western media. I asked how a man in that position came to be circulating uncritically in a socialist group, and said that what counts in politics is what you are for, and that Marandi is for the theocratic gangsters who would be happy enough to deal with the Dershowitzes of this world. That was the attack. On Tuesday night it came back as a count in the indictment, alongside the observation that Marandi may be a gangster or support them but that we have no evidence he is. Then the group was closed again.

What I have no good answer for is what all that defending was worth. The layer I had been worried about turned out to defend me at length, without knowing me, quoting me accurately, and getting liked for it. A few hundred people, most of them in none of the small organisations, is the exact layer any regroupment has to win, and on Tuesday afternoon several of them read the passage and said what it said, and were then told that anyone persisting would be removed. They did not persist. I am not certain I would have, in a group where I had friends. The administrator owns the group, and nothing in a WhatsApp group goes to a vote, so the people defending me had exactly the standing I had, which was none. Somebody closed the argument while they were winning it, and whether an argument that ends that way leaves anything behind in the people who were winning it I do not know. A room would have held it longer. There was the Connections Convention in Sheffield in June, and the Socialist Federation has a Congress in the Midlands coming this autumn, and those rooms are filled by people already in something, which is the difficulty, because the layer I am describing is defined by being in nothing. Whether the two can be got into the same room I do not know, and the next two months are about to supply a great many rooms without answering it.

Somewhere in the middle of Monday evening, between the exchange about Mariupol and the exchange about NATO enlargement, the week’s meetings went up in the chat. Thursday at six, a meeting on the state of Your Party opened by somebody from its executive, with two other groups invited to send speakers on next steps. The notices kept going out underneath the argument all evening and they are going out still, and the network will carry on doing a good deal more than nothing without me in it. Lee Cheuk-yan will be sentenced in the autumn. In two days nobody mentioned him again, including the people defending me, and whether anybody in that group can be brought to say plainly that his jailers are the enemy is a question I no longer know how to put to them, and being outside the group does not make it easier to put.

Postscript, 26 August

The group opened again later that evening and the argument ran until one in the morning.

A member suggested there had been a misinterpretation of what I said and was told to pull the other one, it had bells on. She asked whether I might be given a second chance on terms, any white supremacy stuff and he is out. “Nope!” Another member wrote that she comes from a huge community of anti-imperialists and that nothing I had said made her uncomfortable. “I dont care.” A minute after that: “it makes me extremely fucking uncomfortable.”

At 22:36 somebody put the question that should have been put on Monday. What did I think was better, rule by US imperialists or rule by the national bourgeoisie. He expected it to force me to reveal my actual position, and it would have. Fifteen months ago Red Mole argued that an Israeli attack on Iran would strengthen the clerical regime by handing it the nationalist rally that Iraq’s invasion handed Khomeini in 1980. The bombs fell in February and the paper said it again in five words: oppose the strikes, support the uprising. In March, against Alan Woods and the unconditional defence of Iran’s military that the RCI declared six weeks after the IRGC shot protesters in seventy cities, it worked through his question at length. Driving out the aggressor is unconditional. Whether the force that takes the credit afterwards ought to be the one that shot the protesters in January is a second question, and the two have different answers. The question was asked in a room I had been out of for nine hours, and at 22:53 it was answered on my behalf, mistakenly, by the contributor who had assigned me to a social-imperialist trend, who explained that my position is that taking the side of the national bourgeoisie is campism and that I have said so many times. This, of course, is not my view. I supoort a developing or semi-colonial country against the attack of an imperial or colonial power: that is why I defend Iran against the US, and also defend Ukraine against Russia.

He added that he has no sympathy for me because I once tried to get links to his articles taken down, that I failed, and that I am no partisan of party democracy. I have no memory of every asking for links to be removed, in that group or anywhere else. He gives no date and no place, and if he has something specific in mind he should say what it was.

At half past eleven a member who said he did not know who I was, and who had completely disagreed with my analysis and my emphasis, wrote that any group ought to give people clear warnings before drastic action, particularly where interpretations of what was written differ among members. We have to be better at this than what others are.

The reply came at five to one in the morning: an edited statement running through the charge again, and naming a second member as somebody who often backs my arguments. That member is the person who had asked, in the middle of Monday’s argument, whether a British Iranian born in Iran to two Iranian parents was allowed to oppose both her own government and the states bombing it, and whether she had to pick one. Nobody answered her then. Then: pausing over night folks. Then the group was closed for the fourth time in two days.

Note: A preview link to this article was shared with Spotlight for comment yesterday afternoon. No response was received in the following few hours, but comments are open on this post. The postscript is new.

Related Reading:

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• Four true things about the Iranian revolution — and how long the Fourth International took to say them. : A companion to our Archive Unlocked reprint of André Duret’s lost 1983 report

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A piece here in July argued that the SWP and the Fourth International tradition have stopped differing about the theory of women's oppression, and that the live difference is autonomy: who organises separately, and through what. It rested on one editorial from Socialist Woman, spring 1974. One editorial is not much to rest on. So here is the longer document sitting behind it, Leonora Lloyd and Laurie White's 'Revolutionary Organisation and Women's Liberation', from the July–August 1973 issue of the same paper.

Socialist Woman was the paper of the International Marxist Group, British section of the Fourth International, the line that runs down through Anti-Capitalist Resistance to this publication, which borrowed its title from the IMG's other paper of those years. Lloyd co-edited it and compiled its booklist for women's liberation.

The copy we have worked from is a bad photocopy of a worse scan (many thanks to Keith W. for the copies and Rob M. for the scanning). A photograph of Helke Sander eats the inner column of the second page, and what the photograph doesn't eat the typeface does. Three or four passages are marked below as illegible because they are. We have left the gaps showing.

Summer 1973. The women's liberation movement is five years past its post-1968 rush, a socialist current is growing inside it, and Selma James's arguments against the trade unions have just been beaten at the National Women’s Liberation Conference (held in Manchester on 25–26 March 1972), a result the two authors record with visible relief. What is the revolutionary organisation's relationship to the WLM? They call the question overdue, and they are right about that.

One sentence in the article has been doing damage ever since. Faced with male chauvinism inside the revolutionary organisations, they write, the radical-feminist answer is to build an autonomous women's movement, and 'this is an incorrect solution'. Read cold, that is a refusal of women's separate organisation as such. It is nothing of the kind. The IMG ran Socialist Woman as a women's paper under women's control, and defended the right of women to caucus inside the organisation and across the movement. What Lloyd and White refuse is the counterposition: autonomy offered as the answer to male-dominated parties, an exit from the IMG rather than a lever inside it. Their prescription combines the two and puts the weight on a permanent struggle to turn the revolutionary organisation itself into an instrument against chauvinism in its own ranks, which is easier to write in a paper than to enforce in a branch. By the time I joined the Trotskyist movement in the 80s, the positive impact was already visible, and so was the burden of the struggle inside left organsations. 

The candour about that chauvinism is what still startles. Lloyd and White will not treat it as a matter of individual bad attitudes. It is structural, in the plain sense that the sexual division of labour outside the organisation gets reproduced inside it, with 'women's work' sealed off as the business of women alone. The article calls this, borrowing a phrase reported of Lenin, 'feminism à la rebours', feminism turned upside down. And then the example: the German Social Democracy, which built the most developed separate women's structures in the International and used them to file the woman question away, economic demands on one side, the socialist future on the other, and very little in between that might have disturbed how the party actually ran itself.

Two things about the text. The long passage given to Alexandra Kollontai, on the SPD's indifference to agitation among women, is not a quotation. It is Lloyd and White's paraphrase, broadly consistent with 'The Social Basis of the Woman Question' of 1909, though several of its sentences are not hers in any version I can find. The Lenin phrase has the same standing: it reaches us through the literature of his reported conversations rather than from anything he set down. Whether the two had these from the IMG's own education material or from something circulating in the movement that summer, the article does not say, and the part of the page where a source note might have sat is under Helke Sander's elbow.

Which is why the document belongs beside the argument about the SWP. The obvious reading is that 1973 contains the antidote to 2013: get the party's internal life right and no disputes committee ever has to fail two women. But that is not quite right either. Lloyd and White are describing an organisation that had not yet been tested deeply, and their answer, a party so transformed by the women's struggle that it can be trusted to police itself, is the answer the SWP leadership would have given about itself in 2012. Whether any party can be trusted that far is what 2013 leaves open. Lloyd and White close where the tradition kept closing, on the working class as the agent: women's liberation 'situated in the framework of the political activity of the proletariat'. Feminists to the IMG's left heard subordination in that sentence, arriving by a longer route at the same place. They said so at the time. They are still saying it in the conference halls this summer, and nobody in 1973 answered them.

Revolutionary Organisation and Women’s Liberation

Leonora Lloyd and Laurie White

Socialist Woman, July–August 1973, pp. 9–12

The continuing debate inside the Women’s Liberation Movement (WLM) about the relation between women’s liberation and the class struggle, the massive rejection of Selma James’s anti-trade-union positions at the last WLM conference, and the growth of a socialist current within the WLM, make an article on the relationship between the revolutionary organisation (the Leninist Party) and that layer of people identified around the question of women’s oppression and loosely grouped in the WLM timely, not to say overdue.

Discussion inside both the WLM and the revolutionary groups on the relation between capitalism and women’s oppression, the class struggle and women’s struggle, Marxism and feminism, has overshadowed and been sidelined by a failure to confront the key problem of defining the relationship between the WLM and the revolutionary organisation — which is a specific instance of a more general relationship between the revolutionary organisation on the one hand and on the other the ‘new vanguard’ constituted by all those who have become radicalised during the big upturn in the class struggle in the advanced capitalist countries since 1967–68. Nor has this problem been explicitly taken up either by those militants of the left groups who are also active in the WLM or by members of the WLM who reject the revolutionary groups as male-dominated. The preconditions for transforming the present WLM into a movement of mass proportions require that the revolutionary organisation become capable of playing a leading role in this process. The problem is urgent; in this article we can only make a preliminary attempt to define it.

WOMEN’S POLITICS v. LENINISM

Revolutionary Marxists active in the WLM find themselves confronted with a specific ideology which argues that the Leninist theory of organisation has no relevance — certainly no immediate relevance — to women’s struggle against their oppression. For some ex-comrades the question of party is a distant one; for others a distraction. Many feel that adherence to a socialist party demands a submission of their feminist politics to the political practice of the party. Unlike the organisations of the working class, which are seen as bureaucratic and male-dominated, the WLM is seen as totally democratic. This form of ‘community politics’ is not difficult to identify as a reflection of anti-Leninist politics — neither social-democratic nor Leninist but a species of socialist feminism accepted even by those who claim adherence to Marxism. Those who accept this ‘community politics’ position accept it as the belief that the WLM is women’s answer to Leninism.

There have been various attempts inside the WLM to provide a ‘scientific’ basis for the concept of women’s politics, a concept which leads to the view that women’s oppression has the same priority as class — or indeed a greater one — in contemporary society. This view stems from theorists of, for example, the mode of reproduction, who reject the terrain of historical materialism from the outset. They postulate an inverse relationship between the sphere of production and the mode of reproduction, or set up a model of capitalism in which the two compete for dominance. This argument is taken up elsewhere in this issue of SW¹; what is relevant here is that in these theories the fundamental category of Marxism — class — is replaced by the category of ‘sex’, and the Leninist theory of organisation is rejected as irrelevant to the specific oppression of women.

Revolutionary Marxists have dismissed the concept of women’s politics without trying to understand precisely why anti-Leninism is so strong in the WLM. The reasons are complex, but we can identify three broad factors.

• a) The origins of this politics are to be found in the historical and political characteristics of the rise of the WLM. The mass vanguard, of which the WLM is an important and integral part, arose first of all on the basis of solidarity with the people’s wars — Cuba, China, Vietnam — and was strengthened by a deep crisis of confidence in the imperialist metropolises. This radicalisation took place outside the traditional organisations of the working class and in reaction against the bureaucratic and personal attitudes of their male and female members.

• b) The continuing dominance of this politics inside the WLM cannot be reduced to the fact that the movement is young. It has continued to grow and produce a considerable literature and has not been overcome by its entry into political arenas. The WLM has survived all predictions of its imminent disappearance and has generally responded very positively to the upturn in struggle of the last two years. The fact that it continues to hold this layer of the mass vanguard is a direct consequence of the failure of the revolutionary groups to react sufficiently swiftly, or in an adequate fashion, to this layer in relation to the class struggle.

• c) At the level of theory, the revolutionary left has largely failed to understand the precise connection between the oppression of women and the class struggle, and how the basic contradiction of the system affects the family. While work on the woman question has been done, it has been approached in a sectional fashion and has been very much influenced by the theoretical production of the WLM itself. Ironically, instead of the revolutionary left hegemonising the ideological field, it has largely been hegemonised by the WLM on this question. This is a real crisis of the revolutionary vanguard.

A further factor concerns the history of Leninism. The anti-Leninism of the present WLM results from a superficial examination of women’s oppression that leads to the conclusion that it has nothing to do with the oppression of one class by another under capitalism. After all, what is the position of women in the non-capitalist countries? A great deal has been achieved there, but women’s liberation has not followed. The explanation can only be given in terms of the concrete history of women and of the degeneration of the first workers’ state and the international Communist movement.

The role of the WLM does not rest on these fundamentals. It does not rest on the claim that the working class is the only revolutionary force capable of completing the transition to the socialist order. What it does do is to undermine all workerist and economistic conceptions of the revolutionary left, and all opportunist theories of mass struggle. It is increasingly realised that the WLM cannot take on mass proportions without joining the working-class struggle and that the struggle for women’s liberation must be situated in the framework of the political activity of the proletariat.

MALE CHAUVINISM IN THE REVOLUTIONARY ORGANISATION

A major contribution of the WLM has been to document in great detail all aspects of women’s social inferiority. The social division of labour between men and women in capitalist society is reflected at all levels, including within the organisations of the working class. As long as women are oppressed in society at large, men will tend to have a majority over women in the revolutionary party. The social division of labour between men and women makes it hard for female comrades to be as active as male ones. The subordinate position of women in society at large means that women’s work has certain specific features due to the specificity of women’s social situation. The very fact of women’s oppression gives rise to special demands — labour protection of nursing mothers, crèches, struggle against prostitution, and so on.

The problem of male chauvinism inside the revolutionary organisation cannot be reduced to the personal attitudes of its male and female members. It affects the overall practice of these organisations. The number of women in positions of responsibility is invariably much smaller than would be expected from their numerical strength in the organisation as a whole. This means a massive under-utilisation of the talents and skills of the membership, a failure to realise its full political potential. Male chauvinism is also visible in the relative lack of importance given by organisations to work among the masses on the question of women’s oppression. Documents and platforms tend to treat the question of women’s oppression as something separate from the mainstream of the class struggle, as an area of work which is basically the responsibility of women. This results in the effective autonomy of this work from other activities of the organisation. Persistent organisational divisions which at each stage appear to be justified by purely tactical decisions in effect reproduce the sexual division of labour inside the organisation — what Lenin called ‘feminism à la rebours’.

Thus in a number of very concrete ways male chauvinism transcends the framework of personal attitudes and becomes an obstacle to the transformation of the organisation into a revolutionary party capable of leading the political struggle of the proletariat at all levels of society. A party under the sway of male chauvinism will be severely hampered in its efforts to bring the broad masses into revolutionary struggle. Moreover, once the political power of the bourgeoisie is overthrown, such a party will not be capable of leading the working masses in the construction of socialism.

It is instructive here to consider a historical example: the German Social-Democratic Party at the beginning of the century. As is well known, the SPD held that while it was absolutely necessary for the proletariat to conquer political power, it was not necessary that the existing state should be smashed. The parliamentary struggle was of paramount importance and provided the ground upon which it built its entire political strategy. The founding question of the SPD was the democratic equality of all, regardless of sex or race, and this was written into its programme.

But for a long time this was just so many words — until the question of electoral reform became an acute political problem. As Kollontai reports: ‘The Party’s indifference to the question of women’s oppression had deep and vital roots in the following: while women were deprived of political rights, the involvement of women in party politics had less significance for the immediate success of the Social Democrats than enlisting men among the male proletariat. Agitation among women workers was something which the social democratic party could pursue only for the remote future. The question of radical reform of the electoral system brought women less into the circle of the political fight. Getting women workers, these possible future voters, into the Party life acquired a topical interest.’

The main principle around which the SPD organised its work in this field was that of separation and autonomy of action among women. This was justified on the basis that, although the women’s struggle was inseparable from the general working-class struggle, it had certain specific features due to the specificity of women’s social situation. For women to become politicised required a far more radical break with traditional morals, concepts and customs than was the case for men. All these factors were seen as demanding a separate structure for agitation among women: a committee, bureaux, etc., staffed by women. The Central Committee of the party always had a woman comrade in charge of this area of work. The Party held separate meetings and conferences for women and formed intercessory organisations for them. At the same time it was held to be the responsibility of women comrades to draw the Party’s attention to the interests of women workers. In this way the sexual division of labour operating outside the party was reproduced within it, and what appeared at first sight to be purely technical decisions dictated by the realities of the social situation of women turned out to separate off ‘women’s work’ and leave it to women comrades. The question of women’s liberation became a matter of, on the one hand, a series of economic and bourgeois-democratic demands and, on the other, a vision for the distant future.

Faced with the persistence of male chauvinism inside the revolutionary organisations, the radical feminist solution is to build an ‘autonomous’ movement of women. As we tried to show elsewhere¹, this is an incorrect solution.

We have also argued that to expect the revolutionary organisation to be totally free of male chauvinism is to fail to understand the material roots of this ideology. But this does not mean that one simply accepts it. On the contrary, it is necessary to wage a perpetual struggle to make the revolutionary organisation of the working class into an effective instrument for combating male chauvinism — both within its own ranks and within the working class — through conscious effort and continuous education of its cadres.

The position of women in the countries where capitalism has been overthrown can be analysed within the theoretical framework we have tried to sketch above. WLM literature often addresses the reasons for the relatively limited political advance made by women in non-capitalist societies, and has identified at least two levels: the economic and cultural underdevelopment of the countries where the revolution has been successful (often coupled with severe imperialist interventionism) and the inadequacy of classical Marxism in relation to the complex nature of women’s oppression. However, while these factors have certainly played a fundamental role, they are not sufficient to explain the present position of women in these countries. In order to understand what went wrong one needs to understand not only the nature of the contradictions in societies in transition from capitalism to socialism but also the role of the subjective factor — the revolutionary party — in overcoming these contradictions. Thus the bureaucratisation and the subsequent degeneration of the Russian Communist Party was a determining factor in the progressive degeneration of the early Soviet state — a degeneration which was by no means inevitable.

The repeal in the thirties and forties of much of the Bolshevik legislation that had, after October, laid the foundation for the legal, social and political equality of women was an integral part of the Stalinist counter-revolution. Any scientific discussion of the role of women in transitional societies can only be carried out within this double theoretical framework: the contradictions of non-capitalist transitional societies and the historical origins and mechanisms of the degeneration of the workers’ state. One of the great contributions of Trotsky to revolutionary theory was to document and elaborate the theory of that degeneration, against which he fought from the beginning with the founding of the Left Opposition — thirty years ago.

The Fourth International of today bases itself on the analysis of the Left Opposition, whose essential charge against the Stalinist degeneration included the rehabilitation of the bourgeois family. It is increasingly realised that the struggle for women’s liberation can only mean the revolutionary movement joining the working-class struggle, and that the struggle for women’s liberation must be situated in the framework of the political activity of the proletariat.

¹ See Tessa van Gelderen’s article, p. 6.

TL;DR: Bogdan Syrotiuk is serving fifteen years in Ukraine for treason, under a verdict of the Pervomaisk city and district court of 10 August 2026, case 484/5921/24. This piece opposes the conviction and supports his appeal. He was convicted for publications and for nothing else, which makes him a political prisoner, and the charge itself was a choice. Ukraine has a statute for justifying Russian aggression, article 436-2, carrying at most eight years, and its wording is the wording the state’s own experts used about his articles. Prosecutors reached past it for article 111, which begins at fifteen years and runs to life. His politics are campist and wrong, and none of that is treason. The second half is harder. The International Committee’s account of the case does not match the court record. The judgment records that Syrotiuk solicited and received a monthly payment from a person it calls OSOBA_29, that his articles were edited with the participation of citizens of the Russian Federation, and that Russian army equipment and an FSB souvenir were seized in Pervomaisk. Ukrainian treason judgments normally name the paymaster when one has been found. This one does not, and the ICFI has left that ambiguity standing for two years.

Bogdan Syrotiuk is serving fifteen years in Ukraine for treason, under a verdict of the Pervomaisk City and District Court of 10 August 2026 published in the Unified State Register of Court Decisions as case 484/5921/24. I oppose the conviction and support his appeal. He was convicted for publications and for nothing else, which makes him a political prisoner, and the charge itself was a choice: Ukraine has a statute for justifying Russian aggression, Article 436-2, carrying at most eight years, and its wording is the wording the state’s own experts used about his articles. The prosecutors reached past it for Article 111, which begins at fifteen years and runs to life.

His politics are campist and wrong. He put the origin of the war in Washington, called 2014 a coup, and described the Kyiv regime as a co-author of a third world war. None of that is treason and none of it should cost a man his twenties.

But the International Committee’s account of the case does not match the court record, and the mismatch has been left standing for two years. Its statement on the verdict says the sole evidence against him was his writings. The judgment also records that Syrotiuk solicited and received a monthly payment from a person it calls ОСОБА_29; that his articles were edited with the participation of citizens of the Russian Federation; and that Russian army equipment and an FSB souvenir were seized from a basement in Pervomaisk, as Intent reported from the hearing.

Here is what is unusual. Ukrainian treason judgments name the paymaster when the prosecution has found one. They name the FSB, they name GRU officers, they record how the money moved. This one names the World Socialist Web Site on almost every page, identifies two of its representatives, and then attaches no description whatever to the person paying. Nor does it place the Russian editors.

So the question is elementary. Was the International Committee employing and supporting its own representative in Ukraine, which would be unremarkable, or was somebody else, whom it cannot account for?

That question does not change what we call Bogdan Syrotiuk. He would be in that cell whoever was paying him. What it changes is what we make of an international that has money and hands supporting its Ukrainian operation whose provenance it will not state.

Asked directly, the ICFI replied that the asking serves the interests of NATO. They of all people should know better. In 1985 their own Control Commission opened the books of their British section and found more than a million pounds from Libya, Kuwait, Iraq and others, taken over nine years without the International’s knowledge, and it deformed that section’s politics beyond repair. They wrote the definitive account of what unexamined money does to a movement.

They can close this in one sentence. They have had two years, and they have chosen the ambiguity instead.

Further reading

• On August 21st, I submitted a comment to the ICFI website post mentioning me. As of August 24th, it’s not been posted from the moderation queue. A comment by Marc Léger has been removed. So, you can’t read those.

• On August 24th, a useful article has been posted by Simon Irani: Jail sentence for Ukrainian Trotskyist is an assault on free speech | People and Nature. Simon generously assumes that the ICFI paid Syrotiuk, but the ICFI goes out of its way to not confirm that.

The Your Party homepage takes about forty seconds to read. Tax the very richest in our society. An NHS free of privatisation, with energy, water, rail and mail brought into public ownership. A massive council-house building programme. Standing up to fossil fuel giants putting their profits before our planet.

Read it a second time and the grammar starts to matter. Taxing. Bringing. Investing. Standing up to. Four gerunds and not a subject among them. Who taxes the very richest? Who brings the water back? Somebody does, at some point, in some chamber, and the sentences decline to say who. The declining is the politics.

A comrade put the objection to me this week, in a form sharp enough that it has been rattling around since: everything is a demand on the bourgeoisie until the seizure of power. Which sounds unanswerable, and which would make the complaint about those four gerunds a matter of taste.

It is worth being slow about what the sentence is claiming, because it can mean three different things and only one of them is interesting.

1. It can mean that nothing won short of power is safe from being taken back, which is true, and which nobody in this argument disputes, and which decides nothing about what to do on Friday.

2. It can mean that every demand the movement raises is addressed to the bourgeoisie.

3. And it can mean the strong version: that until the state is taken, the ruling class is the party that decides, so everything we do short of that is a petition with better or worse manners.

The second version is false as a description. The third is false as a strategy, and it is false for a reason that the Marxist tradition worked out under conditions considerably worse than ours.

Concede the narrow version first

Wage claims, rent freezes, an arms embargo, the reversal of a hospital closure: these are extracted from a class that owns and from a state built to defend the owning, and no amount of throat-clearing about soviets changes it. The eight-hour day was extracted from the bourgeoisie. So was the National Health Service. The currents that greet each strike wave by explaining that nothing short of dual power will serve have organised nobody and will organise nobody, and their purity has cost the British working class more than their numbers would suggest.

Now refuse the general version, because on the evidence it is simply false.

Open the Transitional Programme at the section on picket lines. “Strike pickets are the basic nuclei of the proletarian army. This is our point of departure.” Who is being petitioned in that sentence? A picket line is not granted. It is mounted, at four in the morning, by people who have decided among themselves who is bringing the flask. Trotsky goes on: it is imperative “to organize groups for self-defense, to drill and acquaint them with the use of arms”, and to advance the slogan of a workers’ militia as “the one serious guarantee for the inviolability of workers’ organizations, meetings and press”. Not one of those demands has a bourgeois addressee. You cannot ask the ruling class for a defence squad, and it would be an odd sort of militia that arrived by statutory instrument.

The demand for self-defence against the far right is a demand the workers’ movement makes on itself. So is the demand for a united front against austerity. So, for that matter, is the demand for committees of action with recallable delegates. These are the load-bearing demands of the transitional method, and the formula does not describe them at all. It is not merely too coarse. It has the wrong number of parties in it.

Who is actually being asked

Even where there is a bourgeois addressee, the addressing is rarely direct, and this is where the argument gets interesting rather than merely corrective.

In very few countries does the bourgeoisie now govern in person, in the manner of the mill-owner who sat on the corporation he had paid for. Hardly anybody works for the person who owns the firm. The manager who refuses the pay claim is an employee on a contract with a performance review, answerable upward to a board answerable in turn to institutional shareholders who have never seen the building and could not find it. The officer who signs off the cuts is a professional appointed under section 151 of the Local Government Act 1972, and when the money runs out it is that officer, not the councillors, who issues the section 114 notice under the Local Government Finance Act 1988 and halts all spending outside statutory services. Birmingham in September 2023. Nottingham, Woking, Thurrock, Croydon three times over. The elected chamber is not where the decision sits and everybody in the room knows it.

The temptation at this point is Burnham’s, and it should be named so that it can be avoided. Managers are not owners; from which The Managerial Revolution concluded in 1941, a year after its author left the American Trotskyist movement, that a managerial class had displaced the capitalists and would inherit the earth. The conclusion was wrong then and it is wrong now. What the layering means is not that a new class rules but that the old one rules at a remove, through an apparatus with duties and personnel of its own, and that the administrative superstructure catches up with the economic base unevenly and late.

The Fourth International’s 1979 World Congress described the mechanism precisely. The real decision-making power of parliamentary bodies is rapidly shrinking. The power of the executive branch is growing, and inside it a handful of committees setting policy on finance, industry, the military and the repressive apparatus, bodies which escape the hazards of political and parliamentary life, and ensure that the interests of big business are directly represented. Then the rider that matters more than the description: But a good many of the decisions dreamed up in these exclusive clubs are being called into question by the stubborn reality of the class relationship of forces.

That unevenness is not an inconvenience for the transitional method. It is the opening the method exists to exploit. Business secrets can be abolished precisely because the books are administered rather than owned, kept by salaried people in a system that generates paper, and Trotsky’s formulation depends on it: “The abolition of ‘business secrets’ is the first step toward actual control of industry.” A demand aimed at an intermediary who must go away and ask forces the chain of command into view. That is the point of aiming it there, and it is why “open the books” is a different order of demand from “fund our council properly”, though both are addressed to the same building.

The apparatus includes our own side

Here is the part the formula obscures most damagingly. The layer standing between the working class and the bourgeoisie is not made up only of managers and officers. It includes the labour movement’s own leadership.

The 1979 document is blunt: the trade union bureaucracy’s “long years of integration into the various cogs of the bourgeois state apparatus has prepared these leaderships to come to the rescue of bourgeois regimes in distress”. Which means that a great many of the decisive demands in any real campaign are addressed neither to a capitalist nor to a manager, but to a general secretary, a trades council, a mosque committee, a branch that has not yet voted.

Trotsky understood the united front as exactly that kind of demand and never pretended otherwise. On 8 December 1931, arguing with the German Communist Party as the clock ran down: “No common platform with the Social Democracy, or with the leaders of the German trade unions, no common publications, banners, placards! March separately, but strike together! Agree only how to strike, whom to strike, and when to strike!” And, in the same text: “On this basis, an agreement with the Social Democratic and trade-union organizations is not only permissible, but a duty.” There is no bourgeois anywhere in those sentences. The addressee is a rival workers’ organisation whose leadership he despised and whose members he needed, and the demand was to be made publicly, repeatedly, in a form that could be accepted.

“Every factory must become an anti-fascist bulwark, with its own commandants and its own battalions”, he wrote a few lines later. Not a request. An instruction to our own side, which our own side was free to refuse and did refuse, at a cost that is still being paid.

What Luxemburg was arguing about

Which returns us to the Reform or Revolution passage, usually quoted too short. Luxemburg wrote that people who pronounce themselves in favour of the method of legislative reform “in place and in contradistinction to the conquest of political power and social revolution, do not really choose a more tranquil, calmer and slower road to the same goal, but a different goal”.

The sentence is not comparing the contents of two shopping lists, and it does not say that reform is a smaller ambition with revolution as the same thing scaled up. The claim is about the destination. Bernstein’s was elsewhere: “Instead of taking a stand for the establishment of a new society they take a stand for surface modifications of the old society.”

The obvious reading is that Luxemburg counterposed demands to power, and that a movement serious about power should be faintly embarrassed by demands. That is not quite right either. Look at what the Spartacus League put its name to in December 1918. Disarm the police and the officers. Confiscate the weapons. Arm the workers. Form a workers’ militia. Then expropriation of the banks and the large enterprises, and a six-hour day. A list of demands, and a conventional-looking one, until the sentence that governs it: “From the uppermost summit of the state down to the tiniest parish, the proletarian mass must therefore replace the inherited organs of bourgeois class rule”, meaning the assemblies and the city councils, “with its own class organs, with workers’ and soldiers’ councils.”

The demands did not change. The addressee did. And the same programme carries the line that ought to be read aloud wherever somebody proposes that a small organisation act on behalf of a class which has decided nothing: “The Spartacus League will never take over governmental power except in response to the clear, unambiguous will of the great majority of the proletarian mass of all of Germany.” The guard rail against substitutionism sits in the same document as the call for councils, and the two halves are one argument seen from either end.

Luxemburg had already worked out why the layering does not paralyse anything. In The Mass Strike the economic and the political struggle are not two stages waiting on each other: “The economic struggle is the transmitter from one political centre to another; the political struggle is the periodic fertilisation of the soil for the economic struggle.” Cause and effect, she wrote, continually change places. Which is the answer to any account of the modern state so impressed by its own insulation that it concludes nothing can be built until the whole thing is taken.

Ernest Mandel put the same point against Nahuel Moreno in the late 1970s, and the metaphor is the thing to hold on to. Trotsky’s bridge was not a bridge between backward consciousness and objective necessity. It was a bridge between the present demands of the masses and the programme of the socialist revolution, which is to say the seizure of power by the proletariat. Moreno’s bankruptcy was to put immediate, democratic and transitional demands on the same footing, which collapses the method back into the old Social Democratic split between a minimum programme for now and a maximum programme for the millennium.

What the Federation has written down

This debate will come to Coventry, to the Socialist Federation conference.

The Socialist Federation was constituted on 31 May 2026 on a call with something over 220 people on it, out of the Members’ Charter grouping that spent the winter arguing for internal democracy inside Your Party and losing. Its 28 June conference carried an Interim Platform and a structure document, both as amended, and voted 68 per cent to delay forming a party. A founding congress follows this autumn.

Read the platform and the architecture is there, adopted. “We reject the owners’ dictatorship in the workplace and the so-called ‘right of managers to manage’. We fight for workers’ control and management.” Nationalisation of the top hundred corporations without compensation. Then the two sentences that decide the argument: “We campaign for committees of action in every city and every town, made up of recallable delegates from the workplaces, working class estates and communities, schools and colleges”, and “A workers’ government will need to break with the ruling class and their state and pass power directly into the hands of working-class organisations to begin transition to a socialist society.”

Recallable delegates from the estates are not a lobbying strategy, and the founding documents put defence and joint action in the same breath as education. Whoever wrote that understood what sort of demand they were making and on whom.

The anxiety persists for a reason that has nothing to do with wording. A platform is a hierarchy and nothing in this one establishes which clause governs. The committees of action sit alongside thirty-odd other commitments: proportional representation, cancellation of tuition fees, citizenship for all, legal protection for trans people, a thirty-hour week, abolition of the monarchy. Each defensible. Each, on the page, of exactly equal weight. A platform in which recallable committees of action carry the same typographical authority as proportional representation has not decided whether the committees are the method or another item, and the difference between those two readings is the difference between the two organisations the Federation might become.

The comrades know it. The report Democratic Socialists published of their 9 June conference records the split: proposals from Richard Gerrard built around immediate agitational demands, others from Raz O’Connor concerned with defining Marxist concepts, and underneath both an unresolved argument about whether a programme exists to establish theoretical agreement or to define a strategic horizon for working-class power. The report notes that it stayed unresolved. It also notes that the gathering was disproportionately older, male, and white, and that the sheer number of proposals crowded out the political debate. Anyone who has sat through an event where the compositing runs longer than the argument will recognise the shape of it.

Two illustrations, and only one of them cheering

Greens Organise, founded in September 2024 by around 150 members including Zoë Garbett and endorsed by Siân Berry, asks Green council candidates through its Austerity Pledge to hold emergency summits, open the council books, demand a wealth tax and rent controls and a national care service, and resist the managed decline of local services. Open the council books is a transitional demand in classical form, arrived at without anyone from our tradition putting it there. As Red Mole argued when the pledge appeared, it remains a programme of refusal, a statement of what Greens will not accept when the Finance Settlement squeezes. Opening the books can mean councillors publishing a spreadsheet and lobbying the ministry. It can also mean the UNISON branch and the tenants’ federation reading the accounts alongside the people who use the care service, and deciding from outside the chamber which cuts will not be implemented. The pledge does not say, and the section 151 officer is watching either way.

Your Party is the discouraging one, and it has run the experiment for a year. Fifty-five thousand members by December, then a Central Executive Committee elected in February over a factional slate war, twenty candidates across seventeen wards in May with none elected and under five thousand votes nationally. The detail that matters most, though, is April, when the CEC banned dual membership with the SWP and the Scottish Socialist Party. Set that beside everything above. A party whose demands are all addressed to a parliamentary majority it does not have went out of its way to foreclose the one category of demand with a live addressee today: the demand on other workers’ organisations to act together. That is not electoral misfortune. It is a choice about who is being talked to, made in a committee room, in the spring, by people who had the option of choosing otherwise.

The part I cannot finish

Where this gets harder is at the point of contact, and I am less certain the distinction survives it than the argument above implies. Take a rent strike on a particular estate. The tenants want the rent reduced and will take the reduction from the landlord, the council, a court, whoever offers it first, and they will be right to. Does their committee become an organ of workers’ power because a Federation branch turned up with a leaflet about recallable delegates, or only if it outlives the settlement, and how many of them do?

Worse, and this is the strongest thing that can be said for my comrade’s formula: the united-front demand has a real addressee, which means it can be refused. A general secretary who says no has demonstrated the limits of your forces rather more publicly than a demand on a government that was never going to answer. Demands with no bourgeois addressee are falsifiable in a way that gerunds are not, and that is exactly why a small organisation frightened of its own size will drift back towards the gerunds. The transitional method describes what a struggle can become without guaranteeing the becoming, and the international experience that produced the FI literature is a good deal more confident about this than the defensive experience of the working class on these islands warrants. I have no satisfactory answer to that, and I do not think one exists on paper: we only learn through experience.

What I do think is that the Socialist Federation congress will not settle the question by a vote. It will settle it, or fail to, in what gets prioritised afterwards: whether a committees of action clause becomes a campaign with an actual first town and an actual first dispute, and whether anybody in the Federation picks up a telephone to the organisations Your Party spent April excluding.

Go back to the homepage and the four gerunds. The reason those sentences have no subject is not stylistic timidity. The working class as a subject, an actor making history today, has not been rebuilt, and a sentence cannot name what does not exist. A committee of action with recallable delegates from three workplaces and two estates is, whatever else it is, a subject. It can be named. It can be asked. It can refuse. Luxemburg’s distinction was never between two vocabularies. It ran between an organisation that asks and an organisation that builds the thing capable of taking, and the second is duller work, done mostly in rooms that swelter in summer and shiver in winter, for years before anyone can say whether it was the right call.

Now see: Ernest Mandel on the Programme

Sources. The Transitional Programme quotations are from The Death Agony of Capitalism and the Tasks of the Fourth International, 1938, at the sections on business secrets and on picket lines, defence guards and workers’ militia. The united-front passages are from Trotsky, For a Workers’ United Front Against Fascism, 8 December 1931. Luxemburg is quoted from Reform or Revolution, 1900, chapter 8, and The Mass Strike, the Political Party and the Trade Unions, 1906, chapter 4; the Spartacus material is What Does the Spartacus League Want?, 14 December 1918. James Burnham, The Managerial Revolution (John Day, 1941). The two passages attributed to the Fourth International’s 1979 World Congress, and Mandel’s formulation against Nahuel Moreno, are quoted from the Red Mole archive’s working copies. Section 151 of the Local Government Act 1972 and section 114 of the Local Government Finance Act 1988 are as cited; the section 114 notices referred to are Croydon (November 2020, December 2020 and November 2022), Thurrock (December 2022), Woking (June 2023), Birmingham (September 2023) and Nottingham (November 2023). The Socialist Federation’s Interim Platform and structure document were carried as amended at its conference of 28 June 2026; the conference report cited is the one published by Democratic Socialists on its 9 June meeting. Greens Organise material is from its Austerity Pledge. Your Party membership, ballot and Central Executive Committee decisions are as reported at the time.

They get it half right for the first third: the class divide, the forced adoption, the readers who preferred the machine poem. Then ninety minutes on what the machine is, and not one demand. On an organisation that can read a temperature and cannot write a demand.

Recently, the Revolutionary Communist Party streamed ninety minutes on artificial intelligence, on the night of France against Spain, and their broadband gave out twice. They blamed British capitalism, which under the circumstances was the correct analysis. Somebody in the chat wrote in to say their home internet had just gone down as well.

It is a good stream, and I want to be specific about that before I take it apart, because most of what follows is not a complaint about their politics. They are right that this is a class question rather than a moral one, and they have the figure for it: the Americans most optimistic about the technology are the ones earning two hundred thousand dollars a year and up, and seventy per cent of Americans oppose a data centre near them. They are right that adoption is forced rather than chosen, with sixty per cent of bosses now requiring the tools and one in ten saying they have fired or would fire someone who refuses. They are right to refuse the boycott, since you cannot boycott a condition of your employment. And the best five minutes of the broadcast is on the study in which three-quarters of ordinary readers, shown a real poem and a machine imitation, preferred the imitation. The presenter refuses the easy conclusion that people are getting stupider. She says the system has withheld art from them, that everybody has it in them to appreciate the real thing and has never been given the room, and that the finding indicts capitalism rather than the readers. That is a properly Marxist reading and I have not seen a better one this year.

Then, an hour and a quarter in, a viewer asks the only question that matters.
Are there any legal tools to stop this? How do we stop it when most of society is against it, and nobody voted for it, and it is happening anyway?

Watch what happens, because the whole argument is in the next four minutes. First they answer it well, and with evidence. Eighteen proposed data centres in Scotland are on pause, they say, because of protests. In the United States a quarter of proposed projects were cancelled in the first quarter of this year, because of protests. There is the Brick Lane fight in the middle of London. And these, they add, are small-scale protests, so imagine what a larger movement could do.

Then, within a minute, they answer it again, and the second answer cancels the first. It is a question of who owns and controls the resources. The state exists to protect the ruling class. We cannot appeal to the government and protest with appeals, because the government has absolutely no control over this situation, it is completely out of their hands. Every government in the world is looking to AI as the saviour of capitalism.

Both of those things were said by the same people about the same question inside the same minute, and only one of them can be true. If appealing to government is pointless because government has no control, then the eighteen Scottish moratoria they have just finished reporting did not happen. They did happen. They are the results of exactly the method being waved away.

That contradiction is not a slip. It is the shape of the whole thing, and it has a name in our tradition.

Notice what every concrete fight in the stream is doing there. Brick Lane, the Scottish moratoria, the cancelled American projects, the electricity bills up two hundred and fifty per cent in one Virginia county, the student walkout at Leeds Arts University, the crafting circles that turned into anti-data-centre protests. Not one of them is treated as terrain. Every one of them is entered as evidence of mood, proof that the anger is out there and electric and rising fast. The stream can read a temperature with real skill. It cannot write a demand.

And so, when the question of what to do finally arrives, here is the entire answer. How do we stop the rollout in the way it is being done? We have to own it. How do we own it? We have to be in power as a class. How do we do that? Through a revolution. Three rungs, and the ladder reaches from Monday morning to the seizure of state power without touching anything in between.

In ninety minutes on a technology they say is destroying entry-level graduate work, nobody says the word hours. Not the shorter week. Not the four-day week. Not thirty-five, not thirty-two, not thirty. The demand does not appear.

That absence is worth dwelling on, because it is not an eccentric demand nobody could have thought of. It is the demand the Fourth International has arrived at every single time this argument has come round, and it has come round four times.

It came round in 1955, when Harold Robins went through Iron Age and Mill and Factory and the auto workers’ own research and laid out Buick’s automated cylinder-block lines with no production workers on them at all, and a refinery spokesman conceding that eight hundred employees could become twelve. Robins weighed Walter Reuther’s answer, the Guaranteed Annual Wage, and found it a year’s severance for the displaced, which is a cushion and not a solution. What would actually spread the work, he wrote, is a much shorter week. It came round in 1962, when Ed Beecher reported that the US Census Bureau had done with fifty statisticians what a decade earlier had taken four thousand one hundred, and that the office was the cheapest place in the economy to automate. His answer was thirty hours. It came round in January 1984, when the West German section’s paper carried a report from inside the car plants on the second generation of reprogrammable robots, quoting a Volkswagen engineer to the effect that applying every one of these innovations to a single plant would give you a factory empty of people. In May the metalworkers struck for the thirty-five-hour week, stayed out seven weeks, and came back with 38.5 hours from 1985 and a phased path that reached thirty-five in October 1995. And it came round in February of this year, when Daniel Tanuro’s ecosocialist theses on AI reached the workplace and asked for a union veto on introduction, workers’ control over the workload, and against layoffs a reduction of hours without loss of pay.

Four times, on four machines, by people who probably would have had a row if they were all in the same room. It is in the founding programme of the International the RCP claims descent from, where it is called the sliding scale of hours, and it is there for precisely the situation the stream spends an hour describing.

Why can’t they reach it? Because of what they spent the hour on. Is it conscious? Can it make art? Does it atrophy critical thinking? Is the bubble seventeen times the dot-com bubble? One of the two hot takes is that artificial intelligence will never develop human consciousness, and it is argued carefully, with a good passage about a program that had to play thirty million games to reach superhuman play in one narrow domain while a person has to eat and sleep and talk to other people.

I have no quarrel with the argument. I have a quarrel with the hour, because if your question is what this machine is and where it is going, then the only political conclusion available at the end is that the system which owns it has to go. Nothing else follows from a description of a machine. Demands only become available when you ask the other question, the distributional one: who takes the time it saves, who sets the workload, who pays for the electricity. That is the question the archive answers, and it is the question the stream never asks.

The proof is that the machine argument has been had before and settled nothing. It appeared in the Spring 1954 Fourth International, at similar length and with similar confidence, from a young member of the American SWP writing as Lyn Marcus, who closed by observing that an automated machine has less intelligence than what a biologist finds under the microscope in an amoeba. He was right. It saved no jobs in Detroit, and nobody remembers it, partly because its author went on to become Lyndon LaRouche. Tanuro disposes of the same question in two sentences this February and gives the remaining thirty theses to the workplace, the value chain and the hours. That is the correct ratio.

They know how to do it, which is what makes all this worth writing down rather than shrugging at. The best story in the stream is Leeds Arts University, where management pushed generative image tools at students whose whole prospective trade was making images, and between fifty and a hundred walked out. The demand they raised was open the books: who is investing in this, and what did they get. Sharp, local, answerable, and it worked. And in the closing stretch they attack Stand Up to Racism for a mobilising slogan too narrow to cover the second and third generation being attacked in Belfast, which is a serious criticism, correctly made. They can dismantle somebody else’s slogan. They put forward none of their own on AI.

The name for this is propagandism, and the charge is not new, and it is not ours first. We’ll make it again in these pages about this tendency in another context: that the international Ted Grant founded has walked away from concrete conjunctural analysis toward a portable propaganda that is the same in every country because its object is recruitment rather than analysis. The sharpest form of that charge is that the ground was Grant’s own. Arguing against Pierre Frank in 1946, he insisted that generalisations would not suffice and each stage must be examined concretely. A method that answers every conjuncture with the same question, are you a communist, is exactly the generalisation that will not suffice. They tell us, near the end, that one of them had been reading The Class, the Party and the Leadership that morning, and that it gave her a kick up the backside about how much rests on communists in a revolutionary situation. It does. What rests on them is having something to propose when the question comes.

It shows in small ways too. Asked how many people a data centre employs, one presenter says it is a very good question and they will leave it open; later she says she doubts it is many, and adds that she does not know this for a fact and is guessing on instinct. Robins read the trade press. Beecher read congressional testimony. The West German comrades read a Commerzbank study. If your object is analysis, you need the number. If your object is recruitment, you do not, because the number was never going to change what you were going to say.

And there is one more cost, the one our new Red Mole Guide is built to say. The stream’s positive programme is that under socialism, with the workers owning the means of production, we will decide how the technology is distributed. Our library is where that goes to be tested, and it does not come back intact. Leon Sedov looked at the Stakhanov records in 1936, in a state where the expropriation had already happened, and found the productivity real, the mechanism not the machine but a redivision of labour and an intensity nobody could sustain, and the gain taken as revised norms and cut piece rates. In 1981 a Soviet economist writing for Progress Publishers to celebrate the scientific and technical revolution recorded that nearly half of all Soviet workers in industry and building were still working by hand, and explained why: abolishing unemployment had removed the automatic incentive to technical progress and nothing had been found to replace the reserve army of labour. Mandel, on Gorbachev’s computerisation drive in 1985, found the obstacle was not technical either. Making the machines pay required managerial powers that would undo the right to a job, and every previous attempt had run into the class solidarity and instinctive egalitarianism of Soviet workers. To automate, the bureaucracy needed a reserve army it did not have. Tanuro puts it in a line: replacing capitalist property with collective ownership, in and of itself, would not be enough.

So even the good half of the RCP’s answer is only half an answer. Change the owner and you change what the gain is for. You have not yet settled who commands the labour process, and that is where the gain is distributed. Which is why the shorter week is not a stepping stone to be skipped on the way to the real question. It is the form the real question takes on Monday, and it is the thing you can say to somebody who is furious about their electricity bill and their nephew’s job prospects and has no intention whatever of joining a communist party this year.

That is what a united front on this looks like, and it already exists on paper in our own press. Union recognition along the whole value chain, consultation and a union veto on introduction, workers’ control over workload, no layoffs and hours reduction without loss of pay, a moratorium on new data centres pending a real plan for water, minerals and emissions. Every item is something a non-communist can sign. Half of them are what the campaigns in Scotland and Virginia and Brick Lane are already demanding, which is why those campaigns have wins to report and the stream has only a temperature.

They end on the old mole, burrowing under the surface where you cannot see it. Trust me, one of them says, it’s coming. Every generation of Trotskyists has said that too, and what actually arrived was decided by whether anybody had been organised to ask for the hours, to ask for control, to demand the better pay. The mole does the digging. Somebody still has to say where.

Sources. The stream is the RCP’s World on Fire livestream on artificial intelligence, July 2026; figures quoted are as given on air. On working time: Harold Robins, “Automation: Menace or Promise?”, Fourth International, Spring 1955; Ed Beecher, “Automation and the Trade Unions”, International Socialist Review, Summer 1962; Winfried Wolf’s report from the West German car plants, International Viewpoint 45, 30 January 1984; the IG Metall settlement of 28 June 1984 and the phased reduction to 35 hours in October 1995, per Eurofound. On the workers’ states: N. Markin (Leon Sedov), “The Stakhanovist Movement”, The New International, February 1936; S. A. Heinman, Economic Aspects of the Scientific and Technical Revolution (Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1981); Mandel on Gorbachev’s reforms, International Viewpoint 84, 14 October 1985. Daniel Tanuro, “Theses for an ecosocialist critique of artificial intelligence”, International Viewpoint 616, February 2026. The 1954 article is Lyn Marcus, “Automation: The New Industrial Revolution”, Fourth International, Spring 1954. On propagandism and the Grant tradition, our own The Method That Changed Sides is scheduled for August 28. All the archival texts are reprinted, in extract, in Red Mole Guide No. 16.

Related Reading:

• On Kowalewski’s 1980s Rediscovery of Trotsky: Why Ukraine’s Right to Self-Determination Is Unconditional

• Ernest Mandel: The Soviet Economic Reforms and Yugoslav Experience: A 1968 Talk on Soviet Economic Reforms and Yugoslav Experience

• The Clean Banner: 20 years after Ted Grant’s death, the RCP exemplifies Trotsky and Grant’s warnings about propaganda societies: The Vanguard in Retreat, Part Two

• Is everything a demand on the bourgeoisie until you’ve won power? : How the Socialist Federation and Greens can avoid Your Party’s mistake

• Nationalise Thames Water, Not its Debt: Some nationalisations weaken capital; others strengthen it

This is the companion piece to our Archive Unlocked reprint of André Duret’s 1983 report.

TL;DR: On 8 March 1979, five weeks after Ayatollah Khomeini came home to a welcome of millions, tens of thousands of women marched through Tehran against his instruction that they cover their hair. It was International Women’s Day and it was snowing. They had helped bring down the Shah, and Hezbollahi toughs met them with knives and broken glass. The revolution was six weeks old and the counter-revolution was already in the street. This companion piece to the Archive Unlocked reprint of Andre Duret’s lost 1983 report sets out four propositions. Mehdi Bazargan never held real power, so any reading of Iran built on his premiership is built on sand. The reactionary clerical capture of the revolution happened early, and Khomeini’s return confirmed it. The assault on the left, on women, and on secular and national-minority forces began from that point and ran on as the new power consolidated. The war with Iraq was seized to drive that assault deeper. All four are essentially right. The question worth asking is how obvious they were at the time, and to whom, because the answer indicts a good deal of the left.

On 8 March 1979, five weeks after Ayatollah Khomeini came home to a welcome of millions, tens of thousands of women marched through Tehran against his instruction that they cover their hair. It was International Women’s Day, and it was snowing. They had helped bring down the Shah; now the man they had helped install was telling them what to wear, and Hezbollahi toughs were meeting them with knives and broken glass. The revolution was six weeks old. The counter-revolution was already in the street. The women who marched did not need the theory of permanent revolution to tell them what was being done to them. They could see it.

Hold that date. Everything difficult about the argument that follows sits inside the gap between what those women saw in March 1979 and what the far left was prepared to write down about it — in some cases only years later.

Set out four propositions about the Iranian process, the kind a reader today might reach for. First, that Mehdi Bazargan never held real power, so any reading of Iran built on his premiership is built on sand. Second, that the reactionary clerical capture of the revolution happened early — that Khomeini’s return confirmed it. Third, that from that point the assault on the left, on women, on the secular and national-minority forces began, and ran on as the new power consolidated. Fourth, that the war with Iraq was seized by the Khomeinist leadership to drive that assault deeper and clamp its grip on the whole society. With the benefit of nearly half a century, all four are essentially right. The interesting question is not whether they are true. It is how obvious they were at the time, and to whom — because the answer indicts a good deal of the left, and the document we reprint on 12 August is the evidence for both the indictment and its limits.

Bazargan was a cipher, and that is the point

Take him first, because he is the easiest. Bazargan headed the Provisional Government from February 1979 and resigned on 6 November, two days after students seized the American embassy and made his authority a joke he could no longer tell. He himself said he had been handed “a knife without a blade.” Real power sat elsewhere from the first week — in the Revolutionary Council, the neighbourhood komitehs, and the clerical network that would become the Islamic Republican Party. So yes: to explain Iran through Bazargan’s cabinet is to explain a shadow by describing the shape it throws.

But the proposition overreaches when it says any analysis “based on” him is therefore worthless. Bazargan matters precisely as a cipher. He is the form in which the liberal, national-bourgeois option was tried in public and visibly failed, and his failure is a fact worth having. Read how Duret handles him in the reprint: not as a ruler but as “the Bazargan government, over which” the Khomeini leadership presided and then discarded — a cabinet the clergy set up to reassure the bourgeoisie and dropped the moment the embassy seizure made it useless. The mistake to guard against is not mentioning Bazargan. It is mistaking office for power — and that mistake was catchable in real time, because he told everyone, loudly, that he had none.

The reaction came for its victims in order

The harder proposition is the second, and it needs handling with care, because it is the one most easily corrupted by hindsight. That Khomeini’s programme was reactionary was not a secret waiting to be discovered in 1981. He had published it. The Najaf lectures on velayat-e faqih — government by the jurist — were in print from 1970. The theocratic design was on the record before the revolution had a date. In that sense the raw material of the second proposition was available to anyone who read.

And yet “his return confirmed it” is too clean. February 1979 did not feel confirmed to the people living in it, and not only to fools. Khomeini had spent his months at Neauphle-le-Château promising that the clergy would not govern directly, that there would be pluralism, that the left would be free. The revolution was a genuine front — workers building shoras in the oil fields, the women of 8 March, the Kurdish and Turkoman movements, the Fedayeen and the Mojahedeen — and fronts do not announce their internal winner on day one. The theocratic outcome was sealed in stages, each of which could be argued about while it happened: the rigged referendum of March 1979, the velayat-e faqih constitution ratified that December, the embassy seizure that finished Bazargan, and above all the June 1981 destruction of Bani-Sadr and the Mojahedeen, after which the executions ran in the thousands. To say the return “confirmed” the ending is to read the ending backwards into the opening. The reactionary danger was knowable in February 1979. The reactionary victory was not yet obvious, and pretending otherwise flatters us at the expense of the record.

What was obvious — and this is the third proposition — was the assault, to each group as its turn came. The women knew on 8 March 1979. The Kurds knew that August, when Khomeini declared holy war on Kurdistan and Khalkhali’s firing squads followed the army in. The universities knew in the spring of 1980, when the “Cultural Revolution” cleared them of the left. The point about the onslaught is not that it was hidden but that it was distributed, and that obviousness was distributed with it. You saw the counter-revolution early in exact proportion to how early it came for you. That is why so much of the argument on the left was not about the facts — the closures, the shootings, the hezbollah raids were all reported — but about what the facts were allowed to mean. The Tudeh and the Fedayeen-Majority saw everything and subordinated all of it to unity with an “anti-imperialist” regime.

What the Fourth International could, and could not, see

The document we publish by Duret is the Fourth International’s own answer, and it is more honest than the caricature — its own and others’ — would lead you to expect. Presented to the United Secretariat in January 1983 and published that spring, André Duret’s report already dates the clerical counter-revolution to “the very beginning.” It says the Khomeini leadership “made clear its intention to structure the mass movement from top to bottom”; it puts the “first general assaults on democratic rights” — on women, the press, the Kurds, the independent shoras — in 1979; it reads Bazargan as a discarded cabinet and the clergy as an estate ruling “a bourgeois state apparatus,” with Khomeini operating “like a Bonaparte.” Four years on, in other words, the balance-sheet was substantially right, and substantially what a reader reaching for those four propositions today would want it to say.

Which only sharpens the charge, because the practical line had trailed even this analysis. When Iraq invaded in September 1980 the United Secretariat called to “defend Iran against Iraq and imperialist attacks” — a statement its own minute records as passing by majority vote, so the International was divided over it from the start. That defencism was reaffirmed as late as May 1982, in an IEC statement still headed “Defend the Iranian Revolution!“ and still hailing the recapture of Khorramshahr — even as Iranian armour prepared to cross into Iraq.

And the sharpest sign that the turn was overdue came not from the centre but from a section. On 22 July 1982 — nine days after Iranian troops crossed into Iraq — the Political Bureau of the Japanese Revolutionary Communist League issued a document under the flat title “Against the War by the Khomeini-IRP Regime Against Iraq.” It defended Iran against the 1980 invasion and condemned Khomeini’s offensive war in the same breath, named the regime a “colonial bourgeois nationalist bonapartism,” read the war as a means “to tighten its bourgeois nationalist control over the masses,” and called for “the anti-imperialist unity of Arab and Iranian workers and peasants” across the front. That was the whole of the corrected position, reached by a section within days of the invasion — six months before the International’s own report caught up.¹

The report reprinted here, eight months later, is where the analysis and the line finally met: reject the Khomeini government’s war, call for a ceasefire, the masses “must not win the war and lose the revolution.” By 1984 International Viewpoint was printing “Khomeini’s counter-revolution” as a section-heading; by December 1987 it was calling for “the fraternization of the soldiers of both armies against their rulers.”

None of that last step is a formula, and it is worth being exact about why, because the temptation is to hear “fraternise the soldiers of both armies” as the answer to every war. It is not. Marxists do not meet each war between capitalist states with a plague on both houses; in a war of an oppressed nation against an oppressor — Ukraine against Russia’s invasion, to take the case in front of us — we are for the defeat of the aggressor, and neutrality there is a betrayal wearing internationalist clothes. The 1980 call to defend Iran against an imperialist-backed Iraqi invasion drew on exactly that principle, and on its own terms it was defensible. The error was never defencism as such. It was what the defencism was chained to: a revolution already being strangled from within, so that “defend the Iranian revolution” curdled into defending the regime that was strangling it — and then, when Iran’s conscripts were dying outside Basra, into cheering an invader. The war line was always downstream of the dating question. Get the death of the revolution wrong, and you will get the war wrong for years.

That was the achievement of the American SWP, whose Intercontinental Press and Militant never turned at all: they kept the defencist line past the point where Iran was the invader, cheered the 1984 seizure of the Majnoon Islands, and told their readers an “Iranian victory in the war would be an inspiration.” Cindy Jaquith boasted that the Militant was “virtually the only paper in the U.S. workers movement that defends Iran and the Iranian revolution” — a sentence meant as pride. Jack Barnes’s people had backed Babak Zahraie’s HKE, the Iranian group that adapted hardest to the regime and split from the International over it. The best demolition of that course came from inside the SWP itself and from Ernest Mandel’s The Anatomy of a Split; Kamran Nayeri’s account, from within the Iranian movement, is the fullest reckoning. The people who got Iran right early were not, on the whole, the ones with the largest press. They were the Iranian comrades who paid for the analysis.

So: were the four propositions obvious? The facts were, to whoever the regime reached first. The synthesis — that these facts added up to a finished reactionary regime and not the birth-pangs of a living revolution — was available but bitterly contested, resisted hardest by the “anti-imperialism” that swallowed the internal class struggle whole. And the sense that it was all somehow foreordained is the one part that was never obvious, because it was never true: the outcome was fought over, in the streets and in the congresses, and the fighting is the reason the answer took as long as it did.

The report we publish by Duret is a piece of that fight, caught at the moment the argument turned. Read it against the women of 8 March, and judge for yourself how much of it could have been written in 1979 — and how much only the four years cost in blood had made sayable.

Further reading. André Duret, “The Iranian Revolution Four Years After the February 1979 Insurrection“ — the lost first part of the 1983 report, reprinted here for the first time online. On the war line, the founding defencist texts and their reversal run through the International Viewpoint archive (the May 1982 IEC statement, IV 9; Salah Jaber on the Gulf war, IV 132, Dec 1987; and the 1989 retrospective on Khomeinism, IV 166). On the American SWP’s break: Ernest Mandel, “The Anatomy of a Split“ (1986), and Kamran Nayeri, “Learning From Our Mistakes.”

Footnotes

1. Political Bureau of the Central Committee, Japan Revolutionary Communist League, “Against the War by the Khomeini-IRP Regime Against Iraq — For the Anti-Imperialist Unity of Arab and Iranian Workers and Peasants,” 22 July 1982, in International Internal Discussion Bulletin (SWP), Vol. XIX, No. 3, June 1983. Coming soon in our Archive Unlocked series — “The Japanese Section’s Case Against Khomeini’s War.”

TL;DR: Presented to the United Secretariat in January 1983 and published that March, Andre Duret’s report is the Fourth International’s four-year balance-sheet on Iran, and until this Archive Unlocked reprint its first half existed nowhere online, because International Viewpoint no. 27 is missing from every digital archive of the magazine. Duret dates the clerical counter-revolution to the very beginning. He records that the Khomeini leadership made clear its intention to structure the mass movement from top to bottom, places the first general assaults on democratic rights, on women, the press, the Kurds and the independent shoras, in 1979, reads the premier Bazargan as a discarded cabinet, and describes the clergy as an estate ruling a bourgeois state apparatus with Khomeini operating like a Bonaparte. His synthesis, that these facts added up to a victorious reactionary regime rather than the birth-pangs of a living revolution, was available at the time and bitterly contested, resisted hardest by the anti-imperialism of the American SWP. The concluding part, on the crisis of the Iranian revolution, appeared in International Viewpoint no. 28.

In our Archive Unlocked series we republish documents from the revolutionary socialist press that have fallen out of circulation, alongside a longer discussion of its significance. This one recovers a lost text: the first half of the Fourth International’s 1983 balance-sheet on Iran, which until now existed nowhere online.

Introduction

Presented to the United Secretariat in January 1983 and published that March, André Duret’s report already dates the clerical counter-revolution to “the very beginning.” It says the Khomeini leadership “made clear its intention to structure the mass movement from top to bottom”; it puts the “first general assaults on democratic rights” — on women, the press, the Kurds, the independent shoras — in 1979; it reads the premier Bazargan as a discarded cabinet and the clergy as an estate ruling “a bourgeois state apparatus,” with Khomeini operating “like a Bonaparte.” Four years on, in other words, the balance-sheet was substantially right, and substantially what a reader today would want it to say.

Duret’s synthesis — that these facts added up to a victorious reactionary regime and not the birth-pangs of a living revolution — was available but bitterly contested, resisted hardest by the “anti-imperialism” of the US SWP that swallowed the internal class struggle whole. And the sense that it was all somehow foreordained is the one part that was never obvious, because it was never true: the outcome was fought over, in the streets and in the fields, in the workplaces and universities, and the fighting is the reason the answer took as long as it did.

The report below is a piece of that fight, caught at the moment the argument turned. Read it against the women of 8 March, and judge for yourself how much of it could have been written in 1979 — and how much only the four years cost in blood had made sayable.

The Iranian Revolution Four Years After the February 1979 Insurrection

by André Duret · International Viewpoint no. 27, 31 March 1983

Editorial note. This is the first part of a report presented in January 1983 to the United Secretariat of the Fourth International, whose general line the United Secretariat approved; the concluding part appeared in International Viewpoint no. 28. IV27 is currently missing from every digital archive of the magazine — the online run jumps from 26 to 28 — and the text below is a fresh transcription from a paper copy, made for this reprint. One sentence from the original page 17, damaged by a crease, has been lightly reconstructed.

Four years ago the Iranian masses overthrew the Shah’s dictatorship. Washington lost one of its lynch-pins in the Middle East. Its system of control over a region of strategical importance for its interests was disrupted. Since then, American imperialism has constantly tried to re-establish and re-organise its positions in the area. The initial impact of the Iranian revolution on the masses throughout the region was considerable. The conservative regimes allied to the United States immediately started showing signs of worry. The revolutionary groundswell had rocked imperialism. But the later setbacks inflicted on the mass movement by the Khomeini leadership weakened the anti-imperialist thrust and undermined the anti-capitalist dynamic of the revolution that began in 1979.

From the crisis of the Pahlavi regime to the insurrection

The February 1979 insurrection was the culmination of a prolonged crisis, in which three forces were at work: 1) Pressure for “reforms” exerted by factions of the new bourgeoisie tied to the Pahlavi dynasty; 2) Opposition to the imperial regime by the traditional bourgeoisie, which linked itself to the Shi’ite clergy; 3) The upsurge of a powerful mass movement which began in 1976–77.

Firstly, in the mid-seventies sectors of the new bourgeoisie came out for reforms to adjust the system of political rule and state structures to the needs of a capitalist economy that was undergoing significant development. Such demands were taken up within the state apparatus itself and by a faction of the official “Rastakhiz” party. The Janshia Amouzegar government team represented an attempt by the Shah to respond to this “reformist movement”. Certain forces in the Mossadeghist National Front looked favourably on these developments.

Beginning in the early sixties, a current of opposition to the imperial regime had emerged and consolidated in and around broad layers of the traditional bourgeoisie, which had found themselves excluded from the new sectors of capitalist accumulation (in production, international trade, and commerce). Through their direct hold over the state apparatus and the resources at their disposal, the imperial regime and the bourgeoisie it nurtured had made these new sectors for investment their private preserve.

Bazargan (Movement for the Liberation of Iran) and other currents grouped in the National Front were the spokespersons for the bourgeois layers that were frozen out of the new profit possibilities. The petty bourgeoisie fell in behind these opposition elements. Bazargan’s party developed close ties with the Shi’ite clergy, since, from 1963 on, parts of the Shi’ite hierarchy entered into conflict with the regime. Finally, under the impact of the 1975–76 economic crisis, there was the beginning of the powerful upsurge of the oppressed and exploited masses. In the course of the revolutionary upsurge the Shi’ite hierarchy, in collaboration with Bazargan, took the political leadership of these diverse currents of the developing opposition. Inside the state apparatus itself, including the army, sections broke away to rally to this alternative leadership. This partially explains why certain parts of the Shah’s regime’s institutions remained intact after the insurrection.

Various social layers and classes came together in this anti-dictatorial battle. As early as summer 1976, clashes took place between the army and thousands of “shantytown” dwellers in south Tehran. This area was inhabited by hundreds of thousands of people forced out of the rural zones as a result of the Shah’s “White Revolution”. The army destroyed those make-shift homes which had been built outside the zones specifically reserved for these people uprooted by the Pahlavi dictatorship. At the same time the first strike movement was getting underway (1976–77). Repression was fierce. In the wake of these mobilisations, protest actions were launched by poets, writers and lawyers. These actions focused on the defence of democratic rights. Student struggles went into an upturn. A general strike developed in the universities in Autumn 1976. With the approval of Carter — who had just been elected president — the Shah ordered violent repression against this movement. The mobilisations became stalled.

It was at that moment that a new stage in the conflict between the Shi’ite hierarchy and the imperial regime began. After the campaign launched in 1977 against Khomeini by the government-controlled press, demonstrations were organised in Qom and then at Tabriz, where an uprising took place. The government tried to crush this movement with vicious repression. In fact it triggered off a cycle of commemorations (40 days mourning) for the victims of the repression, which was to set the “tempo” for the rise of the mass movement. The Shi’ite clergy offered its facilities and its powerful organisation to the demonstrators. It sought to win hegemony over the protest movement. Substantial sectors of the traditional bourgeoisie and petty-bourgeoisie rallied to this new leadership of the opposition to the Shah. The involvement of the plebeian masses in the struggle grew steadily. On September 8, (”Black Friday”), the Shah’s repressive forces killed hundreds of demonstrators. The antagonism between the regime and the masses rose to a higher level. Some factions of the clergy inclined towards compromise, and sought negotiations with the prime minister, Sharif Emami. However, the power of the movement and its convergence with strikes by the workers made a compromise virtually impossible. Economic demands and political demands were more and more becoming combined. Strike committees began to emerge in the factories. The entry of the working class into direct battle against the Shah lent a new force to this social and political confrontation. From October 1978, a general strike was on the agenda. This became a central element in relaunching the offensive against the Pahlavi regime.

However, mass street mobilisations remained under the organisation of the clergy and their allies in the Bazaar. Workers entered the conflict after the mass movement had already been structured under the aegis of the Shi’ite clergy. Furthermore, the weakness, not to say the non-existence of working-class organisations, which was the result of years of repression, left the field open for the clergy to structure the mobilisations (in this theology students played a significant role). Moscow and Peking’s diplomacy toward the Shah helped considerably to deepen the discredit of the Tudeh Party (the CP) and to increase the people’s reservations towards organisations claiming to be communist. This political factor worked to the advantage of the Khomeini leadership.

In November/December 1978, the confrontations became increasingly violent. The masses moved into a direct offensive against the regime. From exile, Ayatollah Khomeini called on demonstrators to win the soldiers to their side. Now it was the turn of the peasants, who flocked to the towns to join in the struggle against the dictatorship.

Under the pressure of the masses and Khomeini’s intransigence all the new attempts made by members of the clergy such as Shariat Madari to work out a compromise with figures like Amini or Bakhtiar (who was named prime minister in January) came to nought. Khomeini backed the general strike and rejected any compromise.

Behind the Khomeini leadership was a social bloc including the following components: the traditional bourgeoisie (with its various factions, the big and medium-sized Bazaar merchants, and the small manufacturers); a large petty-bourgeoisie (shopkeepers, small and middle artisans), which had a long tradition of organisation (in guilds and corporations); and the workers and the plebeian masses (who were called the mostazafin, “the disinherited”). Among these poor masses were hundreds of thousands of recently arrived migrants from the countryside, a semi-proletariat severely hit by the crisis of the building industry, whose previous growth had offered them opportunities for finding temporary jobs. A lumpen proletarian layer also took part in this struggle. For many of these uprooted people, the religious organisation that existed in the shantytowns offered a substitute for the village community structures and provided a network of social aid (charity). The clergy’s denunciation of the affluent living of the “nouveau riche” layers (taghootis) of the imperial regime found a ready audience among these layers of the popular mass, which were on the receiving end of repeated attacks by the repressive forces and were beset with all sorts of problems.

Rich merchants financed the mobilisations. Shopkeepers sold their goods at low prices to the impoverished masses. The mosques became the main organising centre for the fight against the dictatorship. In fact, the masses used the channels of expression that the Pahlavi dictatorship had not been able to destroy. This consolidated the hold of the Khomeini leadership over the mass movement, especially since he had become known as an opponent of the Shah from a long way back. Indeed, as early as 1963, he declared his hostility to measures associated with the “White Revolution”, which undermined the regional bases of the Shi’ite clergy and the traditional local power structures to which it was traditionally linked. Khomeini’s opposition was based on this conservative point of view. Nonetheless, the terrible consequences of the “White Revolution” for whole layers of the people built an audience for Khomeini’s positions. Finally, even though he supported the overthrow of Mossadegh in 1953, he unfailingly denounced imperialism’s influence and the Westernisation in Iran. These denunciations touched a deep chord in the popular classes.

Strikes by workers played an important role in destroying the monarchy. They helped to paralyse the nerve centres of the economy (i.e., oil). They gave an added thrust to the power of the people’s mobilisations. But the working class did not assume the role of the organisational and political vanguard of the anti-dictatorial struggle on a national scale. Organisations such as the Mojahedeen of the People or the Fedayeen of the People had been decimated by the repression. Moreover, given the weaknesses of their political line and programme, they were not really able to offer a political perspective of their own, and still less to serve as an organising force. Thus, it was to prove very difficult for a process of political differentiation to develop within the social bloc grouped behind Khomeini and thus for the proletariat to assert itself and bring its weight to bear.

In January 1979, a Council of the Revolution was set up. It included Bani Sadr, Bazargan, Yazdi, Ghotbzadeh, and religious dignitaries such as Beheshti, Motahari, Rafsanjani, and Bahonar (all former theology students of Khomeini) and Khomeini himself. Its composition remained secret for a long time.

During the general strikes, committees (komitehs) mushroomed in the neighbourhoods. After August 1978, fourteen komiteh “centres” (which later became known as Imam’s Committees) were set up in Tehran to try to control the movement. They were presided over by Madhavi Kani. Identical structures were set up in other towns. Madhavi Kani, freed from prison along with other mullahs by the Shah, made no secret of his intention of fighting the left’s influence in the mass movement. The komiteh centres set up under his direction were effective instruments for taking over the mass bodies in the neighbourhoods.

Under the body blows of the demonstrations, after the Shah’s departure and Khomeini’s triumphal arrival, the dynasty’s apparatus of domination (army, patronage system and state bureaucracy) began to break up. Khomeini nominated Bazargan as the “real” prime minister, and a situation of “dual power” between Bakhtiar and the representative of the Council of the Revolution was established. At the beginning of February, the Council of the Revolution opened negotiations with the high command of the imperial army — a fraction of which showed a willingness to collaborate with the emerging power. However, on February 9, a mass-based military response was organised against the attacks on a “Homofars” unit (air-force technicians) by the Imperial Guard. The Mojahedeen and Fedayeen, together with the Homofars, initiated the 10/11 February insurrection. The masses immediately took part in the military action. Prisons and barracks were attacked. Agents of the SAVAK (the Shah’s secret police, which had been set up with CIA aid) were hunted. The imperial army began to disintegrate.

At the beginning the Khomeini leadership was opposed to the insurrection. It backed it once the uprising was underway in order to avoid being out-flanked. The Army General Staff, notably General Gharabaghi, observed a sort of neutrality. Khomeini issued appeals designed to hold back attacks against the army and to preserve at least parts of it.

Confronted with this revolutionary explosion, the Khomeini leadership showed it had three main concerns. First of all it sought to avoid violent disintegration of the Shah’s state apparatus. Not that it wanted to maintain the army as such. But it feared the mass movement would get irretrievably out of hand if there were no structures able to control it. It immediately appointed a government from the top. The masses did not have the right to choose!

However, the Khomeini leadership was not yet ready to take power directly itself. The bodies and institutions on which it could base itself were not yet consolidated. Moreover, there were important differences within the Shi’ite hierarchy itself about the needs for clerical involvement in political life. Therefore, the Khomeini leadership set up the Bazargan government, over which it maintained close supervision. Then it moved ruthlessly to assume control of all the komitehs. Slowly the komitehs were centralised under its control. Uncontrollable komitehs were dissolved. The Central Military Council, a body parachuted in at the beginning of the insurrection, had the objective of disarming the masses. A good part of the militants who were to form the backbone of the future pasdar army were recruited from the komitehs.

Thus, from the very beginning the Khomeini leadership made clear its intention to structure the mass movement from top to bottom. One aspect of this political line was seen right away with the attacks on the press, which, as in all revolutions, reflected the ferment of ideas and all sorts of initiatives by every section of society. Finally, on February 18 the Khomeini leadership began putting heavy emphasis on the need to restore production and therefore to re-establish order in the factories.

Right from the beginning of the revolution, given the whole approach of the Khomeini leadership, it was the central task of revolutionaries to fight for the independence of the mass movement. That was essential to reinforce the anti-imperialist and anti-capitalist thrust of the revolution.

The upsurge of the mass struggle and Khomeini’s response (1979)

A) The working class in struggle

For the first time in decades the working class was able to freely develop its own instruments for struggle. Trade unions revived in the traditional industries (textiles, leather, printing). Many shoras (councils) emerged, developing out of the strike committees. The working class was relatively “new”. It was in a very great part the product of the rural exodus of the preceding fifteen years. The majority worked for small-scale firms or in the building industry. Its strongest and most militant contingents were in the big centres of oil and gas production, steel making, and in the car assembly plants. The repression of the Pahlavi regime prevented the workers from building their own organisations. Therefore, the trade-union experience of the working class was limited, and its political experience even more so. Nevertheless, during the insurrectionary upsurge, it gained an awareness of its power and organisational capacities.

During 1979 and the beginning of 1980, strikes developed, despite the threats of government representatives and religious leaders. Workers demands focussed on: the 40-hour week, equal working week for civil/public workers and other workers; re-opening of factories closed by their exiled owners and the takeover of abandoned factories; the election of the heads of nationalised companies and not their designation by the state; the re-instatement of workers sacked for their activity against the dictatorship; the repeal of Article 33 of the labour relations law; the payment of back pay, salary increases; demands associated with various workers control initiatives; the removal of former agents of the dictatorship.

The nationalisations in industry in June and July 1979 immediately posed the problem of the relationship between the directors nominated by the government and the shoras. The pre-eminent authority of the directors was confirmed by the regime. Various shora coordinating committees were set up: in the oil industry of Khuzistan, in the steel industry (among production workers at Ahwaz and administrative workers in Tehran), in small and medium-sized industries in Gilan, in the building industry of South Tehran. A coordinating committee of the Gostaresh workplace shoras (Organisation for the Development and Modernisation of Iranian Industry, grouping the modern companies developed with the aid of the imperial regime) was set up and organised demonstrations. A centre for the councils of East and West Tehran was established. The first signs appeared of the working class winning organisational independence.

There was (and is) large-scale unemployment. Its level rose remorselessly. At the beginning of 1980, the Central Bank estimated the number of unemployed at 3 million (a third of the economically active population in the modern sector of the economy). Consequently the unemployed began to mobilise in many industrial centres. In Tehran, Amol, Broojerd, Hamadan, Kerman and Masjed Soleiman they organised sit-in actions. Official buildings were occupied on many occasions. There were numerous clashes with the pasdars: at Isfahan in April 1979, in Masjed Soleiman in October 1979 and in Broojerd in January 1980. In the latter towns the population massively supported the unemployed, and the governor had to decamp.

In response to this upsurge, the government offered a loan of 1,000 tomans for six months to the unemployed (the minimum monthly salary was then 1,100 tomans). This “loan” had to be paid back when the unemployed worker found a job. About 350,000 jobless “benefited” from such aid. The weakness of the organised workers movement, the lack of a leadership, prevented a convergence between the unemployed movement and workers in jobs. Furthermore, in a large number of nationalised workplaces workers not only got wage increases but, despite economic stagnation, they got paid regularly at the end of each month (the Central Bank was keeping the nationalised companies afloat). These factors, along with the repressive action of the pasdars, explain the collapse of the unemployed movement in 1980.

In this period the Fedayeen, Peykar and Mojahedeen won a certain base in the working class. The Tudeh Party also had some influence, but less than it had in the state apparatus and above all in the administration of the nationalised sector. To counteract workers activity, the regime adopted legislation in May 1979 restricting trade-union action. The anti-working class laws from the Shah’s era continued to be used — including the one on “communist activity” in the workplaces. Khomeini announced: “Those who incite the workers to continue to strike are guilty of treason”.

The attack against the independent shoras was not long in coming. Coordinating committees of Islamic shoras linked to the Islamic Republic and the Islamic Republican Party (IRP) were organised to stop the coordination of independent shoras, which was the strategic key to winning working-class independence. Obviously this crackdown did not proceed without running into certain difficulties. Some Islamic shoras were members of the Polytechnic School Coordinating Committee (June 1979). IRP representatives, Doctor Peyman’s Movement of Muslim Fighters (which published the Ommat newspaper and held “socialistic” Islamic positions) and the Mojahedeen were included in the leadership of this Coordinating Committee. The pressure of the workers struggles meant that the shoras often tended to escape the authorities’ control. For the IRP it rapidly appeared that controlling the shoras required setting up a coordinating committee more directly under its command. This was done at the beginning of 1980, with the takeover of the Workers House. “Domesticating” the shoras was not a linear process. This is shown by conflicts that arose in Tabriz, Ahwaz and Tehran between workers and representatives of the new regime over the independent activity of the shoras.

The whole policy of the Khomeini leadership — corresponding to its overall ideological orientation — was designed to block the development of an independent workers movement with its own structures, press, freedom of discussion and debate and with an ideology of its own out of line with Khomeini’s doctrine of Velayete Faghih, the rule of the supreme expert in Islamic law.

B) The peasants and the revolution

In the months following the overthrow of the Pahlavi regime, peasant struggles developed. However, there was no overall, unified movement. One major reason for this is the diversity of the conditions in which the peasants live. They are scattered in 70,000 villages. There are different farming systems in different parts of the country. The importance of large estates varies considerably from place to place. The effects of the Shah’s agrarian reform were different in different areas. Some areas had a more militant tradition, such as the provinces of Gilan and Mazanderan along the Caspian coast. Moreover, in Gilan and Mazanderan, a considerable amount of land had been grabbed by the Imperial family and their cronies. In addition, peasant struggles were often interlinked with the struggles for national liberation, as in parts of Kurdistan. This was true also in the Turkoman region, where there were many absentee landlords and large estates.

In hundreds of villages, peasants occupied the land. The bulk of the police deserted their posts for fear of peasant reprisals. Lack of land was strongly felt by the great majority of peasants. The pressure on them to emigrate to the towns was a concrete demonstration of this. This peasant movement was not at all stimulated by the Shi’ite clergy. Furthermore the mullahs only had a permanent presence in some 5,000 villages. From a sociological point of view, they were closely linked to sectors of the medium and big landowners, who were the only ones able to finance religious activities and pay the religious tax (Khoms). In Fars province, the peasant mobilisations began at the start of 1980. The land occupation movement was largely spontaneous. To be sure young peasants, recent migrants to the towns and won over to the revolution, returned to their villages and initiated or supported such occupations. In certain cases, the pasdars called in to “rescue” the landowner sided with the peasants.

However, the Khomeini leadership and the government were opposed to land occupations. Pasdar units from the towns sided with the landowners, and, occasionally, helped local strongmen linked to the new regime to take over land. Peasants were expelled from the occupied lands, as was the case in the Kermanshah region. Clashes were particularly sharp in Kurdistan and the Turkoman region. In Ourumieh and Nagadeh (Kurdistan), the big landowners attacked the villages and took back the land. In May 1979, the government gave the Piranshar region landowners arms to carry out their battle against the poor peasants. In the Turkoman region, pasdar units, mainly Persians, attacked peasant committees and tried to chase them off occupied land. In these regions, the landowners and the new regime used two political arguments to justify their actions: 1) these movements challenged the unity of Iran, 2) went against “Islamic order” which guarantees private property rights.

In various regions, under the protection of the pasdars and the local clergy, a layer of “kulaks” formed, who had profited from the redistribution of the land. In other regions, according to “Islamic principles”, tenant farming was replaced by share cropping.

One of the paradoxical effects of the revolution was to accentuate the movement of the peasants to the towns. Not only were they now able to move more easily but above all they were attracted by the demagogic promises of the new regime (the massive aid that the “disinherited” were supposed to be receiving). Thus, during the first year of the revolution, more than a million and a half people from the rural zones flocked to Tehran. Repressive measures were taken against the street vendors — whose numbers had multiplied due to this influx of people.

To respond to the open crisis in the countryside, a land reform law was prepared at the end of 1979. The Council of the Revolution adopted this law. A sector of the mullahs opposed it (for example the Ayatollah Golpayegani). They focused their criticisms on two articles of the law concerning the division of the land of the big landowners. This showed the common interests of the latter and the landowning clergy. According to them, the land reform law was “contrary” to Islamic principles. The Council of the Revolution then suspended it. Its presentation to parliament was put off to 1981. Faced with the needs of the rural masses, the leading circles of the Islamic Republic opted for the following measures: setting up committees composed of mullahs, landowners, pasdars, and peasants, in opposition to the village councils, in whose formation the poor peasants had played the dominant role; and repression and legal constraints to combat the radicalisation of the struggle by the poor peasants against the landowners and the middle men.

C) The resistance of the national minorities

The struggle of the national minorities was a part of the impetuous revolutionary upsurge at the beginning of 1979. The Kurds of Iran — more than 5 million strong and mainly of the Sunnite branch of Islam — have been in the forefront of this struggle. They have a strong fighting tradition and experienced nationalist cadres forged in struggle. Neither the pasdar corps nor the komitehs could be set up in Kurdistan. The Islamic regime therefore had no instrument for structuring and controlling the masses.

Already on February 19, Kurdish nationalist movement representatives presented their demands to the provisional government. On March 1, Sheikh Sayed Ezzedin Housseini, Kurdish religious and national leader, declared that the demand for autonomy did not involve separation from Iran. He stressed the desire of the Kurdish people to participate in the revolution, but also its determination to struggle for the right of self-determination. The response of the Bazargan government — in concert with the Khomeini leadership — was clear: autonomy was rejected. This orientation was confirmed in the first draft of the Constitution which began to circulate in June 1979. The mobilisation of the Kurds broadened against this chauvinist policy of the central government. On June 26, the KDPI issued an open letter to Khomeini asking him why the government gave its support to the “aghas who had supported the Shah to the last”. In July and August 1979, military attacks on the Kurdish population and its fighters (peshmergas) greatly intensified. Khomeini on many occasions denounced the Kurds as “communists, supported by foreign countries and enemies of the revolution”. On August 18, the KDPI was banned. Khomeini made himself Commander in Chief of the army, and all-out war was declared against the Kurds in August/September 1979. Baneh and Sanandaj were bombed. The army occupied Mahabad.

This offensive coincided with the first general assaults on democratic rights: measures on the status of women, threats against revolutionary organisations and closure of their public offices, the press law, and the banning of the newspaper Ayandegan. Khalkhali ordered young Kurdish fighters (peshmergas) executed. There were mass protest demonstrations in Sanandaj and Mahabad. The capacity of the Kurdish people to stand up to the attacks of the central government was confirmed. Kurdistan became the Achilles heel of the new regime.

Bazargan gave the following reasons as an explanation for Khomeini’s war against the Kurds: 1. to teach a lesson to all the national minorities; 2. “to shore up the morale and restore the backbone of a demoralised army”; 3. to keep the left organisations from making Kurdistan their sanctuary. (The Guardian, September 10, 1979.) The Kurds mounted a very effective military resistance. The regime’s troops were gradually forced to pull back. The peshmergas had inflicted a defeat on the Tehran government.

A tendency for growing mobilisations of national minorities was seen everywhere. Political and cultural organisations emerged in Khuzistan. They came together in the “Arab Cultural and Political Organisation”, one of whose leaders was Sheikh Mohammed Taher Shobeir Khagani. The Arabs (more than 3 millions) demanded control over local government, the right to revive their national culture, the teaching of Arabic to their children in school, an end to job discrimination, and a more equal share out of the oil revenues. The pasdars were quickly sent in to repress this movement in Khorammshahr and Ahwaz. Arrests and executions followed. In stages, between May 30 and June 4, a state of emergency was declared in this region. Shi’ite leaders accused the People’s Front for the Liberation of Palestine led by George Habash of supporting this movement. The PLO, which had opened an office in Ahwaz, had to defend itself also against these accusations.

In the Turkoman region, where since 1963 the royal family had taken the big estates, the Turkoman peasants occupied the land. They burnt the big landowners’ mansions. Peasant trade unions grew rapidly. Peasant shoras were elected in many villages. The peasants were supported by the Fedayeen. From May to September in the Gombad region the pasdars and the army attacked the peasants. Several peasant shora leaders were executed. The central regime was not simply opposed to the land occupations (some of which, to be sure, were organised by local landowners who wanted to “take back” land from the royal family). It wanted to bring to heel a minority that was expressing its opposition to the Islamic Republican regime (shown by its boycott of the referendum). The Fedayeen, who did not have a correct understanding of the national question, were incapable of giving perspectives to this struggle or of consolidating it.

In the Azerbaijan region, in December 1979 and January 1980, a series of demonstrations occurred. One of their central slogans was autonomy for Azerbaijan. This movement became intertwined with the conflict between Ayatollah Shariat Madari and Khomeini. The Azerbaijani Ayatollah was strongly opposed to a constitution that gave all power to Khomeini. The Muslim People’s Republican Party led by Abdolhassan Rostamkhani backed Shariat Madari. The latter used this movement as a lever in negotiating with Khomeini and as a means of building up his base in the region, which is strategic for access to Kurdistan. There were violent clashes, particularly since each camp had its own armed forces. On December 10, Bani Sadr was obliged to recognise “the reality of the national problem.” He opened negotiations in order to disorient the protest movement. Finally, a combination of repression, promises, and the domination of a traditional bourgeois leadership led this movement for national rights into an impasse. But it remains a thorn in the side of the Islamic Republic.

From the beginning, repression was the only response of the new regime to the legitimate demands of the oppressed national minorities, because the regime had very little possibility for coopting such movements into the institutions it established (i.e., the komitehs and pasdaran).

D) Students

Students were often in the vanguard of the struggle against the Shah. After February 1979, the universities became centres of free ideological and political debate. The religious currents linked to Khomeini had an influence on the campuses. But the universities were the strongholds of organisations such as the Mojahedeen and the Fedayeen. The clergy reacted against this free flowering of ideas and against the growing strength of organisations that opposed the dominant ideology and in particular sought to link up with the social and economic struggles of the toiling masses in order to carry the revolution forward.

Across the spectrum of the regime, from Bazargan to Khomeini, agreement existed on the need for suppressing the left in the universities. But there was a difference over the future of higher education. Those sectors linked to the modern capitalist bourgeoisie were concerned that the universities continue to carry out their function of training the technical, scientific and administrative “specialists” needed to assure the proper operation of the state apparatus and the economy. The Shi’ite clergy, on the other hand, considered it necessary to “Islamise” the universities, to carry out a “cultural revolution”. This battle over the future of the universities was part and parcel of the struggle for control of the state apparatus between the bourgeois-clerical factions.

A brief analysis of the struggles of the main social forces shows that from the beginning of the revolution the Khomeini leadership followed a two-sided strategy in order to impose its domination on the mass movement. Where it was easier to establish its control, it used selective repression, tactical retreats, economic concessions, demagogy, and so on in order to structure the mass movement as a transmission belt. Where such methods were not effective, above all in the case of the national minorities, it resorted to repression on a massive scale. Thus, on August 30, 1979, Khomeini told the Kurds: “We are going to bury you if you do not get out of the way”. The strength of the mass movement and the profound crisis of the state apparatus, however, allowed the workers, peasants and national minorities in the early stages to win a series of gains (wages, land, cheap loans for house building etc.) and means for waging struggle (shoras, village committees, arming of the Kurds, possibilities of increased activity by the left organisations). The defence of these gains was to prove decisive for the future development of the revolution.

From the first referendum to the embassy occupation

From February 1979, the first objective of bourgeois factions who had supported (more or less) the struggle against the Pahlavi dynasty was to achieve a return to calm, “normalisation” and economic recovery. To block the popular movement, which was broader than that of previous revolutions, they were ready to make all sorts of alliances. But the difference from the past was that the traditional political forces representing the bourgeoisie (National Front, Liberation Movement) found themselves subordinated to the clergy. The relationship of forces that underlay the alliance between the mullahs, the Bazaar, the liberal professions and a part of the state bureaucracy inherited from the monarchy favoured the clergy, who benefited from Khomeini’s prestige. The majority faction of the clergy in the Council of the Revolution needed time to set up a powerful political party (IRP) and administrative, military and legal structures. These were to be used either to curb the old administrative apparatus, which Khomeini and his supporters basically mistrusted, or to replace it. But the essential thing was above all from the beginning to not leave an opening for the masses and their organisations.

From the first days of the revolution sharp antagonisms grew between Bazargan, his government personnel and the Shi’ite dignitaries. The alliance between Bazargan and Khomeini could only be temporary. Bazargan did not want the clergy in the state apparatus. Nor did he want to see a growth of “revolutionary bodies” (the komitehs, pasdars, Revolutionary Tribunals) closely controlled by the clergy, which tended to replace the normal mechanisms of the bourgeois state. These bodies were to facilitate the hegemony of the Shi’ite clergy and its allies. They were to become the focus of a continual struggle between the various clerical factions that were at one another’s throats.

Bazargan and his supporters were essentially seeking to rationalise Iranian capitalist development, to reinforce the positions of bourgeois sectors through enlarging the internal market. If Bazargan accepted the nationalisations of the banks (practically all bankrupt) and the insurance companies (in June/July 1979), he was not a keen supporter of the nationalisation of industry. Nevertheless this was decided by the Council of the Revolution. The majority of the factories had big debts to the banks, very much bigger than their assets. These measures were essentially aimed against the recently formed big bourgeoisie that grew up in association with the Shah’s regime, which had largely fled the country. However, the bourgeois sectors that identified with the Bazargan government were afraid of the dynamic that could be unleashed by these measures, coming in the context of a mass movement still in full upsurge. Furthermore the Bazaar feared foreign trade would pass under state control, and that one of its major sources of revenue would partially disappear. Finally, the prime minister of the provisional government set up by Khomeini made sure not to modify relations between Iran and the imperialist powers, which regarded him and what remained of the old state apparatus as their trump card.

Khomeini immediately proposed a referendum in March 1979. The choice offered to the masses was: the monarchy or the Islamic Republic. Abstentions were very high in Kurdistan and the Turkoman region. The vote in favour of the Islamic Republic certainly won a very large majority — for the masses it was in fact a way of confirming their rejection of the Shah’s dictatorship and their desire for change — but the Khomeini leadership proclaimed that 99% of the electorate had voted in favour of the new regime.

For Khomeini the referendum was a way to avoid calling a real constituent assembly, although he had formally promised one. In August an assembly of 75 experts started its sessions, while the first wave of repression was in full swing. The mullahs ruled the roost there, holding 90% of the seats. A sharp battle over the question of power broke out between the supporters of Khomeini and Bazargan. It focused on the proposed clause in the constitution making the faghih (Khomeini) the supreme authority. At the beginning of December 1979, the Constitution was approved by another referendum. The objective of all these measures was to legitimise the Islamic Republican regime, to consolidate a legal framework within which the new institutions of the Islamic revolution could develop.

But then many elements came into contradiction with these projects of stabilisation. First, the victory of the Kurdish fighters forced the regime to retreat, upsetting its plans for stabilisation and reorganisation. This marked the opening of a period in October/November 1979 in which the repressive campaign became stalled. The mass movement in the factories and the neighbourhoods surged forward again. Secondly, conflicts grew between the circles that were seeking to stabilise the situation by means of a formula, such as that represented by Bazargan, on the one hand, and factions of the Shi’ite clergy, on the other.

It is within this context that the occupation of the American Embassy in November 1979 has to be seen. It was organised by the pasdars along with a faction of the “Students following the Imam’s line”. As soon as the occupation started, Khomeini spoke of the “Second Revolution”. By that he did not mean a leap forward in the development of workers self-organisation or the carrying out of a series of concrete anti-imperialist and anti-capitalist measures. No. He wanted in fact to emphasise that the embassy occupation should lead to the consolidation of the Islamic Republican regime and a regaining of political authority by the leading circles of the Shi’ite hierarchy.

From the beginning, the embassy occupation was seen by a large sector of the toiling masses as the conclusion of the process of overthrowing of the Shah and a definitive break with American imperialism — which they correctly identified with the ferocious Pahlavi dictatorship. The resignation, two days after the occupation, by Bazargan, who appeared linked to imperialist interests, strengthened this political conviction among the masses. In addition, Bazargan could also be made a scapegoat for all of Khomeini’s policy.

The embassy occupation and the seizure of the hostages triggered off a popular mobilisation. But the masses involved were offered only very vague objectives. And, on occasions, this movement was even counterposed to the perspectives opened up by workers struggles that were taking place at that time. So it did not become focused around a concrete social and economic programme that could offer real prospects for breaking the Iranian economy’s subordination to imperialism. The demonstrations in front of the American embassy, which expressed deepgoing anti-imperialist feelings of the people, were channelled and they were kept from converging with the shoras movement in the factories (which was still on the upswing and raising more and more radical demands). Thus, this movement could not develop to the point of providing an alternative to Khomeini. In fact, the demonstrations ended up strengthening the political hold of the Khomeini leadership, which made use of an anti-imperialist demagogy — which, of course, is hardly a new phenomenon in the history of the colonial revolution.

Most of the left political forces fell into the trap laid by Khomeini. Some declared that the whole thing was simply a manoeuvre, and limited themselves to denouncing the operation. Thus, they failed to take advantage of the opportunity offered by the radicalisation and to seek to give it a different direction by offering perspectives linked to the workplaces, working-class demands, and organising the masses. Others separated the anti-imperialist struggle from the fight against the ruling class and the Islamic Republican regime. Thereby, they elevated the anti-imperialist struggle above the real course of the class struggle in Iran. It is also true that the forces of the IRP or those linked to Khomeini’s party made it rather difficult for the revolutionary organisations to operate. They progressively suppressed all independent propaganda directed at the masses. In this climate, in which an alarm was raised about the dangers of an imperialist attack, propaganda opposing the proposed constitution was banned during the referendum campaign period. This Constitution established the power of the faghih (the supreme expert in Islamic law). It placed ultimate authority in his hands, giving him a right of veto on all questions. He could, for example, replace the President of the Republic elected by universal suffrage. The 12-member Council of Guardians can suspend any parliamentary decision, if it judges that it does not conform to Islamic law.

Forces such as the Tudeh Party (a pro-Soviet Communist Party) argued that the “imperialist threat” was so great as to justify silence about a Constitution that was, to be sure, open to question. Furthermore, despite all the regime’s efforts, this second referendum was extensively boycotted among the national minorities. Figures came out much later — during one of the unnumerable conflicts within the leading circles of the Islamic Republic — confirming that not more than 9 million people voted in this election.

Bazargan’s resignation reinforced the IRP’s positions. Its five founders — Beheshti, Mossavi Ardebili, Hashemi Rafsanjani, Khamenei and Bahonar — then formed the majority that transformed itself de facto into the government. All this paved the way for future presidential and parliamentary elections. Khomeini himself unambiguously spelt this out to Bani Sadr in the following way: “The seizure of the hostages has today unified the people; opponents do not dare to act, and we can get the Constitution approved without difficulty. We can proceed to presidential and parliamentary elections. When all that is done, we can let the hostages go.”

In January 1980 Mojahedeen offices were again attacked. Their spokesperson Massud Rajavi was banned from standing for president. Khomeini and Bani Sadr recommended these measures against the Mojahedeen, who rejected the Constitution and were not in favour of repression against national minorities. At the same time, clashes resumed in Kurdistan. In April 1980 a new large-scale offensive was launched against the Kurdish people. Attacks on the democratic rights of the masses were stepped up at the end of the spring. In April the universities were closed down on the pretext of launching an “Islamic cultural revolution”.

American imperialism swiftly took advantage of the occupation to start an hysterical campaign against the Iranian revolution and to prepare an eventual military intervention in the region. It seized this pretext to freeze Iranian assets in the United States, a project which it had in fact envisaged since February 1979. Iranian oil imports to the USA were suspended. The EEC European powers came round — with some delay — to support the blockade decreed in April 1980. The effects on Iran were twofold: on the one side the cost of imports increased; on the other, the revenue from exports decreased. A secondary consequence was a diversification of Iran’s commercial partners — increased trade with Sweden, Austria, Italy, Switzerland, South Korea, Brazil, Pakistan, Turkey, India and East European countries.

In April 1980 Carter organised the unsuccessful Tabas mission. The regime saw this commando operation as directly linked to a much bigger counterrevolutionary plan for Iran. This plan supposedly involved sectors of the army and the opposition linked to Bakhtiar. As a response to this, the leadership of the Islamic Republic struck out against a layer of officers left over from the Shah’s regime and consolidated the pasdar army, which was destined to serve as the mailed fist of the new regime.

The Embassy occupation and seizure of hostages ended in January 1981. Caught in the vise of the Iraqi counterrevolutionary military offensive, which begun in September 1980, and the imperialist blockade, the leadership of the Islamic Republic came to an agreement with the United States. The result was to leave billions of dollars belonging to the Iranian people in the hands of the American imperialists — without getting anything in exchange (such as arms, spare parts). The agreement, signed in Algiers by Nabavi, was seen by broad sectors as a failure or a capitulation. Fred Halliday commented: “The terms of the agreement which resulted in the release of the hostages represents a considerable defeat for Iran: the immediate payment of the debts contracted with American banks represented an unprecedented concession in the history of modern revolution”. (Merip Reports, March/April 1982.)

The IRP consolidates its domination

A) The January 1980 presidential elections, the provisions for which were laid down in the newly adopted Constitution, resulted in a landslide victory for Bani Sadr. He got 78% of the vote. One of the reasons for this success was undeniably the image he tried to project of being the defender of certain democratic rights. The consciousness of the masses was developing toward a break with the clergy. Khomeini kept himself aloof from these elections, fearing to associate himself with a losing candidate, which also helped Bani Sadr. The IRP candidate was heavily defeated.

Bani Sadr’s election to the presidency of the Republic, however, rather rapidly caused growing friction inside the leading circles. This arose over the key question for the Shi’ite hierarchy: the problem of maintaining and controlling “power apparatuses”, one inherited from the old regime, the other represented by the “revolutionary organisations”. Apart from his differences on that, Bani Sadr consistently indicated his agreement with the IRP leaders’ calls for cracking down on the Kurds, leftists and workers.

The elections to the new parliament (Majlis) in March and May 1980 gave the Council of the Revolution leaders and the IRP the opportunity to counterbalance the results of the Presidential elections. The IRP won hands down. In both rounds, it mobilised the “revolutionary organisations” (the komitehs and pasdars) to back up its campaign. Under the direction of Rafsanjani, the departments of the Ministry of the Interior laid the groundwork for the IRP victory. Moreover, this time Khomeini lined up with the Islamic Republican Party. Fraud was very widespread. In whole regions, including Kurdistan, candidates opposed to, or independent of the IRP, had their registration invalidated. Only 28% of the electoral roll participated in the second round. The IRP established its grip on the parliament. It took over the Council of Guardians and the Supreme Council of the Judiciary, as well as the mass media. It consolidated its bases. All of this deepened the crisis with Bani Sadr and his allies. The situation blew up when the IRP parliament designated Ali Rajai prime minister. Bani Sadr opposed his candidacy. Members of parliament opposed to the IRP were ousted from the chamber.

This conflict was not merely one of government institutions. It reflected a deeper social conflict that had some similarity with the one that led to Bazargan’s resignation. A sector of the Bazaar and the bourgeoisie (essentially, the manufacturers and big merchants), which were not ready to link up with forces nostalgic for the previous regime, sought at any cost a political solution that would lead to stabilisation. They saw Bani Sadr as a possible representative of their interests, even if they did not have the same sort of links with him as they did with Bazargan. These capitalist sectors opposed the policies of the top clergy on three levels. Firstly, they baulked at a bigger role for the clergy in the government and in political and economic life in general. Secondly, they considered that the clergy’s lack of any coherent plan for the economy would result in an economic crisis that would deal direct blows to the interests of sectors of the Bazaar. Thirdly, they feared the approach of a section of the clergy that, in order to strengthen its own position, was propagating a populist, “hate the rich” ideology. Aligned behind the IRP, on the other hand, were the Bazaar traders, the middlemen between the market and the rural areas and the traditional petty bourgeoisie.

This antagonism between the IRP leadership and Bani Sadr, which ended in the defeat of the latter in June 1981, was not therefore between the camp of the workers and their allies on one side and the bourgeoisie on the other. The conflict was really over problems that had to do with how to reconsolidate a capitalist state. The interests of the toiling masses did not lie with one camp or the other, even though the Khomeini leadership identified itself with mass mobilisations and the “revolutionary organisations”. These considerations, however, do not justify revolutionary socialists refusing to recognise the legitimacy of the democratic demands raised by sections of the poor masses that backed Bani Sadr.

The new institutions of the regime

The “revolutionary institutions” (the nahads), a product of revolutionary upsurge and prop of the new regime, were rocked by surges of the mass movement. They became the target of drives by the regime to “purify” them and housebreak them. Occasionally, members of the komitehs, or the pasdars, would intervene in a workplace or in a rural region and not play the role expected of them by the bosses or landowners. They would take sides with the workers and the peasants or, more simply, impose their will on the contending camps. Initially the nahads were supposed to move against the agents of the old regime. But they rapidly began to carry out actions against new opponents of the Islamic Republic. They organised interventions against sectors that first rallied to Bazargan and then to Bani Sadr, against members of old bourgeois nationalist formations inside the state apparatus. Often they exceeded their authority and provoked reactions, even among the clergy.

These institutions have also had the task, as clearly pointed out by Khomeini, Beheshti and Rafsanjani, of “combating the influence of the left” (systematically equated to the counter-revolution) and “maintaining order in the workplaces”.

Initially, the komitehs were not a centralised and homogeneous force. Various positions were expressed within them. But they were subordinated to the basic decisions of the faghih. After various “reorganisations” by Madhavi Kani from March 1979 on, they became financially supported by the state. In addition to direct subsidies, they make money from the distribution of basic necessities in the neighbourhoods (after the imposition of rationing due to the war). Their links with the IRP regime were to grow steadily closer. They also had a police role. These activities were to strengthen the hand of those within the komitehs who wanted to use these bodies as a means for direct financial/material gain (that is, corruption).

The corps of pasdars was placed under the leadership of the Council of the Revolution. It was then still relatively small. Control of the pasdars was to be the object of fierce struggles inside the leading circles of the Islamic Republic. Numerous disagreements arose over defining their role and relationship to the regular army. For nearly three years, neither the government, nor even the Council of the Revolution, could get a firm grip on this institution, which was, however, vital for the power of the new regime. It was the pasdars that were encharged with the carrying out of the Islamic regime’s major repressive operations against the national minorities, the left organisations and workers struggles. In turn, Hashemi Rafsanjani, Mosavi-Ardabili, then Khamenei of the IRP were encharged with maintaining liaison between the IRP leadership and the pasdars commanders. Finally, a direct link was established between these commanders and Khomeini. This new military institution of the Islamic Republic was put under the command of a pasdar council. The pasdars are funded by the state, as well as having their own sources of finance. The pasdars corps has a command structure in each important town and province. Inside the pasdars, the Mojahedeen of the Islamic Revolution, a secret reactionary fundamentalist organisation, is in charge of the secret “police work”. A law was passed by parliament after the beginning of the war that gave recruitment to the pasdars a higher priority than recruitment to the army. The pasdars totally controlled the Baseej (mobilisation committees) set up after the war broke out with Iraq. They are also present in the main factories.

The revolutionary tribunals set up in the wake of February 1979 went after the representatives of the previous regime who opposed the IRP but the Shah’s repressive apparatus was not systematically dismantled. Many SAVAK personnel were spared. No few of these collaborated with the new regime to hunt out left-wing militants. Later these tribunals were centralised and placed under the authority of the central Tehran court and the public prosecutors office (based in Evin prison). Revolutionary tribunals exist in the main towns. They are responsible for ensuring the application of “Islamic law”. The judges are chosen by the religious hierarchy. There is no check on them. The tribunals have their own military units and closely collaborate with the komitehs and the pasdars. Like the pasdars and the komitehs, the revolutionary tribunals did not for very long limit themselves to going after collaborators of the Pahlavi dictatorship. They were to strike against advocates of socialism and Marxism, who supported the revolution but not the “Islamic revolution”. The tribunals applied the precepts of Khomeini: “Iran will try to bring religion to the savage beasts that have attacked it. If it does not manage to do this, it will imprison them; in other words it will purge them. That is what all the prophets have done since the creation”. (Keyhan, January 14, 1982.) There are no rights of legal defence. Interpretation of Islamic law is extremely “flexible”, and the most arbitrary sentences are handed out.

The Foundation for the Humble (Mostafazeen) is a key mechanism of the Islamic Republican regime. It confiscated the assets of the upper layers of the old regime. It, therefore, possesses a minor economic empire, both in goods and property (factories, restaurants, hotels and cinemas). It is under the strict control of the IRP. It holds very large funds that enable the IRP to dish out material advantages to its supporters. It has, thus, been able to build a substantial patronage network. The scandals and corruption connected with this institution have been decried on many occasions, including by official representatives of the Islamic regime. It has never published detailed financial accounts.

The Crusade for Reconstruction (Jehad Sazendegi) has its field of activity mainly in the countryside. Thousands of youth involved themselves in this campaign, and they really did want to help the poor rural regions and carry forward the revolution. Rather rapidly, the IRP took it over. Recruitment was carried out through the mosques or the Islamic Associations in the schools. It has been given a role in carrying out the schemes of the Ministry of Planning in the rural areas. Members of the Crusade receive wages. As an institution, it is also funded out of the state budget. It serves above all as an instrument for building the IRP’s influence in the countryside. For example, members of the Crusade collaborate with the police forces in Kurdistan.

The Islamic Associations (Anjomanhaye Eslami) were set up to counterbalance the weight of the shoras in the factories. The regime sought to take the shoras in hand. But the Islamic Associations represented a more direct transmission belt, one more firmly tied to the IRP. Their purpose was to serve as organs of the IRP in the workplaces and to combat all forces based on the workers movement, although in some cases they momentarily slipped out of the role that had been assigned to them. In fact, Islamic Associations have been formed in the army, government apparatus, schools, hospitals... They ensure an IRP presence in all layers of society. The Office of the Monkerat (literally, “Sin”, that which “Must Not Be Done”) is encharged with monitoring the good conduct of citizens, and serves to complement the role of the Islamic Associations. This Office of “Sin” has its own tribunals and police.

All these diverse Islamic and revolutionary institutions are not “ideological associations”. They are directly connected to the Shi’ite hierarchy and the faghih. They are designed to guarantee the domination of the IRP and a significant part of the clergy over a bourgeois state apparatus. This is what fundamentally determines their nature and functions. Their large budgets are made possible, among other things, by the state’s revenue from oil. The presence of radicalised and anti-imperialist youth in some of them does not change this reality. These institutions and organisations form a whole system that has provided the foundation for building and consolidating the Islamic regime, based on a combination of “public assistance” and repression.

The IRP — towards a one-party system

The IRP has an “association” of thugs, the hezbollahis. They call themselves members of the Party of God (Hezbollah). The IRP was not able to take the initiative for repression directly. So, in an underhanded way it organised the hezbollahis. Ayat, a former member of the Iranian Party of Toilers, a right-wing group that supported the 1953 coup, was given charge of organising these goons. Armed with clubs and other weapons, the hezbollahis were assigned the job of subduing the various oppositions to the official party. Because of its “plebeian” social composition (including a lot of lumpen), this group gave the appearance of “emerging from the people”. Thus, it had a certain cover of “popular legitimacy” for its exactions. After Bani Sadr was eliminated, the IRP extended official recognition to the “association”. It also became a battleground of factional struggles within the clergy.

The Islamic Republican Party holds all the strings that link the various “revolutionary organisations”. Khomeini operates like a Bonaparte, throwing his weight this way and that in the factional struggles within the IRP. He is the cornerstone of a system of political domination by a significant faction of the Shi’ite hierarchy. At the same time, the concentration of power in his hands and the preponderant role he plays are the expression of the precariousness of the IRP regime.

To justify an opportunist policy towards the new regime, organisations such as the Tudeh Party or the Fedayeen-Majority talk about “major” differences between the various factions of the IRP. Some of these they define as progressive, “revolutionary” and “anti-imperialist”. Others, they say, are reactionary and anti-communist. The first, according to them, represent the leadership of the so-called anti-imperialist phase of the revolution and of “non-capitalist road of development” and are therefore deserving of support.

Differences do, of course, exist. The Hojatieh group, for instance, is one of the most openly conservative. It is violently opposed to the land reform, as well as to nationalisation of foreign trade. It is virulently anti-socialist, anti-communist and anti-Marxist. It has a very strong influence in the legal apparatus and the new political police, the SAVAMA. One of the leaders of the Hojatieh group, Falsafi, who was involved in the August 1953 coup against Mossadegh, has said that it is necessary to collaborate with former Savakis in combating the left. Another faction, the “Imam’s Line”, tends to indulge in populist demagogy denouncing the “rich” (the mostakbars, the “high and mighty”), which has been a frequently recurring theme in the Islamic nationalist movement.

The Hojatieh faction in the clergy bases itself on, and favours, capitalist sectors, merchants and local strongmen who have been quick to take advantage of the openings created by the revolution to climb the social scale. It is, therefore, opposed to growing state intervention in the economy. It is not happy about Khomeini’s appealing to the people in order to resolve differences within the clergy and to maintain his direct relationship with the masses. As the Hojatieh group sees it, this only retards the necessary social and economic stabilisation. This group favours more direct links with imperialism. It is also hostile to Khomeini’s claim to be the representative of the Twelfth Imam (the “Hidden Imam”, the “Lord of Time”, that is the messiah). Although this opposition is formally based on religious orthodoxy, its practical importance is that it denies that Khomeini has a right to absolute power or that he has the divine authority to establish justice and happiness on the earth, and, therefore, to meet the demands of the masses for reforms.

The “Followers of the Imam’s Line”, on the other hand, stress organising the masses and building up a system of mass transmission belts. This involves some populist measures and a role for a public sector in reorganising the power system. However, they show no less zeal than the Hojatieh faction in repressing all sorts of opponents of the regime — the old monarchist circles; bourgeois sectors disappointed with the results of the Islamic revolution; forces identifying with socialism or the workers movement, or even the advocates of a petty-bourgeois “socialistic”, populist version of Islam (as represented by the leftish Islamic theologian Shariati, one of the sources of inspiration for the Mojahedeen of the People). The anti-imperialist professions of the Imam’s Line group have served above all as a means for manipulating the mass movement. Over and above all the differences between them, all the currents in the regime are firmly opposed to any serious attack on private property, the market economy, or the capitalist state. They have also all opposed the extension of democratic rights and development of a strong and independent workers movement.

The IRP includes the section of the religious hierarchy involved in political activity. (A large part of the clergy refuses to get involved directly in state affairs and politics.) The IRP also serves as a liaison with local dignitaries and representatives of the Bazaar, which is one of the social bases of the regime. And this is over and above the social and economic empire the Shi’ite sect itself possesses. Some elements in the Bazaar are enjoying monopolies granted them by the authorities and have stepped into the openings left by their exiled or “purged” competitors. In this unstable market economy, fortunes are being won and lost rapidly.

Indeed, about 10% of the working population — in large part, plebeian or impoverished petty bourgeoisie — are directly or indirectly linked to institutions on which the new regime is based. This represents a mass social base for the Khomeini regime, which can also rely on a not inconsiderable part of the personnel of the state apparatus, both the “renewed” and the not so renewed.

The present pre-eminent position of the clergy is the result of the weakness of both the bourgeoisie and the working class. The bourgeoisie has lost its modernist wing, linked to the Shah, which was amputated by the February 1979 revolution. The traditional bourgeoisie, for its part, has not had structured political parties. It played only a marginal role in the anti-dictatorial struggle. The economic stagnation since 1979, as well as the activity of the masses, did not help it any to revive after the fall of the Shah. The working class, savagely repressed by the Shah, and suffering from a long series of betrayals by the Tudeh Party, had no solid organisations or political traditions of its own. The workers movement did not get a long enough democratic interlude to organise itself and win the political and organisational independence necessary for it to step forward as a contender for power.

The clergy as an institution has real economic, social and organisational power that has been built up over the course of centuries. It has played a role in the history of Iran, and it has had numerous links with the state. For special historical reasons, it has now come to the front of the political stage for the first time.

Here the first part of André Duret’s report ends. The concluding part — “The Crisis of the Iranian Revolution” — appeared in International Viewpoint no. 28, and takes the story on from the crushing of Bani-Sadr and the Mojahedeen in June 1981, through the Iran–Iraq war, to the tasks it set revolutionaries in 1983.

The statement surfaced this morning and it took a moment to register what was actually in it. Solma Ahmed, Sophie Wilson and Naomi Wimborne-Idrissi resigning from Your Party’s Central Executive Committee: that much anyone who watched July could have predicted. Buried on the second page, written in the flat register of a governance memo, was something else entirely. On 6 July, they write, they learned that CEC members ‘and possibly grassroots members, might face onerous personal liabilities as a result of unresolved governance issues’. Chair Jenn Forbes had referred to this in her July report to members as ‘serious items around liability, insurance, indemnity and data protection’.

By mid-afternoon a socialist who had stood for the CEC in January had been removed from Your Party’s South East regional WhatsApp group. His offence was suggesting that members read the resignation letter and judge for themselves whether it described the party accurately. Wimborne-Idrissi was cut from the official groups the same day. A document alleging bureaucratic closure was answered by bureaucratic closure, in public, within hours of publication.

Set the sequence out and the trajectory is not in dispute. The Many slate took fourteen of twenty-four seats in the February elections. The officers’ group was settled on 8 March. No official minutes have been published since. On 3 July three CEC members were suspended from a meeting due two days later, in relation to a Socialist Federation event (one of them had not even attended the event). On 12 July, a quorate special meeting, convened after the chair and secretary declined to call one, voted no confidence in Forbes, secretary Dawn Aspinall, and membership officer Cassi Bellingham. Corbyn refused to recognise it, on the grounds that he had not been present. Councillor Sam Gorst went on the nineteenth. Noor Jehan - elected on the For the Many slate - resigned as spokesperson a couple of weeks ago. Three more have gone today.

No minutes. No recorded votes. No answer on liability.

That last one is not a procedural complaint, and the left should stop treating it as one. Your Party registered with the Electoral Commission on 30 September 2025 with Marion Roberts as treasurer. A registered party’s treasurer carries statutory duties under PPERA, and a party that is an unincorporated association has no separate legal personality at all, which means its contracts, its employment obligations, its data-protection exposure and its debts rest on identifiable human beings. Which human beings, exactly, is precisely what the CEC says it was not permitted to find out. In the Spotlight Socialist Network chat on the day the letter landed, one member asked whether they should be worried and another answered that they should be worried ten thousand per cent; a third said he had thought the same thing on reading it but had no idea how to establish the facts. Fifty-five thousand people joined this party. Not one of them can currently discover whether they are personally on the hook for anything, and the body elected to represent them was threatened with discipline for asking.

The obvious reading is that this is a Corbyn problem: the leader who could not let go, surrounded by people protecting him from his own membership. But that is not quite right either. Corbyn’s personal conduct explains the tone of the thing, not its architecture. What the resigners describe is a party built as an apparatus for parliamentary representation, onto which a membership was bolted afterwards as a source of subscriptions and canvassers. Their own formulation is sharper than anything the Trotskyist left has managed this year: the rift, they write, is ‘between bureaucrats whose priority is running a parliamentary party with loyal, unquestioning foot-soldiers at local level, and class-conscious activists striving to build a movement which empowers the grassroots through democratic, transparent, accountable campaigning institutions’. Three CEC representatives with no prior involvement in the Fourth International’s tradition arrived at its key conclusions about broad parties after walking into the CEC and coming face to face with a caricature of Scargill’s SLP.

Chris Saltmarsh’s autopsy in Prometheus, published the day before the resignations, conveniently divides the British socialist left into a bureaucratic wing rooted in Labour and the unions, a doctrinal wing of the Marxist organisations, and a movementist wing of issue-based activism, and concludes that each must put its own house in order before unity is attempted again. There is real analytical work in the piece and it deserves engagement rather than dismissal. The categories will not hold, though. The doctrinal bucket collapses the SWP, whose method has been control and recruitment for four decades and which nobody in the movement now trusts on either count, together with organisations that formed specifically to escape that method. ACR exists because Mutiny and then Socialist Resistance both concluded that ‘orthodox democratic centralism’, the unhappy practice far removed from both Marx’s and Lenin’s dreams for communist organisation, produced bureaucratic practice, wasted cadre and a poor record of supporting women and Black and disabled comrades. Filing it alongside the SWP tells you something about the filing system, not about ACR.

A Scottish comrade ran a control-F over the article looking for Scotland, for Scottish, for Dundee, for ISEC, for the name of the party’s most conspicuous Scottish casualty. Nothing. Not one instance. Your Party’s treatment of its Scottish membership was among the clearest demonstrations of the bureaucratic method available anywhere in its short life, and an autopsy of the British left that cannot see north of Carlisle is an autopsy of the English left with the label changed. As per, as per.

There is a further difficulty with holding up any current formation as the model of democratic culture. Comrades who tried to join Ecosocialist Horizon report a two-stage interview process, a period of silence during which the leadership was assembled and the priorities decided, and a self-description as small by design. One of them joked that it was harder to get into than the Illuminati. That may be a perfectly defensible way to build a cadre nucleus. It is not a platform from which to instruct the rest of the left about openness.

What the schema misses altogether is the mass movement. Two years of Palestine mobilisations on a scale Britain has not seen since 2003, and the schema has no term for the hundreds of thousands who marched. Class struggle appears nowhere as a category of analysis. Sort the three lefts into whatever boxes you like: the question of which of them can relate to that layer, and on what terms, is the only question that decides anything, and it is not a question about organisational culture at all.

So what should the left be doing in the next six weeks, before Your Party’s autumn conference does or does not scrap collective leadership? The answer is not another statement of principle. It is finding out who is liable, publishing the answer, and putting it in front of fifty-five thousand people who are entitled to know. The Electoral Commission register, Companies House and the ICO register are all public. Any organisation with a competent researcher and a fortnight could establish Your Party’s actual legal form, who the responsible officers are and what exposure attaches to whom, and doing so would be worth more to the membership than every think-piece written about the crisis combined. Alongside that: publication of all minutes and recorded votes since 8 March, an elected conference arrangements committee with a delegate basis and proper notice, external handling of the misconduct complaints, and no non-disclosure agreements attached to a party email address. Demands that ordinary members can move at branch level, in rooms where the argument is still live.

Whether the Socialist Federation’s delayed conference amounts to anything is a separate question and an honestly open one. ACR’s July conference declined to settle affiliation before seeing who turns up and what the balance of forces is, which was the right call and remains the right call, though the longer it holds, the more it starts to look like waiting rather than judgement. The Greens under Polanski will be administering cuts in Lambeth and Manchester within the year. Neither is the vehicle. Neither is close to being the vehicle, and pretending otherwise now would repeat the error we have spent the summer diagnosing in other people. Or something close to that error, anyway. The analogy does not quite hold and this paragraph should probably not end here.

The resigners write that they will hold the strands of the movement together ‘until new opportunities arise’. Opportunities do not arise. Left Unity did not arise, Respect did not arise, the Socialist Alliance did not arise, and none of them survived contact with the question of who controls the money, the staff and the disciplinary machinery. Your Party did not fail because the wrong people won an election in February. It failed because nobody insisted, in the summer of 2025, that those questions be settled in front of the membership before a single MP put their name to anything. That argument was available. Some of us made it. It was not made loudly enough, and the honest thing to say today is that we do not yet know where it gets made next.

Appendix: Who is liable for Your Party? A briefing from the public registers

Prepared 14 August 2026. Sources are public records. This is not legal advice.

Why this matters

The resignation statement issued on 14 August 2026 by Solma Ahmed, Sophie Wilson and Naomi Wimborne-Idrissi records that on 6 July they learned CEC members, ‘and possibly grassroots members, might face onerous personal liabilities as a result of unresolved governance issues’, referred to in Jenn Forbes’s July report as ‘serious items around liability, insurance, indemnity and data protection’.

Members have no way of finding out what this means from inside the party. Most of it can be established from Companies House, the Electoral Commission register and the ICO register, all of which are public. What follows is what those registers actually show.

Established from the public record

Your Party UK Ltd, company number 16619803, no longer exists.

It was incorporated on 31 July 2025 as a private company limited by guarantee without share capital, SIC code 94920, activities of political organisations, registered at The Atrium, 89-93 Fonthill Road, Finsbury Park, London N4 3JH.

Its directors on incorporation were Jeremy Corbyn, Zarah Sultana, Ayoub Khan, Shockat Adam Patel and Iqbal Mohamed, with Adnan Hussain as company secretary. Mohamed resigned with effect from 20 November 2025.

An application to strike the company off the register, form DS01, was filed on 27 January 2026. The first Gazette notice followed on 3 February 2026 and the company was dissolved on 21 April 2026.

It never filed accounts and never filed a confirmation statement. There is therefore no public record of what assets, income or liabilities the company held during the nine months it existed.

The party confirmed the change on the record. On 27 January 2026 a Your Party spokesperson told City AM that the strike-off was ‘a planned step in our democratic founding process’ and that the party would become ‘an unincorporated association governed in line with our democratic, member-approved constitution, regulated by the Electoral Commission’.

A second company remains active. MoU Operations Ltd, company number 16359847, is a private company limited by guarantee, SIC code 94920, incorporated on 2 April 2025 and registered at 71-75 Shelton Street, Covent Garden, London WC2H 9JQ. Its original directors were Jamie Driscoll, Andrew Feinstein and Dr Bethan Winter, appointed 2 April 2025. Feinstein and Winter resigned on 25 October 2025 and Driscoll on 28 October 2025. Zarah Sultana was appointed on 28 October 2025 and is now its sole director. Its accounting period ends 30 April 2026 and its first accounts are due on 2 January 2027.

Electoral Commission registration. Your Party was registered as a political party on 30 September 2025. Secondary sources give the registered treasurer as Marion Roberts, the registered leader as Jeremy Corbyn and the nominating officer as Adnan Hussain, later Andrew Jordan.

What the unincorporated form means in law

The Labour Party and the Liberal Democrats are also unincorporated associations, so the form itself is unremarkable. The exposure comes from what surrounds it.

An unincorporated association has no separate legal personality. It cannot own property, enter a contract, employ anyone or be sued in its own name. Everything it appears to do is in law done by identifiable individuals, normally the members of its management committee. In Your Party’s case that committee is the CEC.

The practical consequences follow from that single fact.

• Contracts and debts. Office leases, supplier agreements, venue bookings and any borrowing are entered into by individuals. Those individuals, and often those who authorised them, are personally liable, potentially jointly and severally, and the liability is not capped by the association’s funds.

• Employment. Staff are employed by individuals, not by the association. Claims for unfair dismissal, discrimination, unpaid wages or constructive dismissal are brought against those individuals. The resignation statement refers to complaints of serious misconduct including by senior party staff. Where employment claims arise in an unincorporated association, committee members can find themselves respondents in their own names. Employers’ liability insurance is compulsory under the Employers’ Liability (Compulsory Insurance) Act 1969 for any organisation employing staff. Members are entitled to know that a policy is in force and who is named on it.

• Assets. An unincorporated association’s property must be held on trust by named trustees or a custodian body. Without a trust deed, the ownership of subscriptions, donations and equipment is legally unclear, and the individuals in whose names accounts are held may be treated as holding them personally.

• Data protection. The controller of personal data cannot be the association, because the association is not a legal person. The controller will be an individual or a set of joint controllers. Your Party holds the personal data of a membership reported at 55,000 in December 2025. Joint controllers can be individually liable for enforcement action and for compensation claims by data subjects. The ICO’s register of fee payers should show who has registered and paid the data protection fee.

• Bona vacantia. This is the sharpest unanswered question. When a company is dissolved, any property it still holds passes to the Crown as bona vacantia under section 1012 of the Companies Act 2006. Your Party UK Ltd was dissolved on 21 April 2026 having filed no accounts. Members who paid subscriptions or made donations between 31 July 2025 and that date are entitled to know which entity received their money, whether any of it was still held by the company at dissolution, and if so what has been done to recover it.

Statutory exposure under PPERA

The registered treasurer of a registered party carries personal statutory duties under the Political Parties, Elections and Referendums Act 2000.

Section 47 of PPERA provides that where a statement of accounts, notification or auditor’s report is not delivered to the Commission before the end of the relevant period, the person who was treasurer of the party immediately before the end of that period is guilty of an offence, subject to a defence of reasonable excuse. The liability is the treasurer’s personally, not the party’s.

Electoral Commission guidance sets the filing deadlines. A party with gross income or total expenditure of £250,000 or less files within four months of the end of its financial year. A party above that threshold must file audited accounts within six months and seven days. Accounting units with income or expenditure above £25,000 have their own reporting obligations. Changes to registered officers must be notified within fourteen days.

A party reporting 55,000 members in December 2025 is very likely to have crossed the £250,000 threshold, which would put it in the audited category. Its financial year end is not something I have been able to establish; if it is 31 December, audited accounts would have fallen due in the first week of July 2026. The liability question surfacing on the CEC on 6 July is consistent with an accounts deadline, but that is a hypothesis and should be presented as one, not as a finding.

The chronology worth putting in front of members

The strike-off application was filed on 27 January 2026. CEC nominations and elections ran from 5 to 23 February 2026. The officers’ group was formed on 8 March. The company was dissolved on 21 April. The CEC learned of the personal liability exposure on 6 July, and by 14 August seven of its members had resigned or been forced out.

The CEC elected in February inherited a party whose limited liability vehicle was already in the process of being dissolved. Whether the candidates knew that when they stood is a question the party should answer.

Questions the party should be asked

• Does the constitution contain an indemnity for CEC members and for ordinary members, and if so what does it cover and what funds stand behind it?

• Who are the trustees or custodians holding the party’s assets, and into which entity’s bank account are membership subscriptions paid?

• Which entity received members’ money between 31 July 2025 and 21 April 2026, did any assets remain in Your Party UK Ltd at dissolution, and if so has a bona vacantia recovery been made?

• Are officers’ liability insurance and employers’ liability insurance in force, who is the named insured, and what are the limits?

• Who is the registered data controller for the membership database, and is the party or an individual on the ICO register of fee payers?

• What is the party’s financial year end, when are its audited accounts due to the Electoral Commission, and have they been filed?

• What is MoU Operations Ltd’s present relationship to the party, given that a sitting MP is its sole director and its first accounts are not due until January 2027?

  ---

Sources

Companies House, YOUR PARTY UK LTD, company 16619803: https://find-and-update.company-information.service.gov.uk/company/16619803

Companies House, MOU OPERATIONS LTD, company 16359847: https://find-and-update.company-information.service.gov.uk/company/16359847

City AM, ‘Exclusive: Corbyn and Sultana’s Your Party UK Ltd to be deleted’, 27 January 2026: https://www.cityam.com/exclusive-corbyn-and-sultanas-your-party-uk-ltd-to-be-deleted/

Political Parties, Elections and Referendums Act 2000, section 47: https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2000/41/section/47

Electoral Commission, ‘Introduction to being a party treasurer’: https://www.electoralcommission.org.uk/sites/default/files/pdf_file/intro-party-treasurer-rp.pdf

Electoral Commission, ‘How to maintain your registered political party’: https://www.electoralcommission.org.uk/full-guidance/how-maintain-your-registered-political-party

ICO, register of fee payers: https://ico.org.uk/about-the-ico/what-we-do/register-of-fee-payers/

TL;DR: Part 9 of the ‘With Washington and Moscow’ series. Not an analytical piece: a tool for conversations that happen at short notice in group chats, meetings, and pub debates. Each entry is self-contained. Where the evidence is genuinely contested, it is described as such. Seventeen claims are answered. The 2014 coup claim has to explain why the coup produced an OSCE-observed election in which Svoboda fell from 10.45 to 1.16 per cent. The civil war claim runs into Igor Girkin, the FSB colonel who seized Sloviansk and later said he pulled the trigger of this war, a hostile witness the Kremlin has since jailed. The "not one inch eastward" pledge was real and verbal, and Russia then signed the 1997 Founding Act accepting that every state chooses its own security arrangements. The Johnson-at-Istanbul story rests on one Arakhamia sentence while omitting the next one, and on a visit that came ten days after the talks ended. The proxy claim collapses against Kursk, the refinery strikes and the Chevron tankers. Also covered: language law, Minsk, the UN Nazism resolution, Russia's imperialist character, the polling shift to 69 per cent for negotiations alongside 80 per cent refusing territorial concessions, and Baltic and Georgian agency in NATO accession.

Many of these claims circulate simultaneously through Russian state media and MAGA-aligned outlets — a convergence examined in Part 10 of this series. This document addresses the factual substance regardless of the source.

1. ‘The CIA staged a coup in 2014 and installed a far-right government in Ukraine’

A coup is the sudden, illegal seizure of power. If the CIA staged a coup, the people who came to power should surely be its agents or tools. Ukraine held a presidential election on 25 May 2014, observed by the OSCE. A mainstream liberal-conservative, Petro Poroshenko, won 54.7% of the vote in the first round. The far right was routed electorally: Svoboda’s vote was decimated, from 10.45% in the 2012 parliamentary elections to 1.16%. Dmytro Yarosh of Right Sector received 0.7%. A coup, then, that produced a democratic election — and a democratic election that the far right lost by a factor of ten.

Victoria Nuland’s phone call, in which she discussed with the US ambassador which opposition politicians Washington preferred, is real and does constitute evidence of US interference in Ukrainian politics. But interference is not a coup, and the interference did not produce a far-right government: it produced an election in which the far right was comprehensively rejected. Yanukovych was removed not by putsch but by a unanimous vote of the Verkhovna Rada — including members of his own Party of Regions — after he fled to Russia. He was removed by Ukrainian parliamentarians, not installed by Americans. The coup narrative requires you to explain why the existing parliament remained in power, the “CIA’s coup” produced an election, and why that election produced a result in which the CIA’s preferred far-right parties lost decisively.

2. ‘There were eight years of civil war in the Donbas before the invasion — Russia was responding to an ongoing conflict’

The framing does real work. If the Donbas conflict from 2014 was a civil war — a spontaneous uprising of Russian-speaking Ukrainians against Kyiv — then Russia’s 2022 invasion becomes a response to eight years of Ukrainian aggression against its own population rather than the continuation of a Russian imperial project. The framing is formally applicable in the same way that calling Afghanistan in the 1980s a civil conflict was formally applicable: Afghans were fighting, but the external sponsorship was central and publicly documented.

The most important witness against this framing is not a Western government or a Ukrainian source. It is Igor Girkin, the former FSB colonel who led the April 2014 seizure of Sloviansk, the operation that initiated armed conflict in the Donbas. Girkin has said publicly that he ‘pulled the trigger on the war’ and that without his unit’s intervention the conflict would have ‘fizzled out.’ The Moscow Times reported his statement in November 2014: ‘I was the one who pulled the trigger of this war. If our unit hadn’t crossed the border, everything would have fizzled out.’ This is not a Ukrainian government claim, a NATO briefing, or a Western newspaper’s inference. It is the account of the man who did it, speaking about his own actions.

Girkin is a former officer of Russia’s Federal Security Service. The armed formations he commanded in 2014 were organised, supplied, and directed by the Russian state — a finding confirmed by the Dutch-led Joint Investigation Team examining the MH17 shootdown, which placed Girkin’s forces at the centre of the operation that brought down the aircraft. The ‘separatist’ leaders were not local figures who spontaneously took up arms; they were Russian intelligence and military personnel operating under cover of local grievance.

Girkin was arrested in Russia in July 2023, charged with extremism after publicly criticising Putin’s conduct of the war he himself initiated. His arrest does not rehabilitate him. It does make him harder to dismiss: the Kremlin imprisoned its own commander for the crime of saying the 2022 invasion was being run incompetently. He is not a Western asset. He is a Russian nationalist who started a war on Russia’s behalf and later fell out with the government that sent him. His account of what happened in 2014 is the account of a hostile witness to the Ukrainian case — and it confirms the Ukrainian case.

3. ‘The conflict is fundamentally about ethnic and linguistic divisions between Russian-speaking and Ukrainian-speaking communities’

The ethnic framing has an obvious appeal: it presents the conflict as a tragic collision of communities rather than an act of aggression, and it appears neutral. It is wrong about the main thing.

Start with the personnel. Zelensky is a native Russian speaker, raised in Kryvyi Rih, who learned Ukrainian as an adult and still speaks it with an accent. The Azov Regiment, which Russian propaganda identifies as the flagship of Ukrainian ethnonationalism, takes its name from the Sea of Azov — a coast predominantly Russian-speaking since Tsarist colonisation in the eighteenth century. The Ukrainian far right, to the extent it exists as a significant political force, draws heavily from regions and communities that the ethnic conflict model would place on the Russian side of the divide. The categories break down under examination.

More importantly, the timing does not fit. The immediate trigger of the 2013-14 crisis was not an ethnic confrontation. It was President Yanukovych’s last-minute suspension of the EU-Ukraine Association Agreement in November 2013, under direct Russian economic pressure. Russia had explicitly threatened trade consequences if Ukraine signed. The Euromaidan protests that followed were not a movement of Ukrainian speakers against Russian speakers. They were a movement about economic and political sovereignty: whether Ukraine had the right to choose its own trading relationships and institutional alignments. Russia’s stated concern, expressed clearly in Kremlin communications at the time, was losing the economic leverage that made Ukraine part of its sphere of influence.

Ukraine’s trade reorientation since 2014 makes the underlying interests visible. Russia was Ukraine’s largest trading partner before the crisis. By the early 2020s the EU had become its primary trade partner. That shift — not linguistic grievances — is what Russian intervention was designed to prevent. The class interests at stake are not those of Russian-speaking communities in the east. They are the interests of a Russian state and bourgeoisie whose economic leverage over a neighbouring country was being dismantled by that country’s sovereign choice. An analysis that calls this an ethnic conflict is not wrong about every detail. It is wrong about the main thing.

4. ‘Russian language rights were suppressed in the Donbas, justifying Russian intervention’

Ukraine’s 2012 Kivalov-Kolesnichenko Law gave regional official status to any language spoken by more than 10% of a region’s population — including Russian across the eastern and southern oblasts. After Yanukovych’s departure, the Rada voted to repeal it. The acting president Turchynov declined to sign, under pressure from domestic and international opinion to avoid inflaming the situation in the east; the repeal vote, though real, never took effect. The law remained in force.

Ukraine’s 2019 Language Law, passed under Zelensky, made Ukrainian mandatory in public and official life — the civil service, the courts, public-facing retail, public events — with sector-specific requirements phased in over time, and with explicit exceptions for minority language use in private, in media, and in education, including in Russian. The law did not prohibit Russian; it required functional Ukrainian literacy for public roles. The Venice Commission of the Council of Europe, which monitors minority rights, recommended amendments to certain provisions but did not characterise it as suppressive of minority rights overall.1

The distinction being collapsed here is between a state promoting its majority language in public life and a state prohibiting a minority language. The first is standard practice across Europe. The second would be a serious human rights violation. The 2019 law falls within the first category: state promotion of a majority language in public roles, with explicit protections for minority language use in private and community life. The Venice Commission’s concerns were specific and technical, not a finding that Russian speakers faced systematic suppression. If requiring officials to operate in the national language justified invasion, Russia would have grounds to intervene in Latvia, Estonia, the French regions of Belgium, or Wales. Russia has not chosen to make that argument, which suggests the language rights framing is a post-hoc justification rather than a genuine principle.

5. ‘NATO promised not to move one inch eastward’

The phrase comes from US Secretary of State James Baker’s verbal assurance to Gorbachev on 9 February 1990, during negotiations over German reunification. Baker said NATO’s jurisdiction would not extend ‘one inch eastward.’ This is confirmed by declassified documents held at the National Security Archive at George Washington University, and is broadly accepted among historians. What is disputed — and the answer matters — is whether it constitutes a binding commitment. It was an oral assurance, never written into any treaty, and subsequent US administrations explicitly said no such commitment had been made. The verbal assurance was never enshrined in treaty. Russia did raise concerns about NATO expansion through the 1990s — those objections are documented — but the instrument through which Russia negotiated its actual position was the 1997 Founding Act, and Russia signed it.

The 1994 Budapest Memorandum, under which Ukraine surrendered the world’s third-largest nuclear arsenal, committed the US, UK and Russia to respect Ukraine’s sovereignty and territorial integrity. It says nothing about NATO membership (which, to be clear, no wing of the Trotskyist movement advocates).

The 1997 NATO-Russia Founding Act is where the legal framework was established. Russia signed it. It explicitly established that both parties accepted the right of every state to choose its own security arrangements. In exchange, NATO committed not to permanently station substantial combat forces or nuclear weapons in new member states — a commitment NATO argues it has honoured, through the distinction between permanent stationing and rotational deployments — a distinction Russia contests. Yeltsin used the Founding Act to make NATO enlargement politically survivable at home: Russia joined the Partnership for Peace, participated in the architecture of post-Cold War European security, and accepted that the states of Central and Eastern Europe could join NATO if they chose. The ‘broken promise’ narrative requires treating Baker’s 1990 verbal assurance as binding while treating the 1997 treaty Russia itself signed as irrelevant. That is not how international law works, and it is not how the Russian government treated it at the time.

6. ‘Ukraine was planning to let the US build military bases on Russia’s border, forcing Russia’s hand’

Ukraine’s constitution, Article 17, explicitly prohibits the stationing of foreign military bases on Ukrainian territory. This is not a post-2022 addition; it has been in the constitution since 1996. Ukraine adopted a formal policy of non-bloc status and neutrality in its 2010 Law on the Foundations of Domestic and Foreign Policy — a law passed under the pro-Russia president Yanukovych, who wanted to improve relations with Moscow. Ukraine had no active application for NATO membership before the 2022 invasion: the Membership Action Plan had never been granted, and NATO’s own position was that Ukrainian membership was a long-term possibility rather than an immediate prospect. A 2016 European Parliament briefing described NATO membership for Ukraine as ‘a distant prospect.’ The 2019 constitutional amendment adding NATO membership as an aspiration was passed after Russia had already annexed Crimea and started the Donbas war — as a response to aggression, not a provocation of it.

The premise of the argument — that Russia invaded to prevent NATO bases or imminent membership — requires ignoring Ukraine’s own constitution, its formal neutrality law, NATO’s actual position, and the sequence of events. Russia invaded Ukraine in 2014, when Ukraine was formally neutral and had no NATO membership application. The invasion preceded any serious membership prospect; it did not follow one. And the 1994 Budapest Memorandum, to which Russia was a signatory, committed it to respect Ukraine’s sovereignty and territorial integrity regardless.

The December 2021 Russian ultimatum makes the argument harder still to sustain. Two months before the full-scale invasion, Russia issued formal security demands requiring NATO to roll back to its 1997 borders, remove troops and infrastructure from all states that had joined since then, and permanently exclude Ukraine from membership. These demands were not addressed to Zelensky, who had won 73% of the vote the previous year on a platform of deescalation and diplomacy. They were addressed to NATO and the United States, and they were unanswerable by any democratic Ukrainian government: no elected Ukrainian leader could permanently cede the country’s sovereign right to choose its own security arrangements on Russia’s instructions. Russia’s conditions for not invading had nothing to do with what Ukraine actually did or who governed it. They required Ukraine’s permanent strategic subordination.

7. ‘Ukraine and the US voted against a UN anti-Nazi resolution’

The resolution is ‘Combating glorification of Nazism, neo-Nazism and other practices that contribute to fuelling contemporary forms of racism.’ Ukraine and the United States have voted against it. The EU member states and the UK have abstained. The resolution is annually tabled by Russia. It is opposed not because its signatories support Nazis but because, as Ukraine’s mission to the UN has stated, the resolution is instrumentalised by Russia to provide legal and rhetorical cover for its ‘denazification’ pretext for invading Ukraine. Voting for a resolution that Russia deploys as justification for its invasion is not an expression of anti-fascism.

The actual political context makes the double standard visible. Ukraine’s far right received under 2% of the vote in 2014. Zelensky, who is Jewish and Russian-speaking, won 73% of the vote in 2019. Russia, meanwhile, hosts the Russian Imperial Movement — designated a terrorist organisation by the US State Department specifically for its neo-Nazi ideology — and has embedded ultranationalist symbolism and personnel into its military and state structures: the Z symbol, adopted as emblem of the invasion, has been widely associated with neo-imperial ideology; Wagner Group, until its collapse in 2023, was a paramilitary force whose founder Dmitry Utkin’s visible neo-Nazi tattoos became emblematic of its ideology — a force the Kremlin officially denied commanding while directing operationally. Part 6 of this series, ‘Nazi-Infested, Unless It’s Russia’, documents this in detail.

8. ‘Boris Johnson scuppered a peace deal at Istanbul in April 2022’

The claim rests on a single television interview given by Davyd Arakhamia, Ukraine’s lead negotiator, in November 2023. Arakhamia said Johnson ‘came to Kyiv and said that we will not sign anything with you.’ That sentence is quoted constantly. What is quoted far less often is the sentence that follows, in the same interview: ‘there is no, and there was no, trust in the Russians that they would do it.’ Arakhamia said Ukraine’s primary reason for not signing was the absence of any credible enforcement mechanism — not Johnson’s visit. The timeline is also awkward for the claim. The substantive Istanbul sessions were 29–30 March 2022. Reports of the Bucha massacre became public internationally from 1–2 April, as Ukrainian forces entered the town. Johnson arrived in Kyiv on 9 April — ten days after the talks had already concluded without agreement, and a week after the images from Bucha had shifted Ukrainian public opinion against any settlement.

What Russia was actually demanding at Istanbul matters here and is rarely mentioned by those who repeat the Johnson claim: a permanent cap on Ukraine’s armed forces at 85,000–100,000 personnel (Ukraine then had around 250,000); prohibitions on specified categories of heavy weapons; a constitutional ban on NATO membership; and, in the original draft, Russia itself as one of Ukraine’s security guarantors — the state conducting the invasion would guarantee the invaded country’s security. Former Israeli PM Naftali Bennett, also frequently cited, said he felt ‘blocked’ in his mediation efforts but also said Russia had ‘given up on killing Zelensky’, suggesting the terms were shifting in ways that had nothing to do with London.

The evidence available, including the sources campists themselves cite, does not support the claim that Johnson killed a deal Ukraine was ready to sign. It supports a more complicated picture: terms that Ukraine had serious reasons to reject on their own merits, a trust deficit produced in part by the Bucha massacre, and a post-hoc narrative that conveniently externalises the breakdown.

9. ‘Western leaders admitted the Minsk agreements were never meant to be implemented — proving Western bad faith’

The statements are real. In December 2022, former German Chancellor Angela Merkel told Die Zeit that the Minsk agreements had given Ukraine time to build up its armed forces. Former French President François Hollande made similar remarks to Le Monde. Former Ukrainian President Poroshenko made analogous statements. These are genuine admissions and they circulate widely because they are real.

What is less often examined is what they show — and what follows from them.

Both sides used the Minsk period to consolidate their positions. Ukrainian forces strengthened defensive lines in the east. Russia used the same period to establish deeper control over occupied territories, integrate local armed formations with Russian command structures, and prepare what was already evidently planned as a larger war. Russian ceasefire violations during the Minsk period were documented by the OSCE Special Monitoring Mission, whose reports were available in real time — Russia broke the accords immediately and repeatedly, including spectacularly in the Second Battle of Donetsk Airport in January 2015. Ukraine was not the only party buying time, and it was not the first to violate the terms. Zelensky, for his part, accepted the Steinmeier formula in October 2019 — a significant concession that would have granted Donbas special autonomous status — and Russia did not reciprocate.

More importantly, the Minsk agreements concerned a specific question: the status of separatist-controlled areas of Donetsk and Luhansk oblasts. Even accepting the worst reading of Ukrainian bad faith, non-implementation of an agreement about two partially-occupied oblasts in eastern Ukraine does not provide justification for the full-scale military invasion of the entire country on 24 February 2022. Russian forces attacked Kyiv, Kharkiv, Mykolaiv, Kherson, Zaporizhzhia — cities and regions with no connection to the Minsk framework whatsoever. The scale of the 2022 invasion is incommensurable with the grievance the Minsk narrative identifies.

The argument also requires amnesia about who made Minsk necessary in the first place. The agreements were a response to an armed conflict that Igor Girkin — the Russian FSB officer who initiated it — has said he ‘pulled the trigger on’. Ukraine signed Minsk under military pressure, after Russian intervention created a conflict Ukraine then had to manage. Examining the quality of Ukraine’s response to that situation without examining how the situation was created is not a material analysis. It is a moral audit applied selectively.

10. ‘Ukraine is simply a proxy of the United States and NATO, with no independent agency’

A proxy army does what its sponsor tells it to do. The record of this war shows Ukraine repeatedly not doing what Washington tells it to do — on military strategy, on which targets to strike, on when and where to operate, and most recently on whose commercial interests to protect.

The cases divide usefully into four categories.

Advice Ukraine openly rejected. In February 2022, as Russian forces approached Kyiv, the United States offered to evacuate Zelensky. He refused — ‘I need ammunition, not a ride’ — and remained in the capital. This was not a symbolic gesture; it was a decision that sustained Ukrainian state continuity and changed the course of the war. A proxy would have taken the evacuation. Throughout 2024, Washington urged Ukraine to halt or limit drone strikes on Russian oil refineries, citing concerns about Russian retaliation and disruption to global oil prices. Ukrainian officials defended the targets as militarily legitimate and continued the campaign.

US material restrictions that Ukraine circumvented. For much of the war, the Biden administration prohibited the use of US-supplied ATACMS missiles inside Russian territory, primarily over escalation concerns. These restrictions were progressively loosened under pressure — first for limited cross-border use near Kharkiv in 2024, then for longer-range use in November 2024. Ukraine did not wait. It developed and deployed domestically-made long-range drones capable of striking deep inside Russia specifically to operate outside the restrictions on US-supplied weapons. The restriction shaped what Ukraine asked for; it did not shape what Ukraine did.

Operational decisions made without US knowledge or approval. Ukraine’s August 2024 incursion into Kursk Oblast was launched without prior US notification. Washington initially sought clarification and subsequently said the operation was consistent with US policy — but the sequence matters: Ukraine acted, then the US responded. Named Biden officials later expressed concern that deploying experienced troops into Russia weakened Ukraine’s defence around Pokrovsk in the Donbas. That is the friction you get between an ally with its own strategic logic and a sponsor with different priorities. It is not the relationship between a puppet and its handler. Earlier, US officers urged Ukraine to concentrate its 2023 counteroffensive in a single thrust south towards Melitopol and to launch earlier. Ukraine distributed forces across multiple fronts and delayed the offensive on its own judgement.

US commercial and economic interests in direct conflict with Ukrainian war aims. The most recent episode makes the pattern visible in the starkest terms. The Trump administration warned Ukraine against attacking non-Russian vessels in the Black Sea after strikes affected tankers connected to US company Chevron’s oil operations. The stated concern was not military strategy or escalation risk: it was protection of American corporate interests. Ukraine’s Black Sea campaign — targeting Russian oil revenue, the shadow fleet, and military logistics through occupied Crimea — continues regardless. If Ukraine were a proxy of American power, Chevron’s commercial interests would be Ukraine’s operational constraints. They are not.

None of this is to say the relationship is one of equals, or that US military and financial support has not been decisive in sustaining Ukraine’s capacity to fight. It has. But influence over a country’s ability to fight is not the same as control over how it fights. The proxy war argument requires Ukraine to have no independent strategic agency. The record of this war is a sustained refutation of that claim, across four years and multiple administrations.

11. ‘The left that supports Ukraine is backing NATO imperialism’

The Fourth International, whose analysis informs this series, calls for the dissolution of NATO. Its February 2025 World Congress resolution states: ‘We demand the dissolution of NATO.’ Supporting Ukraine’s right to defend itself is not the same position as supporting NATO. These are two separate questions, and conflating them is how the campist argument avoids the harder one. The FI’s position is that the fight against NATO expansion passes through the unconditional defence of the national and democratic rights of people threatened by Russian imperialism: you do not advance anti-NATO politics by abandoning the people Russia is killing.

The strongest evidence that this distinction is real comes not from any Western left organisation but from the left closest to the situation. The Finnish Left Alliance, which held a principled non-alignment position for decades and was ‘fiercely against Finland joining NATO’, acknowledged after the 2022 invasion that it ‘had basically failed to provide any credible alternatives’ to NATO membership for a country facing Russian aggression. The party that had most reason to know what Russian power looks like drew the conclusion that the campist left in Britain refuses to draw. The Ukrainian socialist organisation Sotsialnyi Rukh and the journal Commons — neither of which is a NATO institution — have argued consistently that Ukrainian workers fighting the invasion are not fighting Washington’s war. Their analysis, as people who live under the situation rather than observe it from London, deserves more weight than it receives.

The FI’s position is not a compromise between two indefensible extremes. It is a united front framework: defend the right to resist, criticise the state conducting that resistance, build the working-class movement within it. That is exactly what Sotsialnyi Rukh and Commons are doing, with the solidarity of trade unionists, socialists and anarchists in Russia and around the world. The campist left in Britain that cannot distinguish between supporting Ukraine’s working class and endorsing NATO has not found a more principled position. It has found an excuse to look away.

12. ‘Russia is not an imperialist power — it ceased to be imperialist in October 1917’

This claim does explicit political work. If Russia is categorically non-imperialist, its military actions are by definition responses to Western aggression rather than aggression in their own right, and the logic follows: Russian missiles hitting British weapons factories would be legitimate anti-imperialism. The conclusion is not a reductio ad absurdum. It was stated openly in a Palestine solidarity group chat in August 2026 by someone making this argument.

Three things are wrong with it.

First, Russia is not the Soviet Union. The USSR dissolved in 1991. Whether the Russian state constitutes a clean break from the Soviet Union or a modified continuation is a question Marxist analysis has debated; what is not in analytical dispute is that contemporary Russia operates as a capitalist state: private bourgeoisie, oligarchic class formed through privatisation, a stock market, no meaningful public ownership of the means of production. A capitalist state reconstituted through the ‘loans-for-shares’ privatisations of the Yeltsin era — in which former Soviet assets were transferred to a new oligarchic class at knockdown prices, creating the billionaires who subsequently filled London’s property market — is not straightforwardly continuous with a workers’ state. Putin modified Russian capitalism; he did not reverse it. A 2024 estimate by the Russian Academy of National Economy and Public Administration put the state sector at 48.5% of GDP in 2023, using a broad definition that includes state-influenced enterprises alongside directly state-owned firms — and down from 51.7% in 2022.

Second, the claim misrepresents the Fourth International’s own tradition. The FI characterised the Soviet Union as a ‘degenerated workers’ state’ — not as non-imperialist in all its actions. When the Soviet Union suppressed national liberation movements, the FI opposed it: in Hungary in 1956, in Czechoslovakia in 1968, in Afghanistan from 1979. The conditional defence of Soviet social gains never extended to endorsing Soviet military intervention against independent nations. Applying Trotsky’s vocabulary to reach Stalin’s conclusions is not Trotskyism.

Third, the argument proves far too much. If Russia ceased to be imperialist by virtue of its 1917 revolution and has not resumed that status despite reconstituting a capitalist class and waging colonial wars against neighbouring peoples, by the same measure the United States is not imperialist either. The USA has undergone its own political transformations. It has a large state sector. It has periodically rolled back certain forms of market orthodoxy. The criterion that exempts Russia from the category of imperialism, applied consistently, would have to exempt the very power the campist left identifies as the primary enemy. At that point the category has ceased to do analytical work and is functioning as a label applied selectively to reach predetermined conclusions.

The Fourth International’s February 2025 World Congress resolution characterises Russia as imperialist. This is not a NATO position. It is the position of the international current whose framework this argument invokes while reaching the opposite conclusion.

13. ‘Describing Western class interests in this conflict is a complete Marxist analysis of why it is happening’

The claim about Western interests is substantially true, and it deserves to be stated clearly before anything else. BlackRock and JPMorgan Chase are working with the Ukrainian government to establish a reconstruction bank designed to channel hundreds of billions in private investment into Ukraine. Western arms manufacturers have profited from the conflict. Trade union rights in Ukraine have been gutted under wartime legislation. Ukrainian reconstruction is, without question, an opportunity Western finance capital intends to exploit. None of this is in dispute.

What is in dispute is whether describing these interests constitutes an explanation of why the war is happening. It does not. Having interests in an outcome is not the same as causing it. Western capital also profited massively from the Marshall Plan. That is not a Marxist argument that Western capital caused the Second World War. The question of who benefits from a conflict and the question of who initiated it are different analytical tasks, and collapsing them produces an analysis that is frozen at precisely the point where the conclusion would become inconvenient — namely, the question of what Russia was doing and why.

A complete material analysis follows the money in all directions. Russia is extracting resources from occupied Ukrainian territories on a significant scale: occupied Ukrainian territories contain an estimated $350 billion in natural resources, and Russia has moved systematically to exploit mineral deposits, agricultural land, and industrial infrastructure in the areas it controls. Ukrainska Pravda reported in May 2026 that Russia was planning extraction operations across eighteen mineral deposits in occupied southern Ukraine. If material interests explain this conflict, Russian material interests in Ukrainian territory are at least as relevant as BlackRock’s interest in reconstruction contracts — and they precede the invasion rather than following it.

The Ukrainian working class also has material interests, and a class analysis that accounts for Western capital and Ukrainian oligarchs while omitting them is not a complete analysis. It is a selective one. Ukrainian workers have an interest in not being killed, in not having their cities destroyed, in not being deported to filtration camps, in national self-determination. These interests do not disappear because the Zelensky government’s economic policy is hostile to labour rights. The working class of a country under colonial invasion has interests that are not reducible to the politics of the government that happens to be defending it. That distinction is the starting point of the Fourth International’s analysis, not a footnote to it.

The specific question that this argument does not answer — and which has not been answered in any version of it — is: if it is Western industrialists and finance capital who want this war, how do you explain that it is Russian troops who are fighting it? Describing Western interests does not explain Russian action. These are different analytical tasks, and a Marxism that cannot distinguish between them is not a sharper analysis. It is a shorter one.

14. ‘The resistance has no popular mandate — Ukrainians never voted for this war, and it is sustained only by forced conscription’

Two distinct claims are bundled here and deserve separate treatment.

1. On the 2019 election: Zelensky won the presidency in April 2019 on a platform of implementing the Minsk agreements and pursuing a negotiated settlement with Russia. This is true. The conclusion drawn — that Ukraine therefore has no mandate to resist — is false. Zelensky won promising to implement Minsk; Russia violated the ceasefire repeatedly throughout the 2014–2022 period, as documented by the OSCE Special Monitoring Mission in real time; and in February 2022 Russia launched a full-scale invasion with the stated objective of regime change and the elimination of Ukraine as a separate political entity. A political mandate granted before an invasion does not bind the invaded population to accept the outcome of that invasion. The relevant precedent is not obscure. The United States elected Franklin Roosevelt in 1940 on a platform of keeping America out of the war in Europe. Pearl Harbor changed the situation. What changed Ukraine’s situation was Russia’s decision to invade.

2. On forced conscription: the existence of conscription does not delegitimise a war of national defence. Every major war of national liberation in the twentieth century involved some form of compulsion. The question the conscription argument never answers is: what is the alternative? The populations of Russian-occupied Ukrainian territories have not found occupation preferable to conscription. Filtration operations have processed hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians; the forced deportation of Ukrainian children to Russia was documented by the International Criminal Court, which issued an arrest warrant for Vladimir Putin on that basis; cultural and political life in occupied territories has been systematically erased. The alternative conscription is being compared to is not peace. It is this.

Polling throughout the war has consistently shown majority Ukrainian support for continued resistance, including under conditions of severe material hardship. This does not settle the question — wartime polling is never uncomplicated, and the Zelensky government controls significant levers of public information — but the evidence runs against the claim that the resistance lacks popular support.

What Sotsialnyi Rukh and Commons — Ukrainian socialist organisations — actually argue about conscription is worth noting. They do not demand an end to mobilisation. They demand that its burden be borne equally: that the oligarch’s son be called up as readily as the labourer’s, that soldiers retain the rights of workers, that the weight of a just war stop falling on those least able to refuse it. That is a class argument about how the resistance is conducted, not a claim that it should not be.

Postscripts

15. ‘NATO’s eastward expansion was simply the pure will of the American elite; the accession states had no real agency in the process’

The claim does specific work: if enlargement was decided in Washington and merely imposed on Warsaw, Tallinn and Tbilisi, then those states’ stated reasons for wanting membership can be dismissed as manufactured consent, and Russian objections to enlargement become objections to American aggression rather than objections to the choices of Russia’s neighbours. Andres Kasekamp’s 2020 study in the Journal of Strategic Studies, based on interviews with the American, Estonian, Latvian and Lithuanian officials who ran the accession process, states plainly that most accounts of enlargement treat it as the execution of American grand strategy, and sets out to correct the record. His conclusion is unambiguous: Baltic inclusion ‘was not the outcome of a preordained US grand strategy, but was demand driven.’

The demand ran from the Baltic capitals to Washington, not the reverse, and for years Washington was not interested. Estonian foreign minister Lennart Meri began pushing for NATO membership in 1990, before the USSR had dissolved. By 1995 all three Baltic governments had formally adopted NATO membership as policy, and were told, repeatedly and at senior level, that it would not happen. US Defence Secretary William Perry said so publicly in 1996. Secretary of State Colin Powell, as late as March 2001, said no agreement on enlargement existed and a ‘zero option’ was possible. The Pentagon opposed Baltic membership specifically, worried about arms control fallout with Russia. What changed the outcome was not a Washington plan executed on schedule; it was, in Kasekamp’s account, three small states running a decade of coordinated lobbying, reform and diplomatic manoeuvring against the reluctance of their own prospective allies.

The Russian side of the story confirms this from the opposite direction. Boris Yeltsin met Clinton in Helsinki in March 1997 specifically to extract an oral pledge that NATO would never admit the Baltic states or any other former Soviet republic. Clinton refused. If enlargement were simply the American elite exercising its will, there would be no need for Yeltsin to keep losing that argument to states with a fraction of Washington’s power, and no need for Russia to offer the Balts a unilateral security guarantee in October 1997, which all three governments rejected outright, unwilling to trade sovereignty for a promise from the state that had annexed them in 1940.

Georgia removes what remains of the argument’s cover, because it is the case where the population voted directly. A non-binding referendum in January 2008 returned 77 per cent support for NATO membership, months before the Russian invasion that August. Public support has not collapsed since; National Democratic Institute polling has shown Georgian approval running from the high sixties to the low eighties throughout the years that followed, including well after Georgians had every practical reason to reconsider.

None of this settles what NATO is structurally once these states join it, and the accession process itself contains the evidence for why not. In February 2003, the ten states awaiting membership, organised as the Vilnius Group, published a letter backing the American position on Iraq: a document drafted in the Lithuanian embassy in Washington, with the direct involvement of the US lobbyist coordinating their campaign. It enraged Jacques Chirac, who said the signatories had missed a good opportunity to keep quiet, and it gave Donald Rumsfeld his line about ‘new Europe’ against ‘old’. Estonian prime minister Siim Kallas told Bush exactly what Bush wanted to hear on Saddam Hussein in the Oval Office that September. None of the Baltic governments believed the case for Iraqi weapons of mass destruction; all three deployed troops anyway. The demand for membership was genuine and the states pursuing it had real agency, and the price of exercising that agency was aligning with Washington on a war that had nothing to do with Baltic security, because the accession process ran through Washington’s goodwill regardless of who was doing the demanding.

Ilya Budraitskis, writing from inside the Russian Socialist Movement’s own confrontation with Kremlin expansionism, is right that this agency has to be taken seriously as agency. What the Iraq letter shows is that agency exercised inside an alliance structured around one dominant power still has to pay that power’s price, and it is worth asking what Budraitskis himself makes of that price, since he has.

Set against the Finnish Left Alliance’s own reckoning, examined above, Budraitskis and Yudin’s position stops looking like a break from the Fourth International’s programme and starts looking like an application of it. The Left Alliance held the doctrinaire line against NATO membership for decades and found, when the test came in 2022, that it had no answer for a population facing exactly the threat the Balts and Georgians have lived with since the last century. An action programme for a state under active Russian threat cannot include withdrawal from its own security guarantee; the demand is hopelessly distant from where the broad vanguard in Tallinn, Tbilisi or Vilnius actually stands, and pressing it there generates not a united front but isolation.

The demand for NATO’s dissolution does not disappear. It moves into propaganda: the manifestos addressed to the workers’ vanguard and to other revolutionaries, where the Fourth International is right to keep advancing it, framed within the wider question of self-determination rather than thrown at Estonian or Georgian workers as a test of loyalty. Read this way, Budraitskis and Yudin are not contradicting the Congress resolution. They are doing the work it does not itself perform.

What gives the propagandist demand content, and what Budraitskis has been consistent about since well before the Yudin paper, is solidarity and direct organisational links with the Russian opposition itself: socialists, anarchists, the independent workers’ and national movements that Putinism has spent a decade criminalising. A security architecture that supersedes NATO is not built by Baltic states disarming their own defence. It is built, if it is built at all, by a Russia whose working class has broken the regime that makes NATO membership rational for its neighbours in the first place. That is the one place where Budraitskis’s position and the FI’s actually meet without needing reconciliation, and it runs through the defeat of Putinism from inside Russia, not around it.

(Red Mole Guide No. 15 sets out the propaganda/agitation distinction and the action programme question in full; readers wanting the underlying method should go there.)

16: ‘Ukrainian public opinion has turned against the war — 69% now favour a negotiated settlement’

The Gallup figure is accurate and significant. In polling conducted in early July 2026, 69% of respondents in Ukraine said they favoured a negotiated end to the war as soon as possible, compared with 24% who supported continuing to fight until victory. In 2022 those figures were essentially reversed: 73% for fighting until victory, 22% for a negotiated end. This is a real shift and it deserves to be acknowledged rather than explained away.

What it does not show is what the campist argument needs it to show.

The same polling consistently records near-universal Ukrainian refusal of territorial concessions to Russia. A June 2026 Kyiv International Institute of Sociology survey found that over 80% of respondents opposed ceding any occupied territory as part of a settlement — including Crimea, which Russia has held since 2014. A population that simultaneously wants negotiations and refuses to cede territory is not a population that wants to surrender. It is a population that wants the killing to stop on terms compatible with Ukrainian sovereignty. Those are not the same thing, and treating them as equivalent misreads what Ukrainians are actually saying.

The shift in opinion tracks the military and political situation rather than a change in fundamental will. The partial withdrawal of US military support under the Trump administration in 2025, the continued attrition on the eastern front, and three years of sustained bombardment of Ukrainian cities all constitute rational grounds for preferring a negotiated outcome to continued war. War-weariness under those conditions is evidence of the scale of human suffering the invasion has caused. It is not evidence that Ukrainians believe the invasion was legitimate or that they have concluded occupation is preferable to resistance. The populations of Russian-occupied territories — filtered, deported, forcibly conscripted into the Russian army — are the control group for what acceptance of Russian control actually looks like.

The Russian-conducted referendums in occupied Donetsk, Luhansk, Zaporizhzhia and Kherson oblasts in September 2022 are sometimes cited as evidence of genuine popular preference for Russian rule. Those referendums were conducted under military occupation, without independent monitoring, over four days, with armed soldiers accompanying ballot collectors in some documented instances. The OSCE declined to monitor them. Official results claimed 87–99% support for annexation in regions where pre-war polling showed no significant separatist sentiment. Zelensky’s most pro-Russian rival in the 2019 presidential election received 11% of the vote nationally and was not running on a platform of annexation. The referendums did not produce evidence of Ukrainian preference. They produced numbers.

17: ‘Supporting workers who struggle against a government targeted by US imperialism is backing a regime-change operation’

The argument was stated plainly during a discussion in August 2026: encouraging Russian works to struggle against Putin, or Iranian workers to struggle against the theocracy, when these cuntries are under attack from the West, is functionally equivalent to supporting US imperialism. The same logic appears in discussions of Hong Kong, Venezuela and China: workers and oppressed peoples in states targeted by US power cannot be supported in struggles against those states without providing cover for Washington. The conclusion is that solidarity must wait until the geopolitical situation is resolved.

This position has a name. It is not internationalism. It is a campism that has generalised itself beyond Russia and Ukraine to a universal principle: workers everywhere are entitled to solidarity, except in countries where that solidarity might embarrass the states in Washington’s crosshairs.

The argument has a structural problem that its proponents do not address. Every authoritarian government in a country the US has targeted has described its domestic opposition as a CIA operation. The Soviet Union said the same of the Hungarian uprising in 1956, of the Czechoslovak reform movement in 1968, and of the Polish trade union Solidarity in 1980. In each case, the Kremlin was not entirely wrong — Western intelligence services did take an interest in all of these movements, as they do in any political instability among adversaries. In each case the movement itself was authentically generated by conditions internal to the society concerned. The existence of CIA interest in a popular uprising is not evidence that the CIA caused it. It is evidence that the CIA noticed it. On person in the same Spotlight discussion group said: ‘Involvement of CIA etc after it started is not the same as dismissing it as an imperialist plot.’

The practical test is direct. In 2026, Iranian workers and trade unionists were executed for participating in strikes and protests against the theocracy. Ukrainian and international trade union networks made solidarity with them. Hong Kong trade unionists were convicted this week under national security legislation that destroyed independent labour organisation. The claim that solidarity with them ‘backs the US empire’ requires you to believe that the IRGC’s execution chambers and the Hong Kong courts are expressions of working-class power, while the workers being imprisoned and killed are tools of imperialism. That is not a Marxist analysis. It is an inversion of one.

The historical consequence of this logic is well documented. The Stalinist left in Britain said in August 1968 that the Prague Spring was a ‘counter-revolutionary provocation backed by imperialist forces.’ What was actually happening was that Soviet tanks were killing Czechoslovak communists who wanted the right to organise independently. The campist left’s inability in 2026 to distinguish between genuine working-class struggle and CIA destabilisation is the same failure, reproduced. The test is not which side Washington prefers. The test is which side the workers and oppressed are on.

18: ‘Russia only ever wanted the Donbas and Crimea — it has no interest in ruling the rest of Ukraine’

This argument is sometimes stated as ‘Russia’s goals are limited’ and sometimes as ‘it was always a Special Military Operation, not a full invasion.’ The terminology matters: ‘Special Military Operation’ is Russian state language, adopted by the Russian government precisely to minimise the scale of what it was doing and to evade the legal consequences of declaring war. Using it is not a neutral descriptive choice.

The military record makes the ‘limited goals’ argument extremely difficult to sustain. If Russia’s objectives were confined to the Donbas and Crimea, the assault on Kyiv in February and March 2022 is inexplicable. Russian forces advanced on the capital from multiple directions simultaneously — from Belarus in the north-west, from Chernihiv in the north-east, from Sumy in the east. The Kyiv region, Chernihiv Oblast and Sumy Oblast have no connection to the Donbas framework whatsoever. The Bucha massacre — the killing of civilians documented by the UN Human Rights Monitoring Mission in Kyiv Oblast — occurred in a region Russia would have had no reason to enter if Donbas and Crimea were its only objectives. It took a Ukrainian military counteroffensive to force Russian withdrawal from the Kyiv, Chernihiv and Sumy regions in late March 2022: not a Russian decision to halt at the limits of stated aims, but a military defeat.

The same pattern repeats in the south and east. Russian forces occupied Kherson city — on the west bank of the Dnipro, well beyond the Donbas — and held it until November 2022, when another Ukrainian counteroffensive forced withdrawal. They were driven from significant portions of Kharkiv Oblast in September 2022, again under military pressure. The planned Russian amphibious landing at Odessa — aborted after Ukraine sank the cruiser Moskva in April 2022 — was designed to seize Ukraine’s main Black Sea port, 500 kilometres west of the Donbas line. Russia’s territorial reach across the south was not a miscalculation about the limits of a limited operation. It was the intended operation.

Russia’s own stated war aims in February 2022 — ‘denazification’ and ‘demilitarisation’ — were not defined by territory. They were defined by political regime: the removal of the Ukrainian government and the replacement of Ukraine’s political and security orientation. Putin’s July 2021 essay ‘On the Historical Unity of Russians and Ukrainians’, published six months before the invasion and widely read as a statement of intent, denied that Ukraine constituted a separate nation at all. ‘We are one people,’ he wrote — a claim that, applied militarily, has no limiting principle of the kind the ‘limited goals’ argument requires.

The December 2021 Russian ultimatum is the clearest evidence of what Russia was actually demanding. It required NATO to roll back to its 1997 borders, removing troops and infrastructure from every state that had joined since then. It also demanded that Ukraine be permanently excluded from NATO membership. These demands were addressed to Washington and Brussels, not to Kyiv, and they concerned the entire post-Cold War European security order. No demand about Donbas or Crimea appears in the ultimatum. Russia’s actual negotiating position, as stated in the month before the invasion, had nothing to do with the specific territories the ‘limited goals’ argument assigns to it.

What Russia wants from Ukraine does not require direct annexation of the whole country to be correctly understood as control of the whole country. Britain’s nineteenth-century relationship with Ireland involved direct rule of some territories, a formally subordinate parliament for others, and a carefully managed dependency across the whole island: control over trade policy, security, foreign relations, and political life. The goal was not to administer Ireland from Westminster in perpetuity. It was to ensure Ireland could not act independently in ways that threatened British interests. Russia’s December 2021 demands — permanently barring Ukraine from NATO, permanently restricting its military capacity, permanently subordinating its security arrangements to Russian approval — describe the same structure. Annexing the Donbas and Crimea while achieving those conditions would have met Russia’s actual objectives. Annexing the Donbas and Crimea without them would not have.

This document is updated as the evidence develops. Corrections welcomed via the comments. If you find a claim here that is wrong, say so with a source and it will be corrected.

The series concludes with Part 11: ‘Serbia 1914 or Ireland 1916’.

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The smashed eggs are still on the windows in Clover Way. For three consecutive nights in early August, crowds in Thetford targeted homes they believed were housing asylum seekers, attempted to force entry, broke windows and fences, and sent two police officers to hospital, one with a serious bite wound, one struck by a rock. The men living there had, by every resident account, caused no trouble. One neighbour told ITV you would not have known anyone was home. They were escorted out for their own safety. The protesters declared it a victory and returned the following night.

Stand Up To Racism published a statement on the third day. It is not wrong exactly. That is the problem.

Reform UK, the statement argues, spent years dragging British politics rightward on immigration. Nigel Farage calling migration an invasion does not organise a riot on its own, but it makes the idea that the house on Clover Way is a legitimate target rather than someone’s home progressively easier to think. Britain First and Patriotic Alternative were at RAF Barnham, the former military site the Home Office is considering for asylum accommodation, within weeks of the proposal becoming public. Sarah White, described by the New Statesman as declaring of migrants that “they don’t integrate” and “they’re not evolved like us”, had already travelled from the Epping protests to speak at the Barnham gates. The statement closes with a sentence that is correct: asylum seekers did not sell council homes, run down the NHS or hold wages down.

All of it true. None of it an intervention.

There is no call to action in the statement, no emergency meeting, no solidarity convoy to Thetford, no practical support for the men removed from Clover Way. The statement performs analysis. It does not organise anything. That gap between correct analysis and absent practice is not a failure of nerve. No: it is a failure of method, and the method has a name.

SUTR is not a Marxist united front. It is a popular front: a permanent cross-class coalition including Labour MPs, trade-union bureaucrats and liberal notables, held together by the lowest common denominator of anti-racist sentiment. That structure determines what the statement can and cannot say. It can condemn Reform’s rhetoric. Naming a Labour government’s role in creating the conditions for disorder is another matter entirely: the Home Office’s proposal to house asylum seekers in a former military base on the edge of a small Norfolk market town, announced without meaningful local consultation, into a community already experiencing housing insecurity and the exhausting aftermath of a two-year planning fight with a social landlord. The coalition that includes Labour politicians makes that sentence unavailable. You can see the constraint operating in real time, in the gap between the statement’s correct final paragraph and anything resembling a political demand directed at the government that proposed Barnham.

The deeper problem is that the organising ground existed in Thetford, and nobody used it.

On the Abbey Estate, roughly a mile from Clover Way, residents spent the better part of two years fighting Bromford Flagship’s plan to demolish and rebuild approximately 551 of their 1,100 homes over two decades: a £250 million redevelopment scheme they feared would destroy established community, green space and security of tenure. They built the Abbey Action Group. They gathered more than a thousand signatures, organised meetings, ran market-stall campaigns, secured Thetford Town Council support and attended Breckland Council’s planning committee in October 2025 in sufficient numbers, 112 people in the room, to help defeat the application despite planning officers recommending approval. The committee heard that prolonged uncertainty was damaging residents’ mental health. They refused it anyway.

Bromford Flagship has appealed to the Planning Inspectorate. Hearings are scheduled for November 2026.

But here is what the consultation process did in the meantime: it absorbed the campaign. Objections, meetings, petitions, planning hearings — the forms of participation designed to channel opposition into procedures that can be managed, delayed and appealed. By the time the Barnham mobilisation began, the organising energy that had put 112 people in a council chamber was dispersed. The Abbey Action Group’s activity since the planning refusal appears limited. That is not a criticism of the residents. It is what happens when a community fight has no political organisation behind it capable of outlasting any single procedural stage.

A genuine left presence would have built something capable of surviving the planning process: a tenants’ and workers’ committee with its own existence independent of the Bromford Flagship application, connecting the Abbey fight to a broader demand for social housing investment, building the relationships that might, months later, have provided a competing framework when Barnham was announced. Instead, the community’s organising capacity was lower in the summer of 2026 than it had been in the autumn of 2025, at precisely the moment the right moved in.

The left was absent from the Abbey Estate campaign. It has no presence in Thetford now. The local Greens, who might at least have connected the housing struggle to a solidarity politics, have said nothing publicly about the disorder.

Your Party Suffolk, its nearest branch in the neighbouring county, produced a statement that did what SUTR’s could not: named “a government that repeatedly pits communities against one another” as part of the conditions for the disorder and directed the demand for housing and services at that government. Better framing. Still a statement from the next county.

A genuine united front approach is not difficult to describe. It would have meant being in the Abbey Action Group: not to colonise a tenants’ campaign but to build relationships, connect the fight against Bromford Flagship to the demand for properly funded social housing, and direct a democratic argument at the Home Office, that Barnham requires full public scrutiny of numbers, contracts, safeguarding and infrastructure funding before any decision is taken. It would have meant telling residents that the asylum seekers proposed for Barnham are not responsible for the housing shortage that Labour’s own record has done nothing to reverse. It would have meant being in those streets before Britain First was.

That is slower than a counter-demonstration in Norwich, and it would not have prevented the August disorder. The right had a twelve-month start and a functioning national network. But the August disorder was not the only possible outcome. It was the product of a specific political vacuum, not an inevitable consequence of Thetford’s social composition.

SUTR’s statement ends by saying it is not enough to condemn people throwing rocks while leaving untouched the politics that gives them confidence. The formulation is correct. What it cannot say, structurally cannot say, is that the politics giving them confidence includes a Labour government managing the asylum system through emergency military accommodation while cutting the public provision that might have made the housing situation survivable. That remains untouched. The coalition requires it.

The Abbey hearings are in November. The Barnham proposal is unresolved. What happens in Thetford next depends partly on who is doing politics there: building a tenants’ committee, holding open meetings, drafting the factsheet that answers the rumours circulating on Facebook, making the argument that connects the Abbey fight to the men escorted out of Clover Way. Right now, nobody on the left is doing that work.

That is not a rallying conclusion. It is the situation.

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TL;DR Sian Astley’s Reform campaign in Greater Manchester fronted a grooming-gangs pledge explicitly built around protecting women and girls, while Labour’s first-preference vote fell by close to a third against the last comparable contest and turnout fell by 130,000. Neither shift shows up as a swing of women toward Astley. One pollster’s crosstab has Reform running nine points stronger with men than women, and the largest gap in the whole survey is between men and women who don’t know how they’ll vote at all. The right’s safety pitch and Labour’s collapse are both real. Neither has yet been decided on the terrain this series exists to track. A postscript addresses the strongest version of the counter-argument directly, Sir John Curtice’s own account of the result as a ‘convincing’ win, and why it doesn’t settle the question either way.

It started with a comparison, not a table. Reading Dave Kellaway’s piece on 1 August, the word ‘bounce’ sat wrong against something I’d watched six weeks earlier in Makerfield, when Burnham returned to Westminster on a result that looked, at 54.8% to 34.5%, like vindication. It wasn’t quite that. Labour’s raw vote in Makerfield rose by about a third on its 2024 baseline, but almost all of that rise traced back to the Conservative, Green and Liberal Democrat vote collapsing to a combined 3.3% around him, tactical squeeze rather than enthusiasm. Reform’s own raw vote rose too, by just under 3,000, even as its share fell against the swollen turnout behind Labour. Tactical voting did what it is built to do: it kept the far right out of the seat. It did nothing to shrink the far right’s actual vote, which grew regardless, and nothing but stronger, substantive policy, not the tepid technocratic management Labour offers in its place, is going to do that. If Makerfield was a bounce, it was one built on other parties disappearing, not on Labour convincing anyone new and not on Reform’s own base going anywhere. Watching the same word land on Manchester five weeks later meant going looking for what was actually moving underneath it. What turned up was not where the framing assumed it would be.

Sian Astley launched her campaign for Greater Manchester mayor with a promise to publish ‘all files’ relating to grooming gangs ‘going back at least 40 years.’ It was the centrepiece of her manifesto, repeated in launch interviews. Asked what should happen to the people she blames for the region’s failures, she was specific: ‘Personally I’d just ensure the Green voters, uni-party MPs (present or past) and Cllrs house the illegal criminals, rapists and economic chancers.’ Marlon West, Restore Britain’s candidate, carried a version of the same appeal from a different angle, a former nurse whose own daughter was a victim, running explicitly as a campaigner against child sexual exploitation rather than as a party functionary. Two candidates, two parties competing for the same flank, both fronting the same claim to be the true defenders of women and girls against a Labour establishment they say spent decades looking away.

This is the mechanism the Terrain of Survival series has traced elsewhere: the far right does not win working-class women by accident. It wins them, where it wins them, by occupying ground the left has vacated, the ground of safety, of material precarity, of who is actually present when the immediate danger is a person rather than a statistic. Astley’s campaign was built to occupy exactly that ground in Greater Manchester. What the numbers from this contest show, and it is the sort of finding a rigorous series has to sit with rather than write around, is a region where two things are true at once and neither is what the loudest readings claim: the right’s safety pitch has not converted into a female vote, and Labour’s own coalition did not hold either. Both campaigns lost the argument to the same thing, an electorate that simply did not show up.

Start with the scale of what didn’t show up, and start with the right baseline. The 63.4% Burnham won in 2024 gets quoted more often, but 2024 was the only Greater Manchester mayoral contest run under first-past-the-post, imposed by the outgoing government’s Elections Act 2022 and reversed again before this one. The properly matched figure is 2021, the last time Greater Manchester used the same supplementary vote system Craig faced: Burnham took 67.3% of first preferences that year. Against that baseline, Craig’s 47.1% is a fall of twenty points, close to a third of Burnham’s vote, a larger collapse than the more commonly cited comparison to 2024 suggests, not a smaller one. Burnham set a second, harder floor seven weeks earlier at Makerfield, 54.8%, a result already propped up by tactical squeeze rather than Labour enthusiasm, as the previous paragraph sets out; that comparison holds cleanly, since both Makerfield contests were fought under first-past-the-post. Craig’s first-round vote came in under that floor too, before a single second preference was counted. Turnout dropped seven points on the 2024 baseline, roughly 130,000 fewer people voting than last time despite the electoral register growing by 60,000. Labour’s own count lost around 170,000 votes. The combined Reform, Restore and Conservative vote rose by only 30,000 over the same period, a fifth the size of Labour’s loss. Craig’s eventual second-round margin, 66 to 34, looks like resilience taken on its own, but it is manufactured by transfers, not earned by turnout: roughly nine in ten Green voters broke for Labour, while Reform picked up only about half the Conservative and Restore transfers on offer. A voting system built to reward broad coalitions rewarded Labour’s for having one. It is not evidence that Labour’s own vote held.

None of that demobilisation shows up as a story about women moving right, whatever the framing of Astley’s own campaign implies. YouGov’s internal crosstab, fielded 8 to 15 July among 2,200 adults across the city-region, models Astley at 44% among men against 33% among women in the projected second round. Restore’s first-round figure splits the same way in miniature, 8% among men against 6% among women. If the grooming-gangs pledge is functioning as a gendered recruitment tool in this contest, it is not showing up in a female skew toward either candidate built around it. Reform’s vote, for now, looks like a fairly conventional male-skewed populist coalition, not a coalition of women rallying to a self-styled protector.

Editorial note: this is one pollster’s snapshot from three weeks before the vote, not verified post-election behaviour. UK returns don’t record voter gender, so there is no way to check the model against the actual result directly, and the actual second round (66-34) ran four points more favourable to Labour than this poll projected (62-38). Something moved in the final fortnight that this data can’t see. Treat the gender figures as indicative of the state of the race in mid-July, not as a settled account of who voted for whom.

What the same table shows instead is more useful than a simple negative finding, and it is where the series should actually be looking. In the raw, unmodelled first-vote intention, before YouGov’s likelihood-to-vote adjustment smooths the picture into a headline figure, 27% of women say don’t know against 14% of men, and a further 18% of women say they will not vote against 13% of men. Add refusals and the gap widens further. Women are not choosing Astley over Labour in any numbers that show up in this poll. They are, in far greater proportion than men, choosing neither. That is the same demobilised bloc that swallowed Labour’s own vote, and within it the gender gap is the widest single split in the entire table, wider than the gap between any two parties.

There is a further tension in Astley’s own positioning worth naming. She is a landlord who owns seventeen flats across three properties in south Manchester, campaigning in part on a promise to audit the quality of the region’s social and rented housing stock, having concluded, in her own words, that too much of it ‘is not up to scratch.’ A landlady proposing to inspect the standard of a housing market she profits from is not disqualifying in itself. It is, though, precisely the kind of gap between rhetoric and material position that the terrain-of-survival framework exists to expose, and it sits alongside a grooming-gangs pledge that promises exposure and accountability without connecting either to a single concrete demand: a refuge, a childcare place, a transport route that feels safe after dark. Protection as spectacle, files to be published, someone else’s failure to be exposed, is not the same offer as protection as material change, and the distinction matters more to a demobilised electorate than to a committed one.

None of this should be read as reassurance. A movement can occupy a demobilised bloc slowly and then all at once, and Astley has not been in politics since May. Rupert Lowe’s Restore operation is younger still and appears to be drawing votes from Reform’s own right flank rather than losing the argument entirely, which is its own kind of warning about the durability of any comfort taken from this month’s numbers. Farage himself heads into the contest’s aftermath with his personal ratings among the worst recorded in a decade of tracking, amid the unresolved Cottrell donations affair and his decision to resign his seat and refight Clacton, but a wounded leader is not the same thing as a beaten movement, and Restore exists precisely to catch whatever Reform drops.

What the Manchester data complicates is a version of this series’ own thesis that was becoming too comfortable to repeat: that the far right recruits women principally through safety rhetoric, and that the numbers will show it doing so wherever that rhetoric appears. They do not, not here, not on this evidence. What they show is a contest decided, for now, by who does not turn out rather than who does, a female electorate more unattached than the male one, and two campaigns, Astley’s and Labour’s both, that lost ground to the same withdrawal rather than to each other. Whether that withdrawal is available to be organised, by anyone, on either side of the argument, or whether it simply persists as a permanent feature of a region that no longer expects much from a mayoralty whose main job is keeping the buses paid for, is not a question this poll answers.

Postscript: The Right Baseline, and the Wrong Inference

Three things worth adding after publication: a correction; an observation and a distinction.

The electoral systems

The correction: this piece originally measured Labour’s Manchester collapse against Burnham’s 63.4% in 2024. That figure is real, but it is the wrong comparison. 2024 was the only Greater Manchester mayoral contest run under first-past-the-post, a temporary change under the Elections Act 2022 that was reversed before this contest. The properly matched figure is 2021, the last time Greater Manchester used the same supplementary vote system Craig faced: 67.3%. Measured against that baseline, Craig’s 47.1% is a fall of twenty points, close to a third of Burnham’s vote, not the quarter first reported here. The piece above has been corrected accordingly. The finding gets stronger, not weaker, once the systems are matched properly.

The Burnham bounce

The distinction: Sir John Curtice’s own account of the result, published in BBC InDepth the day of the count, calls Labour’s win ‘convincing’. His case: 47.1% on first preferences was ‘a near doubling’ of Labour’s 24% tally in May’s local elections and four points up on Labour’s local performance in the 2024 general election. Curtice attributes the national recovery mainly to Labour clawing back voters from the Greens and Liberal Democrats: the share of 2024 Labour voters who had defected to the Greens fell from 14% to 9% after Burnham took over, and 67% of 2024 Labour voters now say they would vote Labour again, against 57% when Starmer resigned. Those figures are real, and they describe precisely the mechanism this piece has been calling a Green-to-Labour swing rather than new territory won.

What Curtice’s piece does not do is measure Craig’s result against the last time Greater Manchester used the same voting system she stood under. Every comparison in his analysis, the 2024 general election, May’s locals, the 2024 mayoral race, either uses a different contest entirely or the one Greater Manchester mayoral election run under first-past-the-post. Measured against 2021, the last supplementary-vote contest, Craig’s 47.1% is still a fall of twenty points on Burnham’s 67.3%. A convincing win by the standard Curtice is using is compatible with a real collapse in Labour’s own vote by the standard this piece is using, because the two are answering different questions: whether Labour beat Reform convincingly, and whether Labour’s own coalition actually turned out. The recovery Curtice describes is, separately, concentrated in the North West and Yorkshire and Humber, the two English regions where Labour has clawed back the most ground, according to the nations-and-regions analysis addressed below rather than to Curtice’s own piece, which doesn’t break the national figure down by nation or region. Greater Manchester sits inside the region where that recovery is strongest anywhere in the UK state, since it is Burnham’s own home ground. If the conversion Curtice describes, Green voters returning to Labour, is not reaching the 27% of women in Manchester who say they don’t know how they will vote, it is hard to see where else it would.

Four nations, not one, in the UK state

It is also worth keeping the word ‘national’ out of this, since the recovery Curtice tracks is a Great Britain figure, not a description of all four nations moving together. Separate nations-and-regions analysis, cited independently of Curtice’s piece, shows Labour’s recovery landing unevenly: strongest in the North West and Yorkshire and Humber, minimal in Scotland and Wales, where Labour had just lost heavily to the SNP and Plaid Cymru in May. Curtice’s own numbers describe the mechanism. The nations-and-regions data describes where it is and is not working (and, of course, outlook the UK statelet that divides Ireland). Put together, they say the same thing this piece has been arguing from a different angle: a recovery built on winning back people who never stopped voting is not evidence about people who stopped voting at all, wherever in the UK state you look for it.

Addendum: May Was the Exception, Not July

One more thing worth adding, because it changes which number in this piece should be doing the most work. Everything above measures the by-election result against May’s local elections, since May is the most recent prior contest. But treating May as the baseline gets the comparison backwards. The Mayoral elections in 2021 and 2024, two separate elections years apart, run under two different voting systems, both landed Labour and Green on a combined 70 to 72% against a combined right of 18 to 22%, a gap of roughly 49 to 52 points. That consistency across two unrelated systems and two different years is what a structural baseline looks like. The vote in May 2026 is the outlier against that baseline, not July.

On this reading, May’s near-parity, a two-point gap between the blocs, was the emergency. July’s 22-point gap is a partial retreat from that emergency, not a recovery in any strong sense. It recovers only two in five of the votes lost between the historic baseline and May’s low point, and it leaves the result still 29 points short of where 2021 and 2024 both independently sat, well over half the historic gap still open. Curtice’s ‘near doubling’ of the May tally is measuring the right change against the wrong anchor. Against the only anchor that reflects a stable, unremarkable political moment for the region, this by-election result remains a landslide-scale departure from normal, only a smaller departure than the one two months before it.

None of this settles the harder question this piece opened with, and it sharpens rather than answers it. There is no gender breakdown available for May’s collapse, so it cannot be shown directly that the recovery since then reached men and women unevenly. What can be shown is that whatever partial recovery took place in those eight weeks, it left behind a pool of undecided and non-voting women in July twice the size of the equivalent male pool, the widest single gap in the entire crosstab. A general emergency and a partial general recovery would be expected to move roughly evenly across the electorate unless something else was also at work. The gender skew in who was still undecided by the time of the by-election is that something else, and it is not explained by treating May as the baseline any more than July is. Whatever pulled the region back from a two-point gap to a twenty-two-point one over the summer, it evidently pulled men back into the electorate faster, or further, than it pulled women, and that asymmetry, not the size of the recovery itself, is the question actually worth answering.

SCOPE: In the wake of the Your Party experience, socialists should assimilate the lessons of the past to prepare for the future. Whatever organisational form that future holds, what that organisation fights for, in terms of programme, is critical. The method of transitional demands developed by the early communist and Fourth International could provide a framework for a necessary conversation around programme for the left. But while the method may be valid, more than a century has passed since this approach was formulated. Is the approach still effective? This short survey will provide historical background on the development of transitional demands and their nature. It will present a brief framework of the factors to be taken into account when working to develop demands in practice, together with a worked example of updating a transitional demand for the 21st Century. It is offered as a contribution to the conversation.

Your Party

In the Summer of 2025, when Your Party appeared as a positive opportunity, rather than a bureaucratic train wreck, 800,000 people expressed an interest in engaging with the new entity. It’s a reasonable supposition that the promise of ”doing politics differently” was a substantial part of the Your Party ‘draw’. Over that same Summer, Oliver Eagleton undertook a series of short interviews with a number of leading participants around the Your Party initiative for New Left Review. The interviews had a broad scope, but focused to a significant degree on issues of organisational form for the new party. Some participants also, perhaps more critically, touched on what programmatic elements the new organisation should prioritise.

One of those interviewed, James Schneider, disengaged from the Your Party project shortly after, but his interview raised some interesting — and challenging — thoughts. Framing his responses around the heavy dominance of conventional electoralism in British politics, Schneider identified some key areas of potential work for Your Party. Drawing from the experience of Corbyn’s leadership of the Labour Party, Schneider posited an electoral approach accompanied by an insurgent extra-parliamentary mobilisation. To this were added the construction of a series of alliances of the oppressed, as critical elements in a forward path. Perhaps more importantly, the external mobilisation would be located not only in workplaces, but to a very large part in communities. Schneider labelled it “Popular Power”, and suggested very strongly that the primary objective of action in this area was to develop active class-based communities, growing agency, organisation and influence to reach, effectively, conditions close to what might be described as dual power.

Areas of possibility for the construction of ‘Popular Power’ were largely drawn from international experience. Tenant associations featured prominently in the examples presented; their slender presence in the UK contrasted with their weight and significance elsewhere. The opportunity for serious conversations around the issues raised by this, and to a lesser extent the other interviews, appeared to slip away at a national level in the last half of 2025. Your Party became consumed by the conflict between the emerging proto-branches and the bureaucratic clique around Carrie Murphy and Jeremy Corbyn and the shearing forces it created. Refusal to commence the formation of branches for a year, tight control of contact information, expulsion as individuals arrive for a national conference, obscure election and selection processes; none of these practices was going to lead to the development of trust, or fuel the kind of conversation Your Party needed to have about what it was for.

As the left regroups and assesses the experience of Your Party, it is worth revisiting last summer’s conversations and exploring elements of them in detail. Is ‘Popular Power’ posited as simply a support act for parliamentary representation, or is the relationship between electoral representation and the developing agency of the working class and their community allies more complex? What does the gravitational shift towards organising with and in communities represent for the left — put crudely, a different place to sell papers, or something rather more?

Identifying particular areas of work is vital, but cohering a programmatic approach to that effort is also essential, particularly given that historic dominance of conventional electoralism in British left politics noted by Schneider. To understand where we should go, we have to understand where we have been, and locate the programmatic future in the broader movement’s past.

Prologue: The Programme of Social Democracy

Broadly speaking, Pre-First World War Social Democracy had evolved a programme which was sharply bifurcated. This bifurcation saw day-to-day activity focus on a minimum programme of ‘achievable’ reforms, with a maximum programme — socialism —largely confined to abstract propaganda. There were nuances of motivation in this approach. In the case of the centre, identified in the German SPD (Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands) with Karl Kautsky, there was a theoretical underpinning based around an expectation that capitalism would collapse under the weight of its own contradictions. The right, associated with Eduard Bernstein, developed a perspective that saw capitalism continuing to evolve to meet workers’ needs through a program of reforms. Modern social democrats, including the Labour Party, tend to occupy positions across this spectrum.

Changing the Paradigm

Given the wide political spectrum of those who have engaged with Your Party over the last year, it’s worth pausing to emphasise two further points. In the UK, the Labour Party Programme is identified by many as its electoral manifesto. A party programme should present perspectives on both electoral and non-electoral activity, and emphasise the close relationship and complementarity of the two. There is a more profound difference between the reformist approach and that of the communist left. Whereas a reformist seeks to undertake reforms for the working class, the communist left seeks to develop the empowerment and agency of the class for itself. As Marx argues, from a class in itself to a class for itself.

The Early Communist Parties

The fledgling Communist Parties entered the pre-revolutionary period following the First World War in almost a programmatic vacuum, without a fully articulated and differentiated communist programme. Such programmes that were published, such as the Spartacist Programme adopted by the German Communist Party, the KPD (Kommunistische Partei Deutschlands), tended to reproduce the pre-war maximum programme of social democracy, while asserting their will to implement such a programme. This essentially voluntaristic maximalism did little to provide guidance on what communist parties should actually do in practice, other than organising insurrections at appropriate points. Neither did it differentiate between the ebb and flow of class struggle, between the need to tactically advance and retreat appropriately.

These early difficulties were compounded by two factors. The pro-war line of the SPD, and its complicity in the murder of the KPD leaders Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg, drove many of the German left into what Lenin termed "ultra-leftism”. The early Comintern’s ”Theory of the Offensive”, articulated primarily by Zinoviev and Bukharin in the Comintern leadership and promoted in the KPD by Bela Kun, held that insurrection and armed actions would ”spark” revolutionary opportunities. The ”Theory of the Offensive” was a major contributor to the catastrophic ”March Actions” in Germany in 1921, where the ”spark” failed to ignite an exhausted working class, leaving the KPD isolated and ripe for repression.

As the communist parties and international reflected on their early practice, particularly in Germany, a number of related programmatic elements emerged:

• The tactic of fighting for a united front of workers parties in both offensive and defensive contexts, but particularly in the latter. The unity in action forged in defeating the right-wing Kapp Putsch in 1920 was held up as a practical example of what the tactic could achieve,

• The beginning of an articulation of transitional demands. Such demands were designed to provide a bridge between the day-to-day struggles of the working class and oppressed, and the eventual endpoint of socialism. Transitional demands were envisioned as growing the experience, capacity and agency of the class towards the demand for a government of workers’ parties as a keystone.

An approach based around these elements would encroach on the power of the state and contribute to developing conditions of dual power. This approach, focused on the workplace, mirrors that outlined by Schneider for communities. This is a theme we will return to.

The“Transitional” approach was discussed extensively at early Comintern Congresses, and adopted against fierce opposition from the exponents of the “Theory of the Offensive”. The strategic shift was undertaken under the slogan ”To The Masses” from the Third Comintern Congress in 1921. The Comintern mandated every constituent party to begin the elaboration of a transitional program for their own national context. The resulting programmatic material would be shared with other national parties with the intention of generalising the approach and sharing best practice.

As the Soviet Union succumbed to Stalinism in the mid 1920’s, the Comintern slid towards the maximalism of the ”Third Period”, formally ratified at the 6^th World Congress in 1928. Capitalism was judged to be in a state of imminent collapse; transitional demands, the united front and the tactical lessons of the early years of the Comintern were swept away. In Germany, the abandonment of united front approaches to the SPD, now termed ”social-fascist” greatly facilitated the rise of the Nazis.

Schneider’s New Left Review interview discussed and identified a major element of a socialist programme; the potential points of origin for initial steps in the direction of dual power. The early experience of communist parties adds a further piece to the puzzle. An approach that identified a method for the formulation of demands which broke with the programme of social democracy, developed the agency of the class, and which, taken together, could not be realised under capitalism.

The Fourth International

The codification of transitional demands can be found in the founding programme of the Fourth International, ‘The Death agony of Capitalism and the Tasks of the Fourth International’ (1938). This document, perhaps more than any other, kept alive the core concept and method of transitional demands. That survival took place against extreme odds.

The physical elimination of virtually a generation of revolutionary cadre by Stalinism and Fascism was accompanied by the loss of the collective memory that generation represented. This, coupled with the destruction generated by the Second World War, warped the post-war perspectives of the revolutionary movement. The loss of so many who might otherwise have formed an experienced leadership in the post-war period left the movement isolated and often exposed to the idiosyncrasies of a few manipulative individuals. Attempts to understand the history of the movement and the nature of a revolutionary programme frequently ran aground because, in large part, the context of their development had been removed or denied.

The limited liberalisation of the Soviet regime under Gorbachev, followed by the complete collapse of the regime, enabled the release and publication of a range of previously ”locked down” material. Regaining access to this material began the process of restoring a significant proportion of the collective memory of the movement. The translation and publication of, for example, the documents and proceedings of the early Comintern congresses are of great significance both historically and practically. This in turn provides an opportunity to validate and appropriately re-integrate lessons into socialist practice, filling out the often highly telegraphed programmatic language with the description, action and discussion that framed and formed them. The report of the debate that follows existed in that period of fractured continuity. It is instructive in its own terms, but it is also offered as an example of how the missing pieces of the narrative can impact the whole. It also reflects the tendency to repeat debates of the past when the original is obscured.

Fractured Continuity: The ”What Next?” Debate.

The journal ”What Next?”, published for a decade or so from the mid-1990s, provided an open, generally non-sectarian forum for Marxists to discuss strategy. Many contributors had a historic connection with the, by then imploded, British Workers Revolutionary Party. In 1998 Bob Pitt and Harry Ratner, two such contributors, wrote an extended critique of the 1938 Transitional Programme and its methodology.

Their critique centred around three main elements:

• The core of the 1938 Programme, ”The Death Agony of Capitalism and the Tasks of the Fourth International” was constructed around a perspective that the Second World War would herald an imminent collapse of capitalism and pre-revolutionary period. In this it was incorrect, and, according to Pitt, the error was not ”a question of this or that mistaken prognosis but of a fundamental error in perspectives”.

• That transitional demands were intimately bound up with, and their value exclusively dependent on, a pre-revolutionary, or transitional period.

• As a consequence, socialists should not agitate for transitional demands outside that pre-revolutionary period, but focus on helping workers secure minimum demands. This work should be accompanied by a programme of propaganda for socialism.

Pitt and Ratner’s critique was articulated thoughtfully and with great clarity. It is, in many respects, a model of challenging orthodoxy, but it rests on flawed lines of reasoning.

The conjunctural analysis set out in the 1938 Programme was indeed incorrect. It set out a possible or likely outcome of the Second World War as a certainty, and, particularly given the losses suffered by the movement in the war, contributed significantly to the disorientation of the movement in the post-war period. This disorientation included a denial by some, for several years, that the anticipated crisis had failed to arrive. The ”crisis of leadership” highlighted by Trotsky in the 1938 Programme could perhaps have been given a little more emphasis in the ”What Next?” conversation. Socialists from the Healy tradition — certainly from the 1960s onwards — would recognise the tone-deaf, perpetual imminent-crisis/collapse prognosis from their practical experience.

The adoption of transitional demands is posed, particularly by Pitt, as somewhat similar to a zero-sum game, with a stark choice between transitional or minimum demands. In reality, the choice is not ”either/or”, but a choice or combination driven by context. As Trotsky wrote, ”The Fourth International does not discard the program of the old ”minimal” demands to the degree to which these have preserved at least part of their vital forcefulness” is a fairly clear indication that minimum demands should still play a role within a transitional programme.

In re-creating, effectively, the pre-First World War programme of social democracy, Pitt and Ratner re-create its central problem: that minimum demands become almost the sole focus of practical activity. Similarly, the focus on propaganda for socialism might be taken to imply a model of broadcast and passive reception. Practical implementation work around a transitional demand carries with it active engagement and gathered experience. From a different perspective, this is the difference between a lecture and active learning. Why should the development of experience, self-organisation and agency not be sought in a period of post-war boom? Indeed, Ratner’s contribution to the ”What Next?” debate highlights a success with a transitional demand in precisely this context from his own industrial practice:

”However, I would differ with Bob Pitt’s argument that demands such as the sliding scale of hours were irrelevant during the post-war period. In ”Reluctant Revolutionary” I related how, as a shop steward in the engineering industry, I proposed this demand and got it accepted in my own factory. This took the form of demanding that redundant workers be kept on until alternative work at union rates was found for them elsewhere, and that meanwhile working hours be reduced without loss of pay to absorb the redundant workers. This was fought for in the Platt’s strike of 1949 and was later adopted as policy by a shop stewards’ conference representing over 10,000 workers in the textile machinery industry. There were several strikes in support of these demands which, though they did not succeed in preventing redundancies, forced the employers to concede longer periods of notice with pay in lieu and eventually resulted in statutory redundancy payments guaranteed by law.”

The methodology employed has lasting value precisely because of its focus on developing agency and building the capacity of workers and the oppressed. Put simply, if one regards a programme to be the condensed experience of the class, transitional demands can form the scaffolding for condensed experiential learning by the class.

Pitt and Ratner demonstrate the difficulty in emerging from an organisation bound to a maximalist programme. Their course correction led to oversteer, which landed them in the minimalist slow lane.

Yet there is a further lesson to be drawn from the apparent contradiction between Pitt and Ratner’s versions of their thesis which renders further consideration worthwhile. There is a tendency to speak in broad brush, generic terms about ”the nature of the epoch” or ”prevailing conditions”. Reality has a finer grain, and specific local conditions often trump such generic terms. The experience Ratner describes is the exception that denies the rule as pervasive, monolithic, and all-encompassing. Transitional demands are effective as a multiplier when the class — or elements of it — are in motion. Such motion, even if relatively isolated, can be significantly multiplied by tailored injection of programmatic direction.

Transitional Demands in Detail:
”End Commercial Secrecy”—The Lucas Example

In 1979, a group of shop stewards from a British company were nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize. This eyebrow-raising event recognised the work of “The Combine”; the shop stewards' organisation at Lucas Aerospace. The Lucas story reflects probably the most considered and radical attempt at exerting workers’ control outside a pre-revolutionary situation. It used demands to ”end commercial secrecy” to generate the data which informed a detailed plan for alternative social production.

The arms industry in the UK faced the 1970s with the recognition that the 1965 Wilson Labour Government’s withdrawal of military bases East of Suez, and reorientation towards NATO would provoke major changes. The results of the 1968 defence review stimulated a flurry of mergers, acquisitions and abandoned projects in the UK arms industry.

Workers in one of the major British arms companies, Lucas Aerospace, facing increased offshoring, acted to establish more effective cooperation across the dozen or so unions representing Lucas workers. In 1972 they established ”The Combine”, a representative company-wide shop stewards committee. The Combine was established carefully and inclusively over the course of four and a half years to ensure maximum understanding and solidarity across the company. By 1974 it was strong enough to fight off 800 redundancies. As the Combine strengthened, it added advisory ”services” (effectively working groups) covering a number of areas. Science and technology advice was prominent amongst these services.

Threats of further redundancies led the Combine to seek a meeting with then new Industry Minister in the 1974 Wilson Labour Government, Tony Benn. He suggested that Lucas Management, the Combine and his Ministry formulate a plan to save jobs. The Combine, sniffing corporatism, decided they would instead produce their own plan. Widespread consultation followed across the company, with an emphasis on what socially useful products could be put into production with minimal amounts of retooling of the current plant. The Corporate Plan developed by The Combine articulated 150 possible socially useful projects, with several fully worked examples. This followed a series of in-depth questionnaires assessing technical and human feasibility, and the creative suggestions of Lucas workers. The questionnaires didn’t simply inventory equipment; they also raised the question of alternative ways of running the factory.

Market analyses and economic and social arguments were included in the plan. It took The Combine around a year to develop the plan. Mike Cooley, a leading figure, summed up the challenge: ‘The only way in which we could be involved in a corporate plan would be if we grew it up in a way which challenged the private profit motive of the company and instead talked of social profit.

Three elements are worthy of particular note:

• Lucas clearly employed a significant number of highly skilled workers, but the plan was produced by ”ordinary people”.

• The plan was formulated by a group-wide shop stewards committee, an unofficial union body.

• The plan suggested new and innovative production processes, combining the contributions of theoretical engineers with the tacit knowledge of the shop floor.

Workers in several other parts of the defence industry expressed strong interest and engagement with the Combine’s plan. Workers at BAC Brough, near Hull, faced similar threats of redundancy and closure. The BAC Brough workers, along with BAC Preston, contacted The Combine. They were amongst those who had extended conversations around understanding social profit as a key element of winning support and engagement from the workforce.

The Plan was rejected out of hand by Lucas management. The Labour Government offered tea, sympathy and verbal support. Benn was removed as Industry Minister for his support for workers cooperatives and his objections to joining the EEC.

Lucas: Lessons and Legacy

The Lucas workers challenged commercial secrecy by arguing the case for ”The Right to Know”. A significant proportion of the work undertaken by Lucas was funded by the UK taxpayer. The Combine argued that there should be an absolute right to know how these public resources were being used. This, it could be argued, was a specific tactical realisation of the ”end to commercial secrecy” demand, honed for maximum contextual impact.

The term ”demand” may appear to be an episodic phenomenon; by the dictionary, ”demand” is ”insistent or peremptory”. It might also appear that the act of making the demand is its most important element. The Lucas Combine went beyond that, incorporating the core meaning of the demand into their daily practice; it wasn’t simply a demand, it was part of a rolling process of action monitored (with the technology of the time) by shop stewards across the enterprise.

There is a direct connection between the Lucas Plan and today’s argument for a ”Just Transition” away from fossil fuels and other environmentally damaging products and processes. As the threat of job losses due to AI deployments becomes reality, ending commercial secrecy — and using the financial and other information obtained to develop alternative products — is both relevant and essential.

”An End to Commercial Secrecy” and its Implications

Individual transitional demands are neither universally applicable nor appropriate in all contexts at all times. With that in mind, the ”End to Commercial Secrecy” demand could be further deconstructed as an example of how the approach embedded in a transitional demand might be modelled in practical detail.

Programmatic demands can appear highly abbreviated for impact. It’s worthwhile, then, to take an example of a demand which has been practically deployed in struggle, such as that of the Lucas workers, and break down its constituent elements. What follows is an illustrative suggestion rather than a solution — one potential means of clarification.

This demand is sometimes shortened and simplified as ”open the books”. There are a number of issues with this formulation. Whilst demands around ”an end to commercial secrecy” have a specific point of focus in making financial information public, the demand is not limited to financial information. The broad programmatic context of the demand should be understood clearly; it forms several links in the chain that lead to workers' control and ultimately a planned economy.

1. Understand the specific context: Threat of closure/reduced working week and pay/redundancies? Strength and experience of union/s numerically and politically in enterprise. Assessment of the balance of forces.

2. Apply the Demand: For an end to commercial business secrecy. Workers’ scrutiny of business decisions. Disclosure of profit and dividends to representatives of workers in the enterprise. Inventory and disclosure of assets, including plant, equipment together with intellectual property and other non-tangible assets. Communication of outcomes in an appropriate range of media. Schedule face-to-face and hybrid meetings to communicate outcomes.

3. Outline the Objectives: To demonstrate in action and in context the inner workings of capitalist business practices. To begin to plan what an alternative may look like in the context of workers’ control of a specific enterprise, including costed plans for alternative socially useful production where an industry is justifiably closing — for example, elements of the arms industry or an industry bound to climate change

4. Establish potential Next steps: To consolidate and generalise experience and build towards workers’ control of the enterprise. To develop calls for solidarity locally and nationally by sector. To take the fight to the community. To build external support partnerships. Generalise the struggle.

The pattern Context > Demand > Objectives > Next Steps may be generally useful scaffolding when formulating transitional demands in collaboration with groups of workers or the oppressed. It should be seen as a tool to enhance understanding by advanced militants and as a guide, rather than as a schema to be rigidly followed. Similarly, one would expect elements of any plan to be critically analysed and modified as the struggle for realisation proceeds. The infinite parameters which interact during the course of real struggle impact the axis and pace of that struggle; class struggle runs to nobody’s script or schema. Understanding and articulating the principles of working class empowerment, self-activity and agency, as objectives, and placing them in the front and centre of consideration are the best guard against reformist degeneration.

The pace of technology-related change is relentless and rapid. This applies to the administration of production in addition to production itself. It is reasonable to ask if the principles that operated yesterday are still operating today, and whether they are likely to operate in the future. It is contentious, but quite possibly accurate, to state that the left has not always factored technology into an assessment of reality. The final section of this document will examine the impact of technology on the transition approach to developing a programme, attempt to assess whether the approach is still valid, and make some projections of possibilities for the future.

Technology and Transitional Demands:
Bringing a Core Demand up to date

Demands focussed around ending commercial secrecy have three principal elements:

1. inventorying assets,

2. establishing access and validating financial data, and

3. contextualising, understanding and communicating both.

The last of these is essential to the key reason for raising the demand; communication is key to developing agency and workers’ control based on that agency. This poses a number of problems. A demand to ”end commercial secrecy” presents a complex issue as relatively simple, and requires further detail to be practically implemented. Accessing complete financial data, particularly in the context of multinational concerns, remains problematic. The financial landscape has grown increasingly complex over the last century, but it is possible to begin to map that complexity and suggest potential solutions. The development of a more comprehensive shared guide based on experience would be valuable.

Modern Financial Systems

Modern financial systems are a long way away from simply replicating ledgers. Understanding their content goes beyond an understanding of accountancy, and potentially into fairly advanced areas of IT systems analysis. This is particularly the case in the context of a large enterprise or other commercial or public entity. The size of the problem, together with its potential complexity, rather begs the question of the capability to meaningfully interrogate such systems, and where that capability is sourced or developed. Without such capability, there will be a range of difficulties in gaining an accurate picture of assets and financial information. The potential for being deliberately misled in these circumstances is strong. The problem is compounded by the fairly common practice of outsourcing software and systems support, or the purchase of a software as a service (SAAS) offering from a cloud-based vendor. The consequence of either of these approaches — outsourcing or SAAS purchase — is to reduce capacity in the enterprise. The particular target entity the demand is placed on, then, may not retain the capability to realise the demand directly from internal resources.

AI

Whether or not the Large Language Model-based systems which are currently described as ”AI” fall into the classical computer science definition of AI, or whether they are systems which might better be described as ”augmented intelligence”, is, for our immediate purposes, moot. Both systems have the following general characteristics;

• They feed on the public good of the internet commons, and turn it into private profit. A ”large language model” has to get its language from somewhere.

• The algorithms on which the system is based are ultimately the product of human intelligence, with all its quirks, errors and prejudices.

• The training materials on which the system's ”learning” is based are similarly selected by humans and may exhibit open or hidden bias.

Whilst noting, and setting aside, the possibility that AI-based tools may help interrogate financial systems, their other characteristics are not necessarily benign. Examples of this are not difficult to find. Perhaps the most notorious is the Google Photos error, which ”recognised” photographs of black people as photographs of gorillas. Whether this was the fault of the training data selection, errors in core algorithms, or both, is far from clear. What was clear was that it took an entity with the resources of Google/Alphabet years to ”fix”. The Museum of Failure proved a little more data on the ”fix”.

”Rather than retraining the algorithm or rethinking its data, Google simply blocked the words “gorilla,” “chimpanzee,” “monkey,” and all related tags from the system entirely.”

When advocating the open release of commercial data, then, multiple human and artificial means of verification may be of value in developing an accurate picture. This requires strong and inclusive workers’ control. The Lucas Combine’s carefully constructed, shop steward-based, plant-by-plant organising model remains an exemplar. The Combine’s data gathering techniques, although from a different era and heavily reliant on the completion of questionnaires, may still offer a means of cross-checking or obtaining certain types of data. It is our job to carry their approach further, modernising as we go.

In the longer term, in terms of data held in IT and communications systems, the left needs to urgently consider its attitude to open source software.

Open Source Software and an End to Business Secrets

Technology has grown to be embedded in almost every form of economic activity. This speaks to a need for the left to understand open source software alternatives to commercial-proprietary software more thoroughly, and to integrate these perspectives into its programme. There is a strong case to be made that this should include participation in advocacy for the use of open source software. Open source software, as the name suggests, is software distributed as open and transparent source code. Such code is freely available and modifiable, and is distributed under an open source license. Outbound open source licenses fall into one of two broad types; restrictive licenses mandate that any changes made to the code are played back into the codebase. Liberal licences carry no such restriction. Open source software is very widely used both as infrastructure (the internet is largely powered by it), or for application delivery.

Open source software is usually produced collaboratively, and is supported by a variety of business models. Generally speaking, the legal stewardship of open source software is vested in a ”neutral” foundation which enforces license terms, and provides minimal collaborative and human infrastructure, in order to facilitate maintenance and development. Examples of such foundations are Apache, which stewards a variety of general infrastructural and application software, and Apereo, which focuses on education.

To return from a necessary digression, software with visible source code can be understood and audited more readily and thoroughly than proprietary software. This transparency reduces — but does not eliminate — the potential to mislead or obfuscate data. Whilst under no illusions that collaboratively produced open source software is somehow ”socialist” in itself, the left and trade unions should advocate its use as part of advocacy for greater transparency and an element of the demand for ”an end to business secrets”. Open Source software development — whilst maintaining the caveat above — assumes a different relationship between individuals engaged in its production. The openness of open source software is a quality that assumes an end to software business secrets at its very core. In this sense, a case can be made that demands to adopt and contribute to open source software are transitional in nature. The advocacy and use of open source software introduces a layer of structural openness into business operations. This not only facilitates the possibility of ending commercial secrecy, but potentially enables workers and their allies to understand and develop new aspects of workers’ control to match changes in the economy.

Open source advocacy, whilst necessary, cannot provide an immediate solution to the issues of access and understanding. Making connections and alliances with groups and individuals with required skillsets and capabilities to interrogate software is an essential component of developing class-based agency. It should become a structured part of the regular activity of both the left and union activists.

Privacy

The growth of internet-based platforms has thrown issues around personal privacy into sharp relief. Mining user attention data, often with little regard for privacy or age differentiation, has become a major feature of modern capitalism. Theorists such as Shoshana Zuboff have argued that the major digital platforms have created a new economic system that extracts private human experience, turns that into predictive data and uses it to influence behaviour. This is contested by those operating from the Marxist tradition, who have argued that this extraction and commodification of attention is a logical development of capitalism in the 21^st Century, and not a fundamentally ”new” system. Influencing, or attempting to influence purchasing behaviour on the basis of acquired data has been a significant facet of capitalism for as long as mass media has existed. The increased use of psychological data, for example, in the late 1950’s and 1960s advertising marked a significant stage of this development. Whilst the automated acquisition of personal data facilitated by online platforms marks a further novel stage of development, it does not fundamentally mark a new set of economic relationships.

What is uncontested is that the platforms are provoking a response from governments in the shape of privacy legislation. The left and trade unions should monitor and understand the impact of this legislation. Whilst commonly motivated by an ostensible desire to protect against the appetites of rapacious tech capitalism, privacy legislation may act to hinder transparency where we might desire more, not less. This may occur directly as a result of specific national legislation, or be made significantly more complex by data which crosses national boundaries. The left may generally support privacy legislation, but we need to retain awareness of its nature as a double-edged sword in certain circumstances.

Finally, although beyond the scope of this paper, in understanding the capacity and capability of modern digital platforms, we should differentiate between the use of those platforms under capitalism, and their potential use as elements of a planned economy. There are dangers in this approach, and there is a clear need to address them by paying significant attention to issues around governance and workers’ control. There are also opportunities to explore data-driven flexibility within the context of planning.

Provisional Conclusions

The 1938 programme ”Death Agony of Capitalism and Tasks of the Fourth International” did not drop from the sky, but marked a point of codification of the experience of the communist movement as it emerged from Social Democracy in the period of revolution and reaction which followed the First World War. Elements of the 1938 programme, particularly its suggestion of developing class agency through workers’ control, and developing workers’ control through the programmatic deployment of transitional demands, represent a starting point, not a conclusion, There is much else to consider, including the nature of the organisation the class needs, which this paper does not consider. Adapting transitional demands to the circumstances of the 21^st century will require detailed effort to integrate technology — and other factors — with programme. This work has only just begun

That adaptation is profoundly necessary. The Lucas Aerospace story demonstrates the power of an approach based on the integration of ”an end to business secrecy” with a programme of action, education and a determined leadership. As the argument for a “just transition” grows for those in polluting or otherwise harmful industries, demands that help us understand the finance and business practices of the industry, and reach for sustainable alternatives, are essential. The scale of the problem is both enormous and existential. The demand for a ”Just Transition” may prove to be the most significant transitional demand we fight for.

James Schneider was in many senses correct in identifying working class communities as a major facet of the class struggle for the 21^st century. Hull, where I live, is not dissimilar to many Northern cities. Its unemployment rate is officially around 7.5%, and is ranked sixth in the ”most deprived local authority” in England list. Preventable mortality rates are significantly higher than the English national average. Traditional industries are, by and large, long closed. There are, put simply, fewer large workplaces to organise around, and many smaller ones it is difficult to reach.

So, what of the orientation towards community that Schneider suggested? The left in Britain have led major community-centred struggles in the past. The St Pancras rent strike, in 1959-60, involved both Communist Party members and ostensible Trotskyists in leading resistance to a Conservative Council’s rent increases. Clay Cross, in the 1970’s saw a small but determined Labour Council take on the Heath Government’s Housing Finance Act. In the 80’s the Poll Tax campaign saw a mass upsurge in community activity. All of which is to say, there is a tradition of struggle in Britain with a community focus. It is not as absent as Schneider suggested, although in some senses it is distinct from the issues he raises. We need to recover the tactical detail of those struggles and build on them. We need to test our recovered programmatic understanding, and re-learn and redevelop methods our movement learned the hard way. If we do not, Reaction

will continue to step in. We need a strong community orientation to help defeat this incursion, and we need to network the lessons we learn from practice as a matter of urgency. The former Your Party Proto-Branch activists could play a critical role in this.

Initial actions will most likely be small-scale. Hull Trades Council has a project they’ve called ’The Unity Shop’. The Unity Shop is part advice centre, part food bank, collecting and distributing food and other necessities for ”families who are struggling, in and out of work”. It operates around the core theme ”Solidarity, not Charity” and is staffed entirely by volunteers. There’s a conversation running about getting the news about The Unity Shop out further, particularly in the large estates that ring the city, and connecting with local campaigns. There’s a natural affinity between the Unity Shop and a campaign against one of Hull’s School Academy chains ending hot meals at lunchtime for primary school age children. The Trades Council perspective is to make connections around activists, to build support and to network those who are drawn into activity. It would be interesting to see that Academy chain’s financial status in a degree of detail — a useful demand for a campaign to raise. This activity has a modest programme; a small part of the activity we need. Community-focused action may start small, but the important thing is, it starts, and it starts informed by the work — programmatic and otherwise — that went before.

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TL;DR: On 5 August 1981, in issue 107 of Inprecor, the Fourth International’s French-language weekly, Michel Royere used a word that had not been used before, writing that the Tudeh Party of Iran and the majority of the Fedayin held campist positions in international politics. He put it in quotation marks. Four months later, on 21 December, he gave it a heading of its own, From anti-imperialism to campism, and a definition. The word was made in Tehran, to describe one precise operation: how a party that called itself communist talked itself into defending the men who were, that same summer, hanging its own class. By the middle of 1981 the Islamic Republic had prised open the factory shoras thrown up in the 1979 insurrection and refilled them with state-appointed Islamic councils, shut the universities under the name of a Cultural Revolution, run an assault on Kurdish autonomy since Khomeini’s war-fatwa of August 1979, beaten women off the streets since 8 March 1979, and after the fall of Bani Sadr on 21 June 1981 turned the executions into a daily list. The trick was to change the measure. Stop asking what the clerical state does to the workers of Iran, and ask instead where it stands between Washington and Moscow.

On 5 August 1981, in issue 107 of Inprecor, the Fourth International’s French-language weekly, Michel Royère used a word that had not been used before. The Tudeh Party of Iran and the majority of the Fedayin, he wrote, held “campist” positions in international politics. He put it in quotation marks, the way you handle a coin you have just struck and are not yet sure will pass. Four months later, on 21 December, in a long article on the Tudeh and the Mujahedin under Khomeini, he stopped treating it as a passing label and gave it a heading of its own — “From anti-imperialism to campism” — and a definition. Forty-five years later the word is thrown around freely, at Syria, at Ukraine, at every argument on the left about who deserves defending. It is worth remembering that it was made in Tehran, to describe one precise operation: how a party that called itself communist talked itself into defending the men who were, that same summer, hanging its own class.

The Tudeh’s problem was simple, and it was not stupidity. By the middle of 1981 the Islamic Republic had already done, to the Iranian working class and to everyone else the revolution had put in motion, more or less everything a counter-revolution does. The factory shoras — the workers’ councils thrown up in the insurrection of 1979, which for a moment ran production in the oil fields and the plants — had been prised open and refilled with state-appointed Islamic councils. The universities had been shut in the spring of 1980 under the name of a “Cultural Revolution” and the autonomous student organisations and the left driven out of them. The assault on Kurdish autonomy had been running since Khomeini’s war-fatwa of August 1979. Women had been beaten off the streets for refusing the veil since the demonstrations of 8 March 1979. And after the fall of Bani Sadr on 21 June 1981 the executions had become a daily list. Royère’s own headline that August named it exactly: the repressive offensive was aimed at the gains of the Iranian masses and workers.

On any measure the working class might actually use — what a state does to your councils, your unions, your press, your right to organise — this regime was an enemy. So how do you file it as an ally? You change the measure. This is the whole content of what Royère named. You stop asking what the clerical state does to the workers of Iran and start asking where it stands between Washington and Moscow, and having asked the second question instead of the first, you find your answer: it is anti-imperialist, therefore it is ours. The Tudeh’s general secretary Nurredine Kianouri put it without embarrassment in July 1981. The objective of every revolutionary force in Iran, he wrote, “as Imam Khomeini has indicated on several occasions,” was to prepare the masses for a prolonged struggle against imperialism led by the United States; the task was to unite behind “the anti-imperialist and popular line of Imam Khomeini.” The Fedayin majority said the same in plainer words: the Islamic Republic “is a national and anti-imperialist regime; our organisation supports the Islamic Republic against American imperialism and its allies.”

Read those sentences again and notice what has gone missing from them. There is no class in them. There are peoples, there is imperialism, there is a line and an Imam, and there is a camp; there is no bourgeoisie, no working class, no shora, no question of who owns the plants or who fills the prisons. That absence is not an oversight. It is the work the rhetoric is there to do. Royère saw the machinery for what it was — “nothing other than a new version of the Stalinist theory of the ‘bloc of four classes’ dressed up in Iranian colours” — and he traced its moving parts. The class nature of the state is “denied, erased.” The fight against the Iranian possessing classes shrinks into a quarrel inside the ruling party, a right Islamic Republican Party against a left one, exactly as the Stalinists of the Second Chinese Revolution had once sorted the Kuomintang into a right, a centre and a left. The only real test of who was progressive became the attitude taken towards the Tudeh, and sometimes towards the Soviet Union. And from there the road runs one way. A party that has decided the state is its anti-imperialist ally cannot then denounce that state’s repression without denouncing itself, so it does not. At most, Royère noted, the Fedayin majority would “regret” the executions. The Tudeh, in the Stalinist tradition, supported them and took part.

This is what “campism” was coined to name, and it is why the abstraction matters. Royère’s fourth element is the one that carries the word. The Tudeh’s whole orientation, he wrote, belonged to “a campist conception of the world,” a vision in which the development of the revolution is measured “by the evolution of the relationship of forces between states.” The world is cut into camps: the imperialist camp on one side, and on the other a socialist camp to which are added whatever regimes have chosen the “non-capitalist road” — Nasser’s Egypt once, Algeria. The task, in that vision, is an alliance between the socialist camp and the national-liberation movements; and — here is the hinge — that alliance “is not a convergence of interests among exploited and oppressed social classes on an international scale, but first and foremost an alliance between states and regimes.” Substitute the map of states for the line of classes, and every question answers itself. A clerical dictatorship busy shooting communists becomes a partner, because it sits on the correct side of a border you have drawn in place of a class line. The anti-imperialism is not a mistake laid over an otherwise sound analysis. It is the alibi the analysis was built to produce.

The Fourth International was not neutral about imperialism, and the point survives only if that is clear. Royère’s comrades defended the Iranian revolution against the United States and, from September 1980, against Iraq’s invasion; a year earlier the same paper had run the headline “Defend the Iranian revolution!” The argument was never that anti-imperialism is a trap. It was that anti-imperialism is not a permission slip — that a revolution reduced to its anti-imperialist face alone, with the class content boiled off, ends where the Tudeh ended.

It is worth asking, all the same, what kind of anti-imperialism the campists were invoking. Iran’s quarrel with Washington was real — the Shah had been America’s man, and the men who seized the embassy were not going to be anyone’s client — but it was a quarrel over who would command the oil rent and who would be sovereign over Iranian capital, not a break with imperialism as a system. It was bounded enough that the same regime bought its guns, right through the war, from Menachem Begin, a fact Royère records without needing to labour it. The “bloc of four classes” was not a slander but the regime’s own physiognomy: a national bourgeoisie with the clergy at its head, asserting itself against a rival and soon nursing sub-imperial appetites of its own — the anti-imperialism of a competitor, not of the exploited, which is why it could be waved at Washington in the morning and turned on the shoras and the Kurds by the afternoon. The campists did not misread a friendly regime. They lent a bourgeois one a virtue it never had.

The Mujahedin, when they attacked those Israeli deliveries, had the thread in their hands and let it drop. Taking guns from Begin was not a lapse the theocracy had to explain away; it was the project working as intended. What was being built in Tehran was a state — clergy welded to an army and a bureaucracy, the pasdars already its loyal core — and a state arming for a long war takes its weapons where it finds them. The anti-imperialism was the junior partner of that construction from the first day, to be spent or pocketed as the apparatus required; there was never a contradiction to resolve, only an interest to serve.

And the ending was already visible in Royère’s own footnotes. He quoted a small item from the International Herald Tribune of 23 November 1981: the revolution’s prosecutor, Hossein Moussavi, announcing that the “pro-Soviet leftists disguised as Muslims” who had worked their way into the revolutionary institutions must be “identified and executed,” and that it was the Revolutionary Guards in particular that the Tudeh and the Fedayin majority had infiltrated. The party that had spent two years insisting the regime was its ally was being told, in the state press, that it would be hunted down inside the very institutions it had joined out of loyalty.

It took another fourteen months. In February 1983 the Guards arrested the Tudeh leadership more or less entire; some five thousand members went to prison. Kianouri, who had defined the party’s task as unity behind the Imam’s line, was brought onto television to confess to espionage and to recant. The cadres who had been taught that the clerical state was the anti-imperialist camp in Iranian form were hanged by it, many of them, and more in the prison massacres of 1988. The camp they had chosen was never theirs to join. That is the thing the word was built to see coming, and the reason it is worth keeping sharp forty-five years on: campism did not save a single shora, or reopen a single university, or hold a foot of Kurdistan. It supplied a bourgeois counter-revolution with a left, and then watched the counter-revolution use the left for rope.

Postscript: What Inprecor got wrong

Our reader Gilbert Achcar (who wrote about Iran under the name Salah Jaber during the Iranian revolution and counter-revolution) suggests this might not be the earliest use of ‘campism’ in an FI periodical. I’d love it if any readers can point to one, obviously excluding the different error of “third campism”. Gilbert also raises another question: was Royère’s analysis correct? More than critical nuance, there was a sharp rebate in the FI in Iran. To find out more, read this article and that one. Was Inprecor mistaken in its early assessments? When Salah Jaber’s 1981 article “The resurgence of Islamic fundamentalism,” from Quatrième Internationale n° 6, was republished in English in the 1987 International Marxist Review the retrospective introduction says flatly that “the notions put forward … on issues like the essentially reactionary but contradictory nature of the Khomeini leadership have since been confirmed.” But by the time the FI debated the first four years of the revolution (see the United Secretariat report by Duret in IV 27 and 28, for example) it was also clear that:

• 1. It dated the counter-revolution too late, and kept “the Iranian revolution” alive as an object to defend.

• 2. It externalises “campism” onto the Stalinists and lets the Fourth International off too lightly, at a time when a campist and stagist view had been growing among the SWPs Iranian co-thinkers since the early 70s.

• 3. On the Tudeh, it treats an abstract “methodological error” where the later analysis supplies a material and concrete one.

We’ll return to this next week.

Sources. Michel Royère, “L’offensive répressive vise les acquis des masses et des travailleurs iraniens,” Inprecor (2ᵉ série) n° 107, 5 August 1981 — the first appearance of “campiste”; and “Le Tudeh et les Moudjahidin face au régime Khomeini,” Inprecor n° 115, 21 December 1981, from which the definition and all quotations of Kianouri and the Fedayin are taken (Royère cites Kianouri, “Pour la cohésion des forces patriotiques,” Nouvelle revue internationale, Moscow, July 1981, and the Moussavi item from the International Herald Tribune, 23 November 1981). The concept is generalised the following year in Inprecor n° 130 (12 July 1982) and in Quatrième Internationale 3ᵉ série n° 9 (1982) and n° 10 (1983). Translations from the French are my own.

From anti-imperialism to “campism”

Michel Royère, “The Tudeh and the Mujahedin faced with the Khomeini regime,” Inprecor (2ᵉ série) n° 115, 21 December 1981 (written 9 December 1981). This is the article in which “campism” is first defined — the middle section, “From anti-imperialism to campism,” is where the word is coined as a category. It is printed here entire so the diagnosis can be read in its own setting: a critique of both wings of the Iranian left — the Tudeh and the “majority” Fedayin for their campist capitulation to Khomeini, and the Mujahedin for a class-collaborationist, substitutionist course — against which Royère counterposes the independent self-organisation of the workers. Royère’s own section headings are retained; his footnotes follow. Translation mine.

The Khomeini regime’s present policy throws into particular relief the question of democratic liberties for the organisations that situate themselves on the terrain of the Iranian left. Two major political positions, both of them mistaken, predominate: that of the Tudeh and of the majority faction of the Fedayin, on the one hand, and that of the Mujahedin, on the other.

The Tudeh and the “majority” Fedayin start out from a characterisation of the Khomeini regime as anti-imperialist in order to define, in relation to it, their entire political orientation: “The objective of the Revolution, of the Islamic Republic and of all the revolutionary forces of our homeland — as Imam Khomeini, leader of the Iranian Revolution, has indicated on several occasions — is to prepare the masses for a prolonged and relentless struggle against imperialism led by the United States.

“The destiny of the Iranian Revolution, like that of all the destitute and oppressed peoples of our region, depends on this historic battle. To succeed in achieving the unity of the revolutionary forces inside the country, and to make use of the international support of all those who aid the Iranian revolution [implicitly, the socialist camp — editor’s note] in its struggle against imperialism and world reaction, is the sine qua non of victory in the coming confrontation,” [1] explained the general secretary of the Tudeh, Nurredine Kianouri, in July 1981.

The “majority” Fedayin take up broadly the same definition of the Islamic Republic and of its leaders: “After the overthrow of the puppet monarchist regime of the Shah, a national and anti-imperialist regime took power. (…) American imperialism is the principal enemy of all the peoples of the world, the greatest international plunderer and the greatest criminal in history. The principal cause of the privations and the misery imposed on our people is world imperialism led by American imperialism. The Organisation of the Fedayin of the People of Iran (OFPI-majority) recognises that the Islamic Republic of Iran, whose leadership is in the hands of anti-imperialist forces, is a national and anti-imperialist regime. Our organisation supports the Islamic Republic against American imperialism and its allies.” [2]

In the logic of this approach, described as “anti-imperialist,” the Tudeh and the “majority” Fedayin fight for the constitution of a “united anti-imperialist Front.” They confer on it a strategic character. Moreover, if one considers the spread of social classes (including the national bourgeoisie) and the political organisations that the Tudeh and Fedayin address in order to bring it about (the PRI), this “united anti-imperialist Front” is nothing other than a new version of the Stalinist theory of the “Bloc of four classes,” dressed up in Iranian colours.

From anti-imperialism to “campism”

Nurredine Kianouri, in the text cited above, explains: “From the very first days of the Revolution, the People’s Party (Tudeh) defined the key question: that of creating a single Popular Front, that of all the partisans of the Revolution. We defend this demand consistently. The cooperation of the revolutionary forces faithful to the anti-imperialist and popular line of Imam Khomeini with the partisans of socialism inside the country must form the basis of this Front. (…) The People’s Party of Iran seeks to attain such unity, such unanimity. It hopes that, sooner or later, the revolutionary forces of Iran will form a united Front and will bring to nothing the plots of the enemies of the Revolution.”

As for the “majority” Fedayin, they declare in the same vein: “All the forces, organisations, parties, individuals, groups and structures that take part in the anti-imperialist struggle must support one another. The OFPI (majority) supports all these forces in the anti-imperialist and democratic struggle, and fights to unite them in a united anti-imperialist Front.”

This Stalinist-type approach turns on four elements:

a) In conformity with the Stalino-Menshevik schema of revolution by stages, applied in a semi-colonial country, these organisations take up again the old division between a minimum programme (anti-imperialist and democratic demands) and a maximum programme. But, in order to preserve the alliance they envisage with the PRI, they quite naturally come to privilege, within the minimum programme, the anti-imperialist demands (which end in supporting the regime’s “non-alignment” foreign policy) against the other demands of a democratic character (radical agrarian reform, rights of the oppressed nationalities, freedom of organisation, of assembly, of the press…) that stand at the very centre of the clashes between the mass movement and the Iranian possessing classes.

b) The class nature of the state, of its institutions, and, within that framework, of the regime and its policy, is denied, erased. The struggle against the Iranian possessing classes and their political representatives is reduced to espousing the cause of the PRI and of the “anti-imperialist government” in its fight against the “liberals,” the partisans of a “moderate government.”

The whole approach to the PRI and to the regime’s leading circles is made solely from the angle of the various regroupments within them. The Tudeh and the “majority” Fedayin thus carve out a right-wing PRI and a left-wing PRI, just as, during the Second Chinese Revolution, the Stalinists once distinguished a right, a centre and a left Kuomintang… The sole “objective” criterion of these distinctions is the attitude adopted by these sectors towards the Tudeh or the “majority” Fedayin (and sometimes the Soviet Union).

c) This leads the Tudeh and the “majority” Fedayin to support, in varying degrees, the repressive course embarked upon by the regime. At times the “majority” Fedayin simply regret the executions. They confine themselves to pointing out how this repression, the regime’s attitude to the “Kurdish problem,” or again the regime’s policy, fail to advance the Revolution and the unity of the anti-imperialist struggle. But these criticisms never issue in any calling-into-question of their attitude towards the regime. As for the Tudeh, in the Stalinist tradition, it supports and takes an active part in the repression.

d) The last element is that this orientation of the Tudeh and the “majority” Fedayin is inscribed within a “campist” conception of the world.

This is a vision in which the development of the revolution is characterised — essentially — by the evolution of the relationship of forces between states. The world is carved up into “camps”: on one side the “imperialist camp,” on the other the “socialist camp,” to which are joined those regimes that have chosen the so-called “non-capitalist road of development” (for example, in earlier days, Gamal Abdel Nasser’s Egypt, or Algeria).

Faced with the “imperialist camp,” the task is to forge a durable alliance between the “socialist camp” and the national-liberation movement in the developing countries. This alliance is not a convergence of interests among exploited and oppressed social classes on an international scale, but first and foremost an alliance between states and regimes. On one side, the states of “really existing socialism”; on the other, the “anti-imperialist governments.” This is the traditional orientation of Soviet diplomacy over many years.

Curiously, it is not the Tudeh but the “majority” Fedayin who, with the zeal that marks neophytes, express this line most openly: “In confronting world imperialism, the working class of the capitalist countries and the national-liberation movements, which fight for peace, for national independence, democracy and socialism, form the world revolutionary Front. The forces of this world revolutionary Front — that is to say the socialist countries, all the democratic and national regimes, all the communist and workers’ parties, all the national-liberation movements — are the defenders and allies of our people and of our Revolution. The consolidation of solidarity and cooperation with these forces will ensure the victory of our people’s struggle for national independence, social progress and the defence of the gains of the Revolution” [3] — declares that same text of the “majority” Fedayin, which smacks of a literal translation from the Russian.

From the reduction of the Iranian revolutionary process — which is a process of permanent revolution — to its anti-imperialist character alone, through to the support given to the Khomeini regime, the circle is almost complete. Just one detail is missing, one that will recall how the support given by the local Communist Parties to the “anti-imperialist” Iraqi, Egyptian or Sudanese regimes came to an end. It is a small item of news, carried on 23 November 1981 in the International Herald Tribune, according to which the Prosecutor of the Revolution, Hossein Moussavi, declared that “the pro-Soviet leftists disguised as Muslims and working within the revolutionary institutions must be identified and executed.” In this interview with the newspaper Ettela’at, taken up by the International Herald Tribune, Hossein Moussavi asserts that it is the corps of pasdars in particular that has been infiltrated by the Tudeh or the “majority” Fedayin.

The alliance policy of the People’s Mujahedin

The condemnation we make of the Stalinist policy of the Tudeh or the “majority” Fedayin cannot, however, blur the deep divergences we have with the strategy developed by the organisation of the People’s Mujahedin. These divergences plainly do not put in question our denunciation of the repressive course embarked upon by the Khomeinist regime, which in fact targets the gains of all the labouring masses of Iran. Unfailing solidarity with the militants of the Mujahedin, with the Kurds and with the revolutionaries hunted, tracked, tortured [4] and executed is an integral part of our defence of the Iranian Revolution — including against the smear and slander campaigns of imperialism (on the theme of the revolution devouring its own children…). It is also one of the preconditions of any political debate on the orientation most appropriate to pursue today. The criticism we make of the Mujahedin organisation bears on three essential points:

• a) From the standpoint of the programme of action and the political alliances they propose, the Mujahedin’s orientation remains stamped with the mark of class collaboration.

• b) The analysis they make of the crisis of the Khomeini regime is largely triumphalist and consequently underestimates the political battles that remain to be fought in order to develop the consciousness and the independent organisation of the living forces of the Revolution.

• c) This leads, on the military plane, to a substitutionist line, to a form of “private war” waged between an organisation and the regime.

Let us examine first the Programme of the Provisional Government of the Democratic Islamic Republic of Iran. As its title indicates, it aims only to “democratise” the present Iranian regime. This programme, in its broad lines, is the political basis on which the National Council of Resistance (CNR) is founded.

It stands in continuity with the institutions of the Islamic Republic, if only through the recognition of Bani Sadr as President of the Republic (chapter 1, point 7), even though it is said that it will be a Constituent Assembly, issuing from free popular elections — in which neither the partisans of the Shah nor the forces that support Khomeini will be able to take part — that will have to draw up the new political system and the new Constitution (chapter 1, point 3). The Programme, moreover, defends the restoration of civil liberties. The Iranian revolution is defined as “national, democratic and anti-imperialist” (point 4).

On the economic plane, “the provisional government admits national capitalism and the national market economy, personal and private property and individual investment, on condition that they do not assume unlimited dimensions, that they do not engender comprador relations or dependence on foreign powers, and that they do not compromise the socio-economic development of society.” Alongside measures such as the nationalisation of foreign trade or a radical agrarian reform, the Programme multiplies its overtures towards small and medium entrepreneurs — for example by guaranteeing to the Bazaar Council or to the professional guilds a genuine right of veto over tax rates.

While the programme provides for the dissolution of the “committees” and the pasdars [5], where the army is concerned there is talk only of a “popular restructuring”: “Internal relations must be democratic, while respecting the hierarchy.” The soldiers would merely be “consulted” on the choice of officers.

As regards workers’ rights, the Programme remains very limited. It provides, to be sure, for the abolition of all anti-worker regulation and the satisfaction of a certain number of demands of an economic character, but it commits itself to recognising only the “peaceful forms of protest (including the strike) announced in advance.” On the new labour legislation, it is said that the workers will be consulted. Not a word on the workers’ shoras or on workers’ control. In the reformist tradition given to them, for example, by Ayatollah Taleghani, the shoras are regarded only as a form — particularly suited to Iranian conditions — of the administration of the state, that is, as municipal or regional councils.

In this context, the question of the Constituent Assembly is approached only from the angle of formal respect for the norms of bourgeois representative parliamentary democracy.

At the level of alliances, the Mujahedin, through Bani Sadr, in fact address themselves to those sectors of the Iranian national bourgeoisie and of the army that would be at once “anti-imperialist” and “anti-Khomeinist.” It would be disastrous to believe that the alliance with Bani Sadr is, in the end, no more than a neat little tactical manoeuvre that would make it possible to isolate the regime further and to increase the representativeness of the non-monarchist opposition. It is wrong to see in Bani Sadr merely an isolated man, dependent — for his programme as much as for his board and lodging — on the goodwill of the Mujahedin. Tomorrow, in the event of a power vacuum or of civil war, Bani Sadr may once again become the principal political card played by sectors of the Iranian bourgeoisie and of imperialism.

The divisions of the Iranian bourgeoisie, the weakness of its political apparatuses (which explain, among other things, the autonomy of a religious hierarchy that commands this material force) mean that it is always the Iranian army that will be, in the event of civil war, of open struggle for power, the principal and last blockhouse of the counter-revolution. It will fight tooth and nail to defend, against the mass movement, the bourgeois state and private property. The preservation of the ex-imperial army in the essentials of its structures will not have been the least of the crimes committed against the Iranian Revolution by the Khomeinist regime.

Finally, on the subject of Bani Sadr, it must be recalled that in politics the accounts are settled by the laws of algebra and not of simple arithmetic. That is to say, there are alliances that cost more than they bring in, alliances that, over the medium term, weaken more than they strengthen the struggle being waged. And such is the case of the alliance with Bani Sadr. The Mujahedin declare that, in order to fight the regime, the struggle of the nationalities must be linked to the struggle of the popular masses of the Persian provinces, that the hour has come to prepare a vast campaign of strikes in the factories, leading to a general strike against the regime.

Is it serving that struggle to ally oneself with a man who ordered and covered the military campaigns to crush the Kurdish resistance; a man who justified, at the time, the assaults on democratic liberties, notably the closure of the universities; a man who, finally, denounced the activity of the workers’ shoras and the strikes; a man who always opposed — even when the threat of imperialist intervention was at its height, or during the Iraqi aggression — the massive arming of the workers and peasants?

In this regard, the Mujahedin’s tactic towards the army, or the cover they give to Bani Sadr’s repeated appeals to the military hierarchy, are anything but innocent.

To be sure, the Mujahedin are wagering on the emergence, within the lower ranks of the military hierarchy and in the corps of non-commissioned officers, of nationalist currents that would refuse both a return to the old regime and submission to imperialism, while not recognising themselves in the present regime of the Islamic Republic. It is in this perspective, too, that their campaign of military actions is inscribed. This may lead, tomorrow, to the temptation of integrating certain sectors of that army into “progressive” coup projects against Khomeini, or of constituting — out of a liberated zone in which a provisional government would be installed — another army made up of the columns of the Mujahedin organisation and of the rallied sectors of the present Iranian army. These are nothing but deadly chimeras for the future of the Iranian Revolution. Not that such “nationalist” sectors do not exist in the army, notably among the junior cadres. It is true that the Mujahedin have support in some of these sectors. But they do not represent, and will never represent, the centre of gravity of the Iranian army.

In this regard, Massoud Rajavi and the Mujahedin leadership ought to follow their own reasoning to its conclusion when they denounce the (quite real) deliveries of Israeli military equipment to the Iranian army. Certainly, in doing so Israel is defending its own interests of state. Those interests run through the neutralisation of the Iraqi army, at a time when Baghdad was, together with Syria, the principal state in the region opposed to the Camp David accords. Menachem Begin does not wish to support the Khomeini regime, but the material aid supplied by Israel corresponds to one of the strategic designs of imperialism: to avoid at all costs a fatal collapse of the ex-imperial army.

A substitutionist orientation

The second mistaken aspect of the Mujahedin’s orientation is their triumphalist analysis of the political and social isolation of the Khomeini regime. No doubt the regime’s social base has largely narrowed. But it is wrong to deny the massive participation of several hundred thousand people in the funerals of Prime Minister Ali Rajai and of Bahonar, or to hold to the simplistic explanation that these are merely the clienteles of the mosques’ social-assistance networks. It is undeniable that the PRI has used the network of mosques and of institutions such as the “Foundation for the Dispossessed” to build for itself, notably among the plebeian layers of the towns, a clientele devoted to it. It is on this basis too that the hezbollah gangs [6] were formed, which have been regularly used against the left or the workers’ movement. But it would be disastrous to believe that one can dispense with a battle to win over those popular sectors that still follow the PRI but that above all place their trust in Khomeini for the role he played in the overthrow of the Shah and for his stances towards imperialism.

This triumphalist vision, combining with the populist and guerrilla tradition, issues in a line of military action that is substitutionist with respect to the development and the strengthening of the mass movement. Its first effects can already be seen. There is no doubt that spectacular blows have been struck against the Khomeinist regime through the assassinations. But this typically Narodnik [7] line of the mechanical destruction of the state, individual by individual, has not put in question the foundations of the Islamic Republic.

This campaign of attacks leaves the field open to the bloody provocations of the old Savak hands who continue to infest the Iranian state apparatus, and of the imperialist intelligence agencies, which doubtless see in it a good opportunity to pour a little more oil on the fire.

But the most serious thing is that, on the political plane, it leaves disoriented a mass movement that has no place to take in this “private war” waged between an organisation and a state apparatus. Moreover, in the substitutionist form it takes, this campaign of attacks allows the regime to weld back around itself those popular sectors that fear the fall of Khomeini would open the way to a return to power of the military and monarchist clan.

The overthrow of the “moderate,” “liberal” government of Mossadegh in 1953, and the installation of twenty-five years of ferocious dictatorship, still mark the collective memory of many Iranians. From this point of view too, the appeals to the army launched by the Mujahedin have the opposite effect to the one their authors seek in order to unmask the regime’s policy.

It is one thing to reject the dilemma advanced by the Tudeh or the “majority” Fedayin, who explain that the choice comes down to Khomeini or a military dictatorship. But it is political blindness not to understand that this argument still has, for hundreds of thousands of Iranians, resonances that reflect what their contemporary historical experience actually is.

It is not a matter of renouncing the defence of the threatened democratic liberties, of renouncing the calling-into-question of the regime, on the pretext that conditions would not be ripe for a qualitatively higher form of government, a workers’ and peasants’ government.

The battle for the defence of democratic liberties is essential in order to revive the mass movement and, for that, it must find concrete form at the central political level. For the policy of the PRI and the Khomeinist clergy is an overall policy that strives to be coherent on a national scale. It rests on the control of a series of institutions: the Constitution and the rule of the velayat-e faqih, a Majlis (Parliament) totally monopolised by the PRI through anti-democratic elections, control of the judicial apparatus, legislation (the so-called Law of Talion, or the legislation against women’s rights), and control of the repressive apparatus (pasdars, “committees,” but also the army). From this it follows that revolutionaries cannot content themselves with denouncing the assaults on democratic liberties without also calling into question the regime and the government that has made these assaults into a systematic policy.

In this context, the slogan of a Constituent Assembly (or National Assembly, or any other formula) takes on its full value. It is a bourgeois-democratic slogan, “the most democratic of the bourgeois revolution,” according to Lenin. The level of development of the self-organisation of the mass movement, and the still limited character of the political differentiations within the labouring masses, do not permit the slogan of a workers’ and peasants’ government — which would be the first form of, or a short stage towards, the establishment of the dictatorship of the proletariat — to be advanced as an agitational slogan. Yet, in the Iranian context, it is impossible for revolutionaries to approach the slogan of a Constituent Assembly as the Mujahedin do — that is, solely from the standpoint of respect for the norms of bourgeois representative democracy.

It must be approached also from the standpoint of the social and economic measures that ought to be on the agenda of that Assembly, at the same time as the discussion on the forms of political regime. It must be approached, too, without counterposing it to the development of the self-organisation of the masses (shoras, militias, etc.). On the political plane, the question of formal democracy overlaps with the problem of the attitude of the revolutionary vanguard towards the petty-bourgeois masses (notably the peasantry), the plebeian masses, and also those sectors of the working masses that have not yet acquired class consciousness.

On the economic and cultural plane, these petty-bourgeois and plebeian layers are extraordinarily weak. Their essential political strength lies in their numbers. The slogans of formal democracy, like that of the Constituent Assembly, are capable of winning over not only the petty-bourgeois and plebeian masses but also the great working masses, precisely because this last slogan offers them the possibility — at least in appearance — of setting their will against that of the dominant classes.

For that, one must first take account of their real motivations, of the fact that they threw themselves into the revolutionary fray not so much for more formal democracy as to change their concrete lives and become the subjects of history.

This is what gives its importance to the close link between the slogan of the Constituent Assembly and the implementation of economic and social measures against imperialism, the big capitalists and the landowners.

This is what gives its importance to the battle for the defence of democratic rights — for the workers, the poor peasants and the national minorities — for the development of self-organisation, so that they can make their voices heard and directly exercise their political rights without waiting for new saviours or a supreme Imam.

Hence the importance, within the general slogans on self-organisation — in order to guarantee the existence of a genuine sovereign Constituent Assembly capable of implementing these measures against the threats of the possessing classes, of reaction and of imperialism — of the slogan of the general arming of the workers. What is a Constituent Assembly worth if it is “protected” only by the present Iranian army, even “democratised” according to the programme of the CNR?

For to advance in Iran today the slogan of a Constituent Assembly does not mean renouncing or setting aside the battle for the reconstruction, the strengthening and the centralisation of the shoras, which is a central element in the building of an independent workers’ movement. The realisation of the conditions permitting the free election of such a sovereign Constituent Assembly — one taking up the great political, economic and social questions — would indeed be favourable to the revival of workers’ self-organisation and activity.

This struggle for the strengthening and the independence of the workers’ movement will doubtless pass through many mediations (a national congress of the shoras, trade-union organisation, the emergence of an independent workers’ party with a mass influence, etc.), and no one can arbitrarily define its forms and rhythms in advance. But Iranian revolutionaries must wage two battles at once:

— that for the satisfaction of the democratic demands (including as regards the forms of the state) that no sector of the Iranian bourgeoisie is in a position to wage, or even to begin to pose consistently;

— that for the strengthening of the workers’ movement with the perspective of issuing in a form of dual power.

On this double battle will depend the possibility for the working class to play its leading role in the process of permanent revolution opened by the outbreak of the Third Iranian Revolution — to weave the necessary alliances with the plebeian layers of the towns, the poor peasantry and the movement of the nationalities, an indispensable condition for the definitive triumph of the Iranian Revolution, indispensable to the liquidation of imperialist domination, of exploitation and of oppression.

— Michel Royère, 9 December 1981

Footnotes

1. Nurredine Kianouri, “For the cohesion of the patriotic forces,” Nouvelle revue internationale [New International Review], Moscow, July 1981.

2. The guerrilla organisation of the Fedayin of the People of Iran (OFPI) split between the end of 1979 and the beginning of 1980. The majority of the Central Committee — whence its name “majority” — decided to abandon the armed struggle alongside the Kurds and to adopt towards the regime a line analogous to that of the Tudeh. The “minority” Fedayin, for their part, have since maintained a line of resolute opposition to the regime. They were, together with the Peykar, the principal Marxist organisation struck by the latest wave of repression. It is worth noting that both these organisations condemn the Mujahedin’s alliance with Bani Sadr and that both are opposed to the launching, at the present time, of armed struggle against the regime.

3. All these quotations of the “majority” Fedayin are drawn from their May Day 1981 message, published in a special English-language issue of Kar International.

4. Khomeini recently issued a fatwa (religious decree) justifying the use of torture — Le Monde, 6–7 December 1981.

5. Pasdars, or Guardians of the Revolution: an army of volunteers rigorously selected for their loyalty to the regime. The pasdars, recruited mainly in the towns of the Persian provinces, are said to number several tens of thousands.

6. Hezbollah, or “partisans of God”: the thugs who attacked the demonstrations of the parties of the Iranian left, chanting “There is but one party, the party of God!” — whence their name. Their principal leader is a prominent figure of the regime, Ayatollah Ghaffouri.

7. Narodniki, after the Russian populist organisation Narodnaya Volya (People’s Will) of the 1880s, whose militants were to orient themselves, little by little, towards terrorism directed at the Tsar, his ministers and his generals.

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TL;DR: The climate generation is pouring into Polanski’s Greens, and not because the Greens have the better ecological politics, since they have quietly dropped most of the climate framing for the cost of living. They have a vehicle. The two revolutionary organisations competing for the same recruits have a position. The RCP treats climate change as solved in advance by expropriation and planning, quotes the metabolic-rift Marx while burying degrowth as ‘Malthusianism’, and gives its own World School not one session on the planet in a record-heat summer. The SWP runs the same rift in theory, rules degrowth an ‘inadequate strategy’, then organises for the sectoral cuts it will not name. The label is fairly contested, including inside the Fourth International. The abstention is not. Neither organisation has built anything on this terrain with anyone else, the terrain ACR and the Fourth International, as well as groups like rs21, are still trying to hold, and the RCP has built nothing on any terrain with anyone else at all.

The RCP’s World School programme went up in early July. Twenty-one sessions across six days, and you can read the whole thing top to bottom without once finding planet Earth. Cosmology is there, and they deny the Big Bang. So are Shostakovich, the 1926 General Strike, the Enlightenment, Rojava, and a session on the Epstein class. Alan Woods opens the week. In the hottest run of summers ever recorded, at the flagship school of an International that describes itself as steaming towards 10,000 members, there is no session on emissions, no session on adaptation, no session on the transition. The subject that likely drives most of those recruits through the door in the first place does not make the timetable.

That gap, between the door and the syllabus, is the issue.

Go to Gorton and Denton, in the east of Manchester, where in February the Greens took their first seat in the North of England, and their first parliamentary by-election anywhere, on nearly forty-one per cent of the vote with Labour pushed into third behind Reform. The Revolutionary Communist Party, until its 2024 relaunch the International Marxist Tendency, works those same streets and stalls the same estates, chasing the radicalised nineteen-year-old the Greens are pulling in by the hundred thousand. May Day in Manchester was for decades the guarded preserve of the trades council; now the Greens run their own rival event, sold out, with the new MP on the platform. Into this the RCP sends its paper and its recruiters, and the recruit who stops at the stall no doubt almost always arrives carrying the same question. The climate. It is the one question they have quietly decided not to answer.

Not by turning her away. The RCP is far too clever for that, and its own writers say so plainly: they will not, in the words of their April piece on Polanski, ‘dismiss this phenomenon in a haughty, sectarian way’, nor cheerlead the Greens either, but engage the layers moving leftward and win them ‘over to a revolutionary programme’. So the recruit gets a warm hearing on rent and landlords, on Gaza, on the greed of the billionaires. On the climate she gets four words, expropriate and plan, and the conversation moves on. Communism at the end of the rainbow, with the walk towards it offered as the whole of ecological politics.

It was not always this thin. Here, the obvious charge, that the RCP simply ignores ecological Marx, turns out to be wrong, and the real fault is worse. Their 2020 theses on the climate crisis are the high-water mark, and they are serious. They quote Marx in Capital on capitalist agriculture as a progress in the art of ‘robbing the soil’. They answer Malthus through Engels’ letter of 1865. They close on the Engels of 1876, on how each human conquest of nature ‘takes its revenge on us’, how we do not rule over nature ‘like a conqueror over a foreign people’. That is the metabolic rift, quoted at length, though the theses never call it by that name. Every classic is marched out for one purpose: to bury degrowth. Zero growth and degrowth are reactionary, ‘an argument for permanent recession and permanent austerity’; the whole emphasis is ‘actively harmful’; the target is ‘Malthusianism in all its varieties’. And the reflex is already fixed. Nationalise the monopolies and they will ‘slash emissions and pollution in the space of a few years’. The same theses open by citing the IPCC’s own timetable: emissions cut by nearly half by 2030, net zero by 2050, and above that the decades of adaptation the document itself lists, the flood defences and the reforestation. A dozen theses later, the monopolies change hands and that timetable shrinks to a few years. The adaptation is not mentioned again, nor is the warming already banked.

To be fair to them, and the characterisation only holds if it is fair, the 2020 document is no hymn to endless output. It grants that enough is already produced, that rational distribution would do the work without a gram of additional production. The problem is never that they want more growth. The problem is that they have folded the entire ecological question into a question of ownership, and thrown the biophysical one out of the window, along with the word they refuse to say.

By December 2025 even the seriousness is gone. Manon Powrie’s ‘What would the communist solution to climate change look like?’ is the party’s current explainer, the thing you hand the worried teenager, and it is a catalogue. Fifty-one billion solar panels laid across a patch of the Sahara. Dutch vertical farms. Half a trillion trees. Hurricane-proof houses in Florida. The Marx soil quotation survives, reduced now to a single ornament. Degrowth is not argued against; it is simply gone, the question treated as settled years ago. And the Engels of 1876, the warning about revenge and consequence, has vanished from the text entirely. The piece ends on the opposite promise, that the working class can ‘mitigate and reverse the climate crisis’, can ‘possibly halt it altogether’.

You do not need to import a single outside critic to see the problem. Hold their own 1876 quotation against their 2025 programme. In 2020 they printed Engels on how every conquest of nature takes its revenge in second and third effects that cancel out the first. That is the rebound effect, named a century before the economists reached for it. In 2025 they propose to conquer the climate with fifty-one billion panels and leave the warning on the floor. The Powrie piece rests, first line to last, on the claim that ‘the technology exists’ today. It never asks whether the throughput to build all of it, the copper and the lithium, the grid cables the article itself admits are running short, meets any limit that ownership cannot dissolve. That is the green-growth answer with a single variable swapped. And the people who noticed the limit, the RCP calls Malthusians.

Watch where Powrie reaches for her emblem of harmony. She picks the Netherlands, the world’s second agricultural exporter on a sliver of land. The Netherlands is the standout European case of intensive farming in open metabolic crisis: a livestock and manure base so overloaded that the country’s highest court halted construction over its nitrogen emissions, and the state now pays farmers to cull their herds. She quotes Marx on capitalist agriculture robbing the soil, and picks as her model the one country where the robbery became a constitutional emergency.

Here the RCP has a real point, and it must be granted in full or the rest is worth nothing. Neo-Malthusianism is reactionary. It is genuinely there in the movement, in Ehrlich and the population bomb, in the deep-ecology fringe that treats the poor of the global South as the problem to be managed. The RCP is right to hate every part of it, and so are we. Nothing in this argument asks them to soften that.

But population is not the question degrowth asks, and this is where the theses stop reading their opponents and start sorting them. Malthusianism is a claim about how many people there are. Degrowth, in the form any ecosocialist would defend, is a claim about what gets produced and for whom: that fossil extraction, private aviation, fast fashion and the advertising industry that manufactures the demand for both have to shrink absolutely, and that health, housing, care and public transport have to grow. Those are opposite arguments. One wants fewer people sharing a fixed pile. The other wants the pile broken up and rebuilt around use-values, which is a proposition about class power and nothing whatever to do with birth rates. A third thing again is the collapse politics rs21 diagnoses, the position that mitigation is finished and only prepping remains, and that is not an argument for reduced throughput at all but a refusal to fight for anything. The RCP files all three under ‘Malthusianism in all its varieties’ and swings once.

Michael Löwy is the proof that the distinction holds, and he makes it from inside the Fourth International rather than as a concession to it. He junks Serge Latouche’s ‘immoderate celebration of the Stone Age’ and the contempt for the Enlightenment that goes with it, in terms the RCP would recognise as their own, and he rejects the population frame outright. What he then argues for is the planned suppression of specific destructive production, which is the thing the RCP has told itself is austerity. So the line the theses insist cannot be drawn is drawn, in print, by their own tradition’s ecosocialist. Swinging at Malthusianism in all its varieties, the RCP connects instead with the metabolic rift, which belongs to Marx, and never feels the contact.

The SWP reaches the same abstention by the opposite road. Its road is paralysis. Martin Empson’s work runs with the metabolic rift concept throughout, cites Foster with approval, concedes that socialism will carry ‘aspects of degrowth’, and then rules that degrowth is ‘an inadequate strategy’. The objection is to the word, and its dangers on a leaflet, never to the analysis underneath. On that much they have a case, and it is not only theirs. The Fourth International thinned the label out of its own manifesto after its sections in the global South said plainly that degrowth lands as austerity on people who have never had the growth, and the drafters were right to listen. Nobody has to march under a bad noun. What cannot be conceded is the next step, which is to drop the word and then never name what shrinks. Camilla Royle, in Socialist Worker at the start of 2025, went further than the line permits, presenting degrowth warmly and closing that ‘another world without growth is possible’. No correction from the leadership followed. Whether Royle’s piece is a crack in the wall or a licensed vent nobody outside a party aggregate can say, and possibly nobody inside one either. Meanwhile the Campaign Against Climate Change, where SWP members do a lot of the work, demands the closure of the fossil sectors and the conversion of the car plants, which is sectoral degrowth under another name. The party organises for the cut six days a week and warns against the word on the seventh.

And the cohort keeps walking anyway, which is the part that should worry everybody, because it is not walking over vocabulary. The Greens are not offering a better account of throughput. They have dropped most of the climate framing to run on the cost of living, and the RCP’s own report of Polanski notes he mentions the environment only in passing. What the Greens offer is a vehicle: an electoral machine with momentum, a leader on the news, a by-election in Gorton and Denton, something to do on a Tuesday that shows up in a result. What the revolutionary organisations offer is a correct position and a paper. The recruit is not choosing between analyses. She is choosing between a thing that moves and a thing that is right, and she is twenty, and the summers are getting worse.

What are they all walking away from? A terrain, and the clearest map of it comes from rs21, whose ecological bulletin Red Bird spent its February issue asking where the climate movement had gone. The answer is bleak and unsentimental. The movement is at its lowest ebb in a decade, activists pulled towards Palestine and the anti-racist mobilisations, collectives turned inward by state repression, and in the vacuum a ‘collapse’ politics spreading: the concession that mitigation is finished and only prepping and charity remain. Against it they set what they call the triple fight, to cut emissions as fast as they can be cut, to contest the transition that states and capital are imposing from above, and to organise the adaptation that breakdown already demands. ACR names the same ground from the programmatic side, the planned suppression of fossil fuels, of fast fashion, of advertising, the sectors that simply have to shrink. This is the united front for climate justice. It is exactly the terrain the RCP has declared already won, and the terrain the SWP cannot bring itself to name.

And everyone is leaving it. The Greens leave it as they broaden, Polanski mentioning the environment, by the RCP’s own account, ‘only in passing’, the Spring Conference quietly walking its own energy-nationalisation pledge back to the wires and nothing more. The collapsitarians have declared it lost and gone home to prepare. As for the RCP, its departure is the most complete of the three, because a problem you have already solved is one you need never return to. No, worse than that: never teach, never defend, never put on the timetable of a six-day school in a burning August. And the two retreats are not equal, which has to be said even where it flatters the party this paper has spent a year criticising. The SWP is at least in the Campaign Against Climate Change, doing the unglamorous work of a coalition it does not control, which is the thing the RCP will not do anywhere on any question. Thirteen hundred members, a print shop, a world school, and not one campaign in the country that exists because they built it with anybody else. The organisation that has solved the climate crisis in advance has also arranged never to be in a room where anyone might test the solution.

So the recruit keeps coming. As long as the summers worsen she will arrive at the stall in Gorton, at the meeting upstairs in the Friends Meeting House, carrying the one question, and the organisations built to answer it will hand her everything except the answer. Whether anyone is still standing on that terrain when she gets there is not a thing a correct programme settles. It is the question the doom-monger cannot ask and the RCP will not. For now the field empties a little more each summer, and she comes anyway.

The general method behind this retreat, the RCP’s refusal of the united front itself, is set out in The Clean Banner, the earlier instalment in this series.

Related Reading:

• The Clean Banner: 20 years after Ted Grant’s death, the RCP exemplifies Trotsky and Grant’s warnings about propaganda societies: The Vanguard in Retreat, Part Two

• The Wildfires that Marxists Predicted: Marijke Colle, Michael Löwy, and Manuel Garí Ramos on about wildfires and the global ecological crisis

• The RCP Interprets AI: The Point, However, Is to Change It: They say what the machine is, but cannot raise a demand. The Vanguard in Retreat, Part Four

• Ecology: The Heavy Legacy of Leon Trotsky: First Time In English & With A New Postscript

• The One Thing The SWP Cannot Grant: Marxism 2026, and why the real argument between the IST and the Fourth International is no longer...