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TL;DR: Jo Freeman’s 1970 essay ‘The Tyranny of Structurelessness’ argued that informal, non-hierarchical groups do not eliminate power structures: they make them invisible and unaccountable. The British left has reproduced this failure repeatedly, from the women’s liberation movement of the 1970s through Beyond the Fragments, through Your Party’s bureaucratic collapse, to the Connections network today. As the Green Party absorbs a growing portion of the dispersed post-Corbyn layer, the question of whether it can develop accountable democratic structures — or whether its rapid expansion under Zack Polanski is producing a new version of the same informal elite — is one of the most important organisational questions on the left. Freeman’s essay, fifty-five years old and still unread by most of the people it describes, is where to start.

Sometime in the summer of 2025, 800,000 people gave Your Party their email address. The number was real. The desire behind it was real. What Your Party did not have was any mechanism by which those 800,000 people could hold its leadership accountable for what was done in their name.

A year on, most of that layer has moved. Some to the Connections network, some to the Socialist Federation, a great many into a Green Party that has more than tripled its membership in nine months. The vehicle changed. The question did not, because it was never a question about vehicles. It has a name, given to it in 1970 by a woman writing about a movement that believed it had abolished power. Jo Freeman called it the tyranny of structurelessness. The British left has spent fifty-five years proving her right and most of it still has not read her.

Freeman’s argument is not complicated, which is part of why it keeps being ignored: simple truths are easy to nod at and hard to act on. There is no such thing as a structureless group. Any collection of people that stays together for any length of time develops a structure. The only question is whether that structure is explicit or hidden, accountable or unaccountable. Informal structures are not more democratic than formal ones. They are less democratic, because their rules are known only to those already inside them, their power cannot be challenged by any legitimate procedure, and their authority flows from personal relationships rather than from the consent of the group. Structurelessness, Freeman wrote, ‘becomes a way of masking power’. And it is ‘usually most strongly advocated by those who are the most powerful, whether they are conscious of their power or not’.

Hold that last clause. It is the whole essay. The people who most love the open, informal, structureless formation are usually the people the informal structure already serves.

The recurrence is the evidence

If this were a mistake, it would happen once. It happens every time, which is how you know the problem is structural rather than contingent.

In 1979 Sheila Rowbotham, Lynne Segal, and Hilary Wainwright published Beyond the Fragments, first as a pamphlet out of the Tyneside Socialist Centre and Islington Community Press, then as a book from Merlin. It sold out. A national conference in Leeds pulled hundreds. Every organisation on the revolutionary left felt obliged to answer it. The argument, at bottom, was Freeman’s applied to the whole left: the fragments were doing the work of a party, Wainwright wrote, the ‘left-wing trades councils, socialist resource centres, socialist women’s groups, theatre groups, left bookshops, militant shop stewards’ committees’, all of them carrying out ‘the functions of a socialist party but without the co-ordination and long-term perspectives of a party’. The work was being done. The power was not being held to account.

The book was right about the disease. It was right that democratic centralism as most of the far left practised it meant centralism with the democracy left theoretical, and right that the informal male hierarchies of the revolutionary left reproduced in miniature the oppressions they claimed to fight. Penny Duggan pressed the hardest version of the objection: that the left’s very way of doing politics is ‘simply masculine’, built for one half of the population and closed to the other. She grounded it in the sexual division of labour, which she read as a constant of the workforce. It does not halt at the organisation’s door. The same formal role carries different content depending on who fills it, political work in a man’s hands, clerical labour in a woman’s, and the informal structure does the reassigning while the title on the door stays fixed.

Beatrix Campbell sharpened it in a direction that matters more now than it did then. Trotskyist organisations, she argued, ran on ‘a kind of slide rule’, a particular vocabulary whose terms functioned as passwords: ‘the naming carries a kind of control, and then you don’t have to think about them’. Master the language and you get to run things. Fail to, and you are ‘grappling with concepts rather than with reality’, and the grappling itself marks you as peripheral. Anyone who has watched a bright new member fall silent in a meeting the moment the acronyms start knows Campbell was describing something that did not die with the IMG.

The confirmations came from the people trying to rebut it. Rowbotham, in the IMG’s own journal that autumn, named the star system from inside it and by naming it demonstrated it: ‘The person who can speak or write like me putting these things together may be momentarily “leading”’, she wrote, before adding that in another sense she should ‘be seen as a particularly backward person’. The star who identifies the star system is still the star. The SWP’s Lindsey German meant to refute the book and instead described her own organisation’s informal leadership with some precision: participatory democracy, she warned, throws up its own leaders, ‘women who have some time to spare’, ‘a certain level of education and articulacy’, ‘journalists, writers and so on’. She was correct. She had simply drawn the SWP’s own internal map by accident.

The wrong turn, and why it still matters

Beyond the Fragments diagnosed the disease and then prescribed a version of it. The appeal to prefigurative politics, the idea that the movement’s forms must already model the socialist relations it is building, was elegant. It was also a way of dodging the question of structure by talking instead about the quality of the relationships inside the unstructured space.

Freeman had answered this ten years early. When a group has no specific task, she wrote, ‘the people in it turn their energies to controlling others in the group’, not from malice ‘but out of a lack of anything better to do with their talents’. The consciousness-raising circle, the horizontalist network, the participatory assembly: each works for the task it was built for, which is generating shared understanding among a small group of similar people. It does not scale to a national campaign. And it cannot hold power to account, because it contains no mechanism for doing so.

The fragments learned this the hard way. Their most prominent activists, Wainwright among them, ended up inside the Greater London Council under Livingstone, using state money to fund the autonomous organising the book had championed. The prefigurative politics of the fragments needed institutional cash to breathe. Thatcher abolished the GLC in 1986 and the fragments dissolved. The most consistent horizontalists on the British left arrived, by the logic of their own commitments, inside the reformist state, and then the state cut the branch they were sitting on. The date is not the point. Any formation today that takes warm relationships for accountable structure is walking the same road, and it ends where the fragments ended.

The same test, now

Which brings the argument to the present, where it is being taken live.

Your Party had a Central Executive, a leadership, and in Corbyn a figure whose public profile ran far ahead of any formal accountability to the members. What it did not have was a branch structure with democratic rights over national decisions. Hundreds of proto-branches built real local presence and absorbed real energy; the membership list sat centrally, and the branches had no claim on it. Freeman named this in 1970 as the star system: the movement ‘has thrown up many women who have caught the public eye’, who ‘represent no particular group’, but who, in the absence of any accountable spokesperson, get treated by the press as the movement’s voice. Swap the noun and you have Your Party’s first year exactly. The proto-branches never chose Corbyn as their spokesman. They had no procedure by which to choose anyone, because none had been built. And when the branches pushed, the leadership’s answer was not to open the structure but to freeze it: ban dual membership, expel the organisers, pull what authority existed further into the centre. Freeman saw that coming too. Challenge an informal elite and it reaches for formal rules, not to submit itself to democratic contest but to institutionalise the arrangement it already enjoys.

The Connections network is the honest case, and I want to be careful with it rather than tidy. It began last autumn as an online discussion group faciliated by the Transform network, and by its own account it did not set out to be an opposition; the conduct of the Many-dominated Your Party executive made it into one. On 6 June it held the first of a promised series of conventions, at SADACCA, the African Caribbean community centre in Sheffield, under the plain banner ‘Where next for the Left?’. No more than a hundred and fifty came through across the day. I was there for the closing session, when perhaps eighty were left in the room, and when the final resolution was put most of them kept their hands down. Read that as failure and you misread it. That many people, spread across that many political directions, cannot manufacture a shared line in a single day, and the thin vote registered exactly that, a real political condition rather than a facilitation problem that better chairing would have solved. Where Freeman starts to bite is at the next stage, the one nobody has reached, when a network that has been carrying the functions of a party without its coordination begins to take decisions that actually bind people, and it is not clear the people convening it have settled how those decisions will be made, or by whom, which is perhaps the most honest thing that can be said about it just now.

The triangle here is old. At the autumn 1978 Marxist Symposium, Celia Pugh put the IMG women’s commission line, a revolutionary party with an autonomous women’s organisation as sister formation; Campbell argued for a party transformed by the autonomous movements; Joan Smith of Women’s Voice argued for a third form independent of both. Revolutionary organisation, facilitated autonomous space, programmatic debate structure answerable to neither. That triangle maps without much strain onto the Socialist Federation, now building toward its September founding congress, the Connections network, and the SEDA today. The 1979 debate settled it that all three forms are necessary and none alone is sufficient. It did not settle which does what, and neither have we.

What the Greens are about to decide

The highest-stakes case is the one growing fastest. Since Zack Polanski took the Green Party leadership in September 2025 its membership has run from around 70,000 to past 220,000, and on 26 February 2026 it broke through at Westminster: Hannah Spencer took the Gorton and Denton by-election off Labour, with Reform second and Labour beaten into third. A large share of the post-Corbyn dispersal, the same layer that handed Your Party its 800,000 addresses, along with much of the pro-Palestine vote Labour had forfeited, has reoriented towards them.

This deserves analysis rather than reflex, and the analysis is Freeman’s. Rapid growth is not democratic accountability. The party grew because Polanski is a compelling media figure with a clear left message, and that is the star system operating at scale, not a democratic mandate. A party of 70,000 with a settled culture and known informal networks is a different animal from a party past 220,000 that has taken in three new members for every old one in nine months, strangers who arrive with their own expectations of what the surge is for. The informal channels through which the party actually makes its decisions, which candidates get backed and which internal critics get quietly eased towards the door, were shaped under the old conditions and have not been redrawn for the new scale.

The German comparison is not a prophecy, it is a mechanism. Die Linke’s accommodation to the Greens, and the Greens’ administration of cuts in one German city after another, did not happen because the members wanted austerity. It happened because the informal networks steering the party in office answered to nobody who could compel a different course when the fiscal squeeze came. The Greens here do not yet run councils at scale, Mid Suffolk aside, and their stated position is anti-austerity. The warning is prospective. A party past 220,000, gaining ground electorally, led by a figure whose authority rests substantially on media profile rather than on any internal democratic mandate, is walking towards the pressure that has broken every previous left formation to reach municipal power. Its policies will collide with British capital; without revolutionary politics to win that collision, the record says it capitulates when organised capital pushes back. Whether it has built the structures to survive that pressure is a question its new members are entitled to ask now, loudly, before the answer is decided for them.

Freeman’s actual proposal, put to work

Freeman was never against organisation. She was against the mystification of its absence, and her closing section on democratic structuring reads better in 2026 than most of what has been written since. It is usually cited as a list. It is more useful as a set of questions to put to whatever formation you are currently standing in.

Who holds this authority, and by what procedure were they given it? To whom are they answerable, and through what mechanism could that authority be withdrawn? How widely is authority spread, and how often does it rotate, or has it settled on the same handful of capable, available, articulate people it always settles on? Can an ordinary member find out what was decided, by whom, and why, without knowing someone on the inside? Does everyone have equal access to the group’s resources, its money, its data, its platforms, its list of 800,000 names? Put those questions to Your Party and the answers are damning. Connections, asked the same, would say honestly that it has not met them yet and knows it. The Green Party past 220,000 answers with silence, or a membership card. Which is not an answer.

These are not radical demands. They are the minimum conditions for an organisation to be the thing it says it is. The women’s liberation movement did not meet them. Neither did Your Party. The Greens, at their present scale, are not meeting them yet either, and the reason the left keeps failing this test is not mysterious. Informal power is comfortable for those who hold it. The star system is comfortable for the stars. The friendship networks that run things are comfortable for the friends.

Last year, at the People’s History Museum in Manchester, all three authors of Beyond the Fragments, Rowbotham, Segal and Wainwright, now in their seventies and eighties, gave the keynote at a conference marking the book’s anniversary. The questions they had raised in 1979 were still on the table. The left that gathered to ask them had spent four and a half decades producing variants of the same answer, a new network, a new formation, a new vehicle, each with the same invisible structure and the same unaccountable conveners. And somewhere in a room in that building, or one very like it, the people who will build the next formation were taking notes, and some of them were already, without noticing, the friends who would run it.

Sources. Jo Freeman’s ‘The Tyranny of Structurelessness’ (1970) is on marxists.org. Penny Duggan’s ‘simply masculine’ criticism and her observation on the sexual division of labour are from ‘The Feminist Challenge to Traditional Political Organizing’, IIRE Working Paper No. 33, based on a report to the IIRE Women’s School in 1991 and published in International Viewpoint in 1997. The IMG’s 1979 exchange on Beyond the Fragments, with contributions from Rowbotham, Campbell and Joan Smith, appeared in International vol. 5 no. 1; Lindsey German’s SWP response is on marxists.org.

In 1970 the British section of the Fourth International, smaller then than the Revolutionary Communist Party is today, argued its way out of propaganda-group purity and into the movements. Its national secretary wrote the case. The IMG's nephews, the RCP, have spent 2026 arguing the opposite.

Two secretaries, the same tradition, fifty-six years apart, and the same question put to each: what is a small revolutionary group actually for? Rob Sewell, political secretary of the Revolutionary Communist Party, gave his answer at the party’s Central Committee this June, and we took it apart in ‘The Clean Banner’: the broad movements are class collaboration, the united front is a snare, and the task is to keep the flag clean and recruit the vanguard of the vanguard. Pat Jordan, national secretary of the International Marxist Group, gave the opposite answer in the document extracted below, and he gave it from the weaker position. The IMG in 1970 was a few hundred strong and a few months into being the British Section of the Fourth International, following the departure of ‘MIlitant’ from the FI at the 1969 world congress. The RCP, Militant’s descendant, claims thirteen hundred. The smaller group is the one that argued for going out into the movements; the larger is the one arguing for staying home.

The document is the IMG’s hinge. Both wings of the British section had been built out of the long years of ‘deep entry’, its people working inside the Labour Party as a propaganda ginger-group (in the case of Militant) and as the infrastructure for The Week, the Labour-left magazine, vibrant campaigns for Vietnam and workers’ control (in the case of the International Marxist Group), and this resolution is the new section, the IMG, talking itself out of that and into independent public work. Jordan even borrows his title. ‘From a Propaganda Group to a Party of Mass Action’ was James P. Cannon’s phrase for the American SWP’s own refounding turn in 1946, which is partly why the Americans reprinted the British text in their internal bulletin: two fraternal sections making the same argument, that the era of the small group defending a body of ideas was over, and the job now was to intervene.

Jordan names the trap first, and it is the RCP’s trap exactly.

However, we must be objective and assess our present stage as that of being essentially a propaganda group. Obviously from the situation described previously this is quite inadequate: what can a propaganda group do in the case of big industrial struggles (in particular a general strike)? If we are to play our role in the historic task of helping to bring into existence a revolutionary leadership we have to transcend being a propaganda group.

We are, in a sense, in a vicious circle just now: our ability to intervene in the many struggles and even explosions which are inevitable in the coming years is strictly limited by our small size; and yet unless we can intervene in this kind of struggle we will find it difficult to grow in size and influence. The example of the Northern Ireland struggle last summer, where we could not send someone over until two or three months after the main action and where we were incapable of taking the political initiative, is a warning. We will not automatically grow in size and influence in even the most militant struggles. Put another way we can say that unless in the coming years we can go from being a propaganda group to a league for revolutionary action the opportunity may be lost for a whole period.

His way out is not to accept the circle as a discipline, which is what Sewell has done. It is to break it, and he begins by saying what the organisation should become.

By a league for revolutionary action I mean an organisation capable of initiating campaigns in an increasing number of fields, able to intervene in most of the important political processes and able to take the initiative in the decisive struggles. It is not yet a revolutionary party: it is not substantial enough and has not yet got the support of a decisive section of the working class. However, because it is seen as a serious force by the whole left it can act as an important pole of attraction which militant workers will respect.

Note the modesty the RCP lacks: ‘not yet a revolutionary party’. The turn had a governing rule, and the rule is the whole quarrel with Sewell in a single clause.

It is for us to avoid the organisational sectarianism of IS (International Socialists) and the SLL (Socialist Labour League) and build our organisation not in competition with but for the labour movement.

And then the thesis, stated flat.

The era of the small group is now over; the main function of the Trotskyist movement is not any more that of preserving and defending a body of ideas against Stalinism and reformism. Today, the task is to rapidly set about the job of laying the basis for mass revolutionary parties.

Honesty about the document cuts the other way too. Jordan’s sense of tempo was fantasy. He has capitalism in its ‘final death agony’ and thinks a French May in Britain is possible inside a year, which is the same overheated clock the RCP runs at its World School, and if we hold Sewell to it we hold Jordan to it. The perspective was wrong. What was right was the orientation underneath it, and the two come apart.

Then, in an appendix on the dangers of the turn, Jordan does the thing no one at the RCP’s World School has done. He describes the party the RCP is becoming, and names it a disease.

a) Organisational sectarianism: This disease is one which has stricken many revolutionary movements, the SLL being an almost laboratory pure specimen of the phenomenon. It has its sources in the impact of bourgeois ideology on the movement and the consequences of competition between various groups in a period when they are not put to the real test of leading mass struggles. In the latter circumstances there is a built-in tendency for those groups to flourish which concentrate on building their own resources, putting great emphasis on organisational efficiency, regardless of how this relates to the class struggles. In this situation the yardstick for the ‘correctness’ of a tendency’s policies can become its success in selling papers rather than how well it can apply Marxism to a concrete situation. If a tendency can accumulate enough resources to have a print shop or a publishing house the process can be structuralised. For it the recruitment of some business efficiency experts will reap bigger dividends than leading a strike.

These trends are all the more intensified because in a situation where there is a low political level of activity and general lack of Marxist education recruitment will be easiest for those tendencies which have a very simple unsophisticated policy. All of this tends to become self-perpetuating: the more resources a group has the more propaganda it can make, the more propaganda it makes the more members it gains, the more members it has the more resources it has, and so on and so on. This circle will only be broken when the organisation is put to the test in a decisive struggle or if its internal structure fragments.

Jordan wrote that in 1970, about the SLL. Read it again with the RCP in mind, and the only thing that has changed is the letterhead.

There is a harder truth still, and it is the reason this is an unlock and not a fable. The IMG made the turn Jordan urged, and it did not become a mass party. It reached a thousand, then declined, and in 1982 it folded into Labour as the Socialist League. So the document is no recipe for victory; the right orientation guaranteed nothing, because the objective conditions Jordan misread were not there. What it proves is narrower and sharper. The question Sewell treats as long closed, whether a small group grows by entering the movements or by holding aloof with a clean banner, was posed and answered the other way by the RCP’s own tradition, at the RCP’s own size, by a man in the RCP secretary’s own job. The RCP has not merely chosen abstention. It has chosen the option its tradition tried, renounced in writing, and warned against, and it has done so as though the argument were never had.

Read it as the tradition arguing with itself. Jordan lost the perspective and won the orientation. The RCP has kept neither.

The document was proposed by the IMG Political Committee and was almost certainly drafted by Pat Jordan, the IMG’s national secretary, who defends it under the pen-name ‘Peter Peterson’ elsewhere in the same bulletin and whose Ireland writing in International the text cross-refers to in the first person. It appeared as ‘From a Propaganda Group to a League for Revolutionary Action’, prepared for the IMG’s March 1970 conference and reprinted in the US SWP Internal Information Bulletin*, no. 6, October 1970. Red Mole publishes it as part of the inheritor tradition of the section that wrote it. Some of the language, particularly in the appendices on Black and Irish work, is of its moment; we reproduce it as a historical document rather than edit it into the present.*

The full document, pages 31 to 45, main resolution and all appendices, is available to download here.

TL;DR: The RCP has redefined the united front so tightly that every broad campaign the rest of the left builds, anti-racist, anti-war, climate, counts as 'popular frontism' to refuse, a stance it dignifies as a 'clean banner'. But Trotsky invented the united front to do the opposite, enter the common fight without dissolving into it, and warned that refusing joint action leaves you a 'propaganda society', never a party for power; abstaining on purity just hands the ground to the campists the RCP claims to despise. Its own tradition saw this coming: in 1970 the IMG, smaller then than the RCP is now, argued its way out of exactly this bind, in the document we publish alongside this piece.

One of them went to the anti-racist counter-demonstration by himself. He said so afterwards, in the party’s own paper, and he was proud of it: all he had on him was a bundle of The Communist and some leaflets, and the point, the thing worth writing up, was that he had stood out from the moralism of the main organisers. Alone, on purpose, distinguishable. That is the RCP’s model of intervention in a single image. Turn up to the movement, yes. Stand with the people organising it, never.

The theory behind the image got its fullest airing at the end of June, when the Central Committee met, in the party’s phrase, under sweltering heat, and Rob Sewell, the political secretary, gave the session on popular frontism. The talk is old Grant, restated for 2026. The united front, Sewell explains, and he explains it correctly, was the Comintern’s tactic of 1921: the mass Communist parties turning to the mass reformist parties and the unions, proposing common action on a concrete demand, marching separately and striking together, so that the reformist leaders stood exposed before their own base. All true. Then the wall goes up. Because every broad campaign in Britain today is cross-class and led by liberals or reformists rather than a bloc of mass workers’ parties, every one of them is filed not as a united front but as a popular front, class collaboration, to be refused.

The congress document names them and shelves them. The TUC, it complains, farms its campaigning out to an ‘alphabet soup’ of ad hoc bodies, ‘Stand Up To Racism, Stop the War, the People’s Assembly’, which hand ‘the SWP and the CPB’ an air of legitimacy and are ‘off-putting to most workers’. The sects who staff them, it adds, ‘dissolve themselves “into the movement”’ until they are indistinguishable from the reformists. Against all of it the RCP raises what it calls a clean banner. Whether the comrade alone at the demo experiences any of this as absence, or only as integrity, is impossible to say from outside, and perhaps from inside too.

Give them their due, because they have some. The popular front really was a disaster wherever it governed. In Spain it presided over the disarming of the revolution and cleared the road to Franco; in Chile the Popular Unity government of Allende took Pinochet into the cabinet weeks before he took the presidential palace. Trotsky’s word for the mechanism was a strike-breaking conspiracy, and the word fits. Lesser-evilism does tend to breed the greater evil it was raised to hold off. The SWP and Counterfire announcing that fascism is at the gates every time Reform tops a poll is a lever for precisely the opportunism the RCP names, and this publication has said so in its own pages. Grant even the sharpest version of the defence: Trotsky himself wrote that for a party of numerically insignificant size, conduct on the mass-struggle front is not yet the decisive organisational question, since the old mass organisations still lead. The RCP has thirteen hundred members. By that measure they are entitled to say their first task is to build themselves.

Entitled to that, but not to what they build on top of it. The popular front and the united front are opposites, and the whole of Trotsky’s 1922 went on holding the two apart, which is the half of the tradition the RCP quietly folds shut. Read him on what the united front actually asks. ‘We participate in a united front’, he wrote, ‘but do not for a single moment become dissolved in it. We function in the united front as an independent detachment.’ The banner stays up inside the common action; that was the entire design. You go in, you keep your flag, you argue in the open for your politics, and you drag the reformist leaders onto the terrain of struggle where their hesitation shows. The RCP has collapsed that. For them, to be inside the broad front at all is to dissolve into it. Not to risk dissolving: to dissolve, automatically, by mere contact. What Trotsky built as a way of being present without capitulating, they read as a choice between capitulation and absence, and they choose absence.

Trotsky wrote the sentence that waits for them at the far end of that choice. A party that will not seek the organisational avenues to joint action with the non-communist masses, he warned, ‘would degenerate into a Communist propaganda society but never develop into a party for the conquest of power’. Set that beside the RCP’s account of itself. Thirteen hundred members, aiming first at two thousand and then ten; the task defined as winning ‘the vanguard of the vanguard’; the movements that actually exist dismissed as alphabet soup and left to others. That is the propaganda society, described from the inside and filed as a virtue. The party quotes Trotsky and Ted Grant in every second paragraph, and has arranged its entire practice around becoming the one thing Trotsky built the united front to prevent.

And who is left holding the broad fronts the RCP has walked out of? The campists.

Sewell spends a good stretch of the talk on what he calls the two-camp theory, the Stalinist reflex that sorts the world into good people and bad, fascist and anti-fascist, war and peace, with no class content underneath. He is right about the reflex. It is the disease that runs through Stop the War and the Morning Star, and this paper has tracked it for two years. But a clean banner carried out of the room does not beat campism; it hands campism the room. Every platform the RCP refuses on grounds of purity, the anti-war coalitions, the Palestine movement that drew millions, the climate mobilisations, is a platform the campists keep uncontested, by default, because the people with the sharpest critique of them have ruled it a point of principle to stay away. It is the same move at work on the climate: they swing at Malthusianism in all its varieties and connect with the metabolic rift, which is Marx’s. Here they swing at the popular front and connect with the united front, which is Trotsky’s. Twice now the club has come down on the thing they claim to defend, and twice they have not felt it land.

There is another way to carry a banner, one that the RCP’s purity and the liquidators’ surrender both miss. It is the one Anticapitalist Resistance works in the Greens and in the ecosocialist current: the visible tendency inside the broad formation, arguing its corner in the open, keeping its own paper and its own politics while doing the common work, neither dissolved nor absent. It is unglamorous, it is exposed, and it wins slowly, an argument at a time, in rooms full of people who do not yet agree. It is also the only thing Trotsky ever meant by the united front, and the only thing that fights campism where campism actually lives, which is inside the movements and not outside them.

So picture the comrade again, the one at the counter-demonstration, alone with his bundle of papers, distinguishable, pure, standing a little apart from the moralism of the main organisers. The march moves off around him. It is led, as it happens, by the people he will not stand with, towards the compromises he can see coming and has decided it is beneath him to prevent from the inside. His banner is spotless. Whether that is the discipline of a revolutionary party husbanding its forces for a wave it alone can see, or a way of staying right about everything while the fight is lost by others, is not a question the clean banner can answer, and it is not going to be answered here.

Published alongside this piece: From a Propaganda Group to a League for Revolutionary Action, the 1970 document in which a sister current then in the RCP’s own tradition, at the RCP’s own size, made the opposite case. The climate instalment of this series follows.

The third in a Red Mole series tracing the Shachtmanite drift in British Trotskyism, from the 1939–40 split in the American Socialist Workers Party to the operational politics of Ideas for Freedom 2025. Part One was ‘”Left Renewal” Against Anti-Zionism’. Part Two was ‘How “Consistent Democracy” Lost Its Verb’.

TL;DR

The Alliance for Workers’ Liberty has, since the 1980s, advocated ‘links with the Histadrut’ as the proper terrain of working-class internationalism on Israel-Palestine. The AWL’s own briefing for British trade unionists, Why trade unions should not break their links with Israel’s Histadrut, written by Harry Glass and Ira Berkovic, sets out the position. The briefing concedes much of the historical record: the Histadrut was founded in 1920 as ‘an exclusivist Jewish labour organisation’, it functioned as ‘a state within a state’ controlling around a third of the Israeli economy, it was simultaneously the major employer and the major union, it has been ‘reactionary’ in its attitudes to Arab workers, its press releases supported the 2008–9 attack on Gaza. What the briefing does with these concessions is the structure this article engages. The historical record is acknowledged and the political conclusion runs the other way: the Histadrut is a trade union and must therefore be linked with rather than boycotted. The briefing rests its practical case on the 2008 cooperation agreement between the Histadrut and the Palestinian General Federation of Trade Unions, and that agreement, examined in full, turns out to demonstrate the argument rather than answer it. The apparatus the AWL inherited in 1988 disqualified the property-form question as politically relevant. The briefing operates inside that apparatus. It can register the Histadrut’s institutional history as background to a trade-union assessment. It cannot let the institutional history condition the assessment, because doing so would require the materialist analysis the apparatus discarded. This article engages the briefing directly, follows the cooperation record to where it actually leads, and closes on the analytical resource the Fourth International has held since 1948 and the AWL has not. It is the third of three articles closing the Drift series. Part Four will engage the political economy of the post-war Western settlement. Part Five will engage the October 2025 Gidley-Mang pamphlet.

I. The framework and its briefing

The AWL’s position on Israel-Palestine has been stable for almost forty years. It is articulated as a ‘Two States’ programme: Israeli and Palestinian peoples have equal national rights, neither has the right to dominate the other, the path to a just settlement runs through joint working-class action across the green line. The political work, on this framework, is to build links with progressive forces inside Israel: Israeli left organisations, Israeli peace movements, and centrally, the Histadrut as the major institution of organised Israeli labour.

The AWL has set out the position in a briefing for trade unionists, Why trade unions should not break their links with Israel’s Histadrut, written by Harry Glass and Ira Berkovic. The briefing is the considered AWL position, presented to the British labour movement, anchoring the case against the BDS movement in Britain through the 2010s and after. It is the document the framework has produced when asked to defend itself in operational terms.

The briefing is also, read carefully, the demonstration of the structural argument this series has been making. It concedes the historical record more openly than its critics have generally given it credit for. What it does with the concessions is the move Part Two of this series traced to its origin in 1988. The briefing acknowledges what the Histadrut is, treats the acknowledgement as background, and proceeds to a political conclusion the historical record does not support. There is a particular experience in reading a document like this: the concessions arrive one after another, each one apparently fatal to the case, and then the case survives them all, intact, as though the facts had been noted and filed rather than reasoned from. The article that follows walks through the briefing’s argumentative structure and shows what the apparatus is doing.

II. What the briefing concedes

The briefing’s account of the Histadrut’s history acknowledges most of what historians of the Israeli labour movement have established. The Histadrut, it concedes, ‘was founded in 1920 as the General Confederation of Hebrew Labour in the Land of Israel as a exclusivist Jewish labour organisation’. It ‘did play an important part in the creation of the state of Israel’. It was ‘one of the central institutions of the society, arguably a state within a state’. It ‘was a major employer, controlling at one point around a third of the economy and employing over three-quarters of workers’. It ‘owned or part-owned the Solel Boneh construction firm, the dairy enterprise Tnuva, Koor manufacturing firm and Bank Hapoalim’. Its holding company, Hevrat Ovdim, ‘managed large swathes of industry’.

The briefing is also explicit about the racial structure of the institution. The Histadrut excluded Palestinian Arabs from membership for decades. When it began to admit them, they ‘were however restricted to an Arab department headed by a Jewish official’. Even after the 1966 name change to the General Confederation of Labour in the Land of Israel, the Histadrut ‘did not campaign against the exclusion of Palestinians from some strategic industries, where military service was a condition of employment’. The briefing acknowledges that ‘in its attitudes to Arab workers within Israel, the Histadrut has often been reactionary’.

The briefing extends the concession to the contemporary record. The Histadrut’s ‘press releases supporting the attacks [on Gaza in 2008–9] were wrong and we said so’. The Israeli-Jewish ruling class, the briefing acknowledges, ‘exploits some Palestinian and Israeli-Arab labour’. The Histadrut ‘is bureaucratically run and politically reformist’. None of this is hidden. The briefing’s case is built on the assumption that British trade unionists who have read the historical record can still be persuaded to maintain links.

The political conclusion the briefing draws is that the record does not warrant breaking links. The Histadrut retains a ‘fundamentally trade-union’ character despite its institutional history. Reactionary attitudes towards minority workers are ‘sadly all too common in the history of the workers’ movement across the world’, not unique to the Histadrut. The institution today is ‘roughly analogous to the British TUC or American AFL-CIO’. The political work for British trade unionists is to maintain links and pressure the Histadrut from within.

III. What the briefing does with the concessions

This is where the apparatus does its work. The briefing acknowledges the historical record, frames it as background, and proceeds to a political conclusion that the historical record does not support. The argumentative moves are specific and worth tracking.

The first is the analogy. The Histadrut, the briefing says, is ‘roughly analogous to the British TUC or American AFL-CIO’. The analogy carries the conclusion. If the Histadrut is analogous to the TUC, then the political relationship British trade unionists should have with it is the relationship they would have with any major foreign trade union centre, and the institutional history becomes a question of bureaucratic conservatism, of racism in the labour movement, of social-partnership models of capitalist administration. These are problems many trade union centres have. Whatever is specific to the Histadrut is, in the analogy, no longer doing analytical work.

The analogy does not survive scrutiny. The TUC has not displaced an indigenous population from its land. The TUC was not founded as the labour wing of a colonisation project. The TUC did not exclude an entire ethnic-national group from membership. The point about membership is worth getting exactly right, because the briefing leans on a date and the date will not bear the weight. Palestinian Arab citizens were barred from Histadrut trade unions until 1953. They were admitted to membership in 1959, the year the briefing treats as the end of exclusivity. They were not entitled to vote in the organisation’s own elections until 1965. Six years, then, between admission and the franchise, and in the intervening period the membership was administered through the Arab department under a Jewish official the briefing has already conceded. The organisation that granted Jews full national-minority representation from the outset gave its Palestinian members a vote only in the second decade of the state. That is not the TUC. It is the institutional expression of a settler-colonial economy managing a subordinated population, and the analogy holds the two together only by treating the difference as residual historical detail.

The second move is the displacement of the property question. The briefing acknowledges that the Histadrut ‘was a major employer, controlling at one point around a third of the economy’ and that this made it ‘much more enmeshed into the state apparatus’ than a typical trade union. Its response is that ‘the involvement of trade-union bodies in various aspects of state administration, including administering welfare services or even overseeing employment, is not uncommon in social-partnership models of capitalist administration. They are models that socialists oppose, but they do not mean that trade unions that engage in them cease to be trade unions.’

The move is structural. The Histadrut’s role as major employer is acknowledged, then framed inside the category ‘social-partnership models of capitalist administration’, a category in which trade unions and states cooperate. The framing absorbs what is specific to the Histadrut, the simultaneous role as employer and employee representative inside a state structured around dispossession of the indigenous population, into a more general phenomenon that does not warrant boycotting anyone. The argument requires that the specific be assimilated to the general; the assimilation requires that the property regime in which the specific operates be treated as background.

The third move is the engagement with COSATU. The Congress of South African Trade Unions, the briefing notes, ‘has indeed been a vocal advocate of boycotting the Histadrut’ and has ‘drawn the analogy with apartheid’. The briefing calls the analogy ‘false’, because ‘the class structure of Israel is different from apartheid South Africa’. The argument runs: ‘In Israel, the Israeli-Jewish ruling class exploits some Palestinian and Israeli-Arab labour, but its economic power rests fundamentally on exploiting Israeli-Jewish workers. In apartheid South Africa, a tiny white caste ruled and exploited the majority black working class.’

This is the briefing’s closest approach to the property-form question, and the tell is what it does next. The concession is real: the Israeli ruling class ‘exploits some Palestinian and Israeli-Arab labour’. It registers, for one clause, that there is a property regime with differential relations to Israeli-Jewish workers and to Palestinian and Israeli-Arab workers. The acknowledgement is then deflected by a demographic argument about South Africa that does not engage what has just been conceded. The structural question that follows from the concession, the relationship between the differential exploitation and the Histadrut’s institutional history, is never put. It cannot be put, because putting it would require the analytical apparatus the AWL discarded in 1988.

The fourth move is the appeal to authority, and it is the move on which the practical case rests. The briefing observes that the Palestinian General Federation of Trade Unions and Israeli labour organisations such as Workers’ Advice Centre / Ma’an, Kav LaOved and Koach LaOvdim ‘do not support the boycott of the Histadrut’. A 2010 Unison delegation, ‘dispatched to Israel/Palestine specifically to “critically review”’ the union’s links, found that the Palestinian and Israeli unions and NGOs it consulted ‘all stressed that the Histadrut was a legitimate trade union’ and ‘did not call on Unison to sever its relations with the Histadrut’. The metric is the political judgement of the contemporary partners. The PGFTU does not call for severing links; therefore the AWL does not. The briefing concedes that ‘the official BDS (Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions) campaign is backed by a significant layer of Palestinian civil society’ and that its trade-union arm ‘has support from many organisations, including affiliates of the Palestinian General Federation of Trade Unions’, and answers that ‘just because a particular demand has a lot of organisational backing does not make it right’. Palestinian civil society’s BDS call is engaged through the filter of the partners’ assessment of it.

IV. The cooperation record, and what it actually shows

The framework’s authority-claim has a concrete substance, and to its credit the briefing does not hide from it. In August 2008, under the auspices of the International Trade Union Confederation and the personal brokerage of Guy Ryder, the Histadrut and the PGFTU signed an agreement in Brussels. It built on an earlier 1995 framework and settled the arrears that had frozen during the Second Intifada. Under it, the Histadrut agreed to transfer at least half of the representation fees deducted from Palestinian workers employed by Israeli firms to the PGFTU, and it made a one-off payment, a little over three million dollars, designated as settlement of the dues accumulated since 1993. The transfer happened. Both the Histadrut and its sharpest critics agree it happened. Any honest treatment of the framework has to start there, and the fashionable claim that the whole relationship is a fiction cannot be sustained: money moved.

What matters is the character of the money that moved. The Trade Union Friends of Israel understood the agreement’s function precisely, and said so at the time: it ‘seems to have cut the legs off most attacks and calls for boycott’. The one-off settlement returned a fraction of what had been taken. The Labor for Palestine backgrounder of December 2025 calculates the transferred sum at around eleven per cent of the deductions levied since 1970; the figure is an advocacy calculation and should be read as one, but the order of magnitude is not seriously in dispute, because the deduction stream itself is documented. Under a 1970 Israeli government decision, the Interior Ministry’s payments section took 0.75 per cent of the gross salary of every Palestinian worker employed in Israel, roughly seventy thousand workers in recent years, and transferred it to the Histadrut under the name of service fees. Ma’an, the Jewish-Arab union whose legitimacy the AWL briefing itself invokes, puts the annual total at more than forty million shekels. Many of those workers were employed where no collective agreement existed, so there was no service to pay for and no legal basis for the deduction. The state skimmed union dues from Palestinian workers and handed them to an organisation that did not represent them, and the 2008 agreement’s achievement was to route half of a portion of that skim to the federation that did.

Then the arrangement collapsed, and it collapsed in a way the 2012 briefing could not have anticipated and its later defenders have not reckoned with. In February 2020 Ma’an petitioned the National Labour Court, not over the boycott, not over politics, but over the plain illegality of deducting representation fees from workers who were represented by nobody. Rather than defend the deductions, the payments section suspended them in May 2020, and when the unions and the ministry could reach no agreement on a replacement, it announced in September that it would stop collecting the fees altogether. The court removed the petition that November. The mechanism the AWL held up as evidence of a functioning trade-union relationship was terminated at its source, because an independent union demonstrated in an Israeli court that it had never been trade-union at all. Ma’an’s own verdict on the fifty-year arrangement was four words: an improper arrangement, buried.

The scholarship has caught up with the point the apparatus cannot reach. Nimrod Ben Zeev, writing in 2023, shows that the Histadrut’s contemporary structure, its membership rules, its collective agreements and its relationship to the state, works to institutionalise a racialised and segregated construction sector in which Palestinian and migrant workers do the dangerous, low-paid labour without union protection under the supervision of unionised Jewish managers and engineers. This is not 1920 and it is not the Nakba. It is the Histadrut now, described in the present tense in a peer-reviewed journal, functioning as the institutional form of a segregated labour regime. The AWL briefing’s category, a trade union with a reformist bureaucracy and some historic racism, cannot hold that. There is a version of the counter-argument that says the segregation is the Israeli state’s doing and the Histadrut merely operates within it, and that version is not nothing; the honest reply is that an institution which administers the segregation, deducts from its victims, and organises their supervisors is not operating within the regime so much as constituting part of it. The line between the two is exactly the line the apparatus was built to blur.

One further fact sits underneath the authority-claim and is rarely stated in Britain. The PGFTU leadership that accepts the transfers is not the whole of Palestinian labour. Its own constituent political blocs backed the formation of the Palestinian Trade Union Coalition for BDS in 2011, which called on international unions to sever all ties with the Histadrut. The federation the AWL treats as its interpretive authority is internally split, its leadership in the bilateral relationship and its base in the boycott coalition, and the relationship itself the PGFTU has described, in its own words, as one ‘of unequals’. The briefing selects the leadership’s operational stance and calls it the Palestinian position. It is a Palestinian position. It is not the only one, and the briefing’s own criterion, the judgement of Palestinian trade unionists, points in both directions at once.

V. What the framework demonstrates

The briefing’s structural function in this article is to demonstrate, in the AWL’s own articulation, what Part Two argued. The 1988 break with the workers’-state framework was not a sociological correction. It was the discarding of the analytical resource that lets the FI tradition engage the property-form question as the condition of political possibility. One of the consequences is the framework the briefing articulates: a framework that can register the Histadrut’s institutional history, concede the racial exclusion, acknowledge the differential exploitation of Palestinian labour, recognise the bureaucratic-conservative character of the institution, follow a fee-transfer agreement through to its collapse in an Israeli court, and let none of it condition the political conclusion.

The framework is consistent with itself. It is internally rigorous. The trade-union character of the Histadrut, on its own terms, is the analytical category that organises everything, and its response to reactionary attitudes, to social-partnership entanglement, to racial exclusion, to a deduction stream ruled illegal, is the same in each case: maintain links, pressure from within. The framework is not stupid and it is not ignorant of the record. It is doing exactly what the apparatus inherited in 1988 permits it to do. What it cannot do is treat the Histadrut as the institutional expression of a labour movement organised, since 1920 and continuously, around the dispossession of the indigenous Palestinian population, and treat that history as constitutive rather than background.

The Fourth International has the resource the AWL abandoned, and it is not exotic. It is the tradition’s foundation. At the 1948 World Congress the FI adopted a resolution rejecting the Zionist solution as a reactionary utopia and holding the repudiation of Zionism to be the precondition for uniting Jewish and Arab workers, while granting Jews full rights as a national minority within a single Palestine. The quarrel was never with the national existence of Jews; it was with Zionism, with partition, and with the colonial character of the labour movement that partition required. Pierre Frank, writing in La Vérité that same year, put the property question at the centre in a sentence the AWL’s apparatus can no longer produce: Zionist immigration had cast the Jewish worker in Palestine in a role ‘quite similar to that of white workers in the colonies’, exploited and yet functioning as an instrument of imperial domination. That is the Histadrut argument in its 1948 seed, from Trotsky’s former secretary, seventy-seven years before Ben Zeev documented its present-tense consequences in the concrete of the construction sites.

The foundation is 1948. The application to the boycott question is our own. When Palestinian civil society issued the BDS call in 2005, and when its trade-union coalition asked international unions to break with the Histadrut in 2011, the FI tradition had the analytical grounds to take the call as the movement’s own chosen form of solidarity rather than as a demand to be filtered through Israeli partners. That work is on the record: in the FI Bureau’s statements (especially since October 2023), in the writing of Joseph Daher, in the standing coverage of International Viewpoint. It does not require the framework the AWL has been refining since 1988. It requires only the materialism that framework discarded.

What this article has argued is the structural claim the briefing demonstrates. The framework cannot see the Histadrut as the materialist analysis sees it because the framework has built itself, since 1988, to exclude the resource that would let the Histadrut be seen that way. The briefing is the apparatus articulating itself in real time, on the document the framework put forward as its own best case. The historical record is acknowledged. The materialist conclusion is refused. The fee stream is defended right up to the point an Israeli court buried it.

The next article engages the broader political economy of the post-war Western settlement, to show that the materialism the AWL discarded is not specific to Israel-Palestine but is the resource the framework has had to abandon across contemporary capitalist analysis. Part Five engages the October 2025 Gidley-Mang pamphlet, which develops at length the argument the briefing already makes in full: that the boycott of the Histadrut, and BDS in general, carries an anti-Semitic logic. The briefing does not make that argument in passing. It makes it as its conclusion, and it is the argument the Left Renewal project has invested most in since. The Drift series does not stand on the Histadrut alone. It stands on the cumulative case that the apparatus the AWL inherited in 1988 has produced, across forty years, the political outcomes the materialism it discarded would have prevented.

This is the third article in The Drift, a Red Mole series tracing the Shachtmanite reframing of Trotskyist categories in British far-left politics. Part One was ‘”Left Renewal” Against Anti-Zionism’. Part Two was ‘How “Consistent Democracy” Lost Its Verb’. Part Four will engage the political economy of the post-war Western settlement, and Part Five will close the series with engagement of the October 2025 Gidley-Mang pamphlet. The AWL briefing engaged here, ‘Why trade unions should not break their links with Israel’s Histadrut’ by Harry Glass and Ira Berkovic, is available at workersliberty.org.

TL;DR

• The RSD’s April 2022 demand for non-NATO peacekeepers in Ukraine's war zone was coherent: scoped to civilian protection, anchored to Russian withdrawal, one instrument among several.

• The International Socialist League rejected it categorically, citing the UN’s structural domination by Western imperialism. But the ISL’s rejection was schematic, not analytical: it refuted an earlier, less precise formulation and never engaged with the specific humanitarian scoping.

• Two vulnerabilities, not one. First: the ISL’s categorical rejection of the peacekeeping demand was schematic on that specific question, even where its broader Ukraine analysis is sound. Second: the L5I tradition entered the ISL through the December 2025 convergence carrying a decade of unexamined campist-adjacent positions. Workers Power was approached for comment before Red Mole published its account; no response came.

• The demand was phase-specific. Sotsialnyi Rukh retired it when conditions changed, maintaining the withdrawal-first framework. By February 2024, Kyselov’s analysis, drawn on by Catherine Samary in International Viewpoint, stated it plainly: ‘if Russia withdraws, there will be no more war.’ The ISL’s categorical rejection required no such updating. Schemas never do.

• Formal solidarity without concrete programmatic engagement is a shell. Campism colonises shells.

There is a photograph that circulated widely in the spring of 2022. Not a combat photograph. A photograph of a queue: civilians, mostly women and children, waiting at a checkpoint near Mariupol to use a humanitarian corridor that had just been shelled for the third time that week. The corridor existed on paper. Russian forces were targeting it. And the organised international left, by and large, was debating whether the correct position was ‘neither Washington nor Moscow.’

That gap — between the abstraction of the formula and the reality of the queue — is what this article is about.

Two socialist organisations engaged seriously with Ukraine in the first months of the 2022 invasion. The Russian Socialist Movement (RSD) and Sotsialnyi Rukh, writing jointly from the Russian section of the Fourth International and the Ukrainian Social Movement, published a statement in April of that year that named Russian imperialism as the immediate aggressor, demanded weapons for Ukraine, demanded Russian withdrawal, and included among its demands the introduction of UN peacekeepers from non-NATO countries to protect civilian corridors and nuclear facilities. The International Socialist League, a Trotskyist international in the Morenist tradition whose Ukrainian section is led by Oleg Vernyk, rejected the peacekeeping demand as ‘shameful’ and ‘a total capitulation’ to Western imperialism. Both organisations formally support Ukrainian self-determination. Their methods of arriving at political conclusions could not be more different.

What the RSD actually proposed

The April 2022 statement is worth reading with care, because it has since been misrepresented by those who want to use it and those who want to refute it. The peacekeeping demand appears in a list of five. The first demand is the immediate withdrawal of all Russian armed forces from Ukraine. The others include targeted sanctions against Russian oligarchs, military support including air defence systems, and cancellation of Ukrainian foreign debt. The peacekeeping demand is specifically scoped: protection of green corridors, protection of civilians, safeguarding of nuclear power plants.

This is not a ceasefire proposal. It is not a mechanism to stabilise territorial lines. It is not an invitation to Western imperialism to manage the conflict on its own terms. The statement explicitly refuses the ‘inter-imperialist proxy war’ framing; it names Russian imperialism as the active aggressor; it argues, directly, that Russian military defeat is necessary for democratisation inside Russia itself. That is a Fourth International position. It is not a NATO position, and it is not a Stop the War position.

The demand for non-NATO peacekeepers, read in that context, does specific work. It addresses the situation of people dying in corridors between cities. It addresses the threat to Zaporizhzhia, a nuclear catastrophe that would not respect the front lines of any subsequent ceasefire. It proposes a scoped, time-limited, multilateral mechanism as a supplement to Ukrainian resistance, not a substitute for it. Whether it was practically achievable is a separate question. As a programmatic matter, it was coherent.

What the ISL actually rejected

Pablo Vasco, writing for the ISL on the same website that hosted the Vernyk interview, described the ‘USFI’ peacekeeping demand as ‘shameful’ and ‘a total capitulation.’ The UN, he argued, is an international body where the US and its allies still call the shots. Any demand for UN armed forces benefits Western imperialism and leaves the conflict in its hands. He cited the record of existing UN missions: of fourteen current missions, eight do nothing to stop the oppressors, the other six face serious allegations of violence and abuse.

That record is real. The argument from the record is not wrong as a general observation about UN peacekeeping. What it does not do is engage with the specific humanitarian scoping of the April 2022 demand. Writing in his introduction to the 9 February 2022 interview with Vernyk, Vasco described the ISL as being in ‘a strong debate’ with what he called the ‘USFI’, the name the Fourth International’s leading body carried between 1963 and 2003, abandoned nineteen years before he was writing. The document he was responding to was not a Fourth International bureau statement; it was a Sotsialnyi Rukh statement, ‘Time for International Anti-War Solidarity,’ published in International Viewpoint on 10 January 2022 under the byline ‘Ukrainian Socialists.’ IV’s own editorial note states that signed articles do not necessarily reflect editorial policy. Vasco attributed a conjunctural national statement by some Ukrainian comrades (not a section of the Fourth International) to the international organisation as a whole, then refuted the International on the basis of it. lis-isl.org/en/2022/02/ucrania-entrevista-a-oleg-vernyk-l… The April statement, with its corridor and nuclear plant framing, appears in the available primary sources to have gone unanswered by the ISL.

This matters because the ISL’s argument is structural, not contextual. The UN is constitutively an instrument of Western imperialism; therefore any demand invoking it is categorically compromised; therefore the specific framing is irrelevant. That is a principle, not an analysis. Principles are useful. They are also capable of producing bad politics in specific situations where the concrete reality does not fit the schema.

The Morenist method

The ISL’s theoretical heritage is Morenoism, the current within Latin American Trotskyism associated with Nahuel Moreno, which split from the Fourth International in the 1980s. Morenism has genuine strengths: it is rooted in the labour movement, it has serious organisational experience in Argentina and beyond, and it produced genuine revolutionary cadres. It also has a characteristic weakness, one that the FI tradition identified with precision at the time of the split and that the Ukraine debate illustrates again forty years later.

Ernest Mandel named it in his 1977 polemic against Moreno, now available in English translation for the first time. The charge was ‘metaphysical scholasticism.’ Where historical materialism ‘starts from social reality and not from the Word,’ Moreno’s method starts from the classification of concepts. The schema is fixed in advance; the concrete situation is then sorted into its pre-existing categories. Mandel wrote that Moreno’s approach was ‘vitiated at its base’ because it asked not ‘what are the real levels of activity and consciousness within the working class, and how do we engage with them?’ but rather ‘which of our existing categories does this phenomenon fit?’

The transitional demands passage is the most directly relevant. Mandel charged that Moreno ‘places on the same footing immediate demands, democratic demands, and transitional demands, without understanding the particular function of transitional demands.’ Quoting Trotsky directly against him: the transitional programme ‘issues from the conditions of capitalist society today, but immediately leads over the limits of capitalism.’ The point is not the label on the demand. It is the specific work the demand does in a specific configuration of forces. Moreno’s method cannot ask that question because the answer has already been supplied by the schema.

Mandel also identified what he called the ‘Manichaean schema’: ‘Comrade Moreno knows only two categories: “the masses” and “the party.”’ Everything outside the revolutionary party — reformist leaderships, popular organisations, intermediate formations — is worth no more than the class enemy. The ISL’s categorical rejection of the UN peacekeeping demand exhibits the same binary structure: the UN or Ukrainian self-determination, imperialism or resistance, with no intermediate terrain where a scoped transitional demand might operate as a supplement rather than a substitute. The binary forecloses the analysis before it begins.

A minor detail illuminates the major point. In his February 2022 polemic, Vasco referred throughout to the ‘USFI’, the name the Fourth International’s leading body used between 1963 and 2003, nineteen years before he was writing. The FI abandoned that name at its 2003 World Congress. Using it in 2022 is not a neutral stylistic choice; it is the usage of someone engaging with a fixed schema of the opponent rather than with the opponent as it actually exists. The schema does not require updating. That is its function.

Applied to Ukraine in 2022, the method works as follows. Western imperialism is the structural enemy. The UN is a tool of Western imperialism. Therefore any demand invoking the UN benefits Western imperialism, regardless of which countries provide the troops, regardless of what specific function is proposed, regardless of whether Russian withdrawal is a stated precondition. The conclusion is reached without examining whether the specific demand, in this specific configuration of forces, serves or undermines Ukrainian self-determination. The schema supplies the answer. The concrete situation is not consulted.

This is not the same as campism. The ISL is not campist. Vernyk and the Ukrainian Socialist League have consistently condemned Russian aggression, supported Ukrainian resistance, and refused the ‘proxy war’ framing that has corrupted so much of the Western left. That record matters and should not be minimised. But formal solidarity without concrete programmatic engagement is a different kind of problem. It is possible to be right about the big question — Russia is the aggressor, Ukraine has the right to resist — and wrong about the smaller question in ways that have real consequences for people in queues at checkpoints.

Two vulnerabilities, not one

The ISL’s position on Ukraine, as Vernyk stated it in February 2026, is analytically serious. lis-isl.org/en/2026/02/ukraine-4-years-of-war-4-years-of-… The campism charge is named correctly. The dual-process argument, national liberation struggle running in parallel with inter-imperialist escalation, is precisely the formulation that distinguishes principled anti-imperialism from both campism and liberal internationalism. The L5I/ISL/ITO convergence is described not as a congress resolution but as the product of three years of political engagement across Milan and Paris, grounded in methodological common ground. That account deserves to be taken seriously.

But the ISL carries two distinct vulnerabilities, and they should not be conflated.

1. The first is methodological and applies to the ISL’s treatment of the peacekeeping question specifically. In his introduction to the February 2022 Vernyk interview, Vasco’s critique was categorical where it needed to be analytical. He engaged with a conjunctural Sotsialnyi Rukh statement published in IV in January 2022, attributed it to the FI as a whole, and never engaged with the April 2022 RSD/Sotsialnyi Rukh formulation’s specific humanitarian scoping. The conclusion was reached by applying a structural schema to the UN rather than by examining what the specific demand did in its specific programmatic context. That the January document was a signed article by the Ukrainian section, not an FI bureau resolution, and that IV’s own editorial note distinguishes signed articles from official positions, did not enter the analysis. Schemas do not require that level of care. Vernyk’s February 2026 statement demonstrates the ISL can perform concrete analysis on the big questions. Vasco’s peacekeeping argument demonstrates the same organisation applying a schema on a smaller one. Both are ISL primary sources. The tension between them is not resolved by pointing to one and ignoring the other.

2. The second vulnerability is structural and concerns how the convergence with the L5I was organised. Workers Power’s Ukraine line from 2014 is documented in detail elsewhere in this Substack: redmole.substack.com/p/the-disgrace-of-the-maidan-leftists The supplement that accused the Fourth International of a second August 1914 for refusing to read Maidan as a fascist coup; the SOAS launch meeting with Counterfire, the CPB, and Socialist Appeal; the Yalta conference in Russian-annexed Crimea; the decade of defending the line against primary-source refutation. The L5I’s June 2023 congress resolution made one formal correction: it acknowledged that withholding support for arms supplies to Ukraine was an error and corrected it. That correction is real and should be recognised as such. What the same resolution did not correct is equally significant. Paragraph ten still describes ‘a coup which overthrew Yanukovych.’ The Borotba reliance is not named. The August 1914 charge against the FI is not retracted. The Maidan framing, softened but structurally intact, survived into the highest-level document the L5I produced on Ukraine before the convergence. fifthInternational.org/2023/07/09/the-war-in-ukraine/

The most striking evidence is the most recent. In August 2025, four months before Istanbul, the German L5I section, Arbeiter:innenmacht, published a lengthy theoretical elaboration of the five-level analysis that still frames unconditional support for Ukrainian victory as impermissible because of NATO’s proxy-war involvement, still opposes arms deliveries in Western parliaments while not physically blocking them, and still defends the inter-imperialist schema against charges of logical inconsistency through an extended philosophical excursus via Hegel and Kant. arbeiterinnenmacht.de/2025/09/16/systematisches-zum-ukrai… The document is sophisticated and internally coherent. It is also, since four months before convergence with an organisation whose position it substantially contradicts, still published as the ISL German section’s theoretical framework without apparent tension.

The convergence resolved a specific practical question: arms supply to Ukraine. That question was sharp, immediate, and politically necessary to agree on before joint work was possible. Agreeing on it did not require, and apparently did not produce, agreement on the underlying analytical framework. The arms error was corrected. The framework that generated the original campist position in 2014 was not examined. It was simply accommodated: the practical conclusion changed, and the schema was reworked minimally around it. The German section can run on autopilot, producing sophisticated theoretical elaborations of the old position, because the convergence happened at the level of the conclusion rather than at the level of the method.

This is the point about factional positions and theoretical presentation. A position adopted under factional pressure does not present itself as factional; it presents itself as principled Marxism, elaborated in theoretical terms, defended with the full vocabulary of the tradition. Dave Stockton’s June 2022 article in Workers Power 394 is the clearest demonstration: written after the full-scale invasion had begun, it named Russian atrocities and called for Russian withdrawal, while still describing the Maidan as ‘a coup’ carried out by ‘an alliance of Ukrainian neoliberals, far right nationalists and fascists, with the aid of US diplomats and NGOs.’ The analytical framework of the 2014 supplement survived intact into the second year of the full-scale invasion in the writing of the man who wrote the supplement. fifthInternational.org/2022/06/04/the-wests-war-aims-in-u… The schema provides both the conclusion and the apparatus for defending the conclusion against evidence. An organisation that has not examined how its schema produced wrong conclusions for a decade has not developed the tools to prevent the schema from producing wrong conclusions again.

These are different arguments with different evidence bases. The first concerns a methodological habit that produces schematic conclusions on specific questions even within an organisation capable of concrete analysis on larger ones. The second concerns a convergence structured around agreement on a practical conclusion rather than examination of the analytical method that produced a decade of error. The first creates a vulnerability to getting specific programmatic questions wrong. The second creates a vulnerability to campist pressure finding purchase through a layer that has not been required to account for why it was wrong before, and whose theoretical framework remains substantially intact beneath the corrected conclusion.

The campist pressure does not announce itself as campism. It arrives as common sense: ‘surely any mechanism that stops civilians dying is worth considering.’ An organisation with a concrete analytical method can answer that question by examining what specific mechanism is proposed, what preconditions are attached, whose interests it serves in this specific configuration of forces. An organisation with an algebraic method cannot answer it that way; it can only repeat the schema. And repeated schemas, under sustained political pressure, wear down. Not because the cadres are unprincipled but because the method does not equip them to hold the distinction that matters.

Consider what happens when a categorical anti-UN position meets the current ceasefire pressure. Stop the War’s AGM resolutions in 2023 and 2025 call for a ceasefire without preconditions. No Russian withdrawal requirement. No humanitarian scoping. The political function of that demand is to stabilise the current territorial situation behind a peace vocabulary. The ISL, with its categorical rejection of any UN mechanism, arrives at a formally different position: no ceasefire stabilisation, maximum Ukrainian sovereignty. But both positions share the same incapacity: neither can engage with the specific question of what a scoped, conditional, phase-appropriate instrument might do in a particular configuration of forces, because one has foreclosed the question by schema and the other by refusing any international mechanism at all.

What happened to the demand

Neither the RSD nor Sotsialnyi Rukh has repeated the peacekeeping demand in any traceable primary source after April 2022. Neither has explicitly withdrawn it. It simply stopped appearing. This is not silence in the pejorative sense; it is a response to changed material conditions.

The April 2022 demand was answering a specific situation: mass civilian displacement, active shelling of humanitarian corridors, the Zaporizhzhia threat in its acute phase, a population still largely present in the conflict zone. By 2023 those conditions had substantially changed. The corridor problem had been partially resolved or rendered moot by population flight. The nuclear facility threat had settled into a different, lower-grade register. The demand had been phase-specific, and when the phase ended, the organisations that generated it moved on without ceremony.

What they did not abandon was the programmatic framework that had made the demand coherent. Writing in February 2024 on International Viewpoint, Catherine Samary, drawing on Sotsialnyi Rukh member Oleksandr Kyselov’s December 2023 analysis in Commons, stated the withdrawal-first principle with the clarity it had always deserved: ‘if Russia withdraws, there will be no more war.’ The specific instrument was gone. The politics remained. internationalviewpoint.org/spip.php?article8423

This is the methodological contrast in miniature. Sotsialnyi Rukh and the RSD moved with the material situation. They had proposed an instrument in response to specific conditions; when the conditions changed, the instrument was retired and new analytical work took its place. The ISL’s categorical rejection of the peacekeeping demand, meanwhile, required no updating when conditions changed, because categorical rejections are not conditioned on material reality in the first place. That is precisely the problem.

The campist formations, for their part, did not adopt the specific RSD peacekeeping language at all. Stop the War’s position, confirmed in its 2023 and 2025 AGM resolutions, is a ceasefire demand without preconditions. The Morning Star material on peacekeeping consists of news reports of Russian objections to peacekeeper proposals, not organisational advocacy. The demand was not stolen and corrupted. It was simply phase-specific, and the phase that generated it has passed.

The general problem remains. Transitional demands are not self-interpreting. Their meaning is determined by the programmatic context they inhabit. ‘UN peacekeepers from non-NATO countries’ meant one thing in April 2022, between ‘Russian withdrawal’ and ‘military support to Ukraine,’ in the first weeks of a full-scale invasion with civilians dying in corridors. It would mean something entirely different today, between ‘territorial concessions are inevitable’ and ‘Ukraine should not join NATO.’ The words would be identical. The politics would be opposed. The RSD understood this without needing to say it. The ISL’s method cannot make the distinction at all.

What the RSD got right

The RSD’s method in April 2022 was the opposite of algebraic. It started from the concrete situation: active bombardment, nuclear facilities under threat, civilians dying in corridors, a Ukrainian left that was simultaneously resisting and demanding international solidarity. It asked what specific demands would serve that situation. It proposed instruments, not principles. And it embedded those instruments in a programmatic framework that specified their conditions and their limits.

That method does not guarantee correct conclusions. The General Assembly route for overcoming Russia’s Security Council veto is procedurally unclear and the ISL’s suspicion that ‘non-NATO’ does not mean ‘without imperialist interests’ is well-founded; China’s interest in a precedent that territorial conquest can be legitimised through peacekeeping is not a minor consideration. The RSD statement did not fully address those vulnerabilities. A stronger version of the ISL objection could have engaged with them directly. Instead, the ISL rejected the demand at the level of the institution rather than the specific function, and the debate that needed to happen never quite did.

What remains is a record of two socialist organisations, both formally committed to Ukrainian self-determination, one of which produced a concrete programmatic response to a concrete situation and one of which applied a schema. The schema reached its conclusions faster. It required less work. It was also less useful to the people in the queue.

The campist pressure on the European left has not eased since 2022. It has intensified, shifted register, and found new vehicles. Whether organisations in the Morenist tradition have developed the analytical tools to resist it — rather than merely the formal positions — is a question the available evidence does not yet answer.

About this series

'With Washington and Moscow' examines how sections of the international left moved from opposing both Cold War blocs to accommodating the joint US-Russia partition of Ukraine. The series documented the settlement terms (Part 1), traced the organisational trajectory (Part 2), amplified Ukrainian and Russian socialist voices (Part 3), excavated the foundational Odesa myth (Part 4), uncovered the 2014 Workers Power origins of British campism's revolutionary alibi (Part 5), analysed how schematic method produces accommodation even within organisations formally committed to Ukrainian self-determination (Part 8), and identified the theoretical framework choice that determined everything that followed (Part 9).

All parts of the series will be posted at “With Washington and Moscow”.

In a hilarious endorsement that spotlights the ridiculousness of the Farage versus Binface election in Clacton, my Anti-Capitalist Resistance comrades Jessica MacKenzie and Simon Hannah put their case for the Count:

"Of course, we want a grassroots-led movement to achieve the revolutionary transformation needed to fight disaster capitalism. But that’s not what we’re working with at the moment – it doesn’t seem likely that anyone with these politics will be standing in Clacton this time.

And when there is no credible socialist candidate in Clacton or organised movement which can mobilise against Farage, the nation turns its eyes to an unlikely hero.

We wish Count Binface well in Clacton and hope that he crushes the far-right chancer standing for Reform."

Regardless of the comic flair in their article, it’s not satire: they stand with a large part of the English left, almost certainly a majority, who would lend their vote to the comedian. My response is po-faced. I see the comedy, but the underlying political questions are serious: how should anticapitalists vote when professional politicians turn corrupt, and no one can expose them like entertainers: Count Binface, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, Bepe Grillo and Coluche? And under what circumstances should we vote for the lesser evil?

To see my response, visit the ACR website.

Chapel replies to MacKenzie & Hannah

TL;DR Turkey shows how a modern state decapitates its opposition: not by coup but by court order, and the cage was built during the ‘reformist’ years before anyone was put inside it. Britain’s equivalent apparatus, the Public Order Act, Prevent, the manufactured anti-migrant consensus, is already largely in place, which is why ‘creeping fascism’ is the wrong image; the creeping is behind us, not ahead. The phrase was always an awkward name for something real: the far-right space cleared by state racism. A Reform government in 2029 would inherit that apparatus intact. The task now, and the lesson of the Turkish left’s failures and its present fight alike, is independent working-class organisation that refuses to dissolve into the liberal-bourgeois pole, which in Britain means Labour, the government currently doing the building.

Last week, the heads of NATO’s governments met in Ankara. Trump came. Rutte read out the communiqué. And an hour from the summit venue, in a cell at Silivri, sits Ekrem İmamoğlu: mayor of Istanbul, the man whose party outpolled Erdoğan’s AKP in the 2024 local elections, the challenger the polls showed beating Erdoğan himself in a run-off, detained on 19 March 2025 and formally arrested four days later, on the very day the Republican People’s Party named him its candidate for the presidency. His trial opened on 9 March 2026. There are 142 charges. The prosecutors are asking for two thousand three hundred and fifty-two years.

He is not the only one inside. Can Atalay was elected to parliament in 2023 for Hatay, the province whose ruins TİP’s volunteers had reached with food and rescue teams when the state did not, in the weeks after the February earthquakes flattened Samandağ and Defne; he has sat in that same Silivri prison throughout, serving eighteen years from the Gezi trial, while the Constitutional Court twice ruled his imprisonment unlawful and the lower courts simply declined to comply. Amnesty calls him a prisoner of conscience, alongside Osman Kavala. His seat is a working-class mandate the state will not honour.

On 21 May 2026 a court of appeal in Ankara declared the CHP’s 2023 congress void under a doctrine called ‘absolute nullity’, removed the party’s elected leader Özgür Özel, and restored to office the man he had beaten, Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu. Kılıçdaroğlu’s first act as court-appointed leader? He sacked the lawyers who were appealing his own reinstatement, and dropped the appeal.

No tanks. No march on the capital. No single afternoon of rupture. The Turkish opposition has been decapitated by warrant, indictment and appeal-court ruling, by the ordinary machinery of a bourgeois state turned to a single purpose. This is the fact British socialists need to sit with, because it is the fact that travels.

On the Anti-Capitalist Resistance website there is a tag, ‘Creeping Fascism’, and it runs forty-two articles deep. The phrase is Neil Faulkner’s, from the book he wrote with Samir Dathi, Phil Hearse and Seema Syeda, and it has shaped how the British far left talks about the present danger more than anything the sects produced in the same years. It deserves better than the caricature its critics reach for.

Faulkner never argued that Britain had become Nazi Germany. He was explicit that fascism is not a fixed state to be checked off against a list but a fluid political process, that arguing over whether Trump or Erdoğan is ‘technically’ a fascist is a waste of breath, that what matters is the direction of travel of the Right as a whole. He insisted, against the grain of the tradition, that the primary agent of fascist repression is not the paramilitary street gang but the existing bourgeois state, reshaped from within by purge and intimidation. And in the book he finished the day he died, Mind Fuck, he pushed further than most Marxists dared, into the psychology of the thing: the narcissism of the atomised consumer who finds in the strongman not a father but a mirror. Ian Parker, who reviewed that book and argued with Faulkner about it as a comrade should, is a Manchester psychoanalyst; their disagreement, over whether fascism is a sickness or a politics, was never settled, and Faulkner died with it open.

Most important, and least remembered by those who invoke the label loosely: Faulkner’s conclusion was a frontal attack on popular frontism. Reviewing Paul Mason and Luke Cooper, he tore into the idea that the answer to the far right is an alliance of the left with the Liberal Centre and a liberal-run state. The interwar record, he wrote, shows the opposite; wherever fascism was stopped, at the biennio rosso, at Cable Street, it was stopped by united fronts of working-class forces, not by popular fronts that harnessed the workers to their bourgeois allies. Build from below, he said, do not hold up a placard begging liberal politicians and the police to save us.

Set against Faulkner is a different reading from inside the same International. At a study day of the Ernest Mandel Foundation in Antwerp last December, Alex de Jong, who directs the Fourth International’s school in Amsterdam, and the historian Vincent Scheltiens argued that naming the contemporary far right ‘fascism’ is not merely inexact but self-defeating. Geert Wilders, on their account, is a radicalised liberal rather than a neofascist: free-market where the interwar fascists were anti-capitalist, working through media saturation where they worked through paramilitaries, a party of two members that coincides entirely with one man. The Blackshirts are absent because there is no organised labour movement left to smash, which makes the far right’s non-violence tactical, not principled. And the label itself, Scheltiens warned, alienates the very passive supporters the left needs to peel away, people who do not recognise themselves as heirs of the brown past and will not be argued out of their vote by a history lesson.

Behind them stands Mandel, who saw all of this coming in 1969. He warned then against loose talk of ‘creeping fascization’, on the grounds that fascism draws its mass from a ruined and desperate petty-bourgeoisie, and that a satisfied, propertied petty-bourgeoisie does not brawl in the streets: it calls the police, and asks them to be better armed. He drew the distinction the whole argument turns on, between fascism proper and the authoritarian ‘strong state’ that represses hard without atomising the class or smashing its organisations. And he mocked, in advance, the habit of calling every authoritarian ruler with a leader-cult a fascist, which is worth remembering when we look at Ankara.

Here is what the quarrel is not about. It is not, at bottom, about whether Britain is fascist yet. Read Faulkner and read de Jong to the end and they arrive at the same door: no subordination to the Liberal Centre, no faith in the capitalist state, build the counter-power from below. The disagreement is narrower and sharper than the shouting suggests. It is whether the word ‘fascism’ clarifies the danger or disarms us before it. Faulkner says the refusal to say the word breeds the complacency that gave us Lexit. Scheltiens says the word loses us the room. I am not sure the argument can be won on the terms it is usually fought, and I am not going to pretend here that it can; what I am sure of is that both men are describing something real, and that the name has been the least useful part of the description.

Because the phenomenon is real, whatever we call it. The space in which Reform now grows was cleared by the state itself: by the Public Order Act and its Serious Disruption Prevention Orders, by the new offences of ‘locking on’ and ‘tunnelling’, by Prevent, by a decade of small-boats theatre and a panic over trans lives conducted from the despatch box. ‘Creeping fascism’ was an awkward name for this. The thing it named is state racism, and the far right is the tenant that racism built the house for.

The apparatus does not need a fascist to build it. Turkey’s Anti-Terror Law dates from 1991, a decade before Erdoğan took office, and the AKP amended it rather than repealed it in the years when Brussels still called them reformers; what changed after 2016 was not the statute but the will to use it, and the courts then took a funeral attended, a speech given, a municipal decision made in elected office, and called it membership of an armed organisation. Britain has its category ready. Counter-terrorism policing calls it Left-Wing, Anarchist and Single-Issue Terrorism, and its own published assessment concedes there has never been a completed LASIT attack in this country and that one remains highly unlikely; the 2024 strategy refresh says the thing is not present here at any significant scale. None of which stopped the diagram being drawn, with socialism and communism and anti-fascism inside the circle. Palestine Action was proscribed anyway.

And the powers keep coming. The Crime and Policing Bill would make it an offence to wear a face covering to conceal identity inside an area a police officer has designated, and the officer may designate that area for up to forty-eight hours on a belief that a protest may take place there and that offences are likely. Not that offences have occurred. That a protest might happen, and that something might follow. Read the two clauses together and the shape is familiar: Turkey’s courts moved the line back from what you did to who you were seen with, and this moves it back from what you did to where you stood and what was on your face. There are exemptions, the government says, for health. The exemption is argued in court. The arrest happens on the street, which is where the demonstration was, and the demonstration will be over by the time anybody is vindicated. Consider, then, who cannot take a mask off in a crowd: the immunocompromised, for whom a mask is the price of being in public at all. Consider who needs to see a face to be spoken to. A law about covered faces falls hardest on the people for whom faces are how language works, and ACR members have been organising against it alongside activists from Liberty and from deaf and disabled people’s organisations, which is the sort of unglamorous defensive work that decides whether there is anyone left on the streets when the powers are finally used.

The bill was drafted before Ann Widdecombe was beaten to death in her Devon home in July, a woman of seventy-eight killed in the place she lived. Counter-terrorism police have taken over the investigation. They have not designated it as terrorism; they say they are still working to establish the motive. That did not slow anyone down. Within a day Robert Jenrick was on the Today programme, pressed on whether the killing conveniently changed the national subject away from Nigel Farage’s five million pounds, and answering that Reform were not mainstream politicians and would not back down. The powers were already drafted. The killing arrives as the weather they will pass in.

Which is why the metaphor has outlived its use. To say fascism is ‘creeping’ towards Britain is to look down the road, when the development that matters has already happened behind us. The obvious reading is that Britain is simply further back on the Turkish road, with the jailings still to come. But that is not quite right either. The lesson of Turkey is not in the jailings; it is in the order of operations. The apparatus that now holds İmamoğlu was assembled during the AKP’s ‘reformist’, pro-EU decade, when Erdoğan was the West’s favourite Muslim democrat and the liberals applauded each expansion of executive power as a blow against the old generals. The cage was built first, in the good years. The prisoner was put in it later.

Britain is in the good years. The 2024 riots, the mosques attacked, the asylum hotels besieged, were a spasm. No, not a spasm: a rehearsal, and the state that stood back and watched them is the state that already holds the powers a future government will need. We are not waiting for the machinery of authoritarian rule to be built. We are living through its construction, and the hands doing the building are Labour’s. Starmer is on his way out even as these words are written; his successor will inherit the apparatus fully assembled and the habit of using it.

For the machinery does not care who inherits it. A Reform-powered government in 2029, and the polling no longer lets us treat that as fantasy, would take office already equipped: the protest law, the surveillance architecture, the Prevent apparatus, the anti-migrant common sense, all built and normalised by others and handed over intact. That is the warning Turkey issues to the British working class, and it is not a warning to be answered at the next election. By the next election the tools are already on the shelf.

So what is to be done now, in the years that feel too early to matter? The Turkish answer is written twice over. It is written in the failure of the old Workers’ Party of Turkey, which won its fifteen seats in 1965 and then let its independence dissolve into the strategic fantasies of others, the officers who would supposedly make the revolution from above. And it is written, more hopefully, in what the present TİP is doing this week. As the NATO leaders meet in Ankara, TİP’s ‘No to NATO’ initiative, in which Fourth International militants are active, has convened an anti-imperialist counter-summit in Istanbul, and the Turkish state has answered it in the only language it now speaks fluently: by arresting anti-war organisers, Muhammed Hizmetçi, Songül Yücel and Sena Şat among them, in the weeks before the cameras arrived. Independent organisation, and an internationalism from below that does not wait for permission. That is the content of the alternative.

TİP knows this tightrope better than we do. It gave Kılıçdaroğlu critical support in the 2023 presidential run-off while running its own candidates for parliament, and it has heard from its critics on the Turkish left ever since that it lent its name to a neoliberal bloc; the sharpest form of the charge, that it kept lending that name even after Kılıçdaroğlu signed a deportation pact with the far right, deserves an honest answer rather than a wave of the hand. But the line those critics point to is the one that matters. You may lend a bourgeois candidate your vote to bury a Bonapartist and still keep your own programme and your own slate on the ballot; fold your organisation into his bloc and you have crossed from the united front to the popular front. That crossing is the thing a British left tempted by Labour will have to refuse, and the tactical vote was never the danger.

And here the Turkish lesson turns inside out as it crosses to Britain. The temptation of the Turkish left is to dissolve itself into the CHP, the liberal-bourgeois opposition, in the name of stopping Erdoğan. The temptation of the British left is to dissolve itself into Starmer’s Labour in the name of stopping Reform. The same imperative, mirror-imaged: the CHP is out of power, and the party the British left is tempted by is in office, administering the very consolidation this meeting is called to warn against. The united front the tradition keeps rediscovering, from Cable Street to Antwerp, is a front from below, of the working class and the oppressed, or it is nothing.

On 3 September the argument gets a room, in Manchester, where ACR and TİP sit down together, and where the comrade asked to defend ‘creeping fascism’ will be defending an ACR book against the Fourth International’s own school, quite possibly with Ian Parker in the audience. Good. That is the argument worth having, and it is better had in public than in a group chat.

None of which resolves the thing that should keep us up. The cage in Turkey was built in the years when building it looked paranoid, and used in the years when it was too late to object. The window in which a counter-power can be built is precisely the window in which the need for it looks least urgent, which is to say now, in the quiet before Reform, in the good years that are also the years the machinery is going up.

TL;DR. When the organised left vacates the ground, a comedian tends to fill it, and part of the left convinces itself the joke is a weapon. It has happened before. In 1981 the comedian Coluche polled into double figures for the French presidency; the Ligue Communiste Révolutionnaire refused to endorse him, ran its own candidate and attacked his 'all rotten' populism for dissolving class politics into cynicism, while still defending his democratic right to stand against a rigged system. His candidacy evaporated; the organisation he later built, the Restos du Cœur, endured, which is the whole lesson: the durable thing is the organisation, not the spectacle. Italy shows the darker ending. Beppe Grillo's Five Star Movement filled the vacuum left by Rifondazione's 2008 collapse, sold horizontal democracy while Grillo personally owned the party, and in 2018 governed with Salvini's hard right. Two comedians, two vacuums: in neither case was the comedian the answer, and in both he was the symptom of a left that was no longer there. Why this keeps happening, and why naming it is not the same as fixing it, is the harder question the piece ends on.

It happens every time the ground goes soft under the organised left. A comedian steps forward, the polls twitch, the establishment panics, and a section of the left convinces itself that this time the joke is a weapon. Back the funny man against the frightening one. It feels like audacity. It is usually surrender, and the reason it is surrender is a lesson our own tradition learned twice, once in France and once in Italy, and mostly declined to remember in between.

Start with the case where the Fourth International actually did the work.

On 30 October 1980 the comedian Michel Colucci, Coluche, declared himself a candidate for the French presidency. He ran as the candidate of ‘those who don’t count’, the marginalised, the ones politics forgets, under a slogan that told you everything about its limits and its appeal at once: ‘un pour tous, tous pourris’, one for all, all rotten. It was received as a joke, a canular. Then it stopped being funny. By the turn of the year the polls had him in double figures, around eleven per cent in the IFOP survey of the new year, reported in some accounts as high as sixteen, and a comedian polling sixteen per cent in a presidential race is no longer a comedian. He was a threat, and the threat was to a particular vacancy in French politics.

Because the ground under the French left had already gone soft. The Union of the Left had collapsed in 1977, the Socialists and Communists were at each other’s throats, unemployment was climbing, and a whole layer of working-class and young voters had been left without anyone who spoke for them. Into that gap walked a man in dungarees who said the whole political class was rotten and got a roar of recognition for it. The response of the state was not laughter. Coluche was dropped from his radio slots, faced audit threats, received a death threat from a far-right police group; the period around his campaign was ugly, and it darkened further with the death of his stage manager, which the authorities eventually established as a domestic killing rather than a political one, though the handling of it kept the pressure on the campaign. He withdrew on 16 March 1981, in the first issue of Charlie Matin, and later called on his supporters to vote for Mitterrand. The joke was over. The question it had posed to the left was not.

Here is what the Ligue Communiste Révolutionnaire did with that question, and it is more interesting than either of the easy options.

The LCR did not endorse Coluche. It ran its own candidate, Alain Krivine, who had carried its banner in 1969 and 1974 and who was promptly locked out of the 1981 ballot by his failure to gather the five hundred signatures of officials, a rule built precisely to strangle anti-system candidacies. And the Ligue criticised Coluche, sharply, on exactly the ground that matters. ‘Tous pourris’ collapsed the distinction the whole of Marxist politics rests on: the difference between the bourgeois politician and the workers’ organisation, between the class enemy and the imperfect instruments of your own side. A blanket contempt for ‘politicians’ is not a class politics. It is a mood, and a mood that curdles easily into the cynicism that says nothing can be built and no one is worth trusting, which is the cynicism the right has always harvested better than we do.

And yet the Ligue did not join the establishment’s dismissal of him either. When the state came after Coluche with audits and sackings and the signature rule, the LCR defended his right to stand, as a democratic question, against a system rigging its own contest. One of its own, the filmmaker Romain Goupil, a militant of May 1968 and at one point of the Ligue, actually ran the campaign, put its machinery together, pulled in the far-left and Hara-Kiri networks around it. ‘Je suis à la disposition de Coluche pour mettre en place sa campagne,’ Goupil recalled: I am at Coluche’s disposal to set up his campaign. So the tradition’s stance was not the flat refusal of the purist, and not the eager embrace of the enthusiast. It was a third thing, and it is the thing worth learning: refuse the vote, name the empty anti-politics for what it is, defend the democratic right, and keep building the only instrument that lasts.

I want to be honest here, because the recognition test cuts toward the dead as much as the living, and Coluche will not survive a lazy caricature. He was not a hollow celebrity. He had, in the words of those who knew him, an instinct de classe; he spoke for the Montrouge poverty he came from and never pretended he hadn’t; he did his homework on food surpluses and arms-factory conversion; he wanted television that explained the economy to people instead of past them. A left that files him under ‘novelty candidate’ and moves on has not understood him and will not learn from him. The point is not that Coluche was contemptible. The point is that even a candidacy with real feeling and real class instinct behind it could not substitute for the organisation that wasn’t there.

Which is exactly what the aftermath proved, and it is the part of the story that should be pinned above every debate about backing a comedian.

The candidacy evaporated in the spring of 1981. What endured was something Coluche built four years later, with no ballot involved: the Restos du Cœur, the food-solidarity movement founded in 1985 that is still feeding people four decades on. The durable thing was not the campaign. It was the organisation. And even that, the Fourth International would not simply applaud. Writing after his death, Rouge gave the Restos their due and named their limit in the same breath: ‘Coluche cache la misère’, Coluche hides the poverty, generosity mobilised as spectacle while the question of jobs goes unasked, charity as an ‘immense opération de dévoiement idéologique’, a vast ideological diversion that stays at the level of distribution and never reaches the root. You can hear, in that verdict, the same argument the Ligue made about the candidacy, now made about the charity: material solidarity is not nothing, but it is not the same as class power, and confusing the two is how a moment of real generosity gets absorbed back into the order it meant to indict. The judgement is hard. It is also, I think, correct, and it is the reason the Restos and not the campaign is the thing history kept: the organisation outlived the spectacle, and even the organisation was measured against the higher standard of what would actually shift the balance of forces.

That was 1981, and the left had the capacity to argue about it in real time, to run its own candidate, to staff the comedian’s campaign and critique it at once. Watch what happens when the ground goes soft again and the left no longer has that capacity.

The Italian left did not collapse gently. In 2008 Rifondazione Comunista, the great hope of the Italian radical left, was wiped out of parliament entirely, and a void opened where a workers’ party used to be. In October 2009 a comedian and a web strategist launched a movement to fill it. Beppe Grillo had built his following the way Coluche had, on forensic comic assaults on corruption and the political caste; the Movimento 5 Stelle he founded with Gianroberto Casaleggio declared itself neither left nor right, rejected the old axis as meaningless, and promised a horizontal democracy run through the internet. It walked straight into the space Rifondazione had vacated and took the votes of the people the left had stopped reaching.

But look at what the horizontal rhetoric actually concealed. Grillo personally owned the movement’s name, its symbol and its blog; the 2013 statute was signed by Grillo, his nephew, and an accountant, and when the movement wanted to detach the founder’s personal web address from its own logo in 2015 it had to hold a members’ vote to do it, on Grillo’s own say-so that the movement was now ‘mature enough’ to govern. He sat above it as its ‘guarante’, its guarantor, a personal authority presiding over a party that advertised itself as leaderless direct democracy. The contradiction was not incidental. It was the model. And it curdled in a way Coluche’s candidacy never had the chance to. In June 2018 the anti-establishment movement that was neither left nor right took Italy into government, and its partner was Matteo Salvini’s League. M5S supplied the parliamentary majority; Salvini, the junior partner by seats, supplied the direction, and the direction was the closed ports, the refused rescue boats, the proposed census of Roma, the decree that stripped protection from migrants. The spectacle that became a party ended as the majority for the hard right. There is a grim postscript that tells you what the thing had been all along: in 2024, when the movement finally voted to abolish the office of guarantor, Grillo went to court to stop it, the founder suing his own creation to keep his ownership of it, and the current leader accused him of trying to sabotage the party that had outgrown him.

Two comedians, then, and two vacuums, and two endings that look opposite and say the same thing. Coluche’s candidacy failed and the organisation he later built endured, because the durable thing is always the organisation. Grillo’s candidacy succeeded, became a party, and the party curdled into the far right’s vehicle, because a movement with no class content and no accountable structure has nothing to stop it drifting wherever the institutional pressure pushes. In neither case was the comedian the answer. In both cases the comedian was the symptom, the thing that grows in the space where the workers’ movement used to be.

So when a section of the left looks at a satirical candidate and sees a weapon, the question to put is not whether the joke is good. Coluche’s jokes were good; Grillo’s were better. The question is what is being built underneath, and the honest answer, most of the time, is nothing, and the trouble with nothing is that it does not stay empty. The right is patient about vacuums. It waits, and it fills them, on the same terrain of forgotten towns and abandoned classes where the comedian briefly stood, and it does not withdraw in March and endorse the Socialist. It governs.

I would like to end this with the instruction that follows, and I find I can’t, quite. The Fourth International’s answer to Coluche was the right one and it is available to us still: refuse the vote, name the anti-politics, defend the democratic right, build the instrument. But the LCR could give that answer in 1981 because it had a candidate to run and a campaign to staff and a paper that reached the estates. The harder truth beneath both these stories is that the comedian keeps arriving because the left keeps failing to be there first, and no amount of correct analysis of spectacle and organisation conjures organisation into being. That is the problem this essay can name and cannot solve. The field keeps emptying. Someone keeps walking into it in a costume. And the work of making sure it is one of us, next time, standing on something real, is not done by writing about comedians. It is the thing we keep failing to do in the years between the jokes.

Postscript: the comedian who won

There is a third case, and it is the one that should stop anyone reaching for a neat conclusion.

In 2019 a comedian won. Volodymyr Zelensky had played a schoolteacher who accidentally becomes president of Ukraine on television, and then he became president of Ukraine, taking the run-off against Petro Poroshenko in a landslide. He ran on the fuel that powered Coluche and Grillo: the political class is rotten, the professionals have failed you, I am not one of them. He was the anti-politician made flesh, elected overwhelmingly in a country whose organised left had been ground down first by Stalinism and then by three decades of oligarchic capitalism.

What followed refuses every moral we might want to draw. Zelensky did not curdle into Grillo’s ending; he did not evaporate into Coluche’s. In February 2022 he stayed in Kyiv, and the comedian became the figure around whom resistance to an imperialist invasion was organised, which is not a sentence anyone writing about satirical candidates in 2019 would have predicted. Nor has his presidency delivered anything a socialist would recognise as a programme. In 2022 he ratified Law 5371, which stripped collective protections from workers at small and medium enterprises and suspended union rights under martial law: the anti-oligarch campaigner signing away the rights of the workers who were dying at the front.

And here is the thing worth carrying out of this essay. Sotsialnyi Rukh, the Social Movement, a small Ukrainian socialist organisation and since 2024 a permanent observer of the Fourth International, was able to do two things at once. It fought for Ukraine’s defence against Russian imperialism, alongside comrades of the Russian Socialist Movement, with whom it issued a joint position in April 2022 together with Belarusian socialists. And it fought its own president’s attack on Ukrainian workers, saying plainly that the government had tried to abuse the situation of war to attack labour rights and that they could not support it. Defence of the country, opposition to the government, in the same breath, without contradiction.

It could do that because it had something of its own. A name, an organisation, a press, roots in the unions. Ask what an organisation that had dissolved itself into the landslide would have had to say when Law 5371 arrived. Nothing, or nothing that anyone would have listened to, because it would have spent its independence on the comedian and had none left when the bill came.

That is what independence is for. Not purity, and not the satisfaction of standing aside: the capacity to still be able to fight the man you may one day have to defend. Coluche, Grillo, Zelensky. The question was never what the comedian would do. It was what stood beside him, and whether it had kept its own name.

A unitary party runs on trust, and trust is the one thing no constitution can hand you. You are asking a minority to accept decisions it voted against, to stay bound the morning after it lost, to keep selling the paper on the same high street beside the people it just failed to convince. Strip out every formal veto and one thing survives the edit: the largest affiliate can still threaten to walk, and a threat to walk is a veto that needs no clause. Call it the social veto. It is what the new Socialist Federation settled on paper in June, and what it will be arguing over, on the floor and in the corridor, long after September.

In June the founding conference took the long, safeguard-heavy composite drafted by James Kulmer and Raz O’Connor Meldau and carried it almost without dissent, forty-nine to two. The shape of it was closer run. A leaner structure moved by Workers Power’s Marcus Halaby, who thought the composite too elaborate for the room to weigh properly, fell by a single vote, twenty-four to twenty-five. Read the composite’s preamble and the Sheridan lesson is already in it, in black and white: practices that must be structural and written, ‘not reliant on goodwill or trust’, a class that defends itself by its numbers and ‘not in the following of great leaders’. It writes in instant recall. Every defeated minority position above a fifth must be minuted rather than buried. And the executive, secretariat and judiciary are held rigorously apart, a separation of powers most national governments would blanch at. The organised left comes in as caucuses that argue through an advocate but cast no bloc vote; the liberation caucuses, after the conference chose reserved votes and seats over a merely guaranteed voice, carry more. On paper, the federation has learned everything the archive is about to teach. On paper.

And still it refused the one commitment that would have given the machinery something concrete to carry: The anti-austerity pledge, a promise every candidate in every ward is asked to make, to oppose every cut, with a public signature list that outlives election night, went down at the same conference by nearly two to one. This substack’s editor moved it, with two comrades, and lost. The councils are cutting now, of every colour, and in Sheffield the Green councillors sit in coalition with Labour and the Liberal Democrats and pass the cuts while the libraries close on Tuesdays. The federation built the chassis and, in the same afternoon, declined to name the destination. Both are reopened in September. The episode argues the structural question as if it were live, and in the way that counts it still is.

The lessons from the past

None of which makes the archive a victory lap. It opens in a betrayal. Socialist Outlook’s front page in June 1997 met the new government with a line that has not dated: ‘Tough on services, tough on the users of services’. Lone parent benefit went within weeks. PFI mortgaged the hospitals to private consortiums for a generation, and ‘Best Value’ walked compulsory competitive tendering back in through the side door of the town hall. Then ‘Party into Power’, Blair’s instrument for stripping the union link out of Labour’s own conference and handing policy to leader-appointed forums. The vacuum that forced regroupment was not an idea. It was a door closing, with thousands of people on the wrong side of it.

Socialist Outlook wanted that regroupment to end in a unitary party, and across 1997 to 2002 it said what such a party needs to survive: the right to organise as a tendency, and the books kept in daylight rather than run behind closed doors. When groups broke the second rule it named them. Jim Beagle went after the AWL in February 1999 for trying to swallow the Welfare State Network whole, because left unity, he wrote, ‘has to start with honesty, transparency, democracy and integrity’. It was the SWP’s turn the following winter, when Nick Long set out in December 2000 why Leeds had excluded the largest group on the far left, on the record of its ‘ruthless history of dealing with dissent and opposition’. By September 2001 Alan Thornett was telling the Socialist Party, in as many words, to drop the federal veto that let a handful block a branch.

The Socialist Alliances

And yet the projects the paper backed still went down. The Socialist Alliance imploded. Years past the far edge of this archive the SSP tore itself apart, in public, in the ugliest way. So the question the episode cannot close: did Socialist Outlook print the right warnings and the left refuse to read them, or did it misjudge the very blueprint the federation has now built?

There is one warning it half-saw and could not follow through. In June 2000 Francis Curran and Murray Smith drew the contrast that made the Scottish party look unanswerable: against Arthur Scargill’s Socialist Labour Party, ‘ultra-centralist, authoritarian, even Stalinist’, the SSP was the open, democratic alternative. All true. And yet almost every article marking the breakthrough turned on the personal pull of one man. On the page the committees held the party. In the country, Tommy Sheridan did. The obvious reading is that the paper was dazzled. That is not quite right either: the warning against guru leadership sits in those same issues, printed and legible, and was never once turned on their own best example. Whether a reader in 2000 could have named what that meant before it happened, I am not sure this archive lets us say.

That is the ground the September congress reviews, and it is firmer ground than the Socialist Alliance ever stood on. The formal veto is gone; the big organisations join as caucuses that argue but cannot outvote the room. And yet. Abolish the formal veto and what remains? The threat to walk, which no constitution has ever repealed, and which the conference kept alive the moment it made alignment optional and let each affiliate keep its own discipline intact. The SSP had the right structure too, rejected guru leadership in almost the words the federation has now used, and it did not save them. Whether a movement can write down everything the last one left to goodwill, or whether the thing that holds a party together when the split finally comes is precisely the thing no clause supplies, the archive will not settle. It tells the congress only what the last people to hold this argument built, and how quickly it burned once the blueprint met the people living inside it.

Read more

For readers looking to dive deeper into the history and strategy of socialist regroupment as documented in Socialist Outlook between 1997 and 2002, here are five essential articles from the archive:

Further Reading: The Path to Regroupment

1. “Socialist Alliances – Small Steps Forward” by Pete Firmin

• Issue: New Series No. 18, September 1998

• Why it matters: This article reports on the initial conference of Socialist Alliances in England. it covers the early efforts to build a “democratic structure” that could coordinate national campaigning and the friction between different groups over the most “appropriate structure” for unity.

2. “SSP Extends Its Reach as Scottish Labour Declines” by Gordon Morgan

• Issue: New Series No. 29, November 1999

• Why it matters: A key analysis of the Scottish Socialist Party (SSP), which served as the primary model for regroupment in Britain. Morgan details the SSP’s growth into a “new political force” and its success in moving beyond the “fringe” to challenge traditional Labour strongholds.

3. “Which Way Will the SWP Jump?” by Alan Thornett

• Issue: New Series No. 32, March 2000

• Why it matters: This piece examines the pivotal moment when the Socialist Workers Party (SWP) began to engage with broader alliances like the London Socialist Alliance. It highlights the tension between “old sectarian top-down structures” and the “pluralist and open” requirements of a genuine regroupment.

4. “Renewing of the Left: Prospects After the May Poll” by Alan Thornett

• Issue: New Series No. 35, June 2000

• Why it matters: Thornett places the British experience in a broader context, describing regroupment as a “Europe-wide phenomenon.” He compares the Socialist Alliance to international projects like Italy’s Rifondazione Comunista, the French LCR–LO lists, and the Portuguese Left Block.

5. “Building a Real ‘Bridge’ to Win the Masses” by Veronica Fagan

• Issue: New Series No. 45, May 2001

• Why it matters: A foundational article in the debate over organizational structure. Fagan argues that for regroupment to succeed, the Alliance must move toward an “individual membership structure” that guarantees the “right to form tendencies and factions,” ensuring it does not become a mere “loose bloc” of independent sects.

TL;DR In February 1989, Livio Maitan published an analysis of the European single market that reads, in 2026, like a forensic account of everything that has since gone wrong. We are republishing it here. But it requires an introduction, because the debate Maitan was entering has not resolved itself. It has only deepened, and the terms have shifted in ways he would have recognised immediately.

The threat Maitan identified, of a European social space hollowed out by capitalist logic, is now being compounded by a second logic: the remilitarisation of the continent. The two processes are not in competition. They are structurally connected, and the left that cannot hold both in view at once will be defeated by both.

There is a particular form of historical embarrassment available only to the left. It arrives when you excavate an old text and discover that the argument was already made, clearly, before the disaster it was predicting had fully announced itself. The embarrassment comes not from the prediction being wrong, but from its having been right, and ignored, and then forgotten, and then wrong again in the same way, requiring the same argument to be made again from scratch, as though the previous instance had never existed.

Livio Maitan wrote ‘The Search for a Strategy’ in early 1989. Bandiera Rossa published it in February of that year. The Berlin Wall fell in November. Maitan could not have known, as he wrote, that the specific institutional form his article addressed, the EEC moving toward 1992, would shortly be operating in a radically transformed geopolitical environment. What he did know, and what the article demonstrates with uncomfortable precision, was that the European left was strategically unprepared for what the integration process would demand of it.

He was right. And here we are.

The context: deepening of austerity

The article that follows is not a historical curiosity. Read it carefully and you find something more unsettling: a diagnostic framework for the present, assembled from the materials of a conjuncture that has since been formally superseded but not, in its underlying logic, resolved. The OECD figures Maitan cites have changed. The institutions have changed. The political parties have changed names and changed again. But the structural argument, what happens when you build a European economic space on capitalist terms without a corresponding social counterweight organised from below, that argument has not dated.

What has changed is that the capitalist logic Maitan was tracking has acquired a new instrument. He identified it clearly enough: the tendency toward “downward homogenisation” driven by market competition; the use of “flexibility” as a mechanism for transferring the costs of restructuring onto workers; the capture of European institutions by “large industrial and financial conglomerates, national and multinational alike.” In 1989, this logic was operating primarily through economic policy. The privatisation drives, the fiscal constraints, the managed assault on collective bargaining that would become the grammar of EU membership for the next three decades.

In 2026 it has acquired a second front: the military budget. No, worse than a second front. The military budget has become the alibi that makes the economic assault politically invisible.

Working-class control to stop imperialist warmongers

The mechanism is not complicated, and Maitan’s analytical framework makes it legible without difficulty. European governments, responding to the shock of Russian aggression in Ukraine and the unreliability of American guarantees under a MAGA administration, have substantially increased defence spending. Britain, Germany, France, Poland: the announcements arrived like dominoes through 2024 and 2025. The EU’s own instruments, the European Peace Facility, the defence industrial incentives, the pressure on member states to hit NATO spending targets, have reinforced the trajectory. This is being presented, across the mainstream political spectrum, as a straightforward response to objective threat.

The threat from Russian imperialism is real. We have said this clearly, and we say it again here: the full-scale invasion of Ukraine is an act of imperialist aggression against an occupied people, and revolutionary socialists must say so without equivocation. The right of the Ukrainian people to resist occupation does not depend on our approval of the Zelensky government’s labour policies, its anti-corruption record, or its relationship to NATO’s strategic priorities. These are separate questions. Collapsing them has been the campist left’s central ideological operation, and we refuse it.

But refusing campism is not the same as endorsing the specific institutional form that European rearmament is taking. And this is where Maitan’s framework from 1989 becomes indispensable.

The European social space Maitan was arguing for, the “common social space” of enforced upward harmonisation of wages, conditions, and workers’ rights, was precisely what the capitalist integration project refused to deliver. The EEC gave capital a single market and gave labour a set of aspirational declarations. The gap between them was not a failure of the project; it was the project. And the gap was maintained, year by year, through the structural power of the institutions that capital had captured, combined with the strategic failure of reformist leaderships that, as Maitan put it with some precision, “found themselves captured by the logic of capitalism and led to adopt solutions that are, in the strictly economic sense, more destructive.”

The rearmament debate is reproducing this structure with only minor variations. European governments are now arguing that the defence emergency requires additional public spending, to which the answer should obviously be: yes, and fund it through expropriation of the frozen Russian assets currently sitting primarily in Belgian accounts, through progressive wealth taxation, through windfall levies on defence contractors whose share prices have been rising since the morning of 24 February 2022 and have not come down. That is the socialist argument. It was available on day one. The mainstream European left, with honourable exceptions, has not made it. It has instead accepted the terms of the debate as given, occasionally appending a note about social guarantees, exactly as Maitan described the reformist leaderships doing in 1989 in relation to the single market.

The Danish Social Democrats, Maitan noted approvingly, had made a strategic pivot on European integration when they judged that Community-level outcomes would be more favourable than what was achievable nationally. The logic was sound. The problem was the same logic, applied without class analysis, led directly to accepting whatever the Community was actually prepared to offer, rather than fighting for the Community it should be. Mette Frederiksen’s government, in 2025, was arguing that Danes might need to work longer hours to fund the necessary rearmament. SF’s spokesperson called this “completely indecent” and proposed wealth taxes instead. That is the correct response. It is also, in its basic structure, the response Maitan was calling for in 1989: organise the defence at the level of the attack.

Our strategy is workers’ control of society

The phrase is his, and it is worth pausing on. “Organising the defence at the level of the attack.” Maitan used it to describe the challenge facing European labour in the face of 1992: capital was reorganising at the continental scale, and the labour movement was still primarily organised nationally. The task was not to refuse European integration, which was a secondary question, but to build the continental-scale workers’ organisations, coordinating bodies, inter-enterprise committees, common trade-union platforms that could contest the terms of integration rather than simply submit to them.

The same formulation applies precisely to the rearmament debate. The attack is operating at two levels simultaneously. The first is the obvious one: Russian imperialism is attacking Ukraine and threatening the security architecture of a broad swathe of Eastern Europe and the Baltic states. The second is less often named: the military-industrial complex, in which BAE Systems and Rheinmetall and their equivalents across the continent are treating the invasion of Ukrainian territory as, in the most direct sense, a business opportunity. These are not the same attack. Responding effectively requires distinguishing between them.

The campist left, led in Britain by Stop the War and Counterfire and the Morning Star’s Stalinist editorial line, has done the easier thing: it has named the second attack while denying the first. This is not analysis. It is the substitution of geopolitical alignment for class analysis, which Maitan would have recognised instantly as a form of the same subordination to capitalist state logic that he was criticising in the European Commission’s social partners in 1989. The left that refuses to support Ukraine’s liberation because it objects to NATO’s strategic purposes has not escaped imperialist logic. It has accepted a different imperialism’s terms instead.

But the opposite error is equally available, and the pressure of the present conjuncture is pushing sections of the solidarity left directly toward it: treating every demand for democratic control of defence production, every insistence that rearmament be funded through expropriation rather than austerity, every call for workers’ control of military facilities and mandatory conversion planning, as somehow insufficiently committed to Ukraine’s cause. This is the logic of the wartime national union, and the Fourth International has seen where it leads. Solidarity with the occupied does not require surrendering the class analysis that is the only basis on which genuine, durable solidarity can be built.

Its sharpest form is conscription. Not whether an invaded people may be called to its own defence, which is not in question, but who is called and who buys their way out, who is rotated and who is left in the line, who commands the army the defence requires. That is an article of its own, and it is coming.

Strategic demands organise the working class

Maitan identified, in 1989, a “dismal balance sheet of the bureaucratic leaderships.” He did not write this as a sectarian provocation. He wrote it as a strategic assessment: the reformist organisations had accepted “the fundamental options of the bourgeoisie,” had hidden behind “the pretext of economic competitiveness,” had positioned themselves in practice as vehicles for what he called “a social offensive against workers” even when their stated intentions were different. The PCI, the PSI, the PS français: each could point to its formal commitment to workers’ rights, its stated opposition to the worst excesses of capital, its genuine base in the organised working class. None of this prevented the outcome he was describing.

The parallel is not hidden. The dominant European social democrats have, in 2025 and 2026, accepted the terms of the rearmament debate as given. They have argued, at best, for social side-conditions attached to increased defence spending, in exactly the spirit of the “social space” demands Maitan was analysing in 1989: genuine commitments, in some cases, but commitments that accept the primary logic of the project rather than contesting it. And the radical left, where it has not fallen into campism, has often been unable to articulate a coherent alternative beyond a vague hostility to military spending in general, which is neither principled nor strategically useful.

What Maitan was arguing for, and what the article being published here actually demonstrates rather than merely proposing, is something harder: a concrete set of “phase objectives” that could unite the broadest possible working-class forces while being in objective contradiction with the capitalist management of the project. Not the rejection of European integration. Not the rejection of Ukraine’s defence. The demand that integration serve workers, and that Ukraine’s defence be funded by those who have profited from the war rather than by those who have not.

Disarm the empires, not the oppressed

One word before the 1989 text reaches its own conclusion and calls for the arsenals destroyed, the member states disarmed, NATO abandoned, because set flat against Ukraine that can read as a contradiction. It is not. Maitan's disarmament is a demand on one's own ruling class and the imperialist bloc it serves, never a counsel of defencelessness for the nation under invasion. To strip the empire of its arsenal and to arm the people it would let be conquered are a single anti-imperialist politics: the first turned on the aggressor and the contractors who bank the war, the second on the survival of those who will die without the means to resist.

A 35-hour week at full pay rather than working longer hours to fund rearmament. Democratic control of arms production with mandatory conversion planning. Progressive wealth taxation and the expropriation of windfall profits. Immediate and unconditional cancellation of Ukraine’s external debt. Full rights for Ukrainian refugees. Workers’ control of facilities that produce weapons that will be used in the name of European workers’ security.

These are not Maitan’s exact demands, updated for 2026. They are, more precisely, the application of his method: identify the phase objectives that connect the immediate defensive struggle to the broader class interest; fight for them even in conditions of political retreat; refuse the binary choices that capitalism offers the left as the only available options.

Past defeats make strategic clarity essential today

There is one further point worth making before the translation speaks for itself. Maitan wrote this piece at a moment when the European left was in what he called a “drastic political and ideological battering.” He was clear-eyed about this. He did not pretend the situation was better than it was, and he did not indulge the illusion, common enough on the left, that a sudden recovery was imminent. “One should not harbour the illusion,” he wrote, “that this situation can be overcome quickly, through mere ‘immediate recoveries.’” What was needed was “a serious, deep-going transformation of the political situation.”

He was writing, he knew, into a long defeat. The piece was published in February 1989. By November the wall was down, and the political terms of European left debate were about to shift in ways that made his argument harder to hear, not easier. Within a decade the institutions he had been arguing needed to be captured from below had been captured from above more thoroughly than even the pessimistic reading of his article suggested. The social Europe he was arguing for was not built. The Darwinian homogenisation was.

We are, in 2026, in a comparable moment. The political and ideological battering of the left has been severe; the rearmament debate has arrived at the worst possible time, when the left is weakest and most prone to either capitulation or reflexive oppositionalism; and the window for the kind of strategic clarity Maitan was calling for is not wide.

But the argument was made. It can be made again. That is why we are republishing it.

The Search for a Strategy

by Livio Maitan Bandiera Rossa n. 2, February 1989

The 31 December 1992 deadline has become, in recent months, a genuine leitmotiv across the labour movement and trade unions. The British TUC congress, in a sharp break with its previous position, gave an enthusiastic reception to Jacques Delors, President of the European Commission — who made a point of arguing that it was necessary to “safeguard and improve levels of social protection for EEC members, not to hide behind social policy, to give workers and employees stronger guarantees and to introduce new European-level measures on collective contracts, workers’ rights and social services.” Until recently, British trade unionists had feared that their hard-won gains would be ground down in the European mill; now, after years of Thatcher’s battering, they are beginning to hope that Community-level outcomes will prove more favourable than what is achievable nationally. A parallel shift occurred at the Danish social-democratic congress, which had previously campaigned for a “no” in the Danish European referendum. In the run-up to the next European elections, the Danish social democrats are now campaigning for “yes to an open Europe” — one extending beyond current EEC membership, tackling unemployment, technological development, and the ECU as an alternative to dollar instability (Le Monde, 22 September 1988).

The 1992 deadline also dominated the German social-democratic congress, where the party leadership tabled a motion on the “restoration of a European social space” guaranteeing regional equilibrium and harmonisation of standards upward. Finally, at the Italian social-democratic congress, Prime Minister Craxi — probably the most ardently pro-European of Italian politicians — addressed the prospects and values of a European outlook toward 1992, with prominent figures from the French and other European parties endorsing his social-democratic vision of a “social Europe.”

These contradictions and difficulties will not be resolved quickly. Throughout the coming period the dominant tendency will be toward a deepening of economic unity and a further widening of the EEC — possibly to include some Eastern European countries, a prospect that now seems more likely than before. The debates and conflicts within the labour movement on these questions demonstrate, on the one hand, that a purely visceral anti-EEC position — one that never tackles the concrete substance of the problems — is no longer tenable; and on the other, that the real alternatives need to be faced with genuine seriousness.

Organising the Defence at the Level of the Attack

There is, in fact, every reason for concern. The new European debate is unfolding in an economic conjuncture radically different from the one that prevailed at the time of the Treaty of Rome. We face, simultaneously, a structural crisis and a vast pool of long-term unemployed workers. OECD figures — which no one can accuse of alarmism — show five million unemployed in the EEC in 1975, two million of them long-term; by 1986 the figure had risen to ten million, representing 11% of the active population.

Various studies project that “1992” will stimulate new growth and therefore new job creation (estimates range from 7.6 to 8.3 million). But these are the rosy forecasts of European integration’s most optimistic partisans. In their book Crisis, Krach, Boom, Michel Albert and Jean Boissonat devote an entire chapter to “1992: a Darwinian purge.” The Economist (12 March 1988) wrote that the single market would deliver a shock of “Darwinian” dimensions. The head of the French employers’ federation spoke openly of “a Darwinian struggle.” Le Monde (14 October 1988) noted that even the European Commission’s own Vice-President, Marin, acknowledged that many jobs would be lost in many sectors while being created in others — and that even if the overall balance proved positive in the medium term, the new jobs would not necessarily appear in the same sectors or regions as the old ones.

Several trends, not all of them new but sharply intensified in this decade, will carry still greater weight as the EEC integration process advances:

• The relentless introduction of new technologies, and the attendant productivity gains, make it improbable that new general industrial growth — even if it materialises — will by itself generate substantial new employment, above all in heavy industry. This tendency toward homogenisation of economic conditions (upward within Europe, downward relative to the broader capitalist economy) will only intensify, and its effects will be felt acutely at the community level. The institutions supposedly governing this process will increasingly be captured by the large industrial and financial conglomerates, national and multinational alike.

• New technologies and new forms of work organisation are penetrating the service sector; capital, pressing above all in the hospital and transport sectors, is using “flexibility” as a safety valve — imposing on workers the costs of restructuring and rationalisation, and shifting the terms of employment toward part-time and casual contracts in a manner that intensifies exploitation.

• The decline of traditional sectors such as steel and shipbuilding will not, in all likelihood, be offset by the growth of new ones. For banks, railways, ferries, and prospectively the utilities, new technologies mean rationalisation and job losses.

• Unforeseen and for the moment unpredictable structural shifts in economic orientation will compound these pressures: the agricultural labour force will face further reductions in most countries; governments burdened with the largest public deficits will seek to cut public service employment, whether through restructuring plans or blanket hiring freezes.

• The introduction of flexibility, part-time work, and the general intensification of employers’ power to impose individual wage differentials within the same firm and occupational group is creating growing objective difficulties for the labour movement. The workers most exposed are those in the private sector — particularly those most vulnerable to unemployment through restructuring and mergers — compared to workers in the public sector, who are in general, though with important exceptions, relatively less exposed.

On the political terrain, greater integration implies handing effective decision-making to ever more remote centres. Already the elected institutions answer an increasingly diminished role relative to governments, and in all the various apparatuses of the state, all the technocracies — not only in the narrow economic sense — of the large industrial and financial groups, national and multinational, are becoming more powerful. This tendency will inevitably intensify, and its effects at the community level will be to place ever greater power in the hands of the bodies designated by governments — the technocrats, who already dispose of vast powers; the ideological-generalising wing, in particular the neoliberal, adopted by the various bourgeois trade union bureaucracies; and a “sovereignty” of the European Parliament that is pure illusion. In all these important cases, the action of this body will be conditioned by the choices imposed by the multinationals, the great financial conglomerates, the banks of the governmental bodies, and the technocrats of Brussels.

The bureaucracy of trade unions and parties operating in various forms within the labour movement, and their representation in the community institutions, will have even deeper illusions in the coming years. Here the illusions will be even more entrenched than at the national level.

The Dismal Balance Sheet of the Bureaucratic Leaderships

European labour organisations and trade unions are ill-equipped to tackle the problems posed by the 1992 deadline in the genuine interests of workers. This is not, in the first instance, a question of individual bad faith: it suffices to consider what they have actually delivered for workers in recent decades, at the level of both theoretical elaboration and practical strategy.

To begin with, almost all trade-union and political organisations have strategically accepted the fundamental options of the bourgeoisie, sheltering behind the pretext of economic competitiveness while laying the groundwork for a social offensive against workers. This is blatant in countries where parties claiming to represent workers are in government; but it is equally true of those in opposition, who are no less favourable to the EEC’s agenda, limiting themselves to calling for a few more social guarantees. This is clearest in debates over “social space” and in demands for a “parliamentarisation” through granting greater powers to the European Parliament — for example in Italy the PCI, the PSI and the PS français all take this line. The PCF remains something of an exception through its refusal of European unification, invoking “national independence” and the need to “produce French” — but without offering any real alternative perspective, and in a way that, on one side, locks the PCF squarely within the logic of the system, and on the other, subordinates its struggle line to the reformist and neo-reformist organisations, more so than other organisations that formally pronounce themselves in favour of the EEC.

These are the results that reformist leaderships have delivered for workers in this last decade. In the absence of any serious effort to outline a comprehensive alternative to bourgeois economic policy, they have found themselves — sometimes individually, with sincere intentions — captured by the logic of capitalism and led to adopt solutions that are on the whole more destructive in the strictly economic sense: outcomes of the so-called “market economy” founded on profit, which these leaderships have so enthusiastically embraced. The alternative in the strictly economic field must take account of the failure of bureaucratic management, of the experiments in “market socialism” in Yugoslavia, Hungary and China over the past decades. It is becoming ever more necessary — and objectively possible — to radically reduce the working day by eliminating superfluous and socially useless labour. Such a change, which would constitute a genuine shift in the “quality of life,” is effectively conceivable only on an international scale. New technologies and the cultural level of the working class permit, to a greater degree than ever before, radical transformations of the structure and functioning of enterprises. These transformations are only possible through the formation of political institutions and social bodies grounded in direct democracy. In this domain, the means of mass communication now available to us permit doing far more than at any previous moment in history.

In this sense, revolutionaries must give concrete form to the argument that what needs to be set against the European capitalism of the EEC is the prospect of a European socialist federation. The battles of the current period in the labour movement are conditioned by national specificities and conjunctural circumstances. But it is not possible to point in a revolutionary or pre-revolutionary direction without a broader, more general framework — one that, even if it can only be conceived as transitional, must be grasped in its most general outlines.

Some exponents of the “reformed” wing already openly celebrate negotiations with employers as a virtue in themselves. Not only is the labour movement’s autonomy increasingly constrained politically and ideologically before these battles of retreat and retrenchment — in some cases, trade union organisations are openly associated with the political-ideological campaigns of governments and employers. For example in Italy, when the PCI launched the “historical compromise” policy supporting the DC government, some trade union bodies simultaneously abandoned strike action in transport and other services through a form of “co-management” (codeterminazione) that was entirely counter to the workers’ interests.

A Global Alternative and Phase Objectives

(...) One further essential point deserves emphasis: rarely in its entire history has the European labour movement endured so drastic a political and ideological battering. The dominant classes have scored spectacular successes — though not, it should be noted, on the socioeconomic plane, where they have generated problems of extraordinary gravity.

Nor should one harbour the illusion that this situation can be overcome quickly, through mere “immediate recoveries” — which, even in the best case, will be limited and temporary in character. What is needed is a serious, deep-going transformation of the political situation. Consider, on the other hand, the enormous defeats of the trade-union movement and the long period of working-class retreat. The European bourgeoisies, despite the economic crisis laying waste to the continent, dispose of enormous resources and were compelled — then even more than now — to take substantial social measures. Workers’ resistance has been far tougher, mass organisations and trade unions far more combative, than the dominant classes would have wished; and governments have generally preferred to hold back rather than push to the point where workers’ reactions could trigger genuine social explosions.

What conclusions follow? We believe it is necessary to begin from a concrete set of attainable “phase objectives” that revolutionary organisations must make their own and fight for even in conditions of political retreat:

• 1. A 35-hour week at full pay with no loss of jobs: the systematic resort to overtime cancels the employment effects of any hours reduction, and the rhetoric of “social flexibility” is in reality nothing more than a cover for building a growing low-wage, precarious labour force.

• 2. A radical increase in real wages: as a first element of the struggle against the “philosophy of flexibility” — not a refusal of improved training provisions or supplements, but an unconditional insistence that employment should not be founded on ever-cheaper and ever-more-precarious labour.

• 3. Exposing the anti-worker ideology of market competitiveness and shareholder primacy: the increasing complexity of productive processes and the greater vulnerability introduced by new technologies are compelling employers to involve workers in enterprise decisions. Where profits are rising, this must be seized as an opportunity to press for across-the-board wage increases; where profits are falling, workers are not responsible and should not bear the consequences — instead, the opportunity must be taken to advance genuine workers’ control over new technologies and the reorganisation of work.

• 4. Workers’ control, exercised by trade-union bodies elected by all workers, over all technological innovations and all reorganisation of work — not merely the narrowly defined questions of training and job familiarisation.

• 5. The right of veto over redundancies, and autonomous trade-union structures that guarantee: a minimum wage always above the poverty line; social benefits for the unemployed never below that minimum; employment for young people; a minimum guaranteed income for women that does not fall below the employment minimum; and permanent social services never subject to cuts.

• 6. The restoration of a sliding-scale mechanism for wages that at least partially compensates for the erosion of purchasing power by inflation, while simultaneously countering employers’ use of wage differentials as an instrument of division.

A “Social Europe”: Concrete Content

A common “social space” will not resolve the unemployment problem if treated as a matter of employment policy alone. The fight against the “philosophy of flexibility” is not a refusal of adaptability — it is a refusal to acquiesce in a system founded on a growing, low-wage, precarious workforce.

Partial solutions can be proposed in a given context — for example the French Socialists proposed the creation of 700,000 new jobs, specifying the sectors and the financing modalities needed. But it is clear that where such objectives are individually defined along similar bourgeois lines, they acquire a transitional character as demands, posing in concrete terms the problem of how to tackle the reallocation of resources in a way that workers find genuinely compelling. This question of the allocation and reallocation of resources is now the most pressing, since the European bourgeoisie’s promise of social benefits for workers within Europe itself implies a rearrangement question: one must fight to reverse course, making it a priority to attack privileged incomes and to reduce indirect taxes, which weigh above all on the lowest incomes.

The importance of a comprehensive alternative is further increased by the possibility of putting the environmental problem front and centre, driving an effective anti-capitalist campaign that confronts not only the devastation produced by the pursuit of profit, but also the need for new qualitative orientations and qualitatively new goods. Partial battles can be fought on this terrain too. The European framework constitutes the necessary common ground for coordinating environmental policies; any purely national initiative risks being limited in effect and open to exploitation as a pretext for bourgeois protectionism.

The “social space” question also means fighting for genuine equality for women in every domain: this requires, among other things, the right to abortion, guaranteed social services for childcare and elder care, the autonomous organisation of women, non-discriminatory criteria and positive action measures, and equal representation at every level of leadership. Campaigns must be organised across Europe against all forms of violence against women.

The most vocal partisans of European unification insist on building an autonomous European military power, while maintaining membership of NATO. No concession should be made to any such project. Revolutionaries must fight against their own ruling class, against the military bloc of European capitalism — whose nature would be no less imperialist than the present one. We must fight to demand the destruction of the arsenals, unilateral disarmament by the member states, and withdrawal from NATO.

The end of the twentieth century presents a peculiar paradox: at the very moment when European unification is advancing, national questions — in Ireland, the Basque Country, Scotland, Wales, Belgium and elsewhere — are reasserting themselves in more acute forms than in the recent past. Revolutionaries must fight for the right of self-determination up to and including separation for all national minorities; against every attack on regional autonomy; and for the elimination of the last remnants of colonialism (New Caledonia). In each specific case, revolutionary Marxists must take their position in the light of the concrete context — self-determination, regional autonomy, federation — as determined by the actual dynamic of the class struggle.

Instruments and Methods

(...) Whatever the concrete developments in the EEC framework, local committees and general bodies of European workers will always be at the centre of activity. We must always work with the aim of making our organisation effective at a European scale. A European campaign must be organised to make the CES an effective instrument of coordination — independent of union affiliation at the national level (as is the case for the CGT française and the Comisiones Obreras in the Spanish state), grounded in straightforward class analysis and the exchange of experience. It will be above all necessary to promote the development of instruments of inter-enterprise and inter-sector coordination, of common committees at the level of the workers in the multinationals.

The more that the heads of the labour movement formally commit to the European framework, the more they will be tempted to integrate further into the “compatibility” of the system — to become super-labourists in service of the market, accepting all its imperatives in homage to new waves of restructuring and rationalisation.

The bureaucrats of the movement have renounced any attempt to configure a comprehensive alternative to governments both bourgeois and paternalist, doing everything possible to forestall any unified movement of solidarity — in all situations in which we find ourselves, in all the adversary’s attacks; resorting to every expedient and manoeuvre to impede the democratic expression of workers’ will.

The conclusion is clear: those who genuinely want a rebuilding of united class action — which does not consist of hollow declarations, does not force itself to present a comprehensive political perspective, and which in any potential unification of struggles would not translate into attempts to recover or suppress the democratic structures of the movement — must, together with all other mass movements old and new, make this a condition indispensable for breaking the impasse and relaunching the workers’ movement and its struggles. This holds, evidently, at the national level as much as the European.

Translator’s note: The ellipses in the headings “A Global Alternative and Phase Objectives” and “Instruments and Methods” are present in the original, indicating that Bandiera Rossa was printing excerpts from a longer document. 

Key translation decisions: “conjuncture” is retained throughout as a term of art in Marxist political economy. “Recomposition” has been replaced by “rebuilding” in the concluding passage where the sense is less technical. “Revendicate” has been replaced throughout by “demand.” “Concretise” has been replaced by “give concrete form to” or “advance.” “Eventual/eventuale” has been rendered as “potential” or “possible” throughout. “Affrontare” has been rendered as “tackle” or “address” rather than “confront.”

Owen Jones left Labour in 2024 after twenty-four years and built We Deserve Better to do one thing: fund socialist candidates regardless of party, judged on whether they would tax wealth and take utilities into public ownership and oppose the war on Gaza. Party-blind, candidate-first. That was the promise, and for a general election it more or less held: Green and independent names, Corbyn and Carla Denyer among the winners, Leanne Mohamad a few hundred votes short of Wes Streeting. Eighteen months on, the promise has a shape, and the shape is the Green Party.

Watch how he got there, because the route matters more than the destination. In July 2025, with Corbyn and Sultana’s new party barely announced, Jones was already arguing that first-past-the-post left the left no choice but to combine, and that combination meant electoral pacts between the new party and the Greens, the French New Popular Front offered as the template. By November the new party had become, in his own phrase, a bit ‘Fyre Festival’: too much drama, too many collapses, the energy draining out of it and towards Polanski’s Greens. He had watched Your Party trip over its own feet and drawn the conclusion any organiser would. The vehicle would be the Greens.

The map his fund published for the May local elections is that conclusion rendered as data. 313 entries. 269 of them Green, more than four in five. And of those 269, only 78 name an actual person or slate. The other 191 read ‘Green Party Candidates’ and stop there: no name, no biography, no organising record, a party label dropped on a ward and called an endorsement.

Type a Manchester postcode into it and the pin that surfaces carries a ward, a party, and nobody’s name. Burnage. Hulme. Moss Side. Sixteen wards across the city, every one of them a blank.

Set that against the test Jones’s own fund set itself. To be backed, a candidate had to show a ‘proven track record in organising locally’ and be well placed to contest the seat. Those are tests you run on a person. You cannot run them on a pin. A proven local organising record means precisely nothing applied to a rosette dropped on a map. On the fund’s own published criteria the 191 are un-vettable, and the candidate-first fund has quietly become a party-first fund that resolves its own contradiction in the Greens’ favour 191 times over.

Jones is capable of precision when he wants it. He has named the four Labour MPs he would never run a candidate against, John McDonnell, Richard Burgon, Clive Lewis, Nadia Whittome, his surviving front, and he has named Polanski as the man who could turn the Greens into a mass party of the left. At the top of the ticket every figure is individuated and weighed. At ward level the weighing stops dead. The same instinct that protects four named socialists in Parliament cannot bring itself to name one in Burnage.

There is the matter of the words themselves. In April the Green Party launched its own local-election fundraiser under the slogan ‘we deserve better’, Polanski telling supporters that from Manchester to Margate people were already saying it. Whether Jones lent the party his fund’s name or the party reached for it on its own I cannot tell you, and I will not manufacture a coordination I cannot evidence. But when the cross-party socialist fund and the party it now serves are campaigning under the same three words, the regroupment has happened in the branding before a single member has voted on it.

The charitable reading deserves its hearing. Most likely the 191 blanks are speed rather than strategy: somebody had a list of Green New Deal Rising target wards and pasted it in faster than names could be gathered, and the placeholders are the residue of a fund moving quickly rather than a fund hiding anything. Grant all of it. Laziness still runs downhill, and here it runs towards the Greens. James Meadway got a name on the map, in Tower Hamlets. Jamie Driscoll got one in Newcastle, Zoë Garbett in Hackney. The profiles got named; the wards got rosettes; when effort ran short the default it reached for was the party.

And the party is not one thing, which is the point the whole exercise depends on. The Greens Organise pledge to oppose austerity in local government, an eco-socialist current’s public commitment for these very elections, was signed both by candidates who mean to fight every cut and by Greens already sitting in council cabinets administering them. A rosette on a ward guarantees you neither. So which Green is the pin in Burnage? The map will not say, and the fund did not ask.

There is a tell, though, in the names the fund did print. Run its named Green candidates against that same pledge and a clear majority of them are signatories: James Meadway in Tower Hamlets, Nate Higgins in Newham, Zoë Garbett in Hackney, Khizer Qayyum beside Mothin Ali in Leeds, Jamie Driscoll’s Newcastle slate, the Southwark bench almost in full, much of Haringey. When We Deserve Better troubled to name a Green, it named the Greens Organise anti-austerity left with something close to precision. Which is what damns the blanks. The fund could find that wing when it looked; it chose, 191 times over, not to look. The placeholders are not a sourcing gap. They are the moment the vetting stopped, at exactly the point vetting would have meant something.

None of this makes the endorsed Greens the enemy or the backed candidates the wrong ones; the named ones, as the pledge shows, are largely the right ones. The harder point is the one the fund used to understand and has stopped acting on. An endorsement that cannot name its candidate is not an endorsement of a candidate. It is a bet on a colour. What scrutiny did the 191 receive before the money was directed their way? The map records none, and the man who built the thing to look past party has ended by leaving the party the only thing on it you can see.

I saw the programme for the Marxism event on Tuesday, and it took a moment to register what it was saying. Marxism 2026, the Socialist Workers Party’s four-day festival at the start of July, and on the timetable the whole of human oppression filed under a single strand. Women under LIBERATION. Race, disability, trans politics, antisemitism, Islamophobia, the manosphere, body image: LIBERATION, every one of them, one heading. And the strand resolving, on the Sunday, into a session called ‘Marxism vs identity politics?’ One Saturday title asked, flatly, what the rest of the grid had already answered: ‘Is capitalism a patriarchy?’

The architecture is the argument. Gather every oppression under one banner, subordinate the banner to the class line, stage the relation to everything else as a versus. You could read the SWP’s theory of oppression off the timetable before a single session opened.

What made it a piece rather than a note was the calendar. The same weekend, also in London, Anti*Capitalist Resistance has its own conference, and ACR is settling on the word ‘anti-oppressive’ in its self-description. Two traditions, the SWP inspired by Tony Cliff’s International Socialists, ACR a year into its affiliation to the Fourth International, the same question, the same four days. The obvious story is that one of them takes oppression seriously and the other dissolves it into class. The obvious story is wrong, and the way it is wrong is worth more than the way it would have been right.

The SWP moved past the caricature

Name the caricature before burying it. Post-Delta SWP: crude on women, deaf to oppression, the talk-about-jobs-and-drop-the-rest left given a coat of theory. It is the reading an ACR member reaches for in the pub after a counter-demonstration, and the SWP’s own festival refutes it.

Read what they publish. SWP CC member Judy Cox, running two of the festival’s sessions, spends her recent International Socialism essay attacking not feminism but its economist enemy: George Galloway campaigning on class and Gaza while turning on trans rights and immigration, his ‘for the workers, not the wokers’; Sahra Wagenknecht splitting from Die Linke over its supposed indulgence of minorities. Cox reaches for Lenin on the duty to answer every instance of oppression, whoever it touches. She calls intersectionality a real advance and credits its dialogue with Marxism. Breaking Our Chains, the women’s liberation book Cox has just written with Sally Campbell and Sarah Bates, is explicitly trans-inclusive, and grounds women’s oppression where the Fourth International grounds it, in class society and the unpaid reproduction of labour. The party’s house journal on social reproduction lines up with Lise Vogel and Johanna Brenner against Heidi Hartmann’s dual systems. On the theory of patriarchy, the SWP in 2026 holds, near enough, what ACR holds.

The obvious reading is that they are reductionists. That is not quite right either. Lindsey German wrote the founding text, the case that Marxism explains women’s oppression better than any theory of patriarchy, but German left for Counterfire in 2010, and quoting her against the SWP is quoting a ghost. The living organisation has moved, and it has moved close. This is not a quarrel about whether oppression matters. It is a quarrel about who can end it.

And there the gap reopens, along two seams.

The men-benefit argument

The first is the one I find hardest to close, so let me state it at full strength. There is a case that working-class men have a real stake in women’s subordination, now, this side of any revolution: the unpaid labour at home, the competition kept out of the labour market, the wage that flatters the male packet. The SWP says no, and has said no for forty years. Cliff, in 1984, called the men-benefit argument nonsense outright, and charged, through Jane Humphries, that it writes working women out as passive victims, objects of a settlement struck between capital and men. Judy Cox makes the same denial promoting the book in 2026: men’s only real interest, she says, is in smashing the system too. The benefit is a trap, not a stake.

Grant the warning its force, because it is not stupid. A theory that makes men the beneficiaries of patriarchy can end with women as objects acted upon rather than agents acting, and that road runs out of class politics into something colder. But the concession does not dissolve the reality. Men’s benefit can be real and this-side-of-the-revolution without being a second system, because it is a local maximum: a peak on the one terrain of class society, lower than the peak liberation would reach, but a peak men sit on now and have reason to hold now. To say so is not to set a second engine turning beside capital. It is to describe one landscape with more than one summit. Whether that reframing settles the question or merely postpones it is exactly the kind of thing a polemic should not pretend to have closed.

Autonomous women’s organisation

The second seam is the one that counts: autonomy. The book is emphatic about how its authors define themselves: we are Marxists, Cox says, not feminists or socialist feminists. That is the self-definition, and the agency claim sits beneath it: Cox writes in International Socialism that only the working class has an interest in sweeping away every form of oppression. The privilege-theory critique Esme Choonara and Yuri Prasad wrote for the party says socialists should engage positively with those fighting oppression, and then treats the autonomous, identity-based organising of the oppressed as a drift from the solidarity only class supplies: engage with them, and organise them through the party rather than alongside it. The autonomous movement is admitted as pressure and folded back. ACR goes the other way: the right of oppressed groups to caucus, a survivor-centred complaints procedure, a coalition built on bodily autonomy. Where the SWP subordinates, ACR devolves. That is the durable disagreement, and it is not a matter of theory.

Which is the point, because the catastrophe was not a matter of theory either. You cannot call a tradition that runs Cox on social reproduction and publishes a trans-inclusive book on women’s liberation thin in its grasp of oppression. What failed in the SWP failed at the level of structure. When a woman member accused Martin Smith, the national secretary and a central figure in Unite Against Fascism, of rape, the party heard the complaint through its own Disputes Committee, a panel that included his colleagues and friends, and acquitted him: unanimously on the rape charge, the chair dissenting on a separate charge of harassment. The full anatomy of that failure, and of the SWP’s twelve-year refusal to reckon with it, is the subject of an earlier piece. What matters here is narrower. There was no standing for the complainant anywhere outside the structure she was accusing, because the framework treats autonomous standing for the oppressed as a deviation, and a body built on that premise has nowhere to put a woman when the man she accuses is central to it. The disputes committee and the versus on the festival grid are the same proposition, written once small and once large. Hold every admirable position the SWP holds in 2026, every one, and you can still build the thing that broke, because autonomy is the one thing the framework cannot grant.

The IMG and Socialist Woman

Here is where the piece is supposed to turn to ACR and say: and we, the Fourth International tradition, understood all along what they refused. The truth is more particular, and more to the tradition’s credit, and the sting it carries is sharper for being narrow.

The IMG built autonomous women’s organisation, and not as a concession. Socialist Woman was the paper of the International Marxist Group, the Fourth International’s British section in the 1970s, the lineage that runs down to ACR, and the IMG’s paper in those years carried a name this publication might recognise: Red Mole. Where the workerist groups treated women’s organising as a recruitment arena or a dangerous distraction and ran off a dutiful document or two, the IMG was in the abortion campaigns, in the movement, building women’s organisation week in and week out, with a national paper to carry it. Inside its own ranks, it argued hard and for years about how far women members should organise separately as women, a question it took to the 1979 World Congress. This is not a tradition that mistook autonomy for a deviation. It practised it. What it rejected, in so many words, was the other thing: the radical-feminist move of answering male chauvinism in the revolutionary organisation by quitting it for an autonomous movement. The answer to a male-dominated party, the IMG held, was to fight the party into shape, not to leave it.

And yet the grand claim, when it came, came in terms a reader of Cox will find familiar. The spring 1974 Socialist Woman editorial holds women’s oppression to be a class question, inseparable from the class struggle as a whole, and locates the family itself as integral to capitalism, its structure and enforced roles rooted in what capitalism needs: social reproduction theory before the term existed. Then the close. Those who cut women’s liberation from the class struggle, it warns, set up a road-block between their goal and ‘the only social force which can achieve it: the proletariat’. The only social force. At the level of final agency the IMG, too, made the working class the single subject of liberation, in nearly the words Cox uses now.

The impact: comrade Delta

So the difference between the two traditions is not what the easy version claims. It is not that the Fourth International embraced autonomy and the SWP refused it; both placed the mixed revolutionary party at the centre, and both, in the last instance, named one social force as the agent. The difference is that the IMG built the autonomous organisation anyway, treated the women’s movement as a thing to join and strengthen rather than merely to pressure and fold back, and held that the workers’ movement itself had to be changed by it. That is real, and it is a difference of practice as much as of doctrine. What it is not is the difference between understanding autonomy and refusing it, because on the question of who finally emancipates whom, the FI tradition gave the answer the SWP gives. And the principle it gave, fight the organisation into shape rather than build standing outside it, is precisely the principle the Disputes Committee tried and broke in the Comrade Delta crisis. Feminists to the IMG’s left pressed exactly there: not on whether the IMG built, which it did, but on whether routing the whole question through the only social force left women’s liberation, in the last instance, holding someone else’s coat. Whether it does is not a thing this piece can settle, and the honest position is that the tradition has been arguing about it, internally and well, since before 1979.

Which leaves the questions a weekend of conferences cannot vote away. Whether the autonomous standing the SWP folds back into the party is precisely what would have held when the man accused was central to the organisation, or whether the fault is older and wider than any single theory of agency. And whether the benefit men draw from women’s subordination is a second system or a single summit on one slope, a question the local maximum reframes and does not close. The analysis comes before the programme. Anyone who tells you otherwise this weekend, in either hall, is selling the conclusion before the work is done.

The argument I have been making in recent months about authoritarian consolidation in Britain, about the architecture of repression that the Tory governments built and Labour has extended, about right-Bonapartist parliamentary politics rather than classical fascism, is not new. The International Socialist Group, formed by the merger of the currents around International and Socialist Viewpoint, was making versions of these arguments in real time through its journal Socialist Outlook from May 1987 onwards. The paper was co-edited by Phil Hearse, an IMG veteran who had edited International, and John Lister, who came from the WSL mainstream that later produced Socialist Viewpoint. The framework they developed together has been in continuous use within the tradition for nearly forty years. The conditions that gave rise to it have intensified rather than passed. This piece is one attempt to recover what the tradition saw clearly, what it got wrong, and why the recovery matters now. The verification work behind the article has so far covered the early issues of Socialist Outlook through to late 1991. The archive is larger than that, and what has not yet been verified may further extend or correct the reading offered here.

The tradition’s analytical core was a wager about the British state. The wager was that the post-war consensus settlement, in which the working class was conceded space within a framework that protected capitalist property relations, was breaking down. What replaced it would not be classical fascism, because British capitalism did not require the destruction of the working class as an organised force. It required something else: a state apparatus capable of disciplining the working class through legal architectures and selective repression while maintaining the formal institutions of parliamentary democracy. The tradition called this a “strong state” and tracked its development through specific legislative moments and policing operations.

What the tradition saw clearly

Phil Hearse’s “Thatcherism: the coming of the strong state” in Socialist Outlook no. 11, December 1988/January 1989, page 25, is the analytical centre of this work and the article that travels best to 2026. Hearse was arguing that the left had underestimated the transformation of state power under Thatcher and that there was, as he put it, “a drift towards a new form of authoritarianism, with some similarities to what Trotsky called ‘bonapartism’.” The argument was directed against two failure modes that had blinded the left to the actual drift. The first was catastrophism: “In the 1970s, sections of the left,” he wrote, “most notably the Workers Revolutionary Party, argued that Britain already had, or was about to have, a form of dictatorship. These absurd and catastrophist declarations have in my view almost numbed the left to what is, in the third term of Thatcherism, a real drift to the strong state.” The second was complacency: “Many comrades in the socialist movement are blind to the advent of the strong state because they think that provided we don’t have either full military dictatorship or fascism, then we must have an unproblematic ‘bourgeois democracy’. This was not Trotsky’s approach.”

The argument is exactly the one the contemporary left needs in 2026. Authoritarian consolidation does not require the abolition of parliament. It requires the parliamentary form to coexist with a repressive apparatus capable of disciplining dissent, criminalising organising, and proscribing specific organisations when their activities become inconvenient. Hearse was tracking the new restrictions on the right to strike, the conditions on ballots that put “all the cards in the hands of scabs and management,” and what he called the array of violent attacks on democratic rights against the wider pattern of the miners’ strike and the Wapping print dispute. The same architecture has been deployed against Reclaim the Streets, against the anti-globalisation movement, against the student protests of 2010, against Occupy, against Extinction Rebellion, against Just Stop Oil, and now against Palestine Action. The form has been continuous. The targets have rotated. The state has not needed to abolish parliament to maintain the apparatus.

The tradition extended this analysis into the cultural and informational apparatus of the state. John Lister and Ken Loach, writing in Socialist Outlook no. 1, May/June 1987, argued that “broadcasting in particular has to be considered in the same light as the police and the armed forces, in its defence of the state and the economic system the state is there to protect.” The framing was sharp for its moment and has aged into something sharper. The contemporary architectures of state-sponsored information control, from the Palantir contracts to the disinformation regulation regime to the criminalisation of journalism that exposes state violence, are continuous with the broadcasting analysis Lister and Loach were making in 1987. The strong state is not only the police on the picket line and the legislation that proscribes the organisation. It is also the information infrastructure that determines what the proscription means and how it is reported. The tradition was right to refuse the separation between repressive and ideological state apparatus, and the contemporary left would do well to recover that refusal.

The tradition’s analysis of the Labour Party’s trajectory was equally prescient. The argument across the 1987-1991 period was that Kinnock’s right turn was not a tactical retreat but a strategic transformation. Labour was being remade as what Socialist Outlook contributors called a “housebroken managerial party,” capable of administering capitalism without disturbing its operations and useful to the ruling class as an alternative manager when the Tories became electorally exhausted. The expulsions and witch-hunts of the period were not merely about removing Militant. They were about producing a party that could be trusted with state power on terms the bourgeoisie could accept. Pete Firmin’s “The downhill road to Brighton ‘89” in Socialist Outlook no. 18, October 1989, captured the internal logic with characteristic acidity. “The watch-word in the Labour Party during most of the 1980s has been that the left shouldn’t ‘rock the boat’, that we have to maintain Party unity in order to win elections,” he wrote. “The right only accept Party unity on their terms — the ‘unity of the graveyard’ where the membership are expected to be silent and dead.”

The Brighton ‘89 conference Firmin was writing about could be the Liverpool ‘24 conference, or any of the post-2020 Starmer expulsions, with the names changed and the basic dynamic identical. The strategic transformation Kinnock began in the late 1980s was completed by Blair, paused under Corbyn, and resumed under Starmer at higher velocity. The current Labour Party is the party Hearse, Firmin, and their comrades predicted in 1989. The expulsion of Jeremy Corbyn, the proscription of pro-Palestine groups within the party, the readmission of figures like Mandelson to senior diplomatic positions, the disciplining of MPs who voted against the two-child benefit cap: these are the working-out of the strategic transformation the tradition tracked thirty years ago.

The tradition was also right about extra-parliamentary movements. The argument was that the most effective resistance to the consolidating state would emerge outside official channels, often in opposition to the official labour movement’s instincts, and would frequently be denounced by Labour leaderships before being claimed by them after the fact. The Poll Tax campaign was the vindication. Mass non-payment, organised through community resistance committees independently of the Labour Party and against Kinnock’s explicit objections, achieved what no parliamentary strategy could have achieved. It defeated the Poll Tax, brought down Thatcher, and established a model of extra-parliamentary action that has been imitated and adapted in every subsequent decade. Graham Topley’s “How we plan to SCRAP the poll tax” in Socialist Outlook no. 14, June 1989, set out the argument in advance: mass non-payment, community organisation, explicit rejection of “official protest” and reliance on Labour pressure. The strategy worked. The tradition was right.

The connected-fronts argument was the fourth analytical move that has been borne out. Socialist Outlook‘s editorial work in the late 1980s, particularly the November/December 1987 piece “Tory hurricane of change,” argued that the various Tory offensives could not be understood as separate policy choices. Anti-trade-union legislation, the criminalisation of protest under the 1986 Public Order Act, the abolition of the GLC, the attacks on social security, the national curriculum, the policing of Black communities in Tottenham and Handsworth: these were elements of a single project. The tradition insisted on what it called a “single analysis,” refusing the fragmentation of struggle that would let the state defeat each front separately. The argument has held up. The contemporary defensive fronts I described in the convention piece, trans rights and disability rights and migrant rights and the right to protest, are the present-day version of the same connected project, run by the same kind of state, against the same kind of working-class formation.

The connected-fronts argument was not abstract. The archive tracked it through specific sites where the strong state’s apparatus was being tested before being generalised. The interrogation centre at Castlereagh and the architecture of policing in the North of Ireland were theorised as the laboratory in which the state’s repressive techniques were developed before being deployed against the miners and the print workers. The 1988 broadcasting ban on Sinn Féin was identified as the template for wider press censorship. Kinnock’s attacks on Black sections were named as enabling rather than incidental to Labour’s rightward managerial turn. Section 28 and the Embryology Bill were analysed as ideological crackdown enforcing the nuclear family as a prerequisite for welfare retreat. The 1988 Immigration Act, the Broadwater Farm policing operation, and the autonomous organising of Women Against Pit Closures and the Greenham Common peace camp were all integrated into the strong-state framework rather than treated as adjacent themes. Black liberation, women’s struggles, Irish solidarity, and lesbian and gay liberation were constitutive of the analysis rather than illustrative of it. The contemporary defensive fronts argument is the direct inheritor of this work, not an extension of work the tradition did not do. The contemporary left has been reinventing arguments the Socialist Outlook archive had substantially worked out.

Where the tradition was wrong

The honest accounting matters. Socialist Outlook and International got several things wrong, and the failures are themselves analytically useful.

1. The most consistent failure was over-prediction of imminent collapse. The tradition was prone to reading each crisis as the one that would bring the system down, and reading each working-class defeat as the precursor to a regrouping that would reverse it. The 1989-1991 recession was treated as a potentially terminal crisis for Thatcherism. It turned out to be a difficult patch in a longer trajectory of neoliberal consolidation. The fall of the Berlin Wall and the dissolution of the Eastern bloc were sometimes read as the end of the post-war international order rather than as the prelude to its reorganisation. The recurring habit of catastrophism, of treating the present as the immediate prelude to revolutionary opportunity, produced both analytical errors and organisational habits that the tradition is still working to unlearn.

2. The second failure was the misreading of Thatcherism itself. Some of the tradition’s writers in the 1980s described Thatcherism as “semi-Bonapartist” or as a move toward fascism. The strong state framework was sound; the specific characterisation was overstated. Critics within the tradition correctly noted that Thatcherism did not need Bonapartist forms because parliamentary democracy proved sufficient as a vehicle for the project. The state did not need to abolish representative institutions. It needed only to ensure those institutions could not be used to obstruct the project’s core moves. That recognition is what Hearse’s 1989 article was arguing for, and the article itself was a correction of earlier work in the tradition. The lesson has been carried forward. The contemporary right-Bonapartist framing I have been using descends from this corrected version, not from the earlier overstatement.

3. The third failure was the misjudgement of Labour’s institutional endurance. Many Socialist Outlook contributors believed across the 1987-1991 period that Labour was in terminal crisis and would soon be replaced by a new socialist formation as its working-class base abandoned it. The prediction was wrong. Labour proved more durable than expected, its base proved more attached to the brand than the analytical models predicted, and the new socialist formation did not arrive. The post-Corbyn moment of 2020-2025, including the YP collapse and the Independent Alliance fragmentation, is in some ways the working-out of a process the tradition expected to happen thirty years earlier. The expectation was right in direction and wrong in timing. The tradition consistently underestimated the inertia of mass political identification, the institutional resources Labour could deploy to manage internal dissent, and the trade union bureaucracy’s commitment to the Labour link even under conditions of repeated betrayal. Those analytical instincts have improved within the tradition over time, but the early Socialist Outlook work was too quick to predict Labour’s replacement.

Where the tradition’s engagement was less frequent, rather than less integrated, was on disability politics. The archive’s work on Black liberation, women’s struggles, Irish solidarity, and lesbian and gay liberation appeared more often across the run than its work on disability. But the disability work that did appear was substantially integrated into the strong-state framework rather than treated as a separate welfare issue. Socialist Outlook critiqued sections of the left that dismissed specific oppressions as “poor relations” and argued that ableism, alongside racism and heterosexism, was constitutive of the capitalist order rather than incidental to it. The analysis of Tory welfare retreat tracked how cuts to social security and services forced the burden of care for disabled, sick, and elderly relatives back onto the nuclear family and specifically onto women, with the family forced to “absorb the impact of Tory policies” within the domestic sphere. The closure of centres for disabled and mentally disabled young people in Manchester was theorised as part of the architecture of class repression rather than as an isolated cuts story. Kirsten Hearn’s work on disabled lesbians and gay men was discussed as a radical challenge to the white, able-bodied male-dominated traditions of the left. The participation of disabled Black women in the Women for Socialism conference generated explicit calls for representational changes in leadership. By 1991, Harry Sloan’s writing was naming the movement of people with disabilities alongside the women’s, Black, and lesbian and gay movements as one of the fundamental liberation movements the revolutionary socialist project must champion, with self-organisation as the necessary component for breaking the logic of the market and the strong state’s repressive consolidation.

The contemporary attack on disabled people through PIP cuts, work capability assessments, the Cass Review legacy, and the wider dismantling of collective provision is the present-day version of the offensive the tradition was tracking in 1987-1991. The analytical resources for theorising it are available in the archive, integrated into the strong-state framework, and waiting to be drawn on. The frequency of the engagement was lower than for some other liberation struggles. The depth of the analytical integration was not.

What the recovery is for

My argument is not that everything the tradition wrote in 1987-1991 should be read as if it were written yesterday. The argument is that a left that has lost its analytical inheritance is a left that must reinvent its analytical tools each time conditions change, and that this constant reinvention is one reason the British left has been outpaced by the right’s organisational and ideological development over the same period.

The right has had its analytical continuity. The think-tanks, the policy networks, the publishing operations, the cadre formation that runs from Mont Pelerin through the Institute of Economic Affairs and the Adam Smith Institute through the Centre for Policy Studies through Policy Exchange through Reform UK’s current strategic apparatus, has been continuous. Each generation has built on the last. Each crisis has been an opportunity to refine and extend the framework. The left’s equivalent infrastructure has been weaker and more discontinuous. The IMG tradition, the Socialist Outlook and International archives, the Mandel and Bensaïd and Achcar bodies of work, the FI’s institutional memory: this is the analytical inheritance available to the contemporary British left, and it is mostly not being drawn on by the activists who most need it.

One small example of the continuity makes the point. Phil Hearse’s Creeping Fascism (2017, with Neil Faulkner, Samir Dathi, and Seema Syeda) is in direct lineage with the strong-state analysis Hearse was developing in Socialist Outlook no. 11 in December 1988. By the November 1991 issue of the same paper, John Lister was already extending the analysis into Europe, identifying the new far right of Le Pen’s Front National, the Vlaamsblok, the German Republikaner and the German Peoples Union, the Freedom Party in Austria, and the far-right leagues in Italy as politically distinct from pre-war fascism: not linked to pre-capitalist classes, not carrying the same anti-capitalist ideology, but with “strong affinities” to 1980s Thatcherism (Socialist Outlook no. 12, 23 November 1991, page 9). Creeping Fascism is what that line of analysis became when it was developed at book length after another quarter-century of evidence. The contemporary left has been engaging with the book without knowing that it descends from analytical work the tradition was already doing thirty years earlier. The recovery makes the lineage visible. The Irony: Creeping Fascism has been out of print for years, despite being less than a decade old. All these experiences will be lost, like tears in rain.

The Socialist Federation convention in September will gather comrades who came to politics through Palestine, through the strike wave, through the climate movement, through housing organising, through the post-Corbyn Labour expulsions. Most of them have not read Socialist Outlook. Many of them do not know there was an International. The framework I have been using in recent writing is not mine. It is the tradition’s, refined over forty years, and it is more usable than any analysis that has to be invented from the present moment alone.

The recovery is for that audience. It is for the comrades who are doing the work and need analytical resources sharper than what the contemporary left has been producing. The Socialist Outlook archive contains a substantial part of those resources. It is mostly out of print and mostly inaccessible. Bringing it back into circulation, with honest accounting of what it got right and what it got wrong, is one of the things a serious British FI tradition could do for the next phase of the work. The Socialist Federation convention is one place that conversation could begin. This piece is one small contribution to it. The rest is for the tradition’s surviving practitioners to take up, if they choose, in whatever forms they can sustain.

Phil Hearse is still writing. Pete Firmin is still organising, and plays an active role in the Socoailist Federation. The IMG tradition’s institutional descendants in ACR and Ecosocialist Scotland, in Resistance Books, in International Viewpoint, in the IIRE, are still functioning. The archive can be recovered. The framework can be extended. The wager the tradition made in 1989 about where Britain was going has been substantially borne out. The wager about what to do about it is now ours to make, drawing on what has been built and adding what the present period requires.

TL;DR: The campist case for Russian intervention rests on a set of figures and claims that circulate without their sources. Fourteen thousand dead in the Donbas: real, but 78% were combatants and most civilians died in separatist-controlled territory. A colour revolution in 2014: Yanukovych’s own party voted 328-0 to remove him after he fled. Energy companies made 400% profits: the actual figure is 125%, and Nord Stream was already shut before the sabotage. The Forest Brothers claim against the FI: Mandel’s own texts say the opposite. NATO expansion: a real phenomenon, and verbal assurances were given in 1990, but no formal treaty commitment was made and Russia annexed Crimea in 2014 before Ukraine had any membership plan. The Fourth International calls this ‘alter-imperialism’: not opposing all imperialist powers, but opposing one while tacitly supporting another. The number is real. The argument built on it is not.

The number arrives without a denominator. Fourteen thousand dead in the Donbas between 2014 and 2022. It circulates in WhatsApp threads, Stop the War meetings, comment sections under every article that mentions Ukraine. It is deployed not as a statistic but as a verdict: Ukrainian forces conducted a genocidal campaign against Russian speakers for eight years; Russia’s February 2022 invasion was therefore a defensive response to an ongoing atrocity; anyone who supports Ukrainian resistance is complicit in that atrocity. The number does the work of a conclusion while presenting itself as evidence.

It is a real number. That is where the argument goes wrong: not in the figure, but in everything that follows from it.

What the 14,000 Actually Shows

The figure derives from monitoring data covering the entire Donbas conflict from 2014 to the eve of the full-scale invasion. The United Nations Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights documented it systematically across more than thirty reports. The breakdown is not contested.

Roughly 78% of the 14,000 were combatants: approximately 4,400 Ukrainian troops and 6,500 Russian proxy fighters. Confirmed civilian deaths over eight years of conflict: 3,107. Add the 298 victims of MH17, shot down by a Russian Buk missile over eastern Ukraine in July 2014, and the civilian total reaches 3,405. Each of those deaths is a real person and a real loss. Three thousand one hundred and seven is not a small number. It is also not fourteen thousand, and it is not a genocide.

The attribution question cuts harder still. Of those confirmed civilian deaths, 78% occurred in territory controlled by Russian-backed separatists rather than by Ukrainian government forces. A further 81% of civilian infrastructure damage from shelling occurred in separatist-controlled territory. The OSCE Special Monitoring Mission recorded approximately 313,000 ceasefire violations between 2017 and 2021, classifying most as ‘undetermined’ rather than attributed to either side. The OHCHR civilian casualty data does the attribution work the OSCE declined to do formally: the primary cause of civilian harm in the Donbas conflict was shelling from the separatist-held side, directed at the population living under that side’s control.

The campist argument requires fourteen thousand to mean: Ukrainian forces killed fourteen thousand Russian-speaking civilians in a genocidal campaign. The data shows: both sides killed combatants over eight years of low-intensity war; roughly three thousand civilians died, the majority of them in separatist-controlled territory, the majority of those from separatist shelling. The number is real. The argument built on it is not.

The Coup That Wasn’t

The campist account of Ukraine’s origins requires a second founding claim: that Yanukovych was a democratically elected president removed by a Western-backed colour revolution in 2014, invalidating Ukrainian democratic politics and creating the conditions Russia was entitled to respond to. This claim is easier to check than most people bother to.

Yanukovych rejected the EU Association Agreement in November 2013 under Russian economic pressure. The sequence is documented: Putin offered a $15 billion loan and a 33% gas price cut; Yanukovych, who had been moving toward signing the agreement with the broad support of his own parliament, reversed course. The Maidan protests erupted in response. Over the following weeks, approximately 100 protesters were killed by government forces. On 21 February 2014 Yanukovych signed an agreement with opposition parties brokered by European foreign ministers, and then fled Kyiv that evening.

The parliament voted on 22 February. The result was 328-0. Not a narrow constitutional majority: unanimous. Of those 328 votes, 36 came from Yanukovych’s own Party of Regions and 30 from the Communist Party. The constitutional mechanism involved reinstating the 2004 constitution, under which the parliament speaker became acting president pending elections. Yanukovych called it a coup. His own party voted for his removal.

This is not a description of a Western-engineered putsch. It is a description of a president who fled after killing protesters, whose removal was processed through parliamentary mechanisms, whose own party recognised that he had lost all legitimacy. The colour revolution framing requires erasing the 100 dead, the flight, the unanimous vote, and the 36 members of his own party who had had enough.

The Energy Argument

The claim that the war was engineered to allow US and UK energy companies to displace Russian gas from European markets, and that those companies made 400% profits as a result, has the appeal of a coherent structural explanation. US LNG exports did benefit from the European pivot away from Russian gas. That is a real geopolitical interest worth naming. The figures, however, do not cooperate.

Profits rose approximately 125% across the major oil majors in 2022, not 400%. Nord Stream 1 was shut indefinitely by Gazprom on 2 September 2022, before the sabotage. European gas prices peaked in August 2022, before the sabotage. The energy price spike was a consequence of Russia cutting supplies; the sabotage was a consequence of the energy crisis, not its cause. The invasion preceded the sabotage by seven months and the supply cuts by six.

The 400% figure is not a rounding error. It is more than three times the documented figure. The energy argument, in the form it actually circulates, does not survive contact with the data.

Who Dies for Russia

The campist argument that Russia is defending its people requires specifying which people.

Zona.media, the independent Russian human rights monitoring project, published its four-year assessment in February 2026. Confirmed Russian military deaths had exceeded 200,000. Residents of Tuva and Chukotka are 25 times more likely to be killed than residents of Moscow. Male death rates in Buryatia and Tuva are 27 to 33 times higher than in the capital. 67% of Russian soldiers killed came from rural areas and small towns, which account for only 48% of the population. Ethnicity is the strongest predictor of death rate, stronger than poverty or religion: in Buryatia and Tuva, which are predominantly Buryat and Tuvan rather than ethnically Russian, the differential against Moscow is at its most extreme.

This is not a new pattern. The Soviet republics’ death rates in the Second World War show the same imperial logic: Belarus at 25.3% of its 1940 population, Ukraine at 16.3%, Russia proper at 12.7%. The periphery bears the cost of the centre’s decisions. Combined and uneven development, as the campist deploys the term to explain why Russia deserves socialist defence, names this pattern without condemning it. The Buryat and Tuvan dead are the human content of that abstraction.

The Russian oligarchs’ war is being paid for in lives from regions that have no institutional leverage over the decision to fight and no political representation in the rooms where that decision was made. That is not a defence of any people. It is the expenditure of some people to secure the interests of others.

The Forest Brothers and the Principle

The campist claim that the FI or Mandel praised Nazi-collaborating partisans as part of their support for Baltic independence deserves a direct answer, because it attempts to delegitimise the entire FI tradition on the national question by attributing to it a position it never held.

Mandel’s 1976 speech ‘Trotskyists and World War Two’, available at Marxists.org, states the principle directly. He uses the IRA’s contacts with Nazi Germany during the Second World War as his example: Seán Russell, the IRA’s Chief of Staff, travelled to Berlin in 1940, underwent explosives training with the Abwehr, and died aboard a German U-boat returning to Ireland in Operation Dove. This is not disputed; it is documented in mainstream historical sources including Mark M. Hull’s academic study Irish Secrets (2003). Mandel’s response is not to condemn Irish resistance to British imperialism. His formulation: a movement by an oppressed nationality against an imperialist occupier is just; leadership collaboration with another imperialist power is grounds to denounce the leadership, not to condemn the movement.

Beyond Perestroika, Mandel’s 1989 Verso book on Gorbachev’s USSR, is available to read. He explicitly condemns the Hitler-Stalin Pact and its implications. He frames the Baltic mobilisations sympathetically as a justified response to what he calls Stalin’s ‘ultra-bureaucratic, repressive and brutal policy with regard to the non-Russian nationalities’. His transitional programme includes ‘the full implementation, within the framework of the Union, of the rights of nationalities to self-administration and self-determination’ as a formal demand. He does not mention the Forest Brothers. He does not endorse wartime partisan formations. The claim conflates support for Baltic independence with endorsement of specific formations that fought under the banner of that independence.

The FI applied the same principle three times in the twentieth century: Finnish resistance to Soviet invasion in 1939-40, despite Finland’s bourgeois government and recent history of white terror against its own working class; Afghan resistance to Soviet intervention in 1979-80, despite the mujaheddin’s reactionary Islamist politics; Baltic independence in 1988-89, despite some formations’ wartime collaboration histories. In each case, Trotsky’s formulation from his 1939 letter: march separately, strike together. Support the people’s right to self-determination without dissolving your organisation into every formation that fights under that banner.

The campist argument requires this principle not to apply to Estonia. No reason is given. The asymmetry is the method.

Pilger, Stone, and Popular Campism

Oliver Stone’s Ukraine on Fire (2016) and John Pilger’s Ukraine journalism are the primary vehicles through which the campist argument reaches audiences beyond the organised left. Both deserve more than dismissal; both exemplify the asymmetric evidentiary standard this series has been documenting.

Pilger’s record as an investigative journalist was serious and should be acknowledged as such. His work on East Timor, on the Iraq sanctions regime, on Western media complicity in imperial violence, stands. His Ukraine writing is a different matter. His 2014 Guardian article describes Putin as ‘the only leader to condemn the rise of fascism in 21st-century Europe’. It repeats the claim, later confirmed as false, that the Obama administration spent $5 billion in 2014 to fund a coup against an elected government. His September 2022 piece on propaganda does not mention Bucha. His Ukraine writing does not engage with the OHCHR civilian casualty data. The rigorous scepticism about Western claims that made his best work essential was suspended entirely when evaluating Russian state claims. This is not anti-imperialism. It is its mirror image.

Ukraine on Fire was directed by Igor Lopatonok, a US-Russian dual citizen who has since appeared regularly on Sputnik, was involved in a 2023 project funded by a Putin-established foundation, and is listed as a ‘Kremlin Mouthpiece’ by Ukraine’s war sanctions programme. An OCCRP investigation published by the Hollywood Reporter documented Lopatonok’s broader pattern: leveraging Stone’s reputation to propose flattering documentaries funded by the autocrats themselves, as with the $5 million received from Nazarbayev’s foundation for a Kazakhstan film. The Guardian’s Moscow correspondent described Ukraine on Fire as part of ‘a series of documentary projects featuring Stone about Russia and Ukraine that reflect a strongly pro-Kremlin worldview‘. The film was broadcast on Russian national television in November 2016, before it received any significant Western distribution. It is now available on Rumble.

None of this makes the NATO expansion critique wrong. It makes these particular sources unreliable guides to the full picture.

The Method, Again

Fourteen thousand dead. Real. Bearing no resemblance to what the argument requires it to bear.

The popular campism assembled in WhatsApp threads and Stop the War meetings is not a different argument from the theorised campism addressed in the previous piece. It is the same method operating at a lower altitude: the same asymmetric evidentiary standard, the same trophy cabinet of real grievances, the same refusal to apply to Russia the analytical rigour applied to Ukraine. The 14,000 figure, the colour revolution framing, the energy profits claim, the Forest Brothers accusation: each is built from something real. The construction built from those materials is not.

The NATO expansion critique deserves a direct answer rather than dismissal. NATO expansion is a real geopolitical phenomenon and Western imperialism’s record in Yugoslavia, Afghanistan, and Iraq is not invented. Those are legitimate anxieties. But no written treaty contained a commitment against eastward expansion: Baker’s ‘not one inch east’ remark was made during German reunification negotiations and concerned NATO military structures in former East Germany, though broader assurances about Eastern Europe were also discussed. What was actually codified in the Treaty on Final Settlement was narrower: no nuclear weapons or non-German NATO forces in former East Germany. Gorbachev himself clarified in 2014 that the topic of NATO expansion as such ‘was not discussed at all’ in formal terms. The assurances given were real; the formal commitment was not. More fundamentally, Russia annexed Crimea in 2014 before Ukraine had any NATO membership plan, and Finland and Sweden joined NATO in 2023 precisely because Russia’s invasion demonstrated that non-membership offered no security guarantee. More fundamentally, the critique treats Eastern European countries as naturally subordinate to Russian interests rather than as sovereign states with their own historical experience of Russian military occupation. The Baltic states, Poland, and Ukraine did not join or seek to join NATO because Washington told them to. They did so because they had specific and well-founded reasons to fear Russian military power.

The Fourth International’s own analysis names the campist method precisely: the risk of sliding from anti-imperialism to ‘alter-imperialism’, not opposing all imperialist powers and projects but rather opposing one or some while explicitly or tacitly supporting another. That is what the trophy cabinet method produces when applied consistently. Western imperialism’s crimes are real. They are not a reason to support Russian imperialism. As the April 2022 International Viewpoint statement put it: what moral standing does the Russian capitalist oligarchy have to speak about democracy?

Residents of Tuva and Chukotka are 25 times more likely to die in this war than residents of Moscow. That is the war being defended. Those are the people paying for it.

TLDR

• In the spring of 1987 Davy Jones, writing in the Fourth Internationalist journal International, set out what a socialist council should do under Tory cuts: a budget built to community need, funded by more grant and the cancellation of councils’ debts to the City, drawn up with the workforce and community through open books and mass consultation. We are republishing it because 2026 anti-austerity pledge says almost exactly this.

• The line has not moved in forty years. Only the legal furniture has: the surcharge that disqualified Liverpool’s councillors is abolished, and the modern weapon is the section 114 notice and government commissioners.

• The same tradition defended Liverpool’s defiance, which won real concessions and protected jobs better than the dented shield, and damned Militant’s method: the cadre and the courts standing in for the self-activity of the class.

• What it has never resolved is race, and is power. Liverpool’s housing was racially unequal before Militant arrived, and Militant refused the Black community’s own remedies; and the method has never held a council long enough to be proved, because the working-class strength it assumes has not been rebuilt.

The article that could have run this week

Reading Davy Jones’s ‘Is there a future for town hall socialism?’ now, the disorientation is in how little of it needs translating. It ran in International, a journal of Marxism in the Labour Party, in the spring of 1987, with Nicholas Ridley glowering off the cover as the minister for rate-capping. Jones counts the damage in the figures of his day: central grant down from 61 per cent of planned council spending in 1980-81 to 46.4 by 1987-88, a cumulative £17 billion stripped out, the share carried by ratepayers climbing past 56 per cent. Change the minister and the numbers and you could file it on Monday.

What has not dated at all is the trap. Jones names the comfortable Labour position of his day through Margaret Hodge, who had by then abandoned even the language of the dented shield for the candour of saying that staying in office meant ‘services must take precedence over trade union interests or even jobs’. That is the Brighton script before Brighton, the Sheffield group’s ‘we can’t commit to always oppose any cuts’ a generation early. The dented shield is not a recent discovery. It is the permanent temptation of a Labour councillor with a balanced-budget duty and no stomach for the fight, and it has been answered, in the same terms, for forty years.

The same demand, forty years apart

Set the 1987 programme beside the 2026 pledge and the continuity is almost embarrassing. Jones argued that the demand for central government to foot the bill, and for the councils’ accumulated debts to the City to be cancelled, should be expressed locally through a budget drawn to the real social needs of the borough. That budget was to be built with the workforce and the community and not handed down: a real process of mass consultation, with all the financial information open to public scrutiny. Read the proposed Socialist Federation pledge and the same skeleton is there, the needs budget, the refinancing of debt, the open books, the assemblies, only with the accountancy updated and the unions named.

The one thing that has genuinely changed is the furniture of repression, and it changed in the council’s favour. The councillors who held Liverpool and Lambeth were surcharged and disqualified by the district auditor, ruined personally for a budget decision. That weapon is gone: the surcharge was abolished by the Local Government Act 2000 and the disqualification route went in 2011. The modern instrument is the section 114 notice and the commissioners it can summon, a political siege rather than a personal bankruptcy. A councillor who refuses to pass on cuts in 2027 risks losing control of the council. They do not risk losing their house. The tradition’s demand has outlived the law that was built to punish it.

Where the tradition broke with Militant

Here is the part that has to be said plainly, because the temptation is to flinch from it. Jones’s tradition, the IMG and its successors through Socialist Outlook to the current that writes this, was not Militant’s. It was Militant’s rival, and it judged Liverpool with its eyes open. Its judgement was double, which is the only honest kind.

The defiance was right. Jones is unambiguous that Liverpool and Lambeth, the only two councils that then actually argued for a deficit budget built on mobilising the community, were the only two prepared in the end to confront the government, and that they were isolated and attacked by the very allies who had promised to stand with them. The co-ordinated rate-capping refusal of 1985, led by Hodge, Blunkett and Livingstone, collapsed the moment the miners were beaten, because it had rested on agreements between council leaders and almost no mobilisation where it counted, in the workforce and on the estates. Livingstone’s capitulation at the GLC, the council with the most prestige, brought the rest down. Liverpool, left holding the line alone, still extracted more from the Tories over the 1984-85 budget than any other council managed in seven years, and even after the surcharge its jobs and services came through as well as or better than the creative accountants managed theirs. Defiance worked, where it was tried and backed.

What failed was the method. Jones’s standing principle is that local action must build ‘the strength, confidence and self-activity of the working class’, not lean on ‘the heroic role of individual socialists and councillors’, and it is exactly here that Militant fell down. The Liverpool leadership increasingly put its own cadre, and then the courts, in the place of the movement it should have been building. The ninety-day redundancy notices issued to all thirty thousand council workers in 1985, the device meant to buy time, were the perfect emblem: a manoeuvre done to the workforce over its head, which split the unions and handed Kinnock his conference weapon. Pete Firmin drew the conclusion in Socialist Outlook in 1990, watching Militant fight the witch-hunt the same way it had run the council. It refused to build a common campaign with the rest of the left and ran the defence ‘solely as a Militant promotion exercise’, then retreated into the courts to stop its own expulsions, a tactic Firmin called ‘futile in its results, and politically wrong’. A tendency that opposed the courts’ interference in the unions was inviting it into the Labour Party. The sectarianism and the legalism were the method showing through, not lapses in it.

The self-activity of the working class

The positive content of Jones’s argument is the part worth carrying into 2027 whole. A needs budget is an organising occasion, not a clever sum. Its purpose is to pull the workforce, the tenants and the community into drawing up what the borough actually needs and then into defending it, so that the confrontation with the centre, when it comes, is fought by a mobilised city and not by a brave caucus in the chamber. The financial devices, then and now, are worth something only if they buy the time for that. Strip the mobilisation out and the deficit budget is just a different accountancy.

The proof of the method arrived where Jones could not yet see it. The poll tax was beaten a few years later, not by councillors and not in any chamber, but by mass non-payment organised street by street, the connected front from below that Liverpool’s go-it-alone defiance had never built. That is the lesson the tradition has held onto: the no-cuts stand is won by the movement the budget mobilises and lost by the cadre that substitutes itself for it. It is the argument the Federation’s pledge is making again, with the union conference season as its proving ground.

The part the tradition has to own

None of this is usable as inspiration unless it carries its worst alongside its best, and Liverpool’s worst was race. The racism in the city’s council housing was not Militant’s invention. A Liverpool doctorate completed in 1985, before Militant took the council, had already shown with allocation data that white households were close to twice as likely as Black households to be given the best stock, and that the system was driving the Black community ever deeper into the worst of it. Militant inherited that machine and made it in some ways worse, imposing Sam Bond as its race adviser over the open objection of the Liverpool Black Caucus and treating Black, women’s and Irish self-organisation as a diversion from the class. The workerism that dismissed those struggles was the politics itself and not a blemish on it, the same narrowing that left the council isolated.

And yet Firmin’s other insistence in 1990 has to stand beside that one. Those real failings, on Black sections, women’s sections and Ireland, were used by much of the left as a spurious reason to let the bureaucracy pick Militant off, and that was a betrayal too. Defend the fight against the witch-hunt; indict the method without mercy; refuse to let either the liberal or the rival sect off the hook. That is the only register in which the left can tell the truth about its own past.

1987’s question, still open

Jones titled his piece with a question, and answered it, in the follow-up that autumn, with ‘not for much longer’. He was right about the era of town hall socialism: it was ending, and what came after was the housebroken party and the managed decline of the cities. But the strategy he set down was never refuted, only never given the conditions to work. The tradition has been right about the method for forty years and has not once held a council long enough, with a movement large enough behind it, to prove it at the scale that would matter. The thing the whole argument assumes, a working class organised enough to make a no-cuts budget stick, is the thing four decades of defeat have worn away.

So the pledge is not a programme with a guaranteed result. It is a bet that the rebuilding starts somewhere, and that a line drawn in every ward in 2027, backed by the union branches and the tenants and the open books, is as good a place to start as any. Whether it does is not settled by the wording, or by this article, or by anything that can be known before the budgets are set. Davy Jones’s question is still the question. We have just run out of decades in which to keep getting the answer right only on paper.

Is there a future for town hall socialism?

Davy Jones, in International: a journal of Marxism in the Labour Party*, no. 9, March/April 1987.*

Repeated Tory attacks are reducing the room for manoeuvre of Labour councils. Is there a role for socialists in local government, and can a belated fightback be organised? Davy Jones looks at the issues.

When the Tories came into office in 1979 their central goal was to restore the profitability of the British economy. This necessitated taking on and defeating the labour movement industrially, thereby weakening the trade unions; running down the welfare state through progressive reductions in social spending; and simultaneously shifting the terms of ideological debate markedly to the right. For their project to succeed the arena of local government was crucial since local councils account for about a quarter of all public spending. As a result the last seven years have seen a battery of new laws and changes to the rules of local government spending.

The net effect of these changes has been enormous. The percentage of central government grant as a proportion of planned council spending in England has fallen progressively from 61 per cent in 1980-81 to 46.4 per cent in 1987-88. Rate support grant has fallen, at 1986-87 prices, from £12,848m in 1978-79 to £8,988m in 1986-87. The cumulative loss to local government between 1978-79 and 1986-87 is a staggering £17,455m. As central government grant has been cut, so the proportion of expenditure born by the ratepayers has risen dramatically from 39 per cent in 1978-79 to over 56 per cent in 1986-87.

But there is a second major reason for the Tories to tackle the issue of local government: namely, the important role of local councils as potential centres of resistance to the Tories’ goals. The Tories’ aim was both to abolish the most powerful of their enemies — the Greater London Council (GLC) and metropolitan authorities — which in radical Labour hands had proved both electorally popular and capable of serious and damaging resistance to Tory rule; and to undermine the potential popularity and influence of local councils controlled by Labour by squeezing their economic autonomy and forcing them to take responsibility for unpopular reductions in services. The crunch is now rapidly approaching both at a local level, as all the tricks of financial resistance to the Tories run out, and nationally, as the likelihood of a majority Labour government committed to bailing out local councils seems daily less likely.

Labour’s response

While the Labour leadership and the party as a whole have attacked the government’s moves against local government, commitments to restoring adequate levels of local spending have been less forthcoming. And at key points in the campaign against the Tories, the party leadership has been part of the problem rather than part of the solution. They refused to co-ordinate national backing to Lambeth and Liverpool councils just as they refused to commit themselves to reverse the surcharges subsequently imposed. They have been only too keen to join in the media chorus attacking local councils rather than seeing the potential mileage in championing the cause of Labour councils facing up to the Tories’ attacks.

Locally some right wing Labour councils have limply capitulated to the Tories’ measures and made cuts in services and jobs, or raised rents to keep within the new financial limits. But for much of the Labour left such options have been unacceptable. Debate has centred instead on the role of rate rises and the myriad of creative accountancy schemes used to deflect the impact of government cash limits.

Raising the rates

For a number of local Labour councils, and metropolitan authorities such as the GLC, the tactic of raising the rates to finance the expansion of services was a deliberate and coherent strategy. The case was made that existing services were completely inadequate and that radical equal opportunity policies needed substantial funds to have any serious impact. In the absence of adequate government grant, and given opposition to rent rises or cuts in jobs and services, rates were seen as the only method of financing such expansion. It was also argued that rate rises had little impact on the working class — as those on supplementary benefit had rates paid by government — but rather hit local businessmen. Supporters of rate rises said that this lesser evil was justified in order to give the council(s) time to win popularity through the expansion of their services, as with the GLC for example.

There were a number of things wrong with this approach. It is simply untenable to claim that huge rate rises do not attack working class living standards. Undoubtedly they severely hit low income wage earners. (In some areas in inner London rates had reached almost the same level as rents by the mid-1980s.) If cuts in jobs and services are unacceptable, why not attacks on living standards? To sanction rate rises as a lesser evil is a slippery slope towards those cuts in jobs and services.

Second, making such huge rate rises at the same time as taking bold equality measures undoubtedly fuelled popular opposition to these initiatives. While the responsibility for this equation lay with the media, it is a fact that the belief that vast sums of money were being ‘squandered’ on these schemes while rates were going through the roof was firmly implanted into tens of thousands of Labour voters’ minds. Funding equal opportunity policies from huge rate rises was to irresponsibly jeopardise their public acceptance.

The most important thing to note about this strategy, however, is that it relied on resolving the problems of local government financing through the actions of councillors, rather than through mobilisation of the community and the workforce. Like all bureaucratic approaches it demobilised the potential for struggling against the Tories’ attacks. In retrospect, though of course it was not so clear at the time, the relationship of forces between the classes at the outset of the Tory government in 1979-80 was far more advantageous than the mid-1980s. The early years of the Tories, before the defeat of the miners, was a far more favourable time to struggle against their attacks on local government. The moment was lost as the left councils who might have led such a struggle opted for huge rate rises instead.

The rate rise argument is not an academic one. While the media’s ‘favourite’ Labour councils such as Islington, Lambeth, Liverpool, Brent, Haringey, Sheffield and others have been ratecapped, there are many more which have not. Some have recently fallen into Labour control, some have radical leaderships or members looking to follow the example of the GLC, Islington, Lambeth and others in financing expansion of services prior to the inevitable ratecap the following year. Such is the case with Ealing and Hammersmith and Fulham, planning rate rises of 65 per cent and 40 per cent respectively.

Proponents of rate rises distinguish rates from rents or cuts in services by making the analogy with income tax. Just as socialists have traditionally favoured income or direct taxation over purchase/VAT (indirect) taxes, so it is argued that rates are relatively progressive taxes based on property values, hitting business more than private tenants. Raising rates, like raising taxes, is therefore a tactical question. This analogy has some truth to it, but concretely with a Tory government attacking living standards across the board, how can socialists justify joining in? There is no ‘acceptable’ rates rise in this economic context. On the contrary, within the framework of a socialist strategy for local government finances and establishing local social needs, a strong case can and should be made for reducing the rates from their current unacceptably high level in some boroughs.

Socialists would oppose an incoming Labour government raising the standard rate of income tax, after Tory reductions, in order to expand social provision. They would argue for the funds to be made available from other sources, such as cutting the misnamed ‘defence’ budget. Equally socialists should not support local Labour councils raising the rates dramatically, after local Tory rule, in order to expand the services. They too should insist that the funds come from elsewhere, not from the pockets of the working class.

Creative accountancy

With the advent of ratecapping attention shifted to other methods of preventing the Tories from decimating local government. A new industry was born — creative accountancy. Essentially, four main devices have been used under this broad heading, each with varying results and with varying degrees of acceptability from a socialist viewpoint. Overall this was termed both by Kinnock and the ‘soft left’ as the ‘dented shield’ approach. First, running down reserves traditionally held to finance major schemes and/or for contingencies. The Inner London Education Authority (ILEA) has maintained itself this way for the past two years and its crisis this year stems from having no more reserves to play with. Second, leasing schemes where council property or equipment is sold to commercial or banking interests who lease it back to the council. This gives the council cash up front. The Tories are committed to closing this loophole. The local government finance act currently going through parliament is likely to outlaw forms of leaseback schemes.

Third, and most significantly, is ‘capitalising expenditure’. This entails the council transferring day to day or ‘revenue expenses’ into its longer term or ‘capital budget’ thereby avoiding various government overspending penalties on its revenue account. This has been particularly used for repairs and maintenance costs. Its serious side effect however is to begin to run down the council’s capital projects programme, which in many cases is central to the manifesto commitments for major growth in areas like housing.

The fourth device, which has arisen partly to compensate for the side effects of ‘capitalisation’, is deferred purchase. Here a private sector intermediary undertakes to finance various capital works, but repayment from the capital budget is deferred, usually for three years. This also has the disastrous consequence of choking off any future capital growth as the repayments come due in later years. The Tories announced last July their intention to introduce legislation, backdated from July 1986, to prevent any more such deferred purchase schemes, though existing schemes will continue.

There are major objections to ‘creative accountancy’ as a solution to the government’s attacks. First, it puts the onus on experts to elaborate ever more complex and secret deals, rather than relying on the capacity of the labour movement collectively to mobilise and confront the government. Second, as a result, it is divisive among those who could and should be united in fighting the Tories, as each borough seeks its own individual and specific solution based on its own capacity to be more ‘creative’. Third, it demobilises the potential for struggle not only by referring it to experts, but also by each year deferring the struggle ‘to next year’ when ‘there will be no option left’ but to struggle. Fourth, and most devastating, it has led to disbelief among the local communities and workforces as the council seems miraculously to bridge the ‘unbridgeable gap’ each year through these mechanisms. The result is that claims of huge deficits, imminent cuts and jobs losses, are no longer believed. The councils have cried wolf too often.

The first real opportunity for a counterattack came in the early 1980s when left councils opted instead for large rate rises. The second was the preparation for the 1985-86 budget and the debate over not setting a rate or setting a deficit budget. The co-ordinated campaign not to set a rate led by Hodge, Blunkett, Livingstone and others relied almost exclusively on agreement among council leaders with lukewarm backing from certain local government leaders. Little mobilisation was achieved where it really mattered — among the workforce and in the local community. With the defeat of the miners in March 1985 the resolve of the local government leaders to face breaking the law and possible surcharge and political disqualification rapidly collapsed. The capitulation of Livingstone at the GLC, which had the most prestige and popularity among the authorities, was instrumental in the collapse of all the other authorities ‘committed’ to not setting a rate.

The only two authorities which had argued for a deficit budget based on mobilising the community and workforce around a budget based on local social needs, in fact became the only two prepared to confront the government — Liverpool and Lambeth. Isolated, and even attacked by their erstwhile allies, they went down to inevitable defeat. Though there are many criticisms of the leadership of both councils, at least they emerged with some credibility from the debacle. Indeed, Liverpool remains the one council to have achieved serious concessions from the Tories in seven years during their mass campaign over the 1984-85 budget.

A socialist response

Any socialist response to the Tory attacks on local government has to start from a recognition of the limitations of fundamental change which socialists can bring about through using the local state machinery. There can be no socialism in one borough. The national (and international) political context of local government places real limits on the capacity of the most socialist-inclined council to effect radical change. At all times local decisions must be weighed closely against national considerations. In particular actions need always to promote the strength, confidence and self-activity of the working class and the oppressed locally and nationally, rather than relying on the heroic role of individual socialists and councillors.

There is still a useful role for socialists to play as councillors — to use that arena to ensure that the working class and the oppressed do not pay for the crisis of local government finances, and to organise others to fight for the same objectives. It is unacceptable for left councillors, under the guise of ‘realism’, to offer lesser evils as options — ‘better to have large rate rises than cuts in jobs’, ‘better a vacancy freeze than handing over to the Tories’. They should not vote for such budgets or measures in Labour group or council, but act as a minority caucus refusing to budge on defending working class interests, if necessary resigning positions of responsibility within the group to do so. At least such a stance prepares the ground for any future confrontation with the government. Whether there would remain even that role for socialists should the Tories be re-elected is open to question.

The demands for central government to foot the bill and for the enormous debts which local authorities have accumulated to the City to be cancelled should be expressed locally through the drawing up of a budget based on local social needs. This entails councils collaborating with the local labour movement, their own workforce, and community groups to establish the real levels of social need in the borough and to draw up a timetabled programme of implementation. Such a consultation process cannot and should not be restricted to council and union leaders. It must be a real process of mass consultation, stimulating the maximum local involvement and mobilisation which will prove vital in any subsequent showdown with central government. Such a process cannot be achieved by relying on financial experts. All the financial information should be made available and subject to rigorous public scrutiny and debate.

Within such debate on priorities and needs all questions must be up for discussion — from the hours and conditions of different sections of the workforce, the rent and rate levels, through to all aspects of service need and provision. Nothing should be exempt from debate and all information should be available. Any such process could only be successful insofar as the council worked hand-in-hand with its own workforce, the local labour movement and community sector.

The struggle over the next year

1987 is almost certainly election year. The pressure on Labour councils to avoid a confrontation and attempt to ‘muddle through’ this year’s budget has been immense. For the centre and soft left this has been a straightforward electoralist decision, avoiding the confrontation with the Tories so as not to embarrass Kinnock in election year. For others, on the hard left, it has been a realpolitik decision that mobilisation, just prior to an election, especially following the defeat of Lambeth and Liverpool, is too difficult to achieve.

However ‘realistic’ the latter assessment may be, it has led councils into all sorts of shady budget decisions ranging from the totally unacceptable to the less obnoxious. But endorsing such budgets rather than fighting for a deficit budget based on social need fails to prepare the labour movement for the inevitable struggle next year. All too often it leads to councils resorting to traditional high-handed managerial styles, an impatience with established procedures, and good socialist councillors of yesterday locking out their workforce today.

Over the next year there will be an increasing number of struggles between Labour authorities and their workforce as the ‘muddle budgets’ break down and the money runs out. Vacancy freezes, hidden cuts or deterioration in services and conditions, or even open reneging on commitments will be par for the course. However ‘difficult’ the position of left councils, socialists should stand fully behind the workforce and local tenants/community groups in such disputes. Every attack on the workforce this year in the name of realism and waiting for a new government is a nail in the coffin of any serious united struggle by councils and workforce next year.

After the election

Clearly the outcome of the general election will affect the possibilities of struggle around local government enormously. The re-election of the Tories would not only be a huge defeat for the labour movement, it would cause widespread demoralisation within local government. Paradoxically though, a convincing argument can be made for attempting to co-ordinate a national campaign of resistance and confrontation to defend jobs, services and living standards in local government against such a government in its first year. There will be little point in Labour staying in office locally to administer Tory cuts as the screw is tightened to stop any creative accountancy miracles.

With the Tories being the largest minority, or in a genuinely hung parliament with Labour and Tories roughly equal and the balance held by the Alliance, there would be pressure on Labour towards lobbying the Alliance for a common approach to defend local government. Nationally, however, the Alliance have made few commitments on local government, and locally its representatives are frequently indistinguishable from the Tories.

Again a strong case can be made for a co-ordinated campaign of confrontation by Labour councils to such a weak government, which would undoubtedly be susceptible to mass pressure.

An outright large Labour victory with a large majority seems excluded in any election this year. A slender majority or being the largest minority is possible and would present complex problems for those wishing to defend and extend local government services. The pressure not to rock the boat and give Labour a chance would be strong. Labour would attempt to alleviate the crisis of funding local government and repeal key aspects of Tory legislation, but it is doubtful whether it would release enough funds to do any more than prevent the most widespread cuts and redundancies. The accumulated debt and problems of the last few years requires a gigantic redirection of funds from other areas, way beyond Labour’s commitments.

Systematic preparation for a co-ordinated fight next year is the most sensible option, whatever the election outcome. The work has to start now. Serious local consultation on establishing a needs budget takes at least six months, and the stronger such local links and campaigns are early on the more difficult it will be for those councillors and union leaders at the top to derail the struggle.

Although needing national co-ordination, this campaign must be prepared in each locality. It is here that any such strategy will stand or fall. The key to local campaigns will be their ability to unite the council, the labour movement and local party, the council workforce, and the voluntary/community organisations.

Such a unity is fraught with difficulties. The workforce unions have to simultaneously defend their own members’ interests, in a period where even left councils are often attacking them, and campaign with those Labour councils against their common enemies in defence of jobs, services and living standards. This will not be easy. The unions will have to avoid the contradictory pressures of being ‘incorporated’ or of ultraleft refusal to build unity against the Tories. An effective local campaign will have to involve forms of mass democracy and involvement in decision-making of the workforce and local community.

Such a scenario may seem far-fetched as we approach a general election with a real chance of facing five more Tory years. But it is one which the left must fight for over the coming year. With the defeat of the miners, printworkers and other key industrial sections of labour, the public sector is next for the chop — local government, and the health and civil services. The left is relatively strong in local government, in councils, the Labour Party, and the unions. It must use that strength to prepare the best possible circumstances for the looming confrontation.

TLDR

• On Sunday the Socialist Federation’s founding conference votes on a ‘Communities Before Cuts’ amendment to its platform. It should have pass ited, but it did not. We explain why here: Postscript: The pledge proposal will return in September

• No cuts is a red line, not a spectrum: a council passes the cuts or it does not. The real question is the next one. No cuts, and then what?

• Both ways of failing betray the line: say no cuts and then cut, the Brighton poison; or say no cuts and then hand the council to commissioners. The answer to both is mobilisation, organise the community, expose the money the council is sitting on, build the pressure on councillors and the public-sector unions. Glasgow showed how.

• One clause can be misread as the Brighton trapdoor. No-one in the Federation reads it that way, and September shuts it with one word, ‘before’ to ‘rather than’. Do not withdraw the amendment over it: a pledge adopted now is a branch motion this autumn, and that timing is the prize.

A pledge the conference has not yet adopted

The Socialist Federation already exists. What it does not yet have is a platform, and on Sunday its founding conference adopts one. A ‘Communities Before Cuts’ amendment is on the table, and it belongs in the platform: 2027 brings local elections fought ward by ward against Labour councils passing on central-government austerity, and a founding platform that cannot draw that line is not worth adopting.

The risk is not that the conference weighs the pledge and rejects it. It is that a misreading of a single clause, a reading nobody in the Federation actually holds, persuades the conference to set the pledge aside for now, and ‘for now’ becomes a lost year. The value of this pledge is not symbolic, and it is not for 2027 alone. Read as it was written and as it is defended here, it is the thing that lets the Federation and its local groups walk into a public-sector union branch this autumn with something concrete to move. Read it that way, adopt it on Sunday, and the work starts on Monday.

So it is worth being exact about what the clause says. The wording commits a councillor, where a balanced budget cannot be set without cuts, to use reserves and borrowing powers and to set a budget based on community need ‘before passing on a single cut’. A comrade read that last phrase as a sequence, fight for every legal pound and then, the options exhausted, vote the cuts through, and would have been right to object had that been the meaning, because it is the Brighton script almost word for word. It is not the meaning. A budget funded by reserves and borrowing and built to community need is, by construction, a budget with no cuts in it. That two readings can sit in one sentence is not a drafting slip to be embarrassed about. It is the whole trouble the left has with the words ‘no cuts’, and it is worth slowing down on.

No cuts, and then what?

No cuts is a red line, and it is a simple one. A council either passes the cuts or it does not; there is no budget that trims a little and stays on the right side of the line. The trouble starts with the next question, the one the slogan never answers on its own. No cuts, and then what?

There are two ways to answer it badly, and both arrive at the same place. The first is to say no cuts and then cut: to draw the line at the conference, find at the budget meeting that holding it is hard, and pass the cuts anyway under cover of having tried. The second is to say no cuts and then hand the council to the commissioners: to set a budget you know will fall, call the falling a principle, and let central government’s accountants do the cutting you promised not to. One betrays the line by stepping over it. The other betrays it by abandoning the ground and calling the retreat brave.

The answer that works is neither. It is to treat the budget as the occasion for the only thing that can make a no-cuts position hold: organise the community, expose the money the council is sitting on, and build the pressure on councillors and the public-sector unions until holding the line costs them less than crossing it. Cuts are a political choice dressed as an arithmetic, and proving that in public is half the mobilising. The line is not the strategy. The mobilisation the line makes possible is the strategy. That is what Glasgow understood, and what Brighton never did.

The two stand a few months and a few hundred miles apart. In Brighton, a Green minority administration elected in 2011 to resist austerity spent three years finding the least-worst cut, and by 2014 was asking the city to accept a council tax rise on top of something close to nine-tenths of the cuts, on the grounds that the law left it no choice. In Glasgow this February, three Your Party councillors, defectors from the Greens, put a no-cuts ‘people’s budget’ to the chamber that the council’s own legal team had ruled competent: a route map to a four-day week, insourcing, the re-establishment of council housing, the gap closed by borrowing the council was already seeking and a five per cent council tax rise, with no service cuts. Same vocabulary, opposite budgets. The first used the levers as the dignified route down. The second used them to refuse to cut at all.

Who actually holds it

Most of the left’s positions on cuts are ways of crossing the line while insisting it has not been crossed. The Labour left does it openly, in the compliance codified in the letter Corbyn, McDonnell and Trickett sent to council leaders in December 2015: set a legal balanced budget, because failing to triggers a section 114 notice and brings in commissioners who cut harder. The logic is not stupid. It is the dented shield, and half a century of dented shields has shielded mainly the Treasury, which collects the revenue of the cut while the councillor collects the blame.

The independent-left pragmatists who hold the balance in places like Hackney cross it for a price they can show: a landlord licensing scheme, lower market stall fees, real things won from opposition rather than a doomed gesture. They are not wrong that an isolated council loses. They are wrong about why it is isolated.

The Greens in power keep revealing the gap between the conference floor and the council chamber. Brighton and Hove’s own party voted its leadership a no-cuts instruction in 2015; the leadership cut anyway. In Sheffield this year the Green group declined an invitation to set a needs budget on reserves and borrowing, warning it would bring in commissioners. The grassroots writes the resolution. The cabinet writes the cuts. That gap, no cuts on the conference floor and cuts in the council chamber, is the Brighton poison in its purest form.

It is also the thing one wing of the Greens is organising to defeat, and the distinction matters. The Greens Organise pledge, carrying some nine hundred signatures and many sitting group leaders, reads Brighton correctly: it names the trap as making cuts ‘in local isolation’ and answers it with an emergency summit of councillors, unions and community organisations, with local assemblies, open books, and the use of reserves and borrowing powers. Ask whether that pledge would have enabled Brighton and the answer runs the other way: it would have made the sell-out harder, because it builds the very pressure whose absence let Brighton cut in the first place. The one thing it stops short of, and the thing the Federation’s pledge adds, is the absolute line, never the cut. The two are halves of one position, the mobilisation Greens Organise is building inside the party and the red line the Federation can plant outside it, and the case for joining them, a line in the sand in every ward and the organisation to hold it, is one I have argued before. A reading that turns the Federation’s pledge into a Brighton trapdoor is not just unheld in the room. It is alien to the entire current the pledge comes from.

Then there are the positions that genuinely want the line held, and even here the answer to ‘and then what’ sorts them, because a no-cuts pledge can be built to hold every council to account or to mark one rival off on the ballot. The petition Dave Nellist launched through TUSC in January 2026, demanding that the Greens pledge no cuts, is the second kind. Its trade-union backers are serious people, but the petition asks the one party TUSC stands candidates against to sign and asks nothing of the Labour councils in Birmingham and Nottingham that have cut for years, because its work is not to bind every councillor to the line but to set TUSC’s candidates apart from the Greens. A pledge built to serve an electoral strategy cannot also be the accountability mechanism it claims to be. The version that works asks the same question of everyone, Labour, Green, Your Party, SNP in Scotland, Plaid in Wales, independents included, and publishes who will sign and who will not, so the line runs through every ward instead of around a single party.

Why mobilising the unions and the community is the whole game

A pledge, however cross-party, is paper until someone mobilises behind it, and that is the least technical part of this whole argument. Mobilisation has two arms. The union branch is one of them. A UNISON branch will not back an illegal budget on day one. It will back a budget its own officers helped draft, that a council legal team has ruled competent, that buys twelve or eighteen months by drawing on reserves the council is sitting on. In Glasgow the unions were part of the preparatory work, and the local UNISON branch sought to take the no-cuts approach further. The Wales TUC backed legal no-cuts budgets funded by reserves and borrowing as far back as 2016. You exhaust the legal route in public not because you expect it to be enough, but because exhausting it in public is how the ‘it’s illegal, it’s irresponsible’ alibi dies, and how the cautious majority of a branch ends up standing where the militant minority started.

The community is the other arm, and this is where the commitments that sound like proceduralism earn their place. Open the books, and ‘difficult decisions’ resolves into a list of choices someone made: the consultancy retained while the youth club shut, the reserve hoarded while the day centre went. Run the budget through local assemblies and participatory budgeting, and the people who use the services stop being a public consulted after the cut is drafted and become a force that helps draft it. Open books and participation are the machinery of pressure: the books prove the cuts are a choice, the assemblies give the people who would feel them a hand on the budget. The levers buy time; the open books and the assemblies turn that time into a movement. That is the whole of it, and the no-cuts vote is only the door it opens.

A story about sequence

The rate-capping rebellion of 1984-85 is usually told as a story about nerve, and it was, but it was also a story about sequence. Liverpool and Lambeth councillors were surcharged and disqualified; the GLC split when Livingstone set a rate within the law and McDonnell held the no-rate line and named the retreat a surrender before the battle had started; in Hackney the courts ruled against the rebels and the leaders resigned. The surcharge that bankrupted them was abolished by the Local Government Act 2000, and the disqualification route went in 2011. A councillor who refuses to pass on cuts today risks a section 114 notice and commissioners, not personal ruin. The financial guillotine is gone. What stays lethal is the older error: declaring the refusal from the platform before anyone has built the forces to make it hold.

How to vote on Sunday, and what we’ll propose in September

The pledge, read as it is written and meant, asks a councillor for one thing on budget night: vote for a budget that meets community need, and where the only budget that meets it runs a deficit, vote for the deficit. That is where the question opens, not where it shuts, because a deficit budget can be carried two ways. Glasgow carried its people’s budget to win it, building on the borrowing the council was already seeking and on money found where no service would feel its loss, and putting to the chamber something the legal team had ruled competent and the unions had been drawn into preparing. Carry it that way and you go hunting the costs that come out clean. Servicing the debt is the first of them; the mis-sold bank loans Liverpool refinanced, saving close to sixteen million are a standing invitation, and outsourced work brought back in-house reclaims the contractors’ margins on top. None of that is a cut a single resident will notice. The other way is to set a budget you know will fall, defiance staged for the minutes while the section 114 notice it invites does the cutting and the commissioners carry the blame. One is a fight. The other smooths the path for the takeover and calls the smoothing a principle. On Sunday, vote for the pledge, and mean the first.

Then September. Begin by assuming good faith, because it is earned: no-one in the Federation will vote for cuts, and no-one in it wants to endorse a candidate who would. The reading that hears ‘before passing on a single cut’ as ‘shortly before passing them’ belongs to nobody in the room. Say it plainly all the same, because words travel: a Green councillor in a cabinet, hunting the Brighton exit, would be glad one day of a sentence that could be read as a permission slip. So in September the Federation closes the door, and it takes one word to do it. ‘Before’ becomes ‘rather than’. A budget set on community need ‘rather than passing on a single cut’ cannot be read as a sequence that ends in cuts; it can only be read as the refusal it always was. One word out, two words in, and not a comma of the Federation’s meaning has changed: what goes is the last inch of room to pretend it meant something else.

Why we are not withdrawing it

When an amendment hits a snag, the reflex is to pull it, tidy the wording, bring it back clean next time. Resist that here, because the cost of withdrawing is not paid in wording. It is paid in time.

The Federation is small, and the thing a small federation needs most is a base in the organised working class. That base is built in the public-sector unions, in the UNISON and UNITE and PCS and NEU branches where the people who would have to hold a no-cuts budget actually sit. A pledge adopted on Sunday is a motion those members can move in their branches this autumn, in the season when branches write the policy their national conferences will debate. Glasgow has already shown the unions will engage: the budget there was drafted with UNISON in the room. Withdraw the amendment to perfect a comma, and the next branch-motion season opens without it, and the Federation spends a year explaining a pledge it has not got instead of organising around one it has.

The ambiguity is real, and it is also no reason to withdraw. A reading nobody in the Federation holds does not need a postponement to fix; it needs one word in September, and the work needs none of that to begin. So adopt the pledge as it stands, and get the materials moving now: a clean statement of the pledge with the trapdoor reading already shut, a model motion a branch secretary can put down without a lawyer, a short note for councillors and union reps on how a needs budget is actually built out of reserves, borrowing powers and the money that can be found without touching a service. None of it waits on September.

It will not enforce itself. ‘We tested every option’ is exactly what Brighton said, for three years, on the way down, and a pledge on a platform is only ever a promise to argue, not the argument won. What turns it from a promise into a fact is whether anyone is in the branch meeting and on the estate when the budget comes round. The platform can be amended in September. The season cannot be re-run. That is the reason to read the amendment as it was meant, adopt it on Sunday, and start.

Postscript: The pledge proposal will return in September

The amendment fell. At the founding conference on Sunday it took thirty-seven per cent in favour, short of the majority it needed, and Communities Before Cuts is not yet in the Federation’s platform.

Read the debate, though, and the defeat says almost the opposite of what a defeat usually says. The sharpest case against the pledge came not from the dented shield but from the other direction. The objection from the Federation’s leadership was that the wording stopped short: that ‘using reserves and borrowing powers ... before passing on a single cut’ could be heard as exhausting the legal options and then passing the cuts, where the pledge should say outright that the council will not carry them out, and will rebel as Poplar and Lambeth and Liverpool rebelled, commissioners or no commissioners. Conference’s instinct, in other words, was that the pledge was too soft, not too hard. That is the best ground a no-cuts pledge could lose on, and it is the exact reading this article was written to answer.

So nothing about the case changes, and the remedy is the one already set out here. ‘Before’ becomes ‘rather than’, and the trapdoor the leadership rightly refused to walk through is nailed shut. The two real disagreements that surfaced alongside it, whether the Federation ties its hands against standing on signers, and what the clause on affiliated groups in the Greens and Plaid is for, are worth the argument they will get, and neither is a reason to lose the tool.

The amendment goes to the founding hybrid congress in September, with the wording tightened to meet the conference’s own instinct rather than fall short of it. The work does not wait on that vote. The pledge, the model motion and the briefing below are finished, the union branch season is open, and thirty-seven per cent is a floor to build from, not a verdict to accept. The argument was won on the principle and lost on a word. September is where the word catches up.

The three documents below are the campaign in usable form: the pledge a candidate signs, the motion a union branch or trades council passes, and the briefing for the councillors and reps who have to make it hold. They are drafted to be copied, adapted and circulated now.

Appendix A: The pledge

Communities Before Cuts: a pledge for council candidates

This is the text the campaign puts to every council candidate, whatever their party. Candidates standing under or endorsed by the Socialist Federation are required to sign it; the same words are put to everyone else on the ballot, and the answers are published.

Since 2010 central government has stripped local councils of a large share of their funding, and councils of every party are passing the cost on to the communities they were elected to serve. I reject that managed decline, and if elected I pledge:

1. No cuts to services. I will not propose or vote for a budget that cuts the services my community relies on, and I will not administer central-government austerity through the council’s budget.

2. A needs budget, funded honestly. Where a lawful balanced budget cannot be set without cutting services, I will use the council’s reserves and borrowing powers, refinance costly debt, bring outsourced work back in-house, and cut waste and vanity spending before any service, to set a budget based on community need rather than passing on a single cut to those services.

3. An emergency summit. I will back an emergency summit of councillors, trade unions, tenants’ unions and community organisations to make unmet need visible and to build a mass campaign for the restoration of local-government funding.

4. Open books and community mobilisation. I will open the council’s accounts to public scrutiny, bring residents into budget decisions through local assemblies and participatory budgeting, and campaign for the solutions austerity blocks: a wealth tax, rent controls, a land value tax and a national care service.

5. Democratic control of local assets. I will support moving power over housing, assets and spending toward the community through participatory budgeting and community ownership, and work to renegotiate or end bad corporate contracts.

6. Solidarity with workers and tenants. I will support every worker in dispute with their employer, including a Labour-run council, and never cross or break a picket line; and I will oppose the use of council powers against tenants, benefit claimants and migrant communities.

By signing, I commit to putting my community’s needs before the cuts, and to being held publicly to this pledge, ward by ward, between now and budget day.

Appendix B: Model branch motion

Communities Before Cuts (for a trade union branch, trades council, tenants’ union or community organisation)

This branch notes:

1. Central-government funding for local government has fallen sharply since 2010, and councils of every party are responding with cuts to the jobs and services our members deliver and depend on.

2. Councillors are not powerless. The surcharge that broke the rate-capping councillors of the 1980s was abolished by the Local Government Act 2000, and councillors who refuse to pass on cuts today face no personal financial penalty.

3. A no-cuts budget funded from reserves, prudential borrowing, debt refinancing, insourcing and the removal of waste can be set lawfully. Your Party councillors in Glasgow put exactly such a ‘people’s budget’ to the chamber in February 2026 and had it ruled legally competent by the council’s own officers.

4. Asking every candidate, of every party, to commit publicly to this approach is normal political activity for this branch and needs no national endorsement.

This branch believes:

1. Cuts are a political choice, not an arithmetic necessity, and the way to stop them is to organise the community and the workforce so that holding the line costs a councillor less than crossing it.

2. A public pledge, with published signatories and tracked records, is an accountability tool the labour movement can use long after polling day.

This branch resolves:

1. To adopt the Communities Before Cuts pledge.

2. To write to every candidate standing in our area’s council elections, of every party, asking them to sign, and to publish their replies.

3. To work with local tenants’ unions, community organisations and the trades council to promote the pledge and to hold signatories to it.

4. To mandate our delegates to raise this pledge at trades council, regional and national union bodies.

5. To stand ready to defend, through publicity and where necessary industrial action, any councillor who holds the no-cuts line.

Appendix C: Briefing for councillors and union reps

For councillors who sign the pledge, and the union and tenant reps working alongside them. This sets out what is legally possible, where the money is, and what separates a no-cuts budget that holds from a gesture that hands the council to commissioners.

What the law actually requires. A council must set a lawful balanced budget. If it cannot, the chief finance officer, the section 151 officer, must issue a section 114 notice, which freezes new non-statutory spending; councillors then have 21 days to agree a lawful budget, and if they cannot, the government can appoint commissioners to run the council. What the law no longer does is punish you personally. The surcharge that bankrupted and disqualified the Liverpool and Lambeth councillors in the 1980s was abolished by the Local Government Act 2000, and the disqualification route through the Standards Board went in 2011. Refusing to pass on cuts is a political confrontation now, not a personal ruin.

Where the money is, in order. Go after the costs that fall on no service before you touch a service. First, waste and vanity: consultancy, agency premiums, communications budgets, prestige capital, the senior-management structure. Second, the cost of debt: refinance mis-sold LOBO loans and expensive historic borrowing through the Public Works Loan Board, as Liverpool did for a saving of close to £16m and Croydon for over £21m, noting that the gain depends on interest rates and exit premiums and must be checked case by case against the council’s own treasury papers. Third, contractor margins: bring outsourced services back in-house. Fourth, income and reserves: maximise income, then draw on reserves and prudential borrowing to fund a budget built to community need. Assembled this way, a no-cuts budget can be ruled legally competent, as Glasgow’s was in February 2026.

The test that matters: cut upward, never downward. Every cutting council says it is protecting frontline services and only trimming waste. The label settles nothing; the direction does. A cut that falls on capital, the contractor, the bank, the consultant, the vanity project, costs the working class nothing. A cut that falls on jobs, hours, libraries or care passes on austerity whatever it is called. Who bears it is the only question.

What makes the line hold. Reserves are a one-year card and borrowing has to be serviced, so a single council cannot, on its own, win back the funding the centre has taken. The budget buys twelve to eighteen months and a platform; the mobilisation is what turns that time into a result. Open the council’s books so residents can see the choices being made. Run the budget through local assemblies and participatory budgeting so the people who use the services help shape it. Work with the union branches whose members’ jobs are at stake and the tenants’ unions whose members feel the cuts first. Build the emergency summit and the national campaign that can force the centre to restore the money.

What not to do. Do not set a budget you know the finance officer will reject in order to make a point: that is not defiance, it is smoothing the path for the commissioners and handing them someone else to blame. Do not cut and call it unavoidable. Do not sign the pledge and then pass cuts under cover of having tried. The pledge is a public commitment, and it will be enforced in public, ward by ward.

TLDR

• At rs21’s second Festival of the Oppressed, the ‘Ballot Box or Barricade?’ panel became an argument about the Green Party of England and Wales, and the room reached no settled answer: go in and shape it, stay out and push, build the independent slate.

• Anticapitalistas, the Fourth International current that helped launch Podemos and then walked out, has produced the balance sheet that speaks straight to that argument and is reflected in a 2022 talk by Andreu Coll, and a harder 2026 self-criticism by Julia Cámara and Raúl Camargo.

• Their five proposals for a new ecosocialist organisation answer, almost point for point, the questions the rs21 room left hanging. The decisive one, on internal democracy and factions, arrives independently at Mandel’s verdict on the Bolshevik faction ban of 1921: the remedy is worse than the disease.

• The lesson is not that broad parties are a dead end. It is a set of guardrails against absorption, written by people who were absorbed and got out. The same question now faces the wider layer of revolutionary socialists weighing work in the Greens, the comrades in Anti-Capitalist Resistance among them.

The session’s energy was high, the discussion was sharp, and the question that had been circling the whole afternoon finally got asked out loud, from the floor, by a comrade who wanted a straight answer. We agree socialists should do electoral work to build towards mass organising. We want a mass party and we do not have one. So what do we do now: should we be in the Greens? Nobody on the platform gave her a straight answer, because rs21 does not yet have one to give.

This was ‘Ballot Box or Barricade?’, a panel at the second Festival of the Oppressed, rs21’s public education weekend, in London on 20 and 21 June 2026. The brief was the place of electoral work in revolutionary strategy. The discussion did what every such discussion now does and turned into an argument about the Green Party of England and Wales. Taisie, of rs21 and the Haringey Socialist Alliance, made the case for taking elections seriously. Gwen, of rs21 and Hackney Votes Palestine, set out what a Palestine divestment campaign had won by helping elect a Green-led council in her borough, and what it had cost. She did not flinch from the Greens’ own deficiencies: the self-advancement, and what she called their failure to back the smaller socialist slate that stood alongside them and then lost to Labour.

From the floor it got sharper, and concrete. A Hackney comrade told the story that had broken days earlier. The official council portrait of Cllr Brenda Puech, a newly elected Green, showed her in a keffiyeh; the image came down from the council website after UK Lawyers for Israel complained that the scarf was a divisive political symbol. The mayor, Zoë Garbett, herself a Green, said the removal had been an officers’ decision, taken with neither she nor Puech nor the Green group consulted. Five Green councillors put out an open letter and a reinstatement petition on 16 June. Within days it carried a couple of hundred names, against a Hackney Green membership of more than three thousand. If the Greens cannot defend the keffiyeh in one of their own councillors’ portraits, the comrade asked, what will they do when the divestment motions arrive? The answer drawn from the floor was blunt. It is not for people who know what they are doing to go into the Green Party. It is more useful to push it from outside.

So the room held the whole range and resolved none of it. Go in and mould a political culture still in flux. Stay out and push from the movements. Build the independent slate and dig in over years. And behind all of it the pressure that Andy Burnham’s arrival will bring down on exactly this space, where Green and Labour now compete for the same left vote, towards the progressive alliance that swallows small forces whole. What was needed is what experience produces. A balance sheet. An account, from a current that had actually tried it, of what working inside a broad party does to the revolutionaries who try.

That balance sheet exists, and it was published this year. It comes not from the International Socialist tradition rs21 was born in, but from the Fourth International, from a current that went further into a broad party than rs21 has so far contemplated and came out the other side with its lessons written down. Red Mole has followed that pattern before, across Bernie, Podemos and Argentina; this is the other half of it, the prescription rather than the diagnosis.

Begin where Anticapitalistas began. In September 2022, at a Tempest forum on building the revolutionary left, Andreu Coll gave an honest accounting of why his current had helped launch Podemos and why it had left. He named the mechanisms and did not spare them. The ‘double illusion’ the comrades had fought: first the movementist faith that the streets alone would suffice, then the electoralist and governist illusion that replaced it. The theory of Podemos as an ‘electoral war machine’. The ‘communicative Bonapartism’ of a leadership that set itself against internal democracy and proportional representation. The talk was still, in places, a defence. Anticapitalistas had come out stronger, Coll suggested, with a renewed leadership and a higher profile for figures like Miguel Urbán and Teresa Rodríguez.

The sharpest critics went for that note. Writing for Left Voice, Nathaniel Flakin argued that the broad party is simply a dead end: that Anticapitalistas had not visibly grown its militant forces, and that its exit had been less a revolutionary rupture than an ‘amicable divorce’, Rodríguez beside Pablo Iglesias in a friendly farewell video while Iglesias went on to serve as deputy prime minister of an imperialist state. Take that argument at its strongest, because the British version is already being written, and it is being written about us. A current joins the Greens, maybe takes a few council seats and a few committee places, softens by degrees, and years on has built nothing of its own that would survive its leaving. No mass recruitment. No independent press. No rupture. Just a slow accommodation dressed as influence, and a parting video when the contradictions become unbearable. If that is where this ends, the dead-end verdict was right, and the rest is self-flattery.

The honest reply is not to deny the danger. It is to ask what, concretely, would prevent it. That is the question the second Anticapitalistas text takes up.

In The Left at the Crossroads: Notes for Building Anew, Julia Cámara and Raúl Camargo return to the same experience with four more years behind them and a harder look in the mirror. They concede openly that Anticapitalistas made political mistakes in the Podemos years, and they still insist the experience was necessary at the time. They refuse the binary that has organised most of this argument, betrayal against dead end. The question is not whether the broad experience should ever have been attempted. Given that it happened, what survives it?

Their diagnosis runs deeper than any organisational chart. The decline of the left, they argue, rests on the loss of class identity: not class as an electoral brand, but class as a way of organising working-class life. Rebuilding a subjectivity grounded in the materiality of class should be the first objective of any project still aspiring to an ecosocialist revolution. The obvious reading is that this is a Spanish story with a British footnote. But that is not quite right either. The same gravitational field acts on every formation the moment it touches the institutions, and the Greens now sit closer to those institutions, with Garbett’s mayoralty in Hackney, Liam Shrivastava’s in Lewisham, Paul Perkins leading Waltham Forest, than Podemos ever did before it entered government.

From there the indictment is unsparing, and it crosses the Bay of Biscay without translation. Today’s institutional left, they write, is a mix of ageing organisations and younger salaried professionals who found in the institutions a refuge against an uncertain job market, drifting from one election to the next to sustain the public subsidies that keep their structures alive. They name the mechanism with Gramscian precision. Under the ‘expanded state’, social-movement activity comes to be financed by ministries and public agencies, which inflates staff, breeds internal bureaucracy, and turns the movement’s self-reproduction into an end in itself: the movement as lobby, rather than as a force wresting gains through self-organisation. On the unions the verdict is blunt. CCOO and UGT have become service agencies for their members and stood as bystanders to the government’s labour policies, where more combative formations like ELA and LAB in the Basque Country, or the CIG in Galicia, keep a unionism of struggle alive. Anyone who has watched a Green council group administer cuts it once marched against knows this is not a foreign disease.

So to the proposals, five of them, and they are worth lifting out of their Spanish setting because each answers a question the rs21 room asked out loud.

Against the ‘electoral war machine’: the weight of a disruptive organisation must lie in building an organised social force capable of confronting the bourgeoisie in every arena, with good communication necessary but never the most important thing. That is the difference between Greens work as broadcast and Greens work as rooting, between the orientation that ends in running the council and the orientation that uses the council to build something in the workplaces and the tenancies that does not evaporate when the count is declared.

Then, a relationship of non-alienation with social movements, built on territorial roots and direct involvement rather than representation. The test is whether the current shows up in the Palestine coalitions and the housing fights as itself, or only as a feeder to the council group. Gwen Jones’s divestment campaign passes that test precisely to the degree that it outlives the seats it helped win.

Then a pluralistic tool, not confined to a single identity, with firm red lines against any agreement with social liberalism, and an anti-imperialist, non-campist outlook. This is what the Fourth International has been trying to specify since it moved from the language of ‘broad parties’ to that of ‘useful parties of the working class’: a party defined by what it can do in the class struggle, not by how many tendencies it shelters. The red line is not abstract for a Green councillor weighing a coalition with the Liberal Democrats, nor for a Green membership in which campist reflexes on Ukraine are a live argument and not a settled one.

Then, on internal life, the most pointed of the five, and the one where the convergence with our own tradition stops being a figure of speech.

Shanice McBean, the author of Abolition Revolution, closed that panel with the diagnosis. The collapse of Your Party, she argued, turned in part on an inability to manage rupture from political difference: differences either buried, breeding resentment and the sense of betrayal, or met with a demand for homogeneity, because the movement could not tolerate the existence of bad ideas. Mass organising is messy with unresolved ideas. The cure for the mess becomes the disease.

Cámara and Camargo prescribe directly against it: a fraternal culture that permits internal factions within a framework of general loyalty, set against the cult of personality and the suppression of criticism that defined the ‘new politics’, and against the factionalism of much of the far left that turns parties into permanent battlegrounds. Read it beside Mandel and the convergence is exact. But not the convergence the careless reader reaches for.

Mandel kept two things apart. Permanent organised factions are a real disease, and the German example proves it. After the March Action of 1921 the Communist Party split into two camps of nearly equal weight and stayed, in his words, ‘divided for 8 years into two factions that hate each other to death, that wage war with knives’. ‘Fractions are a disease, they are not a good thing’; ‘a party divided into more or less permanent organized fractions is a sick party’. Read that far and it sounds like a brief for banning them.

It is the opposite. The verdict Mandel actually drew was that ‘the remedy is worse than the disease’, and he aimed it straight at Lenin and Trotsky, at the ban on factions the Bolsheviks carried at their Tenth Congress in 1921. History had demonstrated it to him, he said, ‘contrary to the idea of Trotsky and Lenin in 1921’: forbid the fractions, forbid the tendencies, and ‘one stifles internal debate and one contributes to bureaucratization and degeneration’. Which is the road the Russian party then took. A Fourth Internationalist, lecturing in 1976, telling his own tradition that history had refuted Lenin and Trotsky on the founding question of party democracy. The original French audio sits on the same page, for anyone who wants to hear him say it in context.

So three voices arrive at one problem. McBean names the disease from an rs21 platform; Cámara and Camargo prescribe against it from the wreckage of Podemos; Mandel, fifty years before either, explains why the cure that tempts every left, the banning of the difference, is the worse illness. They are not borrowing from one another. They have reached the same judgement by the only route that teaches it, which is defeat. The same problem, recognised across a century and three traditions.

The fifth proposal is the guard on the door. Finances resting primarily on the organisation’s own income rather than on subsidies, and clear salary and term limits for anyone holding institutional office. You cannot legislate away the unelected fixer, the union connection, the quiet cluster of relationships that decides who decides. But financial independence and rotation make them harder to entrench, and for a current whose members might sit as councillors on a worker’s wage this is not housekeeping. It is the material difference between a current that uses office and a current that office uses.

None of this settles the argument in the rs21 room, and it is not meant to. Flakin may yet be proved right about the British attempt, as he was at perhaps half-right about the Spanish one. What the Spanish comrades have done is narrower and more useful than a verdict. They have written the guardrails the verdict cannot supply, and written them as people who went in, paid for it, and came out still building. Whether those guardrails hold under the specific weight of the Greens, a party of councillors and the expanded state rather than a workers’ party, with a membership that arrived through no revolutionary door, is a question the principles can frame but not answer. They were not written for Hackney. Some of them may not survive the crossing, and which ones, and how much of the Spanish balance sheet is portable at all, is not something this article can settle, nor probably anything that can be settled in advance of trying.

Cámara and Camargo end on Daniel Bensaïd, who held that building a revolutionary organisation may be as necessary as it is impossible, like absolute love in Marguerite Duras, which never stopped anyone from falling in love. That is the answer to the dead-end verdict, and it is not a triumphant one. We build anew, from the middle, having learned.

The rs21 comrades left their room without an instant, easy, unitary answer, which was the honest thing to do. The question they could not close is now in front of the whole layer of revolutionaries circling the Greens, rs21 among them, the RCP, and the currents whose orientation is not yet decided. It is not a question about Spain. Whether the Green Party is a formation in which something durable can be built, or only another machine that runs on the expanded state and will not abide a current that exists to resist it, the next few years will decide. They have not decided yet.

Further reading on entrism

Written in July 1955, Livio Maitan's 'Relations Between the Communist Vanguard and the Mass Movement' addresses the central problem of Marxist politics: how does a revolutionary organisation relate to the class it seeks to lead?

Part One reconstructs the tradition from Marx and Engels through the First International to Lenin and the Communist International, showing how each generation addressed the fusion problem under different structural conditions. Part Two draws the tactical conclusions for 1955, working through specific national situations in Italy, Britain, the United States, and Argentina.

The argument is directed against two symmetrical errors. The sect preserves its doctrine at the cost of political relevance, isolated from the actual movement of the class. The liquidationist dissolves into whatever broader formation commands working-class loyalty, abandoning independent revolutionary organisation in the name of proximity to the masses. Maitan's method — what he calls 'fortiter in re, suaviter in modo', firm on the principles and flexible on the forms — charts the course between them.

TL;DR Andy Burnham’s Makerfield landslide is being read across the press as the moment Labour found the formula to beat Reform. It is the opposite. The majority doubled because the Liberal Democrat, Green and Conservative votes collapsed into Labour as a defensive bloc, and Reform’s own vote rose 3,000 against its 2024 figure. ‘Manchesterism’ contests the exact terrain this series has mapped, the buses and the housing and the cost of keeping a household alive, but it contests it as administration from above rather than power from below. Burnham is not a techno-fascist; he is a technocrat, and technocracy is not the antidote to the populist surge but its incubator. The terrain of survival cannot be delivered to people. It has to be organised by them. This is the governing prospectus of the man who may be in Number 10 by the autumn, and it is the negative image of everything the People’s Assembly Wales won at the Royal Glamorgan.

The yellow buses are the first thing you notice. They are genuinely everywhere now; you cannot stand on Oxford Road for five minutes without three of them going past, the Bee Network livery doing exactly the job of municipal confidence it was designed to do. The franchising began in September 2023, the first time any English authority had taken control of its buses since the 1986 deregulation, and the early passenger numbers went up. The buses are better. That is not in dispute, and a left that pretends otherwise has lost the argument before it opens its mouth.

Which is why the most quietly devastating line of the entire Makerfield by-election came from the Reform candidate. Robert Kenyon, a local plumber, ran a campaign that landed one sentence cleaner than anything Burnham’s own machine produced: the only thing that’s changed is that the buses have gone yellow. He meant it as a sneer. He did not understand that he had written the most accurate one-line review of Manchesterism available in print. The livery changed. The relations of power did not.

The misread landslide

Begin with the numbers, because the press has already decided what they mean and the press is wrong. On 18 June, Burnham took Makerfield with 54.8 per cent of the vote against Reform’s 34.5, a majority of 9,231, returning him to the Commons for the first time since 2017. Compare that with 2024, when Josh Simons held the seat for Labour with a majority of 5,399 over Reform. The Labour majority did not just hold. It nearly doubled. Four days later Keir Starmer resigned, and Burnham announced he would stand to replace him.

The obvious reading is that Burnham beat back the Reform tide. But that is not quite right either, and the gap between the obvious reading and the real one is the whole story.

Look at where the doubled majority came from. It did not come from beating Reform down. Reform’s share rose, from 31.8 per cent in 2024 to 34.5, and on a turnout almost six points higher than the general election it rose in raw votes as well. The majority widened because the Conservative, Liberal Democrat and Green candidates were squeezed into nothing: all three lost their deposits. An organised tactical-voting operation, Forward Democracy, running a Stop Reform UK campaign, polled the seat and worked to herd the anti-Reform vote behind the only candidate who could stop the populists. It worked. The frightened centre voted Labour to keep Reform out, and the headline writers mistook a defensive consolidation for an advance.

There is a complication, and the piece has to meet it head on or a sharper reader will use it against us. Measured against Reform’s own high-water mark, the by-election was a retreat: in the May local elections Reform had swept all eight Makerfield wards on the Wigan council with around half the vote, helped along by a low turnout and an unusually motivated protest electorate. A right-wing splitter, the Restore Britain candidate, pulled votes off Reform on polling day and left it ‘spooked’. So the mainstream account has a point on its own terms. Against the locals, Reform fell back.

The answer is that the local high-water mark is the wrong baseline. A low-turnout council protest vote inflated by abstention is not the structural position of the seat; the general-election result is, and against it Reform is up. What Makerfield actually shows is a constituency reorganised into two blocs with the middle annihilated: a delivery-Labour pole and a grievance-Reform pole, and nothing of substance in between. That is not Burnham defeating the surge. That is Burnham completing the polarisation that produces it. He absorbed the anti-Reform vote. He did not dissolve the Reform vote, and he has no programme that could.

This is the proposition the forthcoming Red Mole and Anti-Capitalist Resistance meeting at the Friends Meeting House on Mount Street puts in its title: a Labour majority of twenty points should worry the left more than a narrow win would have. A narrow win is a contest. A landslide built on the evaporation of every alternative is a warning.

A terrain-of-survival programme in a technocrat’s hands

Manchesterism is not a slogan Burnham invented for the leadership campaign. It has been given an intellectual architecture, most fully in The Productive State, written by Mathew Lawrence of Common Wealth with Alex Williams and published through the Labour pressure group Mainstream the week of the by-election. The argument is serious and, on its own terrain, often correct. Forty years of privatisation produced an economy that extracts where it should invest and prices for profit where it should meet need; the answer is a public institutional architecture that reasserts control over the essentials, a decommodified foundation under the market. The New Statesman trailed it as the supply-side completion of the project Burnham has been running in Greater Manchester, with the Bee Network as the proof of concept.

Notice what the essentials are. Buses. Housing. Water and energy. The cost of the daily business of staying alive. This is the terrain of survival, named almost exactly as this series has named it: the household, the neighbourhood, the care infrastructure, the things the working class in post-industrial Britain experiences as the immediate texture of its subordination. Manchesterism is a terrain-of-survival programme. That is precisely what makes it worth taking seriously, and precisely where the problem lives.

Because the method is the opposite of the one this series has been documenting. The Royal Glamorgan accident and emergency department was saved by twenty-five thousand people, open meetings in a community arts venue by the river in Pontypridd, every email shared, every decision taken from the floor, the experience of collective power against a public body that the Rhondda had not tasted since the miners’ strike. The Grève Féministe in France put two hundred and one actions on the map on a single day in March through a network of a hundred and forty organisations. Those are the terrain organised from below. Manchesterism is the same terrain administered from above: specified by a combined authority, delivered by a competent mayoralty, franchised to private operators under public contract, and handed to the public as a finished service. The buses are franchised, not owned by the people who ride them or driven by workers who run them. The control sits with the apparatus. The user is still a customer; the driver is still an employee. Better buses, yes. Power, no.

The New Statesman’s own left critics have already said the quieter part. Their piece, bluntly titled ‘Manchesterism is not socialism’, points out that the agglomeration gains of the Greater Manchester model over forty years have been captured as rent by property investors and landlords and sucked out of the households they were meant to lift, and that the trajectory continues the entrepreneurial-city and Northern Powerhouse strategy rather than breaking with it. Our quarrel is not with that. Our quarrel is with the framing that treats the question as whether Manchesterism is socialist enough, a question of degree. The question is one of kind. A programme can decommodify every utility in the country and still leave the working class as the object of competent delivery rather than the subject of its own power. That is not a watered-down socialism. It is a different thing entirely, and it has a name.

The technocrat, not the techno-fascist

The name is technocracy, and the distinction from managerialism matters. Managerialism is a sociology of who governs. Technocracy is the ideology that legitimates them: the claim that the fundamental questions are settled and technical, that politics reduces to delivery and competence, that what works can replace who decides. It is the move that lifts a question out of democratic contest and hands it to the experts. And the experts, in Burnham’s case, are arriving.

The clearest tell is the company he is now keeping. The Guardian reported that his team have spoken to Jim O’Neill about becoming his chief economic adviser, with the FT and Bloomberg adding the names of other City and establishment figures to a widening list. O’Neill is the signal. He chaired Goldman Sachs Asset Management, coined the BRIC acronym, and served as a Treasury minister under Cameron and Osborne, where he was among the leading advocates of the Northern Powerhouse, a project whose regional-growth promises have been delayed and unmet for a decade rather than delivered. This is the man brought in to reassure capital that Burnham’s talk of public control will not threaten profitability or debt servicing. The operational logic remains pro-system even where the rhetoric is anti-privatisation. That is how social-democratic projects are domesticated: they hire establishment economists to whisper to the bond markets that change is safe.

And Burnham has already told us where the real limits sit. In January he complained that Britain was stuck ‘in hock to the bond markets’ and set out his case for what he called ‘business-friendly socialism’. The bond-market line was the truth slipping out, and he spent the following weeks taking it back, telling Reuters and Bloomberg the remark had been misunderstood and that gilt investors were safe with him, before pledging to keep Rachel Reeves’s fiscal rules in full. Submitting the economy to creditor discipline and declaring the fiscal rules untouchable is depoliticisation in its purest form: the removal of the largest questions from the demos and their surrender to the markets. ‘Business-friendly socialism’ is the phrase of a man trying to reconcile two classes whose interests do not reconcile. It is not a synthesis. It is a hostage note.

Here the homonym is too good to leave on the floor, though it has to be handled honestly, because it is a rhyme and not a lineage. Andy Burnham owes nothing to James Burnham; the connection is ours, not his. But James Burnham wrote The Managerial Revolution in 1941 to announce that the working class was finished as a historical agent and that a new class of managers and administrators would inherit the earth, Washington and Moscow and Berlin all converging on the same managerial form. He arrived there by way of the 1939 fight in the American Socialist Workers Party, standing with Shachtman against Trotsky, before bolting Marxism altogether and ending up at the founding of National Review. The managerial thesis was the right-hand exit from that crisis, the Third Camp the left-hand one, and both abandoned the proletariat as subject: one walked to the boardroom, the other to the propaganda group. Orwell saw the trap in 1946. His ‘Second Thoughts on James Burnham’ is a warning against mistaking the momentary balance of forces for permanent inevitability, against the worship of the competent and the strong. Two Burnhams, then, and the second offers as a prospectus, in jeans, what the first theorised as destiny.

The theory that makes this rigorous belongs to Peter Mair. In Ruling the Void he described representative democracy hollowing out as elites and citizens withdraw from each other, the popular component of party democracy emptied until governance is all that remains, and he named the two formations that rush into the emptied space: technocracy and populism, the competent administrator and the angry demagogue, the twin successors to a politics that no longer represents. That is the real adjacency, and it is the one the earlier drafts of this analysis kept reaching for and missing. Burnham and Reform are not opposites locked in combat. They are the two faces of the same hollowed settlement. The technocrat administers the exclusion of the masses from power, and the populist harvests the resentment that exclusion produces. Each needs the other. Makerfield is what it looks like when both poles consolidate and the ground between them is salted.

What the terrain demands

So what is the alternative, and here the honest difficulty has to be admitted rather than smoothed over. The yellow buses are real. The improved service is real. A revolutionary left that answers a better bus with a lecture on commodity fetishism, that treats every gain delivered by a reformist mayor as a snare to be denounced, is a left that has confused purity with strategy and will be rightly ignored by the people queuing at the stop. The point was never that provision does not matter. Provision matters enormously; the whole terrain-of-survival argument rests on it mattering. The point is what provision does to the people who receive it, and whether it leaves them stronger or merely served, and on that question the answer is not yet clear even in the cases where the left has won, which is the unfinished business this series keeps circling back to and has not closed.

What separates the Royal Glamorgan from the Bee Network is not the quality of the service. It is the transitional content. Len Arthur’s framework, set out across Part 3, holds that a demand becomes transitional when it exposes the mechanism rather than reversing a single decision, and when the collective capacity built in winning it is retained and pointed forward. The hospital campaign did not just keep one A&E open. It exposed the deliberate rundown, the unadvertised consultant posts, the austerity dressed as clinical necessity, and it left twenty-five thousand people who now know they can beat a health board. The franchised bus network leaves nobody with anything except a timetable. One builds subjects. The other delivers to customers. That is the entire distance between a transitional demand and a managerial offer, and it runs directly into the capstone this series is building toward, ‘Life-Making as Class Struggle’, where Mandel’s transitional method meets social reproduction: the demand is never simply for the service, but for the service under the democratic control of those who provide and depend on it, because the struggle for the day-to-day demand poses, at the same time, the question of who holds power.

Put the two programmes on the same terrain and the difference is exact. The Productive State would own the water company. A transitional demand would put the water company under the control of the workers who run it and the communities who drink from it, and would treat the fight to get there as the point, not an inconvenience on the way to a balance sheet. Burnham would never accept that, because it crosses the line his bond-market advisers are there to police. Which is the whole argument: the limit of Manchesterism is not a failure of ambition but a structural commitment to leave class power where it is.

The danger is not that Burnham is secretly Reform, or secretly a fascist, or secretly anything. The danger is exactly what he openly is. A competent administrator of a terrain he will not let the people who live on it control, clearing every alternative off the field, presenting a frightened electorate with a choice between being managed well and being told their anger has a flag. The yellow buses run on time. The question Makerfield actually poses is whether anyone is building the thing that turns a better bus into collective power before Reform finishes turning exclusion into something worse, and on the evidence of the seat where it was just tested, the honest answer is that we are not yet, not at the scale the moment now demands.

Red Mole Substack cosponsors Manchester Ecosocialist Discussion. To continue the discussion, join this meeting in person or online.

The second in a series tracing the Shachtmanite drift in British Trotskyism, from the 1939–40 split in the American Socialist Workers Party to the operational politics of Ideas for Freedom 2025. Part One was ‘”Left Renewal” Against Anti-Zionism’, published April 2026.

TL;DR

The phrase ‘consistent democracy’ carries weight in Britain’s far left because it sounds like Lenin, and because the Alliance for Workers’ Liberty has built four decades of programmatic identity around it. The genealogy will not bear the weight. Lenin used the formulation tactically, in 1905 and 1918, to describe the specific historical task of the proletariat in a bourgeois revolution where the bourgeoisie had betrayed its own democratic banner. The phrase named a verb: the work of the working class to drive the revolution past the limits the bourgeoisie tries to set. The AWL’s contemporary deployment names a noun: an abstract preference for the political shell of bourgeois democracy over the political shell of authoritarianism. The verb has been removed. What remains is a moral preference dressed in Leninist vocabulary.

This drift was diagnosed inside the Trotskyist tradition itself, twice. Trotsky diagnosed it in 1939–40, when Max Shachtman’s faction in the American Socialist Workers Party broke with the defence of the USSR’s class character under wartime pressure. Trotsky’s prediction that abandonment of the dialectical apparatus would drive the faction toward the camp of bourgeois democracy was vindicated by 1965, when Shachtman supported US military intervention in the Dominican Republic on explicitly anti-Stalinist grounds. The Revolutionary Workers’ League diagnosed the drift again in 1981–82, when John O’Mahoney’s Socialist Organiser series ‘Socialism and Democracy’ attempted to reground Trotskyism in the inheritance of bourgeois-democratic rights. The Falklands War of April 1982 was the operational test, and O’Mahoney’s faction failed it: refusing to call for British defeat, focusing instead on the ‘fascistic’ character of the Argentine junta. The faction split from the Workers’ Socialist League, founded the Socialist Organiser Alliance, and in September 1988 formally discarded the workers’-state framework in an editorial that conceded, in passing, that ‘There are positive things to learn from Shachtman’.

Part One of this series documented what the apparatus produces in operation. Part Two asks the prior question: where does the apparatus come from? It traces the genealogy from Lenin’s tactical formulation, through Trotsky’s polemic against Shachtman, through Hal Draper’s Two Souls of Socialism as the bridge text, through O’Mahoney’s 1982 Socialist Organiser series and the RWL response, to the AWL’s 1988 formal break with the workers’-state framework. Part Three will engage the materialist counter-argument: what the FI tradition has on its own resources to do anti-campist work without producing the political outcomes the AWL apparatus has been licensing for forty years.

I. Conway’s line

The first article in this series, ‘”Left Renewal” Against Anti-Zionism’, traced what the Alliance for Workers’ Liberty’s ‘consistent democracy’ framework produces in operation: a December 2023 statement whose silences were filled in by an AWL co-author with a programme on Israel-Palestine the signatories had not been asked to underwrite, a Responses page that ran for two years without engaging a single Palestinian or Arab voice, and a November 2025 event at the Highbury Roundhouse where an AWL-platformed Palestinian told his own people their resistance had caused their genocide. This article asks the prior question. Where does the framework that produces these outcomes come from, and how did a phrase Lenin used as a tactical category for proletarian leadership in the bourgeois revolution become a static preference for bourgeois democracy over authoritarian alternatives?

In November I sat in the Highbury Roundhouse and listened to a panel of the AWL debate Geraldine of Socialismo o Barbarie on whether the Stalinist states were progressive. Neither side defended the proposition. The whole debate was structured around its rejection. What stayed with me was a line Liam Conway delivered from the floor, more or less in passing: ‘I believe that a capitalist system that has democratic features is a better situation than any form of authoritarian regime where there are no democratic rights.’

The statement is reasonable enough that you could nod and move on. The capitalist system Conway prefers is the one we live in. The authoritarian regime he opposes is the one that, in actually existing form, killed millions and produced the Hitler-Stalin pact, the show trials, the terror. Conway is not proposing to break a strike. He is articulating, in 2025 and to a room of British socialists, what he thinks the metric for political assessment is.

But pause on the structure of the move. Conway does not say ‘a capitalist system with democratic features is a better terrain for the working class to fight on.’ He does not say ‘the existence of democratic rights inside a capitalist state expresses class concessions the working class wrenched out and can defend through further struggle.’ He says one situation is better than another. The grammar is comparative and static. There is no verb the proletariat is doing in this sentence. There is only a preference between two political shells, weighed on a scale neither has constructed.

This is what ‘consistent democracy’ has come to mean in the AWL tradition. It is the line through which the apparatus the AWL has built for forty years can be heard articulating itself. Mark Osborn, closing the same panel, gave the same metric a more sophisticated formulation: ‘the metric for socialism is to what extent in any given society the working class has freedom, the right to organize, the right to struggle, the right to control’. The shift from Conway’s blunt preference to Osborn’s measured criterion is real. But the deeper structure is identical. Both formulations strip the political question down to which form of state best permits working-class activity, and then make that question the foundation of socialist judgement.

That is a defensible left position. It is the position Hal Draper articulated in 1966 in The Two Souls of Socialism. It is the position Max Shachtman moved towards through the 1940s and 1950s. It is what the AWL has consistently developed since its formal break with the workers’-state framework in Socialist Organiser 371 in September 1988.

It is also not what Lenin meant by ‘consistent democracy’, and the gap between Lenin’s deployment and the AWL’s has political consequences.

II. What Lenin actually said

Lenin used the formulation ‘consistent democracy’ principally in 1905, in Two Tactics of Social-Democracy in the Democratic Revolution. The context was specific: the failed Russian revolution of that year, the Mensheviks’ argument that the bourgeoisie should be allowed to lead the democratic revolution because it was a bourgeois revolution, and Lenin’s counter-argument that the bourgeoisie had already shown it would betray democracy whenever democracy threatened its property.

Lenin’s category is not a moral preference for democratic forms. It is a class analysis of who is doing the democratic work and who is sabotaging it. From chapter 6:

A bourgeois revolution expresses the need for the development of capitalism, and far from destroying the foundations of capitalism, it does the opposite, it broadens and deepens them.

The point is that the bourgeoisie, having a material interest in capitalism’s development, ought logically to be the consistent democrat in the bourgeois revolution. But it is not. It betrays its own historical task, because democracy threatens to bring the proletariat into politics. Lenin’s argument turns on this: the proletariat alone can be ‘consistently democratic’ in the bourgeois revolution, because the proletariat alone has nothing to fear from the democratic process going further than the bourgeoisie can tolerate.

The verb is in the proletariat. The ‘consistency’ is a quality of revolutionary action, not a quality of the state form. And the goal of the consistency is not to defend bourgeois democracy as such but to drive the bourgeois revolution to its limit, which Lenin defines as the threshold of the proletarian revolution.

The 1918 deployment, in The Proletarian Revolution and the Renegade Kautsky, sharpens the same point. Kautsky was defending what he called ‘pure democracy’ against the Bolsheviks. Lenin’s reply:

Bourgeois democracy, although a great historical advance in comparison with medievalism, always remains, and under capitalism is bound to remain, restricted, truncated, false and hypocritical, a paradise for the rich and a snare and a deception for the exploited, for the poor.

And further:

If we are not to mock at common sense and history, it is obvious that we cannot speak of ‘pure democracy’ as long as different classes exist; we can only speak of class democracy. ‘Pure democracy’ is the mendacious phrase of a liberal who wants to fool the workers.

The argument is consistent across the thirteen years between Two Tactics and Renegade Kautsky. Bourgeois democracy is a class form. Its features serve a function in the reproduction of capitalist rule. The proletariat’s task is not to choose between bourgeois democracy and authoritarianism as if these were freestanding political conditions. The task is to recognise that every state form under capitalism organises class rule, and that the proletarian programme cannot be the defence of one bourgeois state form against another but the conquest of state power by the working class itself.

In State and Revolution, written in the summer of 1917, Lenin develops this with a passage the AWL has more than once cited as if it supported their preference. The democratic republic, Lenin says, is ‘the best possible political shell for capitalism’. Conway and Osborn paraphrase: the democratic republic is the best terrain for the workers. But Lenin’s reason is the opposite of theirs. The democratic republic is best for capitalism because it allows capital to rule with less coercion and therefore more durably. It is best for the proletariat because it accelerates the contradictions and exposes the necessity of going beyond the democratic republic to the dictatorship of the proletariat. Lenin’s full sentence, which the partial quotations bury:

For such a republic... does not by any means do away with the rule of capital... but it inevitably leads to such an extension, development, unfolding and intensification of this struggle that... the possibility of satisfying the fundamental interests of the oppressed masses is realized inevitably and solely in the dictatorship of the proletariat.

Read the passage entire and the AWL deployment falls apart. Lenin is not saying the democratic republic is preferable as a terrain. He is saying it is a transitional form that produces the conditions for its own supersession. The dialectical structure is intrinsic to the analysis. Strip it out and the sentence becomes a defence of the bourgeois state.

This is the structural reframing. Lenin’s ‘consistent democracy’ is a verb the proletariat performs, and its goal is the proletarian dictatorship. The AWL’s ‘consistent democracy’ is a noun, a political form, and its goal is the defence of that form against worse alternatives. The same words have been made to do opposite work.

III. Trotsky on Shachtman, December 1939

The drift Lenin’s reframing represents has a specific historical name in the Marxist tradition: Shachtmanism. It also has a specific point of origin. In late 1939 and early 1940, under the pressure of the Hitler-Stalin pact and the Soviet invasion of Finland, a faction in the American Socialist Workers Party led by Max Shachtman, James Burnham, and Martin Abern argued that the USSR’s class character could no longer be defended. The Trotskyist position required the unconditional defence of the workers’ state against imperialist attack, however degenerated the bureaucratic regime. Shachtman’s faction said this position was unsustainable in the face of Soviet aggression and Stalinist crimes. They argued that the Marxist position should be neutrality between the camps: neither Washington nor Moscow.

Trotsky’s response, written across the eight months between his first major polemic in December 1939 and his assassination in August 1940, is the founding document of the orthodox Trotskyist position on what Shachtman represented. In Defence of Marxism, the collection that gathered these polemics in 1942, is the text the AWL has read selectively for forty years and that the Fourth International tradition has continued to absorb whole.

Trotsky’s diagnosis runs at three levels. First, the class basis: the Shachtman opposition was a petty-bourgeois reaction to the war crisis. From ‘A Petty-Bourgeois Opposition in the Socialist Workers Party’, dated 15 December 1939:

It is necessary to call things by their right names. Now that the positions of both factions in the struggle have become determined with complete clearness, it must be said that the minority of the National Committee is leading a typical petty-bourgeois tendency. Like any petty-bourgeois group inside the socialist movement, the present opposition is characterized by the following features: a disdainful attitude toward theory and an inclination toward eclecticism; disrespect for the tradition of their own organization; anxiety for personal ‘independence’ at the expense of anxiety for objective truth; nervousness instead of consistency; readiness to jump from one position to another; lack of understanding of revolutionary centralism and hostility toward it; and finally, inclination to substitute clique ties and personal relationships for party discipline.

Second, the theoretical level: Shachtman and Burnham were rejecting the dialectical method in favour of pragmatic empiricism, which is precisely what made them lose their bearings under wartime pressure:

Comrades Burnham and Shachtman represent the same tendency within our own party. They don’t think that dialectical materialism is a necessary part of our doctrine. They find that it is possible to arrive at a correct political conclusion without the dialectic.... But to the extent they fail to check, to polish, and to sharpen theoretically their tools of thought—dialectics—they are easily lost and relapse again into petty-bourgeois ways of thinking. When they are confronted with great events, they begin to substitute for a class analysis a psychological analysis, or a technical analysis, or an ‘organizational’ analysis.

Third, the political consequence. Trotsky predicted that abandonment of the defence of the USSR would not stop at neutrality. It would, under wartime pressure, drive the Shachtman faction toward the camp of bourgeois democracy. The substitution he names, class analysis replaced by psychological, technical, organisational analysis, is exactly the substitution the AWL apparatus performs eight decades later when it weighs Western democracy against authoritarian states without asking the prior class question. From the December 1939 ‘Letter to Sherman Stanley’:

What we object to about the Kremlin gang is not the expansion and not the geographical direction of the expansion but the bureaucratic, counter-revolutionary methods of the expansion. But at the same time because we as Marxists ‘look objectively’ upon historic happenings we recognize that neither the Czar, nor Hitler, nor Chamberlain had or have the custom of abolishing, in the occupied countries, capitalist property, and this fact, a very progressive one, depends upon another fact; namely, that the October Revolution is not yet dead.

The class analysis remains: what matters is the property form, not the regime’s manners. From the December 1939 letter to Shachtman himself:

I believe that you are on the wrong side of the barricades, my dear friend. By your position you give courage to all the petty-bourgeois and anti-Marxist elements to fight our doctrine, our program, and our tradition.

Shachtman’s group split in April 1940 and founded the Workers Party. Burnham left within months, drifting through the Cold War to a position on the right of the American political spectrum. Shachtman’s trajectory was longer and more revealing. By the late 1950s he was advising the State Department on socialist responses to Soviet expansion. In 1965 he supported the American military intervention in the Dominican Republic. Peter Drucker’s biography of Shachtman records the position: Shachtman argued, in the pages of New America, that ‘the U.S. presence was necessary to ensure that “democratic forces” were not overwhelmed by Castroite elements, placing the preservation of an anti-Stalinist “democratic center” above the principle of national self-determination’ (Drucker, Max Shachtman and His Left, Humanities Press 1994, p. 282). The reframing was clean. The metric of progressiveness was no longer the property form, the class character, or the question of national sovereignty. It was the political character of the contending forces measured against an anti-Stalinist criterion. By Shachtman’s metric, US military intervention against Castroite influence was defensible because it preserved the political space in which ‘democratic forces’ could operate.

I labour the trajectory because the AWL’s reading of Shachtman is selective on this point. The AWL traces its lineage back through Hal Draper’s wing of the broader Shachtmanite tradition, the wing that broke with Shachtman precisely over Vietnam and the State Department turn. The distinction is real. Drucker’s biography documents the Draper-Shachtman split with care, and Draper’s late refusal to follow Shachtman into Cold War liberalism is to his credit. But the analytical apparatus that produced both trajectories was the same apparatus, and the structural logic Trotsky identified in 1939 explains both outcomes. The apparatus that lets you read the Stalinist regime’s character without reference to the property form will, under pressure, let you read any regime’s character without reference to property. What looks like principled neutrality in 1940 becomes Cold War social democracy by 1965. The version that broke with Shachtman over Vietnam still inherits the apparatus. The version that licensed support for US intervention in the Dominican Republic and the version that became the analytical scaffolding of the AWL’s contemporary politics share an analytical origin point.

Trotsky was right in December 1939 about what would happen. He died in August 1940 without seeing the prediction confirmed. By 1965, Shachtman had confirmed it himself, in the pages of New America, by supporting US military intervention against a Caribbean state on the explicit grounds that Stalinist influence had to be checked. The analytical resource that would have resisted that drift was the dialectical apparatus Trotsky was defending. It had been abandoned in 1940.

IV. Draper as the bridge

The text that carries the Shachtmanite analytical apparatus forward into post-1960s left politics is Hal Draper’s The Two Souls of Socialism, published as a pamphlet by the International Socialists in 1966 from a longer essay in New Politics the same year, itself developed from a 1960 article in Anvil. The AWL cites it constantly. Workers’ Liberty study guides treat it as foundational. The argument deserves engagement.

Draper’s central move is to divide socialism into two souls or two tendencies. Socialism from Above is the tradition of socialism imposed by enlightened minorities, by parliamentary parties acting on behalf of the masses, by state bureaucracies, by Stalinist parties claiming to represent the working class without being accountable to it. Socialism from Below is the tradition of working-class self-emancipation, the tradition Draper traces through the Communards, the early Bolsheviks, the works councils movement, the rank-and-file unionism of the 1930s. The argument is that socialism is intrinsically about the form of agency, not the form of property. Whatever class wins state power is irrelevant if the form of that winning is from above.

Read in 1966, the argument has real force. It captures something the Stalinist tradition genuinely got wrong: the substitution of party rule for working-class rule, the cult of nationalised property regardless of its administrative form, the elevation of state ownership over working-class self-organisation. Draper’s polemic does work in the same period that the New Left in its various forms was doing similar work, and it inherits something of the early Marx that the orthodox Trotskyist tradition had let go cold.

But Draper’s framework is not, structurally, what Trotsky was defending against Shachtman. Trotsky’s analysis was dialectical: the Soviet state was a contradictory formation, with a planned economy as its base and a Stalinist apparatus as its superstructure, and the political revolution Trotskyists called for was the revolution that would overthrow the apparatus while preserving the base. The dialectic between base and superstructure was the analytical core. Draper’s framework collapses the dialectic. The question of property form drops away. What matters is the form of agency. If the working class is not in power, by Draper’s metric, the question of property form is irrelevant.

This collapse is the bridge. Draper’s framework lets you read Stalinist regimes as ‘bureaucratic collectivism’ or ‘state capitalism’ or any third-camp formulation, because the property question has been disqualified as the criterion. Once disqualified, the way is open to read every regime’s character through its political form. That is the analytical move the AWL has been making for forty years. Draper provides the theoretical permission. The AWL provides the political application.

The cost of the move is not visible in 1966. It becomes visible only when the framework is asked to do political work in conditions Draper himself did not face. Draper wrote in a period when the great political questions were the Cold War as Soviet expansion versus Western containment, the Vietnam War, the civil rights movement. The analytical question of property form was, in those conditions, a relatively easy question to bracket. The political content of the period seemed to organise itself around questions of agency: who gets to participate, who has rights, whose self-organisation is recognised.

But the framework cannot bear the political weight of conditions in which the question of property form is back at the centre. In Israel-Palestine, where the existence of a Jewish state structured around the systematic dispossession of the Palestinian population is precisely a question about who owns what land. In Ukraine, where a war is being fought over which imperial power gets to determine the property regime. In Britain itself, where the AWL’s ‘consistent democracy’ framing of Israel-Palestine produces an ‘equal national rights’ position that treats the Israeli state and the Palestinian people as symmetrical political forms rather than as colonial structure and colonised population.

The framework that worked, for what it was worth, in 1966, does not work in 2025. The political content of the present demands the analytical resource that Draper’s framework discards.

V. The 1982 acid test, the 1988 self-reckoning

In 1982, the same drift Trotsky identified in 1939 was diagnosed inside British Trotskyism, by people working from the same analytical tradition the AWL claimed to represent. Sean Matgamna, writing under the pseudonym John O’Mahoney, published a series in Socialist Organiser titled ‘Socialism and Democracy’, a response to Michael Foot’s claim that Leninism was inherently authoritarian. O’Mahoney’s reply argued that socialism was the development and deepening of bourgeois-democratic rights, that revolutionary Marxists should act as ‘super-democrats’, that the inheritance from the Levellers and the Chartists was the legitimate analytical ground for Trotskyist intervention in the British labour movement.

The Revolutionary Workers’ League, the United States affiliate of the Trotskyist International Liaison Committee in which O’Mahoney’s organisation also sat, replied in Workers Struggle through 1981 and 1982. Their charge was ‘super-democratism’, and their analysis was that O’Mahoney was reproducing the structure of Kautsky’s ‘pure democracy’ position that Lenin had dismantled in Renegade Kautsky. The polemic accused O’Mahoney of obscuring the class character of the bourgeois state, of treating bourgeois-democratic rights as a ‘heritage’ rather than as concessions wrung from the bourgeoisie under specific conditions of class struggle, and of preparing the analytical ground for a ‘Third Camp’ position that would, when tested, side with imperial democracy against any authoritarian opponent.

The test came in April 1982 with the Falklands War. The orthodox Trotskyist position on imperialist war is unambiguous: revolutionaries in an imperialist country call for the defeat of their own ruling class in a war against an oppressed nation. Argentina was a semi-colony under a fascistic junta. Britain was an imperialist power dispatching a task force to retake territory the junta had occupied. The Trotskyist response was to call for British defeat. The Argentine junta was a separate question; revolutionaries in Britain do not first take a position on the junta and then derive their position on the war. They take a position on the war their own ruling class is fighting, and they work out the rest.

O’Mahoney’s Socialist Organiser did not call for British defeat. The position, articulated through the war, was ‘dual defeatism’, or focus on the Falkland Islanders’ right to self-determination, or focus on the fascistic character of Galtieri’s regime. The Workers’ Socialist League leadership refused to commit to the orthodox position because the orthodox position was incompatible with the analytical framework O’Mahoney had been developing in Socialist Organiser through the prior year. If bourgeois-democratic rights are the heritage to be defended, and if the Argentine regime denies those rights more thoroughly than the British state does, then the Trotskyist position cannot, on this framework, simply be defeat for the imperialist power. The framework requires that something be said about the relative democratic credentials of the combatants. And once that something is said, the orthodox position becomes unsustainable.

The RWL’s polemic predicted exactly this and was vindicated by the war itself. The WSL split. The Internationalist Faction, supporters of the TILC’s orthodox line, were expelled. The Matgamna majority took Socialist Organiser with them, became the Socialist Organiser Alliance, and through the late 1980s became the AWL. The Thornett minority moved towards the Fourth International majority. The TILC itself split, with its successor International Trotskyist Committee founding a new theoretical journal in January 1985 which described its own position as ‘consistent Trotskyism’ against the various drifts that had broken up the previous formation.

Worth pausing on the formulation. The ITC’s ‘consistent Trotskyism’ is a deliberate echo of Lenin’s ‘consistent democracy’, and the echo carries the right structural meaning. The ‘consistency’ is a quality of revolutionary practice in fidelity to the dialectical method, not a quality of any particular state form. The ‘consistent Trotskyists’ are those who maintain the analytical apparatus Trotsky defended against Shachtman in 1939, against the various petty-bourgeois pressures that have driven sections of the tradition off course since. The ITC’s formulation gets the verb back where Lenin had put it. Whether the ITC succeeded as a political project is a separate question; the formulation was correct.

The AWL’s trajectory after the 1982 split is the trajectory the RWL predicted. By September 1988 the formal break came. Socialist Organiser 371, dated 15 September 1988, carried the editorial ‘Reassessing the Eastern Bloc’, which announced the discarding of the workers’-state framework. The opening was direct: ‘By now, most supporters of Socialist Organiser no longer believe that the designation “workers’ state”, degenerated, deformed, or whatever, makes any sort of sense.’ What replaced it was the framework the AWL has used since: a ‘state-monopoly bureaucracy’ whose nationalised economy, far from constituting the basis of a workers’ state contradicted by a Stalinist apparatus, was now itself the property of a ruling elite.

The 1988 editorial is unusually self-aware on the question of its lineage. It anticipates, and tries to defuse in advance, the charge of Shachtmanism. ‘And what of “Shachtmanism”?’, the editorial asks, before noting that Shachtman split with Trotsky in 1940, developed a theory of bureaucratic collectivism, and in old age supported the Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba and the bombing of North Vietnam. ‘Clearly we do not want to follow Shachtman in those respects. But that is not all there was to Shachtman.... There are positive things to learn from Shachtman.’

The concession is the article’s evidence. The AWL knew, in 1988, that what it was doing carried the genealogy this article traces. It knew that the framework it was discarding, Trotsky’s ‘degenerated workers’ state’, was the framework Trotsky had defended in 1939 precisely against Shachtman. It tried to manage the inheritance by distinguishing the early Shachtman (the bureaucratic collectivism analysis, useful) from the late Shachtman (Bay of Pigs, Vietnam War bombing, useless). The distinction is the AWL’s. It is not the dialectical apparatus’s. The apparatus that produced bureaucratic collectivism in 1940 also produced the 1965 Dominican Republic position, because the analytical move that disqualified property form as the criterion was the move that left the apparatus with no resources to resist the 1965 reframing. You cannot inherit Shachtman’s 1940 framework while disowning the trajectory it produced by 1965. The AWL tried, in 1988, to perform exactly that operation. The history of the AWL since is the history of why that operation does not hold.

The 1988 break completed the trajectory the RWL had predicted in 1982. The drift Trotsky had diagnosed in 1939, that Shachtman had completed in 1965, that the RWL had diagnosed in 1981–82, completed its trajectory inside British Trotskyism with the September 1988 editorial. The property-form question was discarded. The political-form question became the whole question.

This is the apparatus the AWL has been refining for the thirty-seven years since. It is the apparatus that produced the ‘Two States’ framework on Israel-Palestine, the ‘consistent democracy’ framing of Ukraine and Iran, the December 2023 statement ‘For a Consistently Democratic and Internationalist Left’ and the body of work the Left Renewal blog has built around it. The Conway line at IFF 2025 is the apparatus articulating itself plainly. Conway is not innovating. He is repeating, in 2025, what the apparatus has been licensing for decades.

VI. Where this leaves the FI tradition

The FI tradition has never required the AWL apparatus to do its anti-campist work. It has its own resources, developed across the same decades, and applied with more analytical rigour than the apparatus the AWL inherited from O’Mahoney. The critique of campism, of Stalinist apologism, of the various forms of left support for reactionary regimes claiming anti-imperial credentials: this work has been done in International Viewpoint, in the writings of Ernest Mandel, Gilbert Achcar, Joseph Daher, in the Bureau statements and Congress resolutions of the FI itself. The work has been done without abandoning the dialectical apparatus that the AWL discarded in 1988.

The question for FI signatories to documents that have been built around the AWL’s apparatus is whether the apparatus is doing the work they think it is doing. Pierre Rousset signed the December 2023 statement understanding it as a list for discussion to broaden unity. He withdrew when the framework began to be used in directions he had not authorised. The withdrawal is the test. A signatory who reads the apparatus carefully, traces what it permits and what it forbids, and recognises that what it produces in operation is not what the FI tradition produces from its own resources, has the same option Rousset took.

The question for the broader left is whether ‘consistent democracy’ as a programmatic phrase is what its users say it is. The phrase carries Lenin’s authority. The deployments do not carry Lenin’s structure. What is being defended under the phrase is a static preference between political forms, a metric of working-class freedom abstracted from the property relations that condition that freedom. Lenin’s ‘consistent democracy’ was a verb describing what the proletariat does to drive a bourgeois revolution past its limits. The contemporary AWL’s ‘consistent democracy’ is a noun describing a state form whose features should be defended against worse alternatives. The first usage is dialectical and pushes towards proletarian power. The second is comparative and stops at the defence of bourgeois rights. These are not the same thing.

What the apparatus produces in operation, this series has already documented in Part One. What materialist analysis the apparatus has discarded along the way, and what the Fourth International tradition has on its own resources to do the same anti-campist work without producing the same political outcomes, is the third article in this series.

For now, the historical point: the drift was diagnosed in 1939. Shachtman vindicated the diagnosis in 1965. The RWL diagnosed it again in 1981–82. The AWL conceded the genealogy in 1988, while trying to manage the inheritance by distinguishing the useful Shachtman from the embarrassing Shachtman. The framework that has been refined in British Trotskyism for forty years to license the drift was identified, at each stage of its development, by participants in the tradition who saw what was happening and named it. The participants who named it were not always politically successful. The RWL never became the dominant force in British Trotskyism. The Internationalist Faction was expelled. The ITC’s ‘consistent Trotskyism’ did not displace the AWL’s ‘consistent democracy’ as the more widely circulated phrase. But the analytical work was done, and it stands.

What the AWL inherits from O’Mahoney’s 1982 reframing, and confessed to inheriting in 1988, is the answer to a question Trotsky had already answered in 1939: what happens to the Trotskyist tradition when, under political pressure, it abandons the dialectical analysis of the workers’ states in favour of a moralised preference for bourgeois democracy. The answer was given. It has been given again. The apparatus has had forty years to demonstrate what it produces. The Highbury Roundhouse on a drizzly November afternoon is what it produces.

This is the second article in The Drift, a Red Mole series tracing the Shachtmanite reframing of Trotskyist categories in British far-left politics, from the 1939–40 split in the American SWP to the contemporary politics of the Alliance for Workers’ Liberty. Part One was ‘”Left Renewal” Against Anti-Zionism’. Part Three will engage the materialist counter-argument and the deeper terrain of the Ideas for Freedom 2025 panel.

Keir Starmer spent Saturday at Chequers, discussing his future with his wife. The Observer reported he was expected to announce his resignation on Monday and set out a timetable for departure, though a government source said he remained focused on the job. Both things can be simultaneously true: a man can intend to resign and need the weekend to absorb the fact of it.

On Friday, Burnham won the Makerfield by-election with a majority of 9,241 over Reform UK, taking 54.8% of the vote against Reform’s 34.5%, with the Conservatives reduced to under a thousand votes and the Greens to three hundred. More than a hundred Labour MPs, roughly a quarter of the parliamentary party, had already publicly called for Starmer to quit or set out a departure timetable. After Thursday night, that number stopped mattering. The question shifted from whether the pressure was sufficient to whether Starmer would accept the conclusion everyone else had already reached.

Cabinet ministers loyal to Starmer told him he faced being forced out by damaging resignations if he did not set out a timetable by the end of the weekend. One described his departure as inevitable. Another framed it with the bureaucratic clarity of someone who has made their peace with a decision: “Everyone thinks it is over and everyone wants it to be a dignified, orderly exit.” Dignity, in this context, means Starmer doing what Burnham’s people want without Burnham having to be seen to force it.

Ed Miliband and Shabana Mahmood had already previously suggested to Starmer that he should set out a timetable for departure. David Blunkett and Harriet Harman had also said there should be new leadership. When the grandees start saying it publicly, the operation is over.

Starmer’s response was to dig in. He called cabinet members on Friday afternoon to set out his determination to fight on, and told reporters that if there were a contest he would run, warning it would “plunge us into chaos.” His team had office space, messaging, events in early preparation, and had raised more than £100,000 in donations. This was either genuine defiance or the infrastructure of a man who needs to be seen fighting before he can accept that he has lost (he resigned the following Monday).

Burnham’s coronation

Burnham’s allies are now talking about a coronation: the number of MPs backing him is described by one minister as having passed 200 “in the dust,” with another suggesting the figure could reach 300. The word ‘coronation’ does a lot of work. It suggests unity, continuity, a transfer of authority that the membership will ratify rather than contest. It also neatly forecloses the question of what Burnham actually stands for.

Wes Streeting says he intends to stand, but sources close to him suggest the most plausible outcome is that he backs Burnham in return for a significant role. Angela Rayner will not run if Burnham is in the race. The parliamentary arithmetic requires only 81 nominations to force a contest. The rest is theatre.

What the theatre conceals is a policy vacuum, and the vacuity is not accidental. Burnham has spent four years in Manchester cultivating a reputation that is simultaneously left of Starmer and rigorous about nothing. His victory speech in Makerfield was dismissed by Starmer’s camp as a list of policies already being implemented by the government: apprenticeships, lower bus fares, nothing that would disturb a Treasury official’s weekend. That criticism, for once, has some force.

The ‘Manchesterism’ brand rests on a specific political history that Burnham’s admirers prefer not to examine too closely. The devolution settlement that underpins his mayoral authority was negotiated between 2014 and 2015 by Andy Burnham, Richard Leese, Howard Bernstein and George Osborne, on terms the Treasury could live with. The “North versus London” rhetoric that Burnham deploys so effectively was constructed on a foundation of public-private partnerships and foreign investment attraction strategies that Blair and Brown would have recognised immediately. Burnham did not break with that tradition. He rebranded it.

His platform does differ from Starmer’s in one concrete and verified respect: he has explicitly called for Thames Water to be nationalised, describing public ownership of water companies as “absolutely an option.” That is a genuine departure from Starmer’s preference for regulatory enforcement and public-private partnership. But Burnham has simultaneously committed to adhering to the same fiscal rules that governed Starmer’s administration, which means day-to-day expenditure must be met from taxation rather than borrowing. He has not set out a confirmed revenue mechanism sufficient to fund his programme. The structural implication is that if the Treasury stalls, if global markets respond badly, or if the tax yield from any revenue measures falls short, the nationalisations do not happen and the council housing programme does not happen. Welfare devolution becomes the transfer of responsibility for administering austerity from Whitehall to regional mayors: more accountable perhaps, but no less austere.

A reversion to Conservative orthodoxy

To clarify: This is not a quirk of Burnham’s positioning. It is the architecture he will inherit. Reeves’s fiscal rules, set out in the Charter for Budget Responsibility in October 2024, preserve the same structural logic that Conservative chancellors operated for a decade. The Institute for Government is direct: Reeves’s rules “share similarities with past iterations adopted by previous governments,” and her move to a three-year horizon “reverts to common practice of chancellors from 2015 until the pandemic.” Not a break with Conservative orthodoxy. A reversion to it. Reeves herself has been equally direct about what this means in practice: “fiscal rules are non-negotiable because they are the foundation of the stability and security that families and businesses require.” Enshrined in law. The bedrock. These are not the qualifications of a chancellor treating fiscal discipline as a tactical constraint to be loosened when conditions allow.

Burnham has committed to the same rules. The investment he is promising: council housing, transport, public ownership: is permitted within the fiscal cage, not by breaking it. Which means the cage remains. When the bond markets react badly, when the tax yield falls short, when the Treasury’s institutional conservatism reasserts itself, the question will not be whether Burnham wants to deliver his programme. It will be whether the programme was ever structurally possible within the framework he accepted before taking office.

The left beyond the soft left

This is not an accusation. It is a structural observation. The history of the soft left in government is the history of reform packages with single revenue assumptions and no contingency encountering the civil service, the bond markets, and the permanent pressure of the financial establishment, and discovering that the fiscal rules were not a constraint they had accepted tactically but a cage they had built around themselves.

During the Makerfield campaign, fighting a constituency that had largely backed Reform in May’s local elections, Burnham’s rhetoric on migration was notably careful. No dramatic reversal is on the record; but the emphasis on “our communities” and the explicit contest with Farage’s nationalism produced a campaign in which the language of progressive universalism was, to put it gently, understated. This is how the soft left adjusts: not through public reversals but through emphasis, cadence, the things not said in the crucial week. The mechanism is quiet and the consolidation is gradual, but the direction of travel is consistent.

The left outside Labour has no lever to pull here. No mechanism exists by which the Socialist Federation, ACR, or the remnants of Corbynism-in-exile can affect who becomes the next Labour prime minister: they have no MPs, no block vote, no institutional presence inside the party's internal architecture. The SCG has functioned, for years now, as a moral conscience without organisational weight: present for the denunciations, silent when the actual manoeuvres are made, its members individually voting confidence in a leadership they collectively deplored. That is not hypocrisy, exactly. It is the structural condition of a parliamentary tendency that chose parliament over party, and now finds it has neither.

The Socialist Federation, still assembling its post-conference organisational shape, needs to think about what this interregnum means. Not in terms of who it prefers between available candidates, because it has no mechanism to affect that choice. But in terms of what the political space looks like when a soft-left prime minister takes office promising competence and regional investment, discovers that the fiscal rules and the bond markets and the Treasury’s institutional conservatism have not altered, and begins the adjustments that every Labour government makes when the programme meets the state.

That discovery will take eighteen months. Probably less. A Burnham premiership is not the same thing as a Starmer one: the style is different, the constitutional instincts are different, and the willingness to name public ownership as a goal rather than an embarrassment is a real, if limited, departure. But ‘different’ and ‘sufficient’ are not synonyms. The left needs to be ready for that distinction to become, once again, brutally apparent.