Apologies to our readers for the high frequency of posts, which reflects events. Tomorrow's post will be postponed to next month and Saturday's regular post in Castilian will go only to subscribers of Topo Rojo. Meanwhile, some friends of Ukraine are calling the French youth revolt Putin’s work. That’s the Kremlin’s argument about Maidan, turned round to face west. Seventy years after Budapest, it’s worth remembering who else said it.

The French socialist Vincent Présumey has spent the last few days comparing France’s school students to the crowds on the Maidan in Kyiv in 2013–14. Under his post on Facebook, an argument broke out among people who all, as far as one can tell, support Ukraine against Russia’s invasion. It shows how easily a good cause can teach bad habits.

One reply put the case against the movement plainly. The groups that first called the protests were “officially pro-Russian”. A poster against the price of petrol is, “in the current context”, “the most pro-Russian slogan possible”. There was a Soviet flag on the marches and no Ukrainian ones. And disorder helps Putin: it puts Marine Le Pen “into orbit” and slows the economy just when France should be rearming and helping Ukraine. “It isn’t with barricades and good feelings that we’ll stop Putin.”

Présumey’s answer was sharp. The Kremlin’s supporters say “NATO and the CIA” whenever something moves against their side. Now the Kremlin’s opponents say “Putin” whenever something moves against theirs. It’s the same narrative, held up to a mirror.

He’s right, and the archive shows why.

The error: asking who profits, instead of who is moving

That reply makes one move. It starts from the war, asks which side gains from a revolt, and then decides what the revolt is. Demands, social content, who is on the streets and why: all of it drops out, and a movement becomes the pawn of whichever power you fear most.

That’s campism, the habit of judging every struggle by which camp it helps. We usually meet it on the left, in people who back any enemy of Washington. But nothing in the method requires that direction. Turn the map round and you get the same reasoning from Ukraine’s friends. We’ve seen it before, aimed the other way, and our comrades answered it at the time.

What the campists said about Maidan

In March 2014 Jeff Mackler, misleader of the once-promising US group Socialist Action, called the Maidan mobilisations “a grotesque caricature” of the Egyptian revolution and headlined it a coup. He hinted that the protesters had organised the snipers who killed them. The Russian media had a shorter phrase for the new government: the “Kiev junta”.

The people who were there said something else. Zakhar Popovych, of Ukraine’s Left Opposition, hid nothing. He told International Viewpoint that the neo-Nazis of Pravyi Sektor had led the first attacks on the riot police and were attacking the left on the square. But thousands of very different people had joined the fight, many of them Russian-speaking youth from the outskirts of Kyiv. “Nonetheless, it was a mass revolt of Ukrainians, of different nationalities and ethnic groups, for democracy in Ukraine.”

Ilya Budraitskis, writing from Moscow, named the error. Those who called it “a conflict of the elites”, he wrote, “miss the most important thing”: the Maidan had become a force that neither the government nor the opposition leaders could manipulate. He saw the “sickening dissonance” between its revolutionary content and its reactionary form, and said it called for “action aimed at changing such an ugly equation”, not squeamish moral verdicts. Catherine Samary later summed it up: neither “a pro-European revolution” nor “a fascist coup under NATO control”. Rejecting the coup story “does not imply ignoring the reality of the far right”.

That’s the method. Look honestly at the far right and at the foreign powers, then look at the people in the street, because they decide what a movement becomes.

The titushki

Présumey’s comparison goes one step further. Yanukovych’s regime didn’t only send in the riot police. Zbigniew Kowalewski described how the barons of the Party of Regions mobilised hired thugs, “the infamous ‘titushki’”, while their television warned of the “Nazis, fascists and Banderaites” of the Maidan. Thugs created the disorder; television blamed the movement for it.

Nobody yet knows exactly what happened in France on 17 October, and we shouldn’t pretend to. But the questions aren’t only being asked on Facebook. In Marseille, rioters wrecked the municipal police station on the Canebière and broke into the town hall. The Socialist mayor, Benoît Payan, no friend of the far left, has demanded explanations from the Interior Minister. He complained of a single company of CRS riot police for the whole city, and asked why the police gassed demonstrators and not looters. Présumey reads the mayor’s account as describing police who stood aside: “a quasi-collaboration”, he says, “without using the word”.

In Lyon, the left and the unions have said what they saw. On 20 October twelve organisations signed a statement against the Rhône prefecture, among them LFI, the PCF, the NPA, the FSU teachers’ union, Solidaires, the CNT, the UCL and the anti-fascist union network VISA. They accuse the prefecture of “disproportionate repression” against school students mobilising outside their lycées, and of breaking up and banning demonstrations; the education unions’ joint banner was stolen on the 13 October march. After 17 October the prefecture banned every gathering in the city centre. Then, during the curfew on the night of the 19th, “fascist and neo-Nazi groupuscules were able to keep marching under our windows without police intervention, from Bellecour to Perrache”. “No need to worry for the white supremacists,” the statement says: they “can calmly break the bans”. The signatories want the prefect’s resignation.

That’s the titushki pattern, seen by the people on the receiving end. In Lyon the people marching unhindered in the dark were the far right. The people who had their banners stolen and their demonstrations banned were the teachers and the school students.

We also know that the state wanted a culprit. According to a Mediapart investigation reported by L’Humanité, police intelligence officers say the Interior Ministry asked them in so many words to write that La France insoumise was behind the movement. They call that “objectively false”.

Since then the story has grown. On 20 October the Prime Minister, Sébastien Lecornu, told the National Assembly that in certain places there had been “the planning of an insurrectionary scheme” by the far left and the ultra-left, “factious groupuscules” who meant to march on the Élysée and Matignon. Présumey calls it what it is: a mad narrative of an attempted coup. That’s the word the Kremlin used for the Maidan, now in the mouth of a French prime minister about his own school students. The same day David Lisnard, mayor of Cannes and presidential candidate, told RTL that the Millevaches plateau in Limousin harbours “terrorist training camps”. Présumey reminds him who last denounced fighters’ camps in those hills: the Nazis and Vichy, hunting the maquis of the communist Georges Guingouin, the largest in France by the summer of 1944.

The French state has form

Présumey is struck by how violent the police were from the start, by Western standards, against girls and boys of fifteen and sixteen. Nobody who knows the history should be surprised. The march of 17 October 2026 fell on the sixty-fifth anniversary of 17 October 1961, when the Paris police under Maurice Papon broke up a peaceful march of Algerians and probably around two hundred were killed, some thrown into the Seine with their hands tied. In December 1986, the night a million school and university students marched against the Devaquet bill, police on motorbikes trapped Malik Oussekine and clubbed him to death. He was twenty-two, and of Algerian origin. The bill was withdrawn anyway.

The French state has always met movements of the young and of the colonised with exceptional violence. The young have more than once beaten it all the same.

Who fills the space

The commenter saw a Soviet flag. Présumey mostly sees Palestinian ones, which for the kids at the vocational school near his home mean the misery of the world and revolt against it. Another commenter wore Ukrainian colours on the Paris march and got smiles. All of that can be true. Hundreds of thousands of teenagers don’t arrive with a finished view of the world. Budraitskis said the same of Ukrainian society in 2014: the battle over what it would become “was never predetermined”.

That’s the uncomfortable lesson of Maidan. In Moscow in December 2011, Budraitskis recalled, almost every left group agreed the protest was “ours” and that they would fight for their place in it. In Kyiv the left mostly stood back, sceptical and divided. The organised far right didn’t stand back. It filled the space. If Ukraine’s friends in France decide the school students are Putin’s useful idiots and stand back, the space won’t stay empty there either, and Le Pen’s party is best placed to take it.

Whose solidarity with Ukraine?

The “Putin” argument asks the young to stop, accept the cuts, put up with the police and wait for what Présumey reports Macron calling a “beautiful presidential election” in 2027. Présumey fears it ends with the Rassemblement National in power, and says his school students see that danger more clearly than many adults.

Solidarity with Ukraine built on social peace in France is solidarity on the French ruling class’s terms. Ukraine’s own young people didn’t wait for permission. In July 2025, when a law threatened the independence of Ukraine’s anti-corruption bodies in the middle of the war, they came out with placards cut from cardboard boxes, and within ten days the law was reversed. Nobody serious called them Putin’s agents. In Serbia, students have led what Présumey calls the largest youth movement in Europe for more than a year, and when they cycled to Strasbourg, Macron chose to receive the president they were protesting against.

Présumey puts it in one sentence: the best solidarity with Ukraine sees “the common social and democratic foundation” of struggles in the East and the West. Setting them against each other ends in conspiracy theories. He has watched it happen in real time. Within days, one self-described pro-Ukrainian “centrist” had moved from a Putinist plot to a Putinist and Islamist one, and claimed to see “the Daesh dress code” on school students. The relentless denouncers of “demonstrations that play the far right’s game”, Présumey concluded, quickly come to play it themselves.

Budapest, seventy years on

This Friday, 23 October, is the seventieth anniversary of the Hungarian revolution, the clearest case there is of a movement slandered by people who judged it by the camp it seemed to help.

It began as a student demonstration in Budapest in solidarity with the Polish workers. When the crowd went to the radio station to have its demands broadcast, the secret police fired on it. Workers came out of the factories and soldiers went over to the crowd. Soviet tanks entered the city the next day, withdrew, and came back on 4 November. The Communist parties of the West called it a fascist counter-revolution. Peter Fryer, the Daily Worker‘s man in Budapest, saw democratic workers’ councils instead, and his paper censored what he sent.

Expelled from the Communist Party, Fryer went on to edit The Newsletter. For the first anniversary, in its issue of 19 October 1957, he printed eyewitness evidence to answer the “comfortable lies” about “White Terror” and “counter-revolution”. In the same paragraph the paper dissociated itself “utterly from the false ‘friends’ of the Hungarian people, the imperialists of Britain and America”. It refused both camps in one breath, and that’s the stance this autumn needs.

The rewrite desk. Franz Xaver Philipp ran the East German news agency ADN’s office in Vienna, monitoring Budapest radio. On 31 October 1956 he sent Berlin what the radio was saying: factories demanding the withdrawal of Soviet troops, police proud that they hadn’t fired on the people. ADN Berlin put out something else under his dateline: “FASCIST ‘ARROW CROSS’ ORGANIZES”, snipers on the rooftops, “EVEN A MOZART SCORE WAS THROWN INTO THE FLAMES BY THE FASCISTS”. On 2 November he reported miners going back to work; Berlin reported a city facing “CATASTROPHE”. On the morning of 4 November, as the tanks came back, he offered Berlin Nagy’s last broadcast and the writers’ appeal for help. The answer, after a long pause: “No. We won’t need that now.” Philipp resigned. Set that beside the intelligence officers asked to write that LFI was behind the movement. Nobody in Paris had to invent the method.

The surgeon at the airport. Marian Bielicki flew into Budapest for the Warsaw weekly Po Prostu with a planeload of medicine and blood plasma. A young woman in a nurse’s uniform, a surgeon as he later learned, spoke to him on the tarmac. He was a journalist, she told him, so “you simply don’t have the right to lie! It is a lie that fascists and counter-revolutionaries are fighting in the city. We are fighting, our nation is fighting, for real democracy, for real socialism, for freedom and independence!” One night he asked a roomful of insurgents, a steel worker, a shipyard worker, a plumber, a book-keeper and a medical student among them, whether they weren’t afraid of fascism. The student answered: “Nobody wants fascism . . . We won’t allow it.”

A box in the same issue quoted the Belgrade Politika of 26 October 1956, and it’s the most useful sentence of all: “Although fascist elements have also been taking part in the uprisings, this has not been a counter-revolution.”

There were fascists in Hungary in 1956. There were neo-Nazis on the Maidan in 2014. There are pro-Russian cranks and far-right looters around the edges of the French movement in 2026. In each case the people who made the movement were somebody else, and the slander needed to pretend they weren’t.

Raw material

Here Présumey’s comparison should be pushed further than he takes it. What happened in Hungary wasn’t only a protest. The historian Miklós Molnár, quoted by John Lister in Socialist Viewpoint in 1986, recorded that “in the space of forty-eight hours all the factories in the country had their elected councils”, with central councils forming for whole towns. A Central Workers’ Council of Greater Budapest called a general strike against the occupation that held into December. A nine-point statement of the councils’ rights began: “The factory belongs to the workers.” A student demonstration had become, in a fortnight, the outline of another kind of power.

That’s why the slander mattered so much to Moscow. A social movement can be bought off or worn down. A movement that starts building its own organs of democracy is the raw material of a new revolutionary movement.

France isn’t Hungary, and a school blockade isn’t a workers’ council. But the raw material is of the same kind. Teenagers are learning, under the baton and the tear gas, to organise themselves and hold their ground. Présumey’s word for it is ferocity. In 1986 their parents’ generation built a national coordination of delegates elected in each faculty and lycée, recallable and mandated by their general assemblies, which the movement’s reporters called “a shining example for the labour movement of democratic forms of self-organization and unity in action”. The question is whether this movement builds those forms again, joins up with the workplaces on the union strike day of 5 November, and finds a political voice of its own. Présumey’s charge against LFI is that it is surfing the movement while hoping it ends, because its only horizon is April 2027.

The Maidan shows what happens if it doesn’t. Budraitskis saw direct democracy born from direct experience, with “no political continuation”. Someone else supplied one.

For socialists outside France the tasks follow. Defend the movement and its organisations against repression, whoever is being lined up for blame this week. Refuse the “Putin” story as firmly as we refused the “NATO coup” story. And help the movement find its friends in the East, in Kyiv and in Belgrade.

Thirty years after Budapest, more than sixty oppositionists from Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia and East Germany, Kuroń, Michnik and Bärbel Bohley among them, signed a joint declaration issued on the same day in Berlin, Budapest, Prague and Warsaw. They wrote that the workers, students and soldiers of 1956 had stormed the radio station “because they had had enough of official lies and wanted to hear the truth and to voice their demands”. Three years later their own regimes fell.

Sources: the Red Mole archive holds the Fourth International’s coverage of Maidan in International Viewpoint (2014), the 1957 eyewitness feature in The Newsletter no. 24, the 1986 tribute in International no. 7 and International Viewpoint no. 108, and John Lister’s twelve-page supplement on Hungary in Socialist Viewpoint no. 14 (1986).

Marsham Street, last month. Socialist Worker placards stacked three deep: SHUT DOWN A.I. DATA CENTRES. Underneath, in smaller type, the subhead did more work than the headline: water, energy and land for public need, not corporate greed. A street sign behind the crowd confirmed, unnecessarily, where everyone already knew they were.

Four words are carrying the whole argument here. It’s worth asking what kind of argument four words can carry.

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Lenin’s What Is to Be Done? lacks a chapter on placards, but the categories he and the Bolsheviks left behind are more exacting than anything in the current AI debate.

• A slogan spreads one idea to many people at once.

• A demand is extracted from somebody (an employer, a landlord, a government) and names who is meant to concede it.

• A measure belongs to a government programme, something a workers’ administration would actually implement.

• A plank sits inside a platform: a union caucus, a students’ union candidacy.

“Shut Down A.I. Data Centres” borrows the grammar of a demand without doing a demand’s job. It doesn’t say who is meant to do the shutting, on what timescale, under what pressure, won by whom.

In an article on ecosocialist.scot last month, I outlined how republican socialists in Scotland could put the four categories to work on this dispute directly.

• The demand already has a name and a paper trail: a moratorium on new grid connections for speculative AI infrastructure, which the Scottish Greens tried to force at First Minister’s Questions before summer recess and which the SNP’s own National Council has since backed, addressed to Ofgem, the network operators and the Scottish government, with a decision date attached.

• Behind it sits a harder measure: a national compute utility, publicly owned campuses sited on the curtailed wind capacity further north that Scotland already pays generators to switch off, putting stranded power to public use instead of handing a stranded grid connection to whichever hyperscaler or landowner gets there first.

• Move the data, not the energy is a slogan that follows from both, short enough for a placard but only honest once the demand and the measure behind it exist.

• And the plank: the moratorium and the public compute utility, written into a Green, left or independent candidacy in any council currently sitting on a live data-centre planning application. The fifteen-odd local campaigns already have a map of every proposal in the country; the platform is still to be built.

The obvious reply is that placards aren’t policy papers, that four words are supposed to be blunt. That’s not quite right either. The blunter the slogan, the more precision it needs standing behind it, because a slogan is supposed to be deduced from the concrete situation in front of you, not substituted for the work of analysing it.

What the SWP’s subhead attempts is the job the headline dodges. Water, energy and land for public need, not corporate greed is not a demand but a measure wearing a demand’s clothes. There’s no campaign named that would win it, no borough, mayor or government specified that should be committed to implementing it, nobody it’s addressed to. It states a value. It doesn’t yet organise anyone around extracting anything from anybody.

This is where the united front question bites. A united front is built on demands precise enough that people who agree on almost nothing else can act on them together: a council worker worried about her pension fund’s data-centre exposure, an angler watching a chalk stream drop, a nurse who has just discovered her trust’s new imaging contract runs on a cloud she’s never heard of. None of them needs to share a theory of capitalism to sign a petition against a specific water abstraction licence. All of them would need considerably more persuading to sign up for shutting the whole sector down, sight unseen, water bill and radiology queue included. The distinction between the issue you’re raising and the social group you’re raising it among, worked out first by Bensaïd and Scalabrino for a very different movement, still holds: a demand has to be deduced from who you’re actually talking to as much as from what you believe.

And that’s worth sitting with for a moment, because “shut down” doesn’t distinguish. The Larbert site earmarked for a data centre sits within 400 metres of Forth Valley Royal, an 860-bed hospital, and within 50 metres of a hospice, ringed by the 200 diesel backup generators the local campaign is right to object to. Does the working class gain nothing, though, from whatever compute keeps that hospital’s own diagnostic queue moving? The placard doesn’t ask. It can’t; there’s no room in four words for the distinction between data centres speculating on hype-cycle valuations and the compute an NHS trust actually depends on, and collapsing the two into one enemy is exactly the kind of ultra-left moralism this framework was built to catch. Or would be, if anyone on that demo had stopped long enough to draw the line.

The moratorium is winnable because it only has to say no, and no is where fifteen local campaigns and the 22,000 signatories against the Duke of Roxburghe’s own £2 billion scheme already agree. The compute utility is harder: it has to say what compute is for, who owns it, and where the money currently heading toward a hyperscaler or a duke’s fifty-thousand-acre estate would go instead. Public ownership of the hardware solves nothing by itself. Whoever still licenses the model, the training data and the chip design keeps the real leverage, which is more or less what happened to Harold Wilson’s National Computing Centre once computing stopped being scarce and the state, having built it, sold the commercial end into what is now a cybersecurity firm on the FTSE 250.

None of this is an argument for fewer slogans, or vaguer ones. It’s the opposite. A slogan that does its job, diffusing one precise idea, deduced from where the relationship of forces actually sits, to people who haven’t yet worked through the argument themselves, is harder to write than a chant, not easier. It has to survive the nurse’s question. Soundbites don’t advance anyone’s consciousness; they just travel. A slogan that’s done the analytical work first can do both. Slogans have to be written after demands, for two reasons.

1. First, slogans communicate one idea to many people because they want to agitate: to stimulate action. Agitation has to be for actions and demands around which we can build unity. If something doesn’t do that, it’s either raising a demand around which we can’t build unity (e.g. it may be arcane, sectarian or ultra-left) or it’s not raising a demand (e.g. it’s a soundbite, not a slogan).

2. Second, what matters in politics is what you are for, not what you are against. Of course you can be for stopping something, but either concretely (you raise demands that counter it) or shapelessly, by deploring something. Sadly, opposition alone is easily co-opted. We saw this when Steve Bannon and a crowd of the US far right signed the Eko statement against data centres.

We should be putting more effort into slogans, not less. The alternative is a placard that says everything and asks nothing.

Next week: the same test on a harder case. Seven dockworkers’ federations have called an international day of action for 30 October, and one of their six points is a flat NO to automation. Is that a slogan with nothing behind it, or something the test has missed?

Join the discussion on 12 November

Message register at bit.ly/NoMoreDataCentres to watch the public meeting online, or join us in person.

On 17 October, protests against the cost of living ended in rioting in towns across France. The Interior Ministry counted 2,397 arrests and 997 police and gendarmes injured. The right answered at once. The next evening on BFM-TV, the Les Républicains MEP François-Xavier Bellamy turned to Philippe Poutou, our comrade in the NPA, and asked him why he wasn’t in prison. Alexis Corbière, sitting beside them, asked whether the right now wanted to ban demonstrations and put Poutou in jail. Bruno Retailleau, LR’s presidential candidate, blames a “convergence” of the far left and “racailles”, and wants a state of emergency and a new loi anti-casseurs.

On 17 October, protests against the cost of living ended in rioting in towns across France. The Interior Ministry counted 2,397 arrests and 997 police and gendarmes injured. The government answered by looking for someone to blame. According to a Mediapart investigation reported by L’Humanité, officers in the police’s territorial intelligence service say the Interior Ministry asked them in so many words to write that LFI was behind the movement, which they call “objectively false”. LFI is taking the Interior Minister, Laurent Nuñez, to the Cour de justice de la République. Bruno Retailleau, LR’s presidential candidate, blames a “convergence” of the far left and “racailles”, and wants a state of emergency and a new loi anti-casseurs.

It didn’t start on 17 October. On 1 October, while school students were blockading their lycées, Retailleau said that “the question of banning LFI” now arose, calling it a party that “is trying to organise insurrection”. He admitted a ban would be “very difficult in law”, but said he was putting it into public debate. The government accused LFI of encouraging and exploiting the school students’ movement, and the Paris police prefect reported the LFI mayor of Saint-Denis, Bally Bagayoko, to prosecutors for “provocation to commit an offence”. Razmig Keucheyan, Gilbert Achcar, Michael Löwy and Ugo Palheta warned in the piece ACR published on 18 October that the legal framework for banning LFI is already in place, and that a far-right president would only need to “press the button”.

Nobody should treat this as noise. It’s the opening of an argument for repression, and the French state has made that argument before.

We’ve gone back through the Red Mole archive to see how it went last time. The record is long, and it teaches the same lessons each time.

A short history of the bans

Occupation and liberation. The French Trotskyists paid heavily in the war. By the count published in New York in January 1946, nearly thirty members were shot by the Gestapo, died in Auschwitz, Dora and other camps, or were killed by the Vichy militia. Two were among the hostages shot at Châteaubriant in 1941. Marcel Hic, one of the founders of the organisation, died in a camp in 1944. Liberation brought only half-legality. The party’s meetings were broken up, its paper La Vérité was refused legal publication, and its members were arrested again and again. Pierre Frank had already been sentenced in his absence in 1939 and interned on the Isle of Man in 1940, as his obituary in Inprecor records.

The Algerian war. Frank was arrested and convicted again for helping the FLN. Michel Raptis (Pablo), the Fourth International’s secretary, and the Dutch Trotskyist Sal Santen were held for thirteen months in Amsterdam before they came to trial in 1961. The prosecution tried to present their work for the Algerian revolution as ordinary crime. The International said the case was prepared by French, Dutch and German police, with the FBI in the background. A campaign of committees, witnesses and student demonstrations in the streets of Amsterdam turned the hearing round. They got fifteen months, which meant release that September, and the trial became a trial of colonialism.

June 1968. On 12 June, with the general strike ebbing, de Gaulle’s government dissolved the JCR, the PCI and the other organisations of the far left, and banned street demonstrations for the election campaign. Alain Krivine was arrested on 10 July for keeping the JCR going. He was never tried. The state put him into the army instead, as a private. Frank was held for “plotting against the security of the state”.

The ban didn’t work. In April 1969 the JCR and PCI merged to form the Ligue communiste, and Krivine stood for president as a conscript. Five thousand people filled the Mutualité to hear him.

1970. The repression didn’t stop at bans. In 1970 French conscripts were court-martialled at Rennes and Landau for discussing politics in the ranks, and people were charged for pasting up posters for soldiers’ rights. That was the year the loi anti-casseurs arrived, making the organisers of a demonstration answerable for what others did on it.

June 1973. The Ligue called a counter-demonstration against a racist meeting held by the neo-fascist Ordre Nouveau at the Mutualité. The police protected the fascists. Then around a hundred police raided the Ligue’s headquarters at dawn without warrants. They broke down doors, wrecked the bookshop and took away two sacks of documents. Krivine and Pierre Rousset were jailed. The government dissolved the Ligue and Ordre Nouveau on the same day.

The United Secretariat of the Fourth International named the trick at once: “No one has been fooled by the false symmetry invoked by the French government in simultaneously dissolving the Ligue Communiste and the pro-Nazi organization Ordre Nouveau.” [scan] More than two thousand people, and many CGT, CFDT and FEN union branches, signed an appeal that said the same. By dissolving both “and so putting them on the same level”, the government wanted to look as if it was answering public opinion. [scan] The signatories also pointed out that the government had an anti-racism law from 1972 it could have used against Ordre Nouveau. It chose a 1936 law instead, so it could lump the two together.

The government threatened the Ligue’s leaders with the State Security Court, with the loi anti-casseurs, and with charges of attempted murder. Krivine was charged as the organiser of a demonstration, for what happened on it.

Why they do it

Pierre Frank’s analysis, written that summer, still reads as if it was written for this autumn. The government was weak. It had won an election, but the movement it faced kept growing: school students, women defying the abortion law, immigrant workers at Renault, and the Lip workers making and selling watches without a boss. The repression, Frank wrote, was “an operation of a preventive character, aimed at decapitating, before the great trials ahead, the strongest and most vigorous organisation of the far left”. [scan] It was carried out in the belief that it wouldn’t unite the Communist and Socialist parties.

That is the pattern. A weak government facing a rising movement looks for the organisation it can isolate. It pairs that organisation with the far right so that the attack looks even-handed. Then it makes the organisers answer for the street.

Blaming LFI for the school students’ revolt, and the far left for the riots, is that same argument scaled up to a whole party. In 1973, as now, the school students were in the streets first. And Retailleau’s new loi anti-casseurs would revive the very law the Ligue’s defenders denounced in 1973. Talk of banning LFI goes one step further. In 1973 the state dissolved an organisation of a few thousand. A ban on LFI would dissolve the party that won 22% of the vote in the first round of the 2022 presidential election.

What beat it

Unity. The government’s bet in 1973 failed. Within days the whole workers’ movement had come to the Ligue’s defence: the Communist Party, the Socialist Party, the CGT, the CFDT, FO and the teachers’ unions. Even the magistrates’ union protested. Jacques Duclos of the PCF took part in the protest meeting at the Cirque d’Hiver, although the party’s leader, Georges Marchais, had only recently been denouncing “Marcellin-style leftists”. Frank argued that after this it would be very hard for the PCF ever again to say that Trotskyism was outside the workers’ movement.

The rivals of the Ligue came too. In London, Gerry Healy’s Workers Press still called the Ligue “Pabloite”, but it printed an appeal for the whole British labour movement to oppose the ban. A democratic right that you defend only for your friends isn’t a right.

Solidarity abroad. Within three weeks the ban was an international issue. There were demonstrations in fifteen cities in the United States and in Canada and Quebec. Five thousand marched in West Berlin and two thousand in Frankfurt, where Daniel Cohn-Bendit and Rudi Dutschke spoke. In London seventy IMG members occupied the French Tourist Board in Piccadilly while fifty more picketed outside. Then came a picket of the embassy and a march from Hyde Park to the embassy, with speakers promised from IS, Workers Fight, Militant, the Chartists and the Communist Party. John Gollan, the CP’s general secretary, signed the protest letter to President Pompidou. The Ligue came back, first as the Front communiste révolutionnaire for the presidential election of 1974, then as the LCR.

Refusing the frame. In 1973 the Ligue’s defenders refused to argue on the government’s ground. They didn’t spend their time denying violence. They asked why the police had protected a fascist meeting, and why the state had reached for a law that let it treat the two sides as one. Henri Weber, editor of Rouge, reminded Communist Party members in an open letter that the Chamber of Deputies that put Léon Blum in power in 1936 outlawed the Communist Party three years later. Powers taken in the name of order against the right end up being used against the left.

What our comrades are asking for

In 1973 the call came from Paris. The United Secretariat asked for an international united front on 10 July, and within days the IMG had answered it with an occupation, pickets and a petition. Solidarity worked because it answered the call that had been made, in the form it had been made.

The call this time is just as clear. The NPA’s statement of 19 October says the threats of repression “against political organisations like ours, brandished by Nuñez, the right and the far right” will not silence it, and that they “have to be resisted collectively”. It names three dates: the mobilisation against the Rassemblement National’s congress in Orléans on 24 October, the “act II” of 17 October, and the strike that every French union confederation has called for 5 November. LFI, for its part, is taking Nuñez to the Cour de justice de la République over the Mediapart revelations.

So the useful things to do are these:

1. Send solidarity now, and say it in public. Messages from union branches, trades councils, student unions and campaigns to the NPA and to LFI, opposing any ban on either.

2. Spread the Mediapart story. A ministry that asks its intelligence officers to write that a party is behind a revolt it didn’t organise is the story. Most people outside France haven’t heard it.

3. Back 24 October and 5 November. Send greetings to the strike, and be ready to act on whatever the French unions and the French left ask of us on the day.

4. Defend everyone targeted, whatever our disagreements with them. Many of us have real arguments with Mélenchon and LFI. That’s beside the point. In 1973 the PCF had spent years denouncing the far left, and it still defended Krivine.

For the British left: it isn’t only happening over there

The same methods cross borders. The week Krivine was in jail in 1973, Tariq Ali was arrested in London during a protest against Portugal’s dictator Caetano. In 1976 Franco’s political police seized Krivine in Madrid, held him for thirty-six hours without charge and deported him. A government that treats the left as a security problem doesn’t keep the idea at home, and its friends abroad learn from it.

Four things should worry us here.

Organisers held liable for the street. The loi anti-casseurs that Retailleau wants back made organisers answer for what others did on a demonstration. Britain has been moving the same way. The Public Order Act 2023 created new protest offences and widened police powers to restrict demonstrations that cause “serious disruption”. The question to ask of every new power is the 1973 one: who will it be used against first?

Proscription. Retailleau admitted a ban on LFI would be “very difficult in law”. In Britain the government has already proscribed a direct-action group, Palestine Action, under terrorism law, and people have been arrested for holding signs supporting it. Once that line has been crossed for one group, it is easier to cross for the next. We should oppose it for groups whose tactics we would never choose, for the same reason the PCF had to defend the Ligue.

The false symmetry. In 1973 Paris banned the Ligue and Ordre Nouveau together. In June, Nuñez moved against a far-right group and a far-left group on the same day. British governments have their own version, in an official definition of “extremism” that puts the far right and parts of the left in one frame. Whenever the left is paired with fascism to justify a measure, say so straight away.

The second generation. Retailleau wants to strip “binationals” of French nationality. The Lega wants to withhold citizenship from young people born in Italy. Britain already has the power to deprive people of citizenship, and has used it. In all three countries the children of migrants are the ones whose belonging is made conditional. Defending them can’t be left to the communities under attack.

None of this means importing French debates in place of work here. It means seeing that the fight over LFI and the NPA is a fight over rights we need too, and that every bit of solidarity we send makes it harder to do the same thing here.

That is why we should demand, here as in France:

• no ban on LFI, and no dissolution of any organisation of the workers’ movement;

• no prosecution of anyone for what they say about the protests, starting with dropping the referral of LFI’s Bally Bagayoko;

• no new loi anti-casseurs, and no holding protest organisers liable for what others do on a demonstration;

• no stripping of citizenship from the children of migrants, in France, Italy or Britain.

They have tried this before. It failed when the left stood together, and when comrades abroad answered the call.

Sources. Every item below was proofread against its scan on 20 October 2026, and the corrected text is on the archive site linked.

• E.R. Fenwick, “Politics of the International: The French Trotskyists”, The New International, January 1946 (Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line)

• Obituary of Pierre Frank, Inprecor (French) 172, 30 April 1984

• “The International Campaign to Free Pablo and Santen”, Fourth International 12, Winter 1960–61

• “The Amsterdam Trial”, Fourth International 13, Summer 1961

• “Street-fighting years: a chronology of an explosive build-up”, International Viewpoint 142, 30 May 1988

• Richard Wood, “An Interview with Alain Krivine”, The International 2:6, June 1969

• Daniel Elkan, “French repression terror”, The Red Mole 1:4, 1 May 1970

• “Ban is concern of labour movement”, Workers Press 1112, 30 June 1973

• Dave Bailey, “Lift the ban on French Trotskyists”, Red Weekly 10, 6 July 1973

• Red Weekly 12, 20 July 1973: “Racist jibes as Tariq Ali arrested”; the international campaign in defence of the Communist League; “Communist League: Statement from FI”

• Henri Weber, “United Front of Workers Must Answer Regime’s Repression” (open letter to Communist Party members from Rouge), Intercontinental Press 1129, 30 July 1973, pp. 923–925 [scan]

• United Secretariat of the Fourth International, “Call for International United Front to Defend French Trotskyists”, 10 July 1973, Intercontinental Press 1129, 30 July 1973, pp. 925–927 [scan]

• Pierre Frank, “La dissolution de la Ligue communiste et la situation politique en France”, Quatrième Internationale n.s. 7–8, May–August 1973 [scan]

• “Appel”, Quatrième Internationale n.s. 11–12, November–December 1973, p. 42 [scan]

• “Vive le Front communiste révolutionnaire !”, Quatrième Internationale n.s. 14, April–May 1974

• “Krivine arrested in Madrid”, Red Weekly 172, 28 October 1976

• Razmig Keucheyan, Gilbert Achcar, Michael Löwy and Ugo Palheta, “France: Revolutionaries inside the Melenchon campaign”, AntiCapitalist Resistance, 18 October 2026 (translated from Contretemps)

• Le Monde with AFP, “Blocage des lycées : Bruno Retailleau propose « l’interdiction de LFI »”, 1 October 2026

• AFP, “France : Retailleau met en cause les binationaux violents qui pillent”, Le Matin, 19 October 2026

• French Interior Ministry figures for 17 October, Trend, 19 October 2026

• “Le gouvernement accusé d’avoir menti pour relier la gauche aux dégradations du 17 octobre”, L’Humanité, 20 October 2026 (reporting Mediapart, 19 October)

This morning the Canary announced that it is closed “for the foreseeable future”. After eleven years, the statement says, a year of attacks has made the operation unsustainable “both financially and operationally”. It names two causes: Lloyds debanking it, and former employees “spreading malicious lies on social media”. It promises to publish, this week, its account of what really happened.

We don’t intend to adjudicate the second cause. The dispute between the Canary and its former staff goes back at least to 2022, when staff took over the company and made serious allegations about how it had been run. Readers can weigh both sides when both sides are in. A socialist paper that takes a publication’s word against its workers, or its workers’ word against the publication, before the evidence is out isn’t doing anyone a favour.

The first cause is a different matter. It is a matter of record, it is not unique to the Canary, and it is aimed at all of us.

What happened

At the end of June, Lloyds closed the account the Canary had held for nearly a decade and kept back what the Canary called “a substantial amount” of its money. Lloyds said only that it does not comment on individual customers. The Canary had launched a daily print edition two weeks earlier, and it suspended the edition straight away. It moved its business to Metro Bank. On 4 September Metro froze that account too, again without giving a reason, and the Canary suspended operations. Some staff went unpaid for August. The day before, Bank of Scotland, which is part of the Lloyds group, closed George Galloway’s accounts after 39 years.

So the Canary did what the usual advice says. It found a second bank. The second bank did the same thing as the first.

It isn’t new, and it isn’t only the high street

Palestine solidarity has been the test case for twenty years. In 2005 Alliance & Leicester closed the Palestine Solidarity Campaign’s account. In 2015 the Co-operative Bank closed or restricted the accounts of about twenty Palestine organisations, PSC branches among them, and blamed due diligence on payments to “high-risk” places. Last year Virgin Money froze Greater Manchester Friends of Palestine’s account with more than £10,000 in it.

The case the left should study most carefully, though, is Unity Trust. Unity Trust is the bank the labour movement built for itself. Trade unions and the Co-op set it up in the mid-1980s, and our own archive finds it in 1986 being consulted over a Labour rally paper during the Wapping dispute (Socialist Action 142, 30 May 1986). Unions, campaigns and charities have banked there for forty years because it was ours. In June 2025 it froze the Scottish Palestine Solidarity Campaign’s account. The reason given was a donation link to Palestine Action on the SPSC website. SPSC took the link down once Palestine Action was proscribed. More than seventy unions, charities and community groups called for the account to be restored, and as far as we can find it is still frozen. Unity Trust’s statement could have come from Lloyds: there are “a variety of reasons why we may be required to, or decide to, suspend or close an account to meet legal and regulatory obligations”.

That is the point. A bank with a social purpose is still a bank. It is regulated by the same Financial Conduct Authority, it is bound by the same anti-money-laundering and counter-terrorism rules, and its compliance department reads the same “adverse media” screening reports as everyone else’s. When the state widens the definition of what is risky, whether by proscribing a direct-action group or by treating anything near Gaza as a high-risk payment, the ethical bank’s compliance officer sees the same flag as Lloyds does. Ownership determines who gets the profits. It does not determine who writes the rulebook.

None of this is a reason to avoid Unity Trust, Triodos or the building societies. Some of them may well be better to deal with than Lloyds. Triodos, for example, comes top in most ethical bank rankings and offers accounts to charities and businesses. But read its terms and you find the same clauses: it can close an account where it suspects a breach of law, regulation, sanctions or money-laundering rules, or where a customer no longer meets its eligibility criteria. The left press should look harder at the progressive banks before it relies on them. Ask before you open the account how the bank treats lawful political campaigning, payments connected to Gaza and adverse media, and get the answer in writing. And don’t confuse a shared ethos with a guarantee.

What a left publication should do

Take the risk seriously before it arrives. The Canary is a reader-funded outlet with paid staff and a print run. For a publication like that, a frozen account is not a nuisance. It is an existential threat, because payroll, the printer and the distributor are all paid from one place. Any left publication bigger than a mailing list should have a written plan for the day its main account is frozen. Where does money come in? Who gets paid first? How long can it keep going?

Spread the money, and spread it properly. The Canary had a second bank and lost both. Two accounts in the same jurisdiction, under the same regulator and run through the same screening vendors, don’t give you two independent risks. They give you one risk twice. Real diversification means accounts that won’t be frozen for the same reason on the same day.

Consider holding deposits overseas. For a publication with a sizeable reserve, that means a properly opened account with a bank in another jurisdiction: Ireland, the Netherlands, Germany or Scandinavia. A decision taken in London does not automatically reach it. This is not a way round UK law, and it shouldn’t be treated as one. A UK-registered organisation is still bound by proscription and sanctions law wherever its money sits, and a foreign bank does its own customer checks, which may well pick up the same British press cuttings. The UK deposit guarantee does not cover money held abroad. There are currency costs, and the accounts have to show up properly in the books. But the purpose is not to hide anything. It is to make sure one compliance officer’s decision can’t silence a publication by the end of the week. A reserve that pays the wages for three months while you fight a closure is the difference between a setback and a shutdown.

Don’t forget the payment rails. A reader-funded publication’s subscription income passes through card processors, platforms and donation services. Each of them can make the same decision a bank can, and some make it faster. Get the same written assurances, and have a second route in place.

Run a clean shop. This is the boring part, and it matters most. Publish your constitution and your officers. Keep accounts that can be audited. Hold donations to a strict policy. Keep campaigning content separate from fundraising links. Don’t link or pass money to proscribed organisations, however strongly you oppose the proscription. Oppose it in your editorials, not through your donate button. The SPSC case turned on one link.

A democratic demand, not a private grievance

Since April, new rules require banks to give ninety days’ notice before closing an account and, with exceptions, to give reasons. The exceptions include the anti-money-laundering and counter-terrorism grounds that banks invoke in exactly these cases. As drafted, the rules apply to contracts made on or after 28 April 2026, which would leave out an account held for a decade. The labour movement should demand that the protection covers every account, that a freeze for “regulatory obligations” has to be justified to an independent body within days and not months, and that money a bank is holding is never used to close a publication down before any wrongdoing has been shown.

That demand should be made for everyone. When Coutts closed Nigel Farage’s account in 2023, the left mostly enjoyed it. The right did not return the favour this summer. The Free Speech Union offered the Canary help, and few others on the right did. But a democratic right that you defend only for your friends isn’t a right. It’s a faction. The trade unions that own a stake in Unity Trust are in a better position than anyone to lead that campaign, starting with their own bank and SPSC’s money.

The left press has been here before. For a long time the weak point was the printer who wouldn’t print, or the wholesaler who wouldn’t carry the paper. Publications survived by owning presses, building their own distribution and never relying on a single supplier who could say no. The bank account is that weak point now. The Canary says it is down but not yet out. Whether it comes back or not, the rest of us should be learning the lesson now, while our accounts are still open.

Sources: Canary on the Lloyds closure, 30 June 2026; Press Gazette on the print edition and the Metro freeze; New Arab; Press Gazette on the 2022 staff takeover; Third Sector on SPSC and Unity Trust; Third Sector on the Co-op closures; Byline Times on Virgin Money and GMFP; Triodos business and charity terms; HM Treasury, contract termination rule changes; Socialist Action 142 (30 May 1986).

The Together Alliance Summit meets in two sessions: Manchester last weekend and London. The London Summit takes place on Saturday, 24 October 2026, at 20 Bedford Way, London, WC1H 0AL, doors opening at 10:00 AM. I write more about the Allinace in an article posted by Anticapitalist Resistance on Tuesday 20th October.

It was Sunday morning before the Workers’ Liberty leaflet (photo below) got a proper reading, fished out of the bottom of the bag of ACR broadsheets where I’d stuffed it after swapping my leaflet for theirs in the tea room at the first-ever Together Alliance Summit. One sheet, printed both sides, headed ‘For a working-class and united front response to the far right!’ and written for the Together Alliance summits in Manchester and London. Most of what it says about the alliance is right, and its remedy, when it finally arrives, turns out to be the AWL.

What the AWL gets right

The diagnosis survived Saturday intact. The leaflet complains that the organisers promise the summits will be about “building power and planning action” and “have not, however, said these summits will have ‘decision making’ or ‘democracy’”. It says the unions have spent years “outsourcing their anti-far right work to Stand Up to Racism”, and that activists hand general secretaries platforms when they should be holding them to account. Then Kevin Courtney, the alliance’s interim chair, stood up in the afternoon workshop on local alliances and explained that Together is not a membership organisation, that “you cannot individually join”, and that the charities inside it mean he cannot say “don’t vote Reform” when he speaks as its chair. He can say “vote for love, hope, unity”. “That is a problem,” someone said from the floor. A retired trade unionist who had come, in his words, “to find how I can get support in dealing with the racism that I face on a daily basis” was handed a list of affiliates to join instead. The AWL could have taken the minutes.

On confrontation the leaflet goes further, and starts to slip. “Together Alliance/Stand Up To Racism mobilisations,” it says, “continue to avoid the necessary physical confrontations with the far right, and rely on the police to manage safety-distanced demonstrations.” That slash does a lot of work. In the activism workshop Nahella Ashraf of Greater Manchester Stand Up To Racism said that if Patriot Platform comes to Salford, as it has threatened to, “we will have to have a counter demo, even if we think it’s going to be a small number. I don’t think we can ignore them.” Courtney drew the line himself: Stand Up To Racism can organise the counter-demonstration, and a local Together alliance may feel its charitable objectives keep it away. The obvious reading is that the AWL has caught the alliance out. It has, but only the alliance. The division of labour runs between the charities and the campaigns inside it, and a leaflet that fuses them with a punctuation mark has spared itself the trouble of saying which affiliate it means, or why Stand Up To Racism, whose anti-fascism officer the leaflet itself names as the SWP’s national secretary, is the one still promising to turn up in Salford.

Must a united front fight for socialism?

“Our guiding framework here,” the leaflet says, “is the united front policy of the communist movement at the start of the 20th century,” and it reaches for Trotsky in the 1930s, “a distinctive emergency initiative”. So far, so orthodox. On the back page the definition arrives: the united front “is about mobilising the maximum number of people from the workers’ movement, to fight for class struggle socialism as an alternative to the far right.” Trotsky’s version, written for the German Communists on 8 December 1931, reads differently. “No common platform with the Social Democracy, or with the leaders of the German trade unions, no common publications, banners, placards! March separately, but strike together! Agree only how to strike, whom to strike, and when to strike!” The agreement is narrow because the parties to it disagree about nearly everything else. In Trotsky's version nobody has to agree about socialism. Each side keeps its own programme and argues for it under its own banner. The AWL writes socialism into the purpose of the front itself. It never says you must sign up to take part, and its local committees are to be "democratic and non-sectarian". But a front whose stated aim is "class struggle socialism" has settled in advance the argument Trotsky left each side to make for itself, and the programme box printed underneath ends up reading like the front's terms. That edges towards a recruitment pitch, or what the tradition would call ultimatism, though the AWL stops short of making it a condition.

Awkward for both sides

Which is where the Together Alliance becomes awkward for both sides. Formally it is the nearer thing to 1931: organisations that keep their own banners and their own disagreements, as Courtney told the summit, agreeing on a target. The temptation on the left is to call it a popular front, because Friends of the Earth, Amnesty International and the Ealing Women’s Rugby Club sit beside the unions. In October 1978 Socialist Challenge ran a strip, ‘The Bad Taste of Wally Warp’, whose sectarian anti-hero explains that the Anti-Nazi League is obviously a popular front, and the joke has kept. The label does not fit. A popular front binds the workers’ organisations to a bourgeois party’s programme for government, and Together has no programme and wants no government. Its defect sits in the clause Trotsky added at the end of that same passage. Such an agreement can be made “even with the devil himself, with his grandmother”, he wrote. “On one condition, not to bind one’s hands.” Charity law binds the alliance’s hands before it starts. It cannot name Reform. It may not be able to join a counter-demonstration, and those are the two things a united front against the far right exists to do, so the alliance’s answer, that its breadth will send people on to the affiliates that can, is a bet that 28 March repeats itself in Salford on a wet Saturday with a small crowd.

The programme box is where the leaflet stops being about the summit. Its bullet points run from abolishing the monarchy to open borders and a Workers’ Government, and one of them reads: “Oppose nationalism in all its guises: patriotism is nationalism by another name.” In a leaflet that sets out to defend Muslim communities and migrants, a blanket ban on nationalism throws away the distinction the Fourth International has always drawn between the nationalism of the oppressor and that of the oppressed. And yet the bullet had a target in the hall. Andrea Egan, Unison’s general secretary, closed her speech by telling the summit that if we are proud of Britain, the Britain we have grown up in, now is the time to defend it, and defend “a multicultural way of life”. A multicultural ‘Britain’, but a flag all the same. The FI’s distinction was built for Algeria and Ireland, not for a general secretary taking ‘Britain’ back from Tommy Robinson, and whether a socialist can refuse her version without refusing the people in the hall she was speaking to is a question the AWL answers too fast and this paper has not answered at all, though the answer probably starts somewhere near the difference between a country and the state that claims it, which is

Elsewhere the politics arrive unannounced. “Organising to get Labour to reverse the cuts is necessary,” the leaflet says, “not least because there is no single left-wing/socialist force that is a viable alternative to Labour.” Your Party goes unmentioned. So does the Green Party of England and Wales. A reader cannot tell what test they fail because none is set, and the sentence passes off the AWL’s whole orientation to Labour as a finding about the state of the left.

Even I have to defend the SWP on this

The history box has its own trouble. It dates the Anti-Nazi League carnival at Brockwell Park to October 1978; the carnival was on 24 September. Its Lewisham is won by “the radical movements”, and the SWP’s own part in the day goes missing. But on the point the box exists to make, the choice between Brockwell Park and Brick Lane, the AWL’s tradition has a better claim than ours. Socialist Challenge, the paper of the International Marxist Group, answered its own question on 28 September 1978 with a back-page headline, “Were we right to go to Brixton? YES! YES! YES!”, above a standfirst complaining that “every sectarian group in town jumped on the bandwagon to denounce the ANL for not diverting to the East End the forces they themselves could not mobilise in a month of Sundays”. The same issue’s report from Brick Lane recorded that the only speaker there to defend the decision to carry on with the carnival was Jonathan Silberman of the IMG. A fortnight later the letters page ran under ‘After Carnival 2’. Comrades in Leicester called the paper’s failure to call for a full mobilisation in the East End “a serious mistake”, and an Anti-Nazi League activist in Leeds objected to its description of those who went to Brick Lane as “sectarian groups”. The readers got it right before the editors did.

Time to get TUFF

Then, in a box beside the programme, the leaflet answers the question the summit could not. TUFF describes itself there as “a network of trade union activists committed to forcing union leaders to turn out their members on anti-far right mobilisations and get activists in workplaces and local branches active on defending migrants and winning over Reform and Restore voters to better, socialist political alternatives.” No programme box. No Workers’ Government. A target, a method and a constituency, and a door an individual can walk through, which is more than Together offered the man in the workshop. On its own site the network has grown a second T, Trade and Tenants Unions Fighting the Far Right, set up in January 2026, and it organises the tenants Courtney and Gawain Little kept invoking from 1930s Stepney as well as the branches. Its open letter to the TUC asks the unions to lead the counter-mobilisations themselves and to recruit defensive stewards from their own ranks. The site names no founders. ACR activists support it, and the AWL promotes it, which means the AWL is putting its name to something closer to Trotsky’s agreement of 1931 than its own leaflet’s theory allows, and the two sit on the same sheet of paper without either noticing the other.

London is next Saturday. Courtney’s advice to the man who could not join amounted to joining someone else, and for trade unionists there is a better version of it: get the branch affiliated, and the branch can send delegates, move motions in a local alliance and ask in public why it will not name Reform. Whether a Together alliance built out of affiliated branches would ever vote to do what its charities cannot, or would simply split along the line Courtney drew in Manchester, is not something anyone at the summit was asked to decide.

Trade unionist or tenants’ activist? Join the TUFF mailing list at tuff.network for its monthly meetings, sign its open letter to the TUC, and ask your branch or trades council to send a representative. Then take a motion to the same branch to affiliate to the Together Alliance and send delegates to its local alliance. ACR activists are involved; in Greater Manchester, contact @acrmanchester on Instagram or acr@redmole.org.

In April 1918 the new Soviet government signed an agreement promising the Academy of Sciences its autonomy. Lenin spent his last years insisting that a backward country had to learn from the bourgeois specialists it had inherited, and could not improvise a 'proletarian science' of its own. Bukharin answered Pavlov's public attacks on Marxism with courtesy, and the two became friends. Then came the grain procurement crisis of 1928, forced-march industrialisation and 'party-mindedness in science'. Genetics took the worst of it. With Stalin behind him, Lysenko drove out Vavilov, who died in Saratov prison in 1943, and did damage to Soviet agriculture that lasted well beyond Stalin. This article from the Fourth Internationalist magazine in Italian, Bandiera Rossa, printed in the Castilian edition of Inprecor in 1991, traces how the Soviet state got from the first position to the second. Our translation to English is, we think, the first.

The development of Soviet ecology must be situated within the broader context of the relationship between science and power in the USSR from 1917 onwards. For some time now, with regard to this issue, the most serious historiography has drawn a clear distinction between an initial phase (which we might call ‘Leninist’) and the phase of science’s total submission to bureaucratic power, dating from the early 1930s and hence from the growing ascendancy of the men and methods of the Kremlin’s new master within scientific institutions as well.

A clear expression of Lenin’s approach to the problem of the relationship between science and power was the agreement signed in April 1918 between Lunacharsky, People’s Commissar for Education, and Sergei Oldenburg [1], Permanent Secretary of the Academy of Sciences, whereby the new revolutionary government undertook to respect the autonomy of scientific and university institutions; whilst these institutions, for their part, agreed to cooperate loyally with the new government (even in the late 1920s, party members represented a tiny minority amongst researchers and state officials).

Learning…

Lenin’s position (shared by Trotsky) stemmed from the firm conviction that it was not possible to improvise a new ‘proletarian science’, as other Bolsheviks (notably Bogdanov) attempted to do, a science set in opposition to the old ‘bourgeois science’ on the basis of an utterly mechanistic and abstract interpretation of Marxism. At the heart of Lenin’s concerns lay the country’s tremendous backwardness; for this reason, on the one hand, it was necessary to call upon the so-called ‘bourgeois specialists’ (granting them certain material privileges which stood in clear contrast to the spirit of the revolution), and on the other, it was necessary to undertake a major effort in basic education in order to enable millions of workers and peasants to become conscious agents in the construction of the new society.

‘For a start, we should be satisfied with real bourgeois culture; for a start we should be glad to dispense with the crude types of pre-bourgeois culture, i.e., bureaucratic culture or serf culture, etc.,’ wrote Lenin in ‘Better Fewer, But Better’ [2], an article from 1923; therefore, ‘we must at all costs set out, first, to learn, secondly, to learn, and thirdly, to learn, and then see to it that learning shall not remain a dead letter, or a fashionable catch-phrase (and we should admit in all frankness that this happens very often with us), that learning shall really become part of our very being, that it shall actually and fully become a constituent element of our social life’ [3]. It was therefore necessary for the new State to succeed in mobilising, alongside itself and in the interests of the immense tasks that lay ahead, the maximum of the available scientific and cultural forces – which had been inherited from the preceding phase and which were often deeply imbued with conservative and reactionary ideologies. Moreover, progress in this field could not be the result of voluntarist interventions, as in the political and military spheres, but could only be achieved through long and patient work that had its own means and methods – namely, intellectual verification and the lessons of experience – within a framework of cultural pluralism and research autonomy.

When, in January 1922, a group of Marxist researchers (including Deborin) founded the journal Pod znamenem marksizma [4] (Under the Banner of Marxism) with the intention of making it the ‘organ of militant materialism’, Lenin sent a communication (which appeared in the second issue of the journal) in which he outlined the priorities on which the cultural struggle should be based. It was necessary to secure ‘an alliance with consistent materialists who do not belong to the Communist Party’, and above all ‘an alliance with those modern natural scientists who incline towards materialism’. Communist researchers were not to distance themselves from non-communists. A ‘modern’ – that is to say, ‘dialectical’ – form of materialism was required, and to this end Lenin emphasised the importance of studying Hegel from a materialist standpoint. Furthermore, particular attention had to be paid to the natural sciences, which were ‘progressing so fast and … undergoing such a profound revolutionary upheaval in all spheres’ that they could not ‘possibly dispense with philosophical deductions’ [5].

The Pavlov Episode

The incident involving the great physiologist Pavlov was characteristic of the climate that prevailed during those years. In 1924, Pavlov gave a series of lectures at the Leningrad Military Academy, attacking Marxism and, personally and in a particularly harsh manner, Bukharin. The Communist leader responded to the scientist with great courtesy: he rejected his attacks on Marxism but reaffirmed the importance of Pavlov’s scientific contributions, and emphasised his respect for the academic’s work: ‘Scientists such as these,’ wrote Bukharin, ‘regardless of their subjective intentions, are working for the very same cause for which we, the revolutionary Marxists, are working.’ Following this polemical exchange between the octogenarian researcher [6] and the young revolutionary leader (who, incidentally, was passionate about biology), a curious relationship of friendship and mutual esteem developed [7].

Towards the end of the 1920s, the atmosphere deteriorated rapidly as the clash between the Stalinist faction and the Bukharinist ‘right’ came to a head. At the heart of the conflict lay differing views on economic policy. The country was once again facing a critical period. Following the successes of the early years of the NEP (the New Economic Policy launched in 1921), it became increasingly clear that it was impossible to continue relying on the dynamics of a fundamentally private economy (particularly in agriculture). The need to promote voluntary collectivisation amongst the peasantry had already been highlighted in 1923 by the Left Opposition; but this position had been defeated. The line summarised by Bukharin’s slogan ‘Enrich yourselves!’ – directed at the peasants – had prevailed; that is to say, the line of reliance on the spontaneous forces set in motion by the NEP. However, the situation came to a head ‘with the grain procurement crisis’ [8], when the spectre of a serious food supply shortfall in the cities began to loom, partly because the peasants were hoarding their surpluses rather than selling them to the State. ‘An urgent solution was sought in early 1928’ [9], and it was implemented through administrative measures, in Stalin’s characteristic manner: the decision was taken that the first Five-Year Plan (October 1928) should establish forced-march industrialisation at completely unrealistic tempos; the collectivisation of the countryside rapidly took the form of a tragic civil war waged (by the bureaucratic regime) against the mass of peasants (under the pretext of fighting the wealthiest, the kulaks), the consequences of which were disastrous for Soviet agriculture for a long period.

A Cyclone

Against this backdrop, ‘a cyclone of immense proportions’ [10] also bore down on the scientific and cultural world. The fact is that the monopoly of absolute power inevitably entails the imposition of uniformity of thought in all spheres. From that moment on, ‘party-mindedness in science’ was openly theorised, and the existence of the dichotomy – which Lenin had once rejected – between ‘proletarian science’ and ‘bourgeois science’ was asserted. This opened the way for direct interference by the political authorities in the very heart of scientific and philosophical controversies [11]. Secondly, the modernisation projects into which Stalin was – recklessly – launching the country required the docile and subordinate collaboration of technical and scientific cadres. The criterion of ‘practice’, in the name of which this or that approach was promoted or excommunicated, had above all one meaning: immediate acquiescence to the Kremlin’s diktat; it was not for scientists to question the objectives set.

However, even this limited autonomy was extremely precarious – as the fate of genetics demonstrates – given that Stalin did not hesitate to meddle at will in theoretical matters of which he understood absolutely nothing, and it was his word that decided what was to be regarded as proven and what was not.

By the early 1930s, Soviet genetics was already producing results of international significance.

Much credit in this regard was due to Nikolai Ivanovich Vavilov, director of the Institute of Genetics at the Academy of Sciences and founder of the Lenin All-Union Academy of Agricultural Sciences. In the early 1920s, with the support of the Government, Vavilov promoted the establishment of the All-Union Institute of Plant Industry (VIR) [12], which quickly became a unique institution of its kind, gaining worldwide renown. Plants were collected at the VIR from every corner of the USSR and, from 1925 onwards, from all over the world, with the aim of studying their adaptation to different climates in order to improve seed selection (the seed was then supplied to all the country’s agricultural organisations) and to carry out theoretical research based on Mendelian genetics. Vavilov even made original discoveries in the course of this work, such as the existence of centres of origin for cultivated plants, or the parallelism of variations among related species and genera (the law of homologous series in variation). However, the validity of Mendelian theory was the subject of controversy for essentially ideological reasons: for some, the immutability of genes was at odds with dialectical materialism. Even so, the fact remains that Vavilov’s position only began to be seriously challenged in the mid-1930s. The movement opposing Mendelian genetics found its leader in the agronomist Trofim Denisovich Lysenko, who owed his notoriety to his method for accelerating seed ripening, discovered almost by chance. He had the backing of one of the most fiery theorists of party-mindedness in science, Isaak Prezent. Claiming to base his work on the empirical findings of a self-taught plant breeder, Ivan Michurin, whom he venerated (Michurin died in 1935), Lysenko sought to challenge Vavilov with a new form of genetics. In reality, what he did was to reproduce old Lamarckian ideas regarding the direct influence of the environment on the production of mutations in organisms and on the inheritance of acquired characteristics.

Stalin’s favour enabled Lysenko to have Vavilov removed from his post; Vavilov was arrested on false charges and sentenced to death in 1940 [13]; he died in prison in January 1943 (he was posthumously rehabilitated in 1955). Some of his colleagues met the same fate. Lysenko, by contrast, completely dominated the scene throughout the Stalinist era. Although he was ousted during the first phase of de-Stalinisation, he nevertheless managed to be back in the saddle by 1961, only to be removed once and for all in 1965, following Khrushchev’s downfall; not without having first caused irreparable damage to Soviet agriculture. The man’s whole style is summed up in the letter he had the participants at the 1948 session [14] of the Academy of Agricultural Sciences send to Stalin, in which the Kremlin tyrant is grotesquely described as ‘leader of the people and coryphaeus of advanced science’ [15].

Bandiera Rossa. Spanish translation by Miquel Novajra; English translation by redmole.org.

Notes

1. Translator’s note: Sergei Fyodorovich Oldenburg (1863–1934), orientalist and permanent secretary of the Academy of Sciences. The Spanish text spells him ‘Oldemburg’.

2. Translator’s note: Lenin’s quotations in this article reached Inprecor through Italian. They are given here from the standard English edition of Lenin’s Collected Works, vol. 33.

3. Note 1 in the original: Quoted in Silvano Tagliagambe, Scienza, filosofia, politica in Unione Sovietica 1924–1939 (Milan: Feltrinelli, 1978), pp. 26–27. Lenin’s article is also an appendix to the Italian edition of Moshe Lewin, L’ultima battaglia di Lenin (Bari: Laterza, 1969), pp. 174–190; in English, Lenin’s Last Struggle (1968).

4. Translator’s note: Lenin’s contribution was ‘On the Significance of Militant Materialism’ (March 1922), Collected Works, vol. 33.

5. Note 2 in the original: Tagliagambe, Scienza, filosofia, politica, pp. 87–89.

6. Translator’s note: So in the original; Pavlov, born in 1849, was 75 in 1924.

7. Note 3 in the original: The episode is recounted by Roy Medvedev and Stephen Cohen, and in Antonio Moscato, Intellettuali e potere in URSS (1917–1956) (Lecce: Milella, 1986), pp. 28–31.

8. Translator’s note: The Spanish text has ‘the crisis of accumulations’, a literal rendering of the Italian crisi degli ammassi: the crisis in state grain procurement in the winter of 1927–28.

9. Note 4 in the original: Giuseppe Boffa, Storia dell’Unione Sovietica 1928–1941 (L’Unità, 1990), p. 11.

10. Note 5 in the original: The phrase is Tagliagambe’s, Scienza, filosofia, politica, p. 140.

11. Note 6 in the original: Among the first to ‘pay the price’ were the ‘dialecticians’, or the group that formed around Deborin, which between 1929 and 1930 enjoyed temporary hegemony in the fields of philosophy and the natural sciences. In December 1930, Stalin personally accused Deborin and his school of ‘Menshevising idealism’; immediately afterwards (January 1931) came the Central Committee’s condemnation of the movement’s journals and the administrative measures taken by the advocates of party-mindedness in science.

12. Translator’s note: The All-Union Institute of Plant Industry, so named from 1930; the Spanish text gives ‘VIRV’.

13. Translator’s note: Vavilov was arrested in August 1940 and sentenced to death in July 1941. The sentence was commuted in 1942, and he died in Saratov prison in January 1943.

14. Translator’s note: The August 1948 session of the Lenin All-Union Academy of Agricultural Sciences (VASKhNIL), at which Lysenko had genetics outlawed.

15. Note 7 in the original: The letter is printed in Silvano Tagliagambe, Scienza e marxismo in URSS (Turin: Loescher, 1979). On the Lysenko affair, see Dominique Lecourt, Proletarian Science? The Case of Lysenko (London: New Left Books, 1977), first published in French in 1976; and Zhores Medvedev, The Rise and Fall of T. D. Lysenko (New York: Columbia University Press, 1969). On Stalinism and the sciences, see also Roy Medvedev, Let History Judge (1971).

On 4 October the Green Party conference in Brighton passed a motion titled “Zionism is Racism“ by 1,022 votes to 813. The party now declares itself anti-Zionist. The reaction from outside was predictable. The Board of Deputies called the Greens an extremist party, MPs reported the party to the equalities watchdog, and Labour, as we argued last Friday, would now rather govern with Tories than with Greens.

The reaction on the left has been a second, quieter argument. Was the motion ultra-left? The word is being used in local parties, in Green Left and in the groups around it. People who agree about nearly everything else are using it to mean quite different things. Some mean that the motion was wrong. Some mean it was badly timed. Some mean it will cost votes. Some mean only that Labour and the press dislike it.

Jewish Voice for Liberation has run two useful round-ups of the argument: one mostly from supporters of the motion, and a second from Jewish and Green critics of it. The second notes how much both sides share: Israel is an apartheid state, and the party should back boycott, divestment and sanctions and an arms embargo. In JVL’s words, “The argument is about strategy”.

This post does not argue that conference was right or wrong. It argues about the word. Used carelessly, “ultra-left” ends an argument that the left in the Green Party needs to have properly.

What did “ultra-left” mean?

The term has a precise history, and it is not “a view most people reject”.

When Lenin wrote “Left-Wing” Communism in 1920, he did not attack the German and British lefts for their goals. He attacked their tactics. They refused to work in “reactionary” trade unions and refused to stand for parliament. He answered that revolutionaries “must absolutely work wherever the masses are to be found“. Parliament might be obsolete to the communists, but “we must not regard what is obsolete to us as something obsolete to a class“.

Trotsky made the same distinction fifteen years later in “Sectarianism, Centrism and the Fourth International“:

It is not enough to create a correct program. It is necessary that the working class accept it. But the sectarian, in the nature of things, comes to a stop upon the first half of the task.

The Transitional Programme lists the symptoms. Sectarians refuse to fight for partial demands. They “remain indifferent to the inner struggle within reformist organizations”. They are “capable of differentiating between but two colors: red and black.”

Socialist Outlook put the point plainly in 1989. Sectarianism, it said, “is a term to describe the relationship“ of a would-be Marxist organisation to the mass of the working class. It describes a relationship, not the content of a position. Ultra-leftism takes four recognisable forms:

• ultimatism, where agreement with your programme is the price of joint action;

• treating a propaganda point as an agitational slogan, as if the masses already held it;

• abstaining from real movements because they are impure;

• a minority substituting itself for a movement that does not yet exist.

By that test, unpopularity is irrelevant. Trotsky said so himself: “Coming from opportunists, the accusation of sectarianism is most often a compliment.“

Would opposing apartheid in 1948 have been ultra-left?

Suppose the Attlee government had called apartheid racist in 1948, when the National Party took power, and pressed for an embargo. It would have been out of step with most British voters and with most of its own cabinet. It would have been right.

What Labour actually did was the opposite. In 1950 it exiled Seretse Khama from Bechuanaland to placate Pretoria and Salisbury, because he had married a white Englishwoman. The Boycott Movement was founded in London in June 1959 as a minority cause. Even after Labour won in 1964, the Anti-Apartheid Movement found that the change of government made little difference to the refusal to impose sanctions. The Fourth International’s press was calling to boycott the apartheid regime long before that became respectable. Nobody now calls the early boycotters ultra-left. They were a minority who built a movement, not a minority who demanded the movement agree with them first.

The family is another example. The Communist Manifesto calls for the “Abolition of the family!“, and notes that even radicals flare up at the proposal. In 1991, Socialist Outlook argued for it against its own readers’ letters. Holding it is not ultra-left. Raising it as an immediate demand would be, and so would refusing to back a childcare campaign that did not adopt it. Trotsky’s correction in The Revolution Betrayed is the transitional method in one line: “You cannot ‘abolish’ the family; you have to replace it.“ The demands are socialised childcare and collective provision. The goal is argued for through them.

Is popularity a defence, then?

No, and this cuts the other way. If unpopularity cannot make a position ultra-left, popularity cannot clear it either.

That matters because “most Greens support it” is the commonest defence of the motion, and the evidence is thinner than it sounds. No poll of Green Party members on the question has been published. The 1,022 votes in favour came from 1,900 or so members attending the party conference in Brighton on the Sunday. The party has about 200,000 members, so that is roughly half of one per cent. Green voters do back it: Opinium found 56% of current Green voters thought the party right to pass it and 13% wrong. The same poll found 35% of the public thought it wrong and 16% right. YouGov recorded a sharp rise in the share who think the Greens have an antisemitism problem.

Michel Warschawski, a leader of the Fourth International’s Israeli section, began his 1992 article “Is Zionism racism?“ by saying the UN’s 1975 vote reminded him of medieval church councils. Majority votes could not decide whether the sun went round the earth. That applies here too. A conference vote does not settle whether Zionism is racism, and neither does an Opinium poll or the Board of Deputies. Nor does any of them settle whether the motion was ultra-left.

Did the Fourth Internationalist tradition ever settle the formula?

It is worth knowing how long revolutionary socialists have argued about these exact words without calling each other names.

When the UN General Assembly passed Resolution 3379 in November 1975, the Fourth International’s own press split three ways.

• Intercontinental Press, edited in New York, endorsed it outright.

• In Inprecor, Nathan Weinstock said that to ask whether Zionism is racist “is not correct“. Zionism was a colonial movement, and racist in the sense that all colonialism supposes a racist practice.

• The Israeli section signed a joint statement with Matzpen saying the resolution “does not concern us“, because governments on both sides of the vote practised discrimination.

In 1992, after the UN revoked the resolution, Warschawski drew the line differently again. In International Viewpoint, he argued that Zionism as an ideology was colonialist rather than racist, but that the Zionist state was “very, very racist”. In 2015 the International’s leadership called the Zionist state “a racist and colonialist project“. In the same declaration, it insisted on combating antisemitism inside the solidarity movement.

There is also a British precedent in a broad party. In 2002 the Scottish Socialist Party conference condemned Zionism as a racist ideology while also condemning anti-Semitism. It passed without a count, over the objections of comrades from the Militant tradition who still held to two states. The SSP went on to its best election result the following year. Socialist Outlook‘s 1987 article “Anti-zionism and anti-semitism“ made the argument the Greens’ motion now makes: opposing Zionism is not hostility to Jews.

None of these people called the others ultra-left or Zionist. They treated the formula as a matter of analysis, to be argued over, not as a password.

Where does the test actually bite?

If ultra-leftism is a question of method, the useful thing is to separate three questions the current argument runs together.

The judgement. Is Zionism, as the motion defines it (”an ethnonationalist Jewish State in historic Palestine to the exclusion and/or domination of the non-Jewish population”), racist? That is a programmatic question. Socialists can disagree about the formula, as the record above shows. Neither answer is ultra-left. Caroline Lucas, speaking against the motion, called Zionism a racist settler-colonial project for Palestinians and also a response to European persecution: “Two things can both be true.” That is close to where Weinstock and Warschawski ended up. It is an argument about analysis, not about method.

The motion also contains a second judgement, which gets less attention than its title. It commits the party to “a single democratic Palestinian State in all of historic Palestine”. Peter Tatchell objected that most Palestinians, Marwan Barghouti among them, support two states, and that the clause “smacks of ‘westerners know best.’” The Palestine Solidarity Campaign backed the Greens against the smears, but its own policy leaves the form of self-determination to Palestinians. So did the alternative motion, E03, which fell without debate. Whether a British party should lay down the outcome is a fair question. It is a different question from whether Zionism is racist, and running the two together confuses both.

The timing. Was it wise to pass it now, with a by-election running and a leader who said afterwards that he agreed with “the substance” but would have voted only for an amended text? Opinium found 46% of adults thought it the wrong priority and 11% the right one. The “bear trap” argument deserves a serious answer. The campaign to equate anti-Zionism with antisemitism is not new, but this motion gave it a fresh target and a deadline. Still, a tactical misjudgement is just a tactical misjudgement. Calling it ultra-left is a category error, and it makes the argument about timing harder to have.

The function. Here the classical test has real purchase. The motion’s second action point says Zionism “will be treated as any other form of racism”. Conference voted down an amendment presented to protect members who belong to Zionist synagogues and institutions from being pressured, but written broadly enough to also protect members who volunteered with the IDF. The motion’s supporters say it has no disciplinary effect because it is a policy motion. Annie Cohen, a Jewish Greens officer writing personally, went further. She argued that it was the defeated amendment that blurred Jews and Zionism, by treating everyone involved with a synagogue as a possible Zionist. Its critics fear the motion becomes a membership test. The party’s own Jewish Greens survey found its members split, and the group took no position.

The text does not say that supporters of two states are racists. It defines Zionism as an ideology of exclusion, says “not all Jews are Zionists and not all Zionists are Jews”, and rejects ascribing any ideology to an entire people. But whether “treated as any other form of racism” stays a policy statement, or becomes a way of sorting members, will not be decided by the vote. It will be decided by how the Anti-Racism Policy Working Group implements it, and by what the left in the party argues for while that happens.

That is the only viable path for an ultra-left danger, and it lies in what happens next more than in the vote. No-one who knows the Green Party or its cultural can honestly think there is a risk of that. If the definition became the boundary of the left inside the Greens, it would become ultimatism. That happens if comrades are sorted by whether they accept it, if the four of the party’s five MPs who rejected the motion are treated as enemies, or if it becomes the condition of working with Labour councillors who back an arms embargo. It is Trotsky’s red and black. There is nothing to suggest the Green Party would work in that way.

And the opposite error?

The opposite error is the one Labour is demanding: drop the policy, disown the conference, or lose the council deals. Agreeing to that because the press, the polls and Labour dislike the motion is not a united-front tactic. It is opportunism, and it leaves the Green Party’s decisions to be made by its opponents.

There is a democratic point too. Some motions will never be implemented in the form members wanted. Some leaders will want to reinterpret what conference decided. Neither is new in a broad party. Defending conference’s right to decide is not ultra-left. Nor is a leader’s reservation the same as Labour’s ultimatum. The left can defend Zack Polanski against the press and the Israeli government, which barred him from entering Israel, while disagreeing with him about two states.

What should socialists say?

Socialists, whatever their view of the motion, should say three things.

1. Defend the party and its conference against the Labour ultimatum, the EHRC referral and the media campaign. The right of a party’s members to decide its policy does not depend on whether you would have voted the same way.

2. Do not make the formula the basis of left unity. As we argued after Brighton, the left wins when it unites around one simple proposition that people are already moving towards. There are such propositions: a full arms embargo, lifting the ban on Palestine Action, and the anti-austerity fight over rents and the cost of living that brought most of the new members in. Those are the grounds for joint work, inside the party and with Labour members who will not follow their leadership’s ultimatum.

3. Hold the motion to its own distinctions. Argue with Jewish members, with two-state supporters and with the MPs who voted against. Do not sort them. If “treated as any other form of racism” starts to mean investigations of members for what they believe about a state, the left should be the first to oppose it.

Holding a minority view for decades is not ultra-left. The early boycotters of apartheid did it, and they were right. A correct position turns ultra-left when it is used as a fence to keep people out.

Presentación

Hay una caricatura del materialismo histórico que lleva siglo y medio circulando: la economía manda, las ideas son un reflejo, las personas son marionetas de su clase. Mandel dedica buena parte de este texto a desmontarla, y lo hace concediendo mucho más de lo que suele concederse.

Concede que la ciencia, el arte, la filosofía y el derecho tienen cada uno su historia propia y su lógica propia. Cada generación de científicos o de juristas hereda un cuerpo de ideas y puede transformarlo, modificarlo o negarlo. Concede que en cualquier país conviven relaciones de producción de épocas distintas, con sus clases correspondientes: campesinos, artesanos, terratenientes semifeudales, incluso esclavistas, sobreviviendo en los intersticios de sociedades ya capitalistas. Y concede que una ideología puede sobrevivir a la clase que la engendró por pura inercia social. Su ejemplo es la Francia del siglo XIX, donde el catolicismo del antiguo régimen siguió vivo pese a todo lo que la Revolución había barrido.

Lo que no concede es el punto de partida. Es la existencia social la que determina la conciencia social, y no al revés. Y la tesis de que la ideología dominante de cada época es la de la clase dominante no dice, según Mandel, más de lo que dice: deja sitio a otras ideologías no hegemónicas, y de hecho la lucha ideológica suele preceder a la política. Las críticas socialistas de la sociedad burguesa llegaron antes que los partidos obreros.

La parte que más me interesa es la del final, porque es donde el materialismo histórico deja de ser método y se vuelve apuesta. La medida real de la libertad humana, dice Mandel siguiendo a Marx y Engels, no es el trabajo productivo sino el tiempo libre. No el tiempo de no hacer nada, sino el tiempo liberado de la necesidad de ganarse la vida. Mientras la sociedad sea demasiado pobre, solo una parte podrá liberarse: los que cobran por pensar, porque no tienen que hornear su pan ni construir su casa. El día que la media jornada baste para cubrir las necesidades básicas de todos, la base material de las clases desaparece.

El siguiente domingo publicamos la teoría del valor-trabajo. Quien quiera el Mandel más político puede ir al archivo de Red Mole, a sus conferencias de 1976 sobre la revolución alemana.

El texto

Al margen de sus teorías económicas específicas, la principal aportación de Marx a las ciencias sociales ha sido su teoría del materialismo histórico. Su punto de partida es antropológico. Los seres humanos no pueden sobrevivir sin organización social.

La existencia social determina la conciencia

La organización social se basa en el trabajo social y en la comunicación social. El trabajo social se da siempre dentro de un marco dado de relaciones sociales de producción específicas, históricamente determinadas. Esas relaciones sociales de producción determinan en última instancia todas las demás relaciones sociales, incluidas las de la comunicación social. Es la existencia social la que determina la conciencia social, y no al revés.

Base y superestructura

El materialismo histórico sostiene que las relaciones de producción que llegan a estabilizarse y a reproducirse son estructuras que ya no pueden cambiarse gradualmente, a trozos. Son modos de producción. Por usar el lenguaje dialéctico de Hegel, que Marx adoptó y adaptó en gran medida: solo pueden cambiar cualitativamente mediante una conmoción social completa, una revolución o una contrarrevolución social. Dentro de los modos de producción pueden darse cambios cuantitativos, pero no modifican la estructura básica. En cada modo de producción, un conjunto dado de relaciones de producción constituye la base, la infraestructura, sobre la que se levanta una superestructura compleja que abarca el Estado y el derecho (salvo en una sociedad sin clases), la ideología, la religión, la filosofía, las artes, la moral, etcétera.

Qué cuenta como relación de producción

Las relaciones de producción son la suma total de las relaciones sociales que los seres humanos establecen entre sí en la producción de su vida material. No se limitan, por tanto, a lo que ocurre efectivamente en el punto de producción. La humanidad no podría sobrevivir, es decir, producir, si no existieran formas específicas de circulación de bienes: por ejemplo, entre unidades productivas (circulación de herramientas y materias primas) y entre unidades de producción y consumidores. La asignación a priori de los bienes determina relaciones de producción distintas de las que determina la asignación a través del mercado. La producción mercantil parcial —lo que Marx llama «producción mercantil simple» o «pequeña producción mercantil», einfache Warenproduktion— implica también relaciones de producción distintas de las de la producción mercantil generalizada.

Salvo en el caso de las sociedades sin clases, los modos de producción, articulados en torno a las relaciones de producción predominantes, se encarnan en relaciones de clase específicas que, en última instancia, sobredeterminan las relaciones entre los individuos.

Libre albedrío y lógica social

El materialismo histórico no niega el libre albedrío del individuo, sus intentos de elegir sobre su existencia según sus pasiones individuales, sus intereses tal como los entiende, sus convicciones, sus opciones morales, etcétera. Lo que el materialismo histórico afirma es: primero, que esas elecciones están fuertemente predeterminadas por el marco social (la educación, la ideología y los «valores» morales predominantes, las variantes de comportamiento limitadas por las condiciones materiales, etcétera); y segundo, que el resultado de la colisión de millones de pasiones, intereses y opciones distintas es esencialmente un fenómeno de lógica social y no de psicología individual. Aquí los intereses de clase son predominantes.

No hay en la historia un solo ejemplo de clase dominante que no intentara defender su dominio de clase, ni de clase explotada que no intentara limitar —y ocasionalmente eliminar— la explotación que sufre. De modo que, fuera de la sociedad sin clases, la lucha de clases es un rasgo permanente de la sociedad humana. De hecho, una de las tesis clave del materialismo histórico es que «la historia de la humanidad es la historia de la lucha de clases» (Marx, Manifiesto Comunista, 1848).

El producto excedente

El objeto inmediato de la lucha de clases es económico y material. Es una lucha por el reparto del producto social entre los productores directos (la clase productiva y explotada) y quienes se apropian de lo que Marx llama el producto excedente social, el residuo del producto social una vez que los productores y su descendencia han sido alimentados —en el sentido amplio de la palabra, es decir, la suma total de los bienes de consumo que consume esa clase— y se ha reproducido el stock inicial de herramientas y materias primas, incluida la restauración de la fertilidad inicial del suelo. La clase dominante funciona como clase dominante esencialmente mediante la apropiación del producto excedente social. Al hacerse con el producto excedente social, adquiere los medios para fomentar y mantener la mayor parte de las actividades superestructurales mencionadas; y al hacerlo, puede determinar en gran medida su función —mantener y reproducir la estructura social dada, el modo de producción dado— y su contenido.

Cuatro razones para no ser determinista

Decimos «determinar en gran medida» y no «determinar por completo». En primer lugar, hay un movimiento «dialéctico inmanente», es decir, autónomo, de cada esfera superestructural específica de actividad. Cada generación de científicos, artistas, filósofos, teólogos, juristas y políticos encuentra un corpus dado de ideas, formas, reglas, técnicas y modos de pensar, al que es iniciada mediante la educación y la práctica corriente. No está obligada a continuarlos y reproducirlos sin más. Puede transformarlos, modificarlos, cambiar sus interconexiones, incluso negarlos. De nuevo: el materialismo histórico no niega que exista una historia específica de la ciencia, una historia del arte, una historia de la filosofía, una historia de las ideas políticas y morales, una historia de la religión, que siguen todas su propia lógica. Lo que intenta es explicar por qué cierto número de cambios, o incluso de revoluciones, científicos, artísticos, filosóficos, ideológicos o jurídicos se producen en un momento dado y en países dados, y son bien distintos de otros ocurridos algunos siglos antes en otra parte. El nexo de esas «revoluciones» con periodos históricos determinados es un nexo de intereses de clase.

En segundo lugar, cada formación social —es decir, un país dado en una época dada—, aun estando caracterizada por relaciones de producción predominantes (un modo de producción dado en cierta fase de su desarrollo), incluye relaciones de producción distintas que son en gran medida restos del pasado, pero también a veces núcleos de modos de producción futuros. Así, no solo existen la clase dominante y la clase explotada características de ese modo de producción predominante (capitalistas y asalariados bajo el capitalismo). Existen también restos de clases sociales que fueron predominantes cuando prevalecían otras relaciones de producción y que, habiendo perdido su hegemonía, aún logran sobrevivir en los intersticios de la nueva sociedad. Es el caso, por ejemplo, de los pequeños productores mercantiles (campesinos, artesanos, pequeños comerciantes), de los terratenientes semifeudales e incluso de los esclavistas, en muchas formaciones sociales ya predominantemente capitalistas a lo largo del siglo XIX y parte del XX. Cada una de esas clases sociales tiene su propia ideología, sus propios valores religiosos y morales, que se entrelazan con la ideología de la clase dominante hegemónica sin quedar completamente absorbidos por ella.

En tercer lugar, incluso después de que una clase dominante dada —por ejemplo, la nobleza feudal o semifeudal— haya desaparecido como clase dominante, su ideología puede sobrevivir por pura fuerza de inercia social y de rutina, de costumbre. La supervivencia de la ideología católica tradicional del antiguo régimen en Francia durante buena parte del siglo XIX, pese a los cambios sociales, políticos e ideológicos radicales que trajo la Revolución francesa, ilustra esa regla.

Por último, la afirmación de Marx de que la ideología dominante de cada época es la ideología de la clase dominante —otro principio básico del materialismo histórico— no expresa más de lo que efectivamente dice. Implica que otras ideologías pueden existir junto a esa ideología dominante sin ser hegemónicas. Por citar la más importante de esas ocurrencias: las clases sociales explotadas y oprimidas pueden desarrollar su propia ideología, que empezará a desafiar a la hegemónica. De hecho, una lucha de clases ideológica acompaña, y a veces incluso precede, a la lucha de clases política propiamente dicha. Las luchas religiosas y filosóficas que precedieron a las revoluciones burguesas clásicas, o las primeras críticas socialistas de la sociedad burguesa que precedieron a la constitución de los primeros partidos obreros y a las primeras revoluciones, son ejemplos de ese tipo.

La lucha de clases ha sido hasta ahora el gran motor de la historia. Los seres humanos hacen su propia historia. Ningún modo de producción puede ser sustituido por otro sin acciones deliberadas de grandes fuerzas sociales, es decir, sin revolución social o contrarrevolución. Que esas revoluciones o contrarrevoluciones conduzcan efectivamente a la realización a largo plazo de proyectos deliberados de reorganización social es otra cuestión. Muy a menudo, su resultado difiere en buena medida de la intención de los principales actores.

Hacer la historia con falsa conciencia

Los seres humanos actúan conscientemente, pero pueden actuar con falsa conciencia. No comprenden necesariamente por qué quieren realizar determinados planes sociales o políticos, por qué quieren mantener o cambiar instituciones económicas o jurídicas; y sobre todo, rara vez comprenden en sentido científico las leyes del cambio social, las precondiciones materiales y sociales para conservar o cambiar con éxito tales instituciones. De hecho, Marx sostiene que solo con el descubrimiento de los principios fundamentales del materialismo histórico hemos dado un paso adelante significativo hacia la comprensión de esas leyes, sin pretender por ello poder predecir «todos» los desarrollos futuros de la sociedad.

El arado de madera: los límites materiales

El cambio social, las revoluciones y las contrarrevoluciones se producen, además, dentro de constricciones materiales determinadas. El nivel de desarrollo de las fuerzas productivas —esencialmente las herramientas y las capacidades humanas, incluidos sus efectos sobre la fertilidad del suelo— limita las posibilidades de cambio institucional. El trabajo esclavo se ha revelado en gran medida incompatible con el sistema fabril basado en las máquinas contemporáneas. El socialismo no podría construirse de manera duradera sobre la base del arado de madera y el torno de alfarero. Una revolución social amplía por lo general el margen para el desarrollo de las fuerzas productivas y conduce de manera trascendental al progreso social en la mayoría de los campos de la actividad humana. Del mismo modo, se inaugura una época de crisis social profunda cuando hay un conflicto creciente entre el modo de producción predominante —el orden social existente— por un lado, y el desarrollo ulterior de las fuerzas productivas por otro. Esa crisis social se manifestará entonces en todos los grandes campos de la actividad social: la política, la ideología, la moral y el derecho, así como en el ámbito de la vida económica propiamente dicha.

El materialismo histórico proporciona con ello una vara de medir el progreso humano: el crecimiento de las fuerzas productivas, mensurable a través del crecimiento de la productividad media del trabajo, y del número, la longevidad y la destreza de la especie humana. Esa vara de medir no abstrae en modo alguno de las precondiciones naturales para la supervivencia y el crecimiento humanos, en el sentido más amplio del concepto. Tampoco abstrae del carácter condicional y parcial de tal progreso, en términos de organización social y de alienación individual.

La libertad se mide en tiempo libre

En última instancia, desde el punto de vista del materialismo histórico, la división de la sociedad en clases sociales antagónicas supone una limitación inevitable de la libertad humana. Para Marx y Engels, la verdadera vara de medir la libertad humana, es decir, la riqueza humana, no es el «trabajo productivo»; este solo crea la precondición material de esa libertad. La verdadera vara de medir es el tiempo libre, no en el sentido de «tiempo para no hacer nada», sino en el sentido de tiempo liberado de la necesidad férrea de producir y reproducir el sustento material, y por tanto disponible para el desarrollo libre y omnilateral de los talentos, los deseos, las capacidades y las potencialidades de cada ser humano.

Mientras la sociedad sea demasiado pobre, mientras los bienes y servicios que satisfacen las necesidades básicas sean demasiado escasos, solo una parte de la sociedad podrá liberarse de la necesidad de dedicar la mayor parte de su vida a «trabajar para ganarse la vida» (es decir, al trabajo forzado en el sentido antropológico y sociológico de la palabra, esto es, en relación con los deseos, las aspiraciones y los talentos, y no con un estatuto jurídico de servidumbre). Eso es esencialmente lo que representa la libertad de las clases dominantes y de sus allegados, a quienes «se paga por pensar», por crear, por inventar, por administrar, porque se han liberado de la obligación de hornear su propio pan, tejer su propia ropa y construir su propia casa.

Una vez que las fuerzas productivas estén lo bastante desarrolladas como para garantizar a todos los seres humanos la satisfacción de sus necesidades básicas mediante un «trabajo productivo» limitado a una fracción menor de la vida (la media jornada o menos), entonces desaparece la necesidad material de la división de la sociedad en clases. Entonces no queda base objetiva alguna para que una parte de la sociedad monopolice la administración, el acceso a la información, el conocimiento, el trabajo intelectual. Por esa razón, el materialismo histórico explica tanto las razones por las que surgieron en la historia las sociedades de clases y las luchas de clases, como las razones por las que desaparecerán en el futuro en una sociedad sin clases de productores asociados que se autoadministran democráticamente.

El Estado y su extinción

El materialismo histórico contiene, por tanto, un intento de explicar el origen, las funciones y la futura extinción del Estado como institución específica, así como un intento de explicar la política y la actividad política en general como expresión de conflictos sociales articulados en torno a intereses sociales distintos (principalmente, aunque no solo, los de las distintas clases sociales; también entran en juego fracciones importantes de clases, así como agrupaciones sociales no clasistas).

Para Marx y Engels, el Estado no es coextensivo con la sociedad humana como tal, ni con la «sociedad organizada» ni siquiera con la «sociedad civilizada» en abstracto; tampoco es el resultado de ningún «contrato social» concluido voluntariamente entre individuos. El Estado es la suma total de aparatos, es decir, de grupos especiales de personas separadas y apartadas del resto —la mayoría— de la sociedad, que se apropian de funciones de naturaleza represiva o integradora que inicialmente ejercían todos los ciudadanos. Ese proceso de alienación se produce en conjunción con la aparición de las clases sociales. El Estado es un instrumento para fomentar, conservar y reproducir una estructura de clases dada, y no un árbitro neutral entre intereses de clase antagónicos.

La aparición de una sociedad sin clases está, por tanto, estrechamente entrelazada, para quienes se adhieren al materialismo histórico, con el proceso de extinción del Estado, es decir, de devolución gradual al conjunto de la sociedad —autogestión, autoadministración— de todas las funciones específicas ejercidas hoy por aparatos especiales, esto es, de la disolución de esos aparatos. Marx y Engels concebían la dictadura del proletariado, la última forma del Estado y del dominio político de clase, como un instrumento para asegurar la transición de la sociedad de clases a la sociedad sin clases. Debería ser ella misma un Estado de tipo especial, que organizara su propia desaparición gradual.

Hemos dicho más arriba que, desde el punto de vista del materialismo histórico, el objeto inmediato de la lucha de clases es el reparto del producto social entre las distintas clases sociales. Incluso la lucha de clases política sirve en último análisis a ese propósito principal; pero cubre además un campo mucho más amplio de conflictos sociales. Como todas las actividades del Estado inciden de algún modo en la estabilidad relativa de una formación social dada, y en el dominio de clase al que está sometida, la lucha de clases puede extenderse a todos los campos de la política, desde la política exterior hasta los problemas educativos y los conflictos religiosos. Esto, naturalmente, hay que demostrarlo mediante un análisis minucioso, y no proclamarlo como axioma o verdad revelada. Cuando se llevan a cabo con acierto, esos ejercicios de análisis de clase y de definición de clase de las luchas políticas, sociales e incluso literarias se convierten en obras impresionantes de explicación histórica, como por ejemplo Las luchas de clases en Francia de 1848 a 1850 de Marx, La guerra campesina en Alemania de Engels, Die Lessing-Legende de Franz Mehring o la Historia de la Revolución Rusa de Trotski.

Los subtítulos son nuestros; el original de Mandel va sin divisiones internas.

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Créditos y agradecimientos

Este texto de Ernest Mandel se publicó originalmente en inglés en International Viewpoint con el título «Historical Materialism», el 30 de diciembre de 2003, dentro de la serie «The Basic Theories of Karl Marx». Mandel, economista marxista y dirigente de la Cuarta Internacional durante décadas, murió en 1995.

Agradecemos de corazón a International Viewpoint su generosidad al permitirnos traducir y republicar su material. International Viewpoint se publica bajo la responsabilidad del Buró de la Cuarta Internacional y se sostiene con donaciones: si este texto te ha resultado útil, considera apoyarles. Sin su trabajo de archivo, la mayor parte de esta tradición seguiría siendo inaccesible.

Quienes lean International Viewpoint pueden acceder también a sus publicaciones hermanas: Punto de vista internacional, en castellano; Inprecor, en francés; y مراسلات أممية, en árabe.

Traducción de Topo Rojo. Se trata de una traducción automática revisada, realizada con un modelo de inteligencia artificial personalizado y entrenado con los escritos de militantes de la Cuarta Internacional del siglo XX. Agradeceremos cualquier corrección.

The Green Party of England and Wales held its autumn conference in Brighton. There it passed a motion declaring that Zionism is racism and that the Greens are an anti-Zionist party. The vote was 1,022 to 813. Zack Polanski had already left the conference and did not vote. He has since said he could only have supported an amended text.

The press reaction was what you would expect. The more revealing reaction came from Labour, and it had nothing to do with Israel or Palestine. It was about councils.

The ultimatum

Labour’s chair, Bridget Phillipson, has written to every Labour council group that shares power with the Greens. Each is to ask its Green partners “to make clear that they reject this position and to call on their national leadership to reconsider” it. Where the Greens cannot give that assurance, “Labour will bring any such local arrangement to an end”. The deadline is seven days. At Prime Minister’s Questions Andy Burnham called the motion antisemitic and said his side of the House “will have nothing to do with it”. Labour has since confirmed that this applies to town halls as well as to Westminster.

Eighteen councils are affected, seventeen in England and Monmouthshire in Wales. Labour leads five of the arrangements: Sheffield, Stafford, West Suffolk, Havant and Monmouthshire. In Coventry, Labour depends on a confidence-and-supply agreement with the Greens. The Greens lead three: Lewes, Wealden and Warwick. The rest are Liberal Democrat-led or independent-led coalitions in which Labour and the Greens both sit.

So this is not a ban on every future dealing with the Greens. It is a deadline imposed on coalitions that already exist. But the principle is plain. A vote at another party’s conference now decides whether Labour will help run a town hall.

What is being demanded

Look at what local Green councillors are actually being asked to do. Nobody is asking whether they will keep the bins collected, protect the housing budget or vote the budget through. They are being asked to denounce a policy their own conference adopted democratically, to do it collectively, and to do it within a week. They must also lobby their national leadership to drop it.

The Greens answered that Labour is wrong to “conflate criticism of Israel with antisemitism”, and that “trying to tell local parties what to do and who they can work with is undemocratic”. On both points they are right. Green local groups decide their own arrangements, and the party has no whip. Individual councillors who voted against the motion are entitled to say so. In Southwark the Greens have already disowned the policy to keep their coalition with the Liberal Democrats. Being made to recant collectively, on Labour’s timetable, is a different thing.

The Liberal Democrats show that another response was available. Their local government spokesperson, Zöe Franklin, called the motion “divisive, irresponsible and deeply insensitive”. The party then refused to instruct its local groups, saying coalitions are a matter for councillors on the ground. Whatever their reasons, that was a choice. Labour made the other one.

Where it bites

The ultimatum does not work the same way everywhere. Where the Greens lead — Lewes, Wealden and Warwick — Labour is the junior partner. A Labour walk-out does not by itself remove the Greens from office: they can look for other partners or govern as a minority. In Warwick the Greens hold 15 of the 44 seats and Labour 7, and the council is led by the Green councillor Ian Davison with Labour members in the administration. Withdrawing would leave the Greens needing eight votes from elsewhere. It would also leave Labour outside a council it now helps to run, and by its own decision. In West Oxfordshire, Runnymede, Rother and West Devon the administration can survive without Labour if the arithmetic allows. The Lib Dems’ localism makes that more likely, not less.

Where Labour leads, the risk runs the other way. Sheffield has 84 councillors, so 43 is a majority. Labour holds 26 and the Greens 19, which gives the coalition 45. The Liberal Democrats have 22, Reform 11 and independents 6. Without the Greens, Labour is the largest group but a long way short of a majority. In Coventry the Labour minority survives on Green votes. In both cities the ultimatum means Labour risks its own administration in order to make a point.

So in a good number of these councils the likeliest result is not that the Greens are punished. It is that Labour leaves office and the Greens stay.

Why the Tories and not the anti-Zionists?

Why would a Labour leadership rather have no partner, or a Conservative one, than a Green group whose conference has called Zionism racist?

It is not as if Labour shuns the right in local government. In June, Birmingham’s Labour group agreed a deal with Reform and the Conservatives to share out the council’s seven scrutiny chairs. One Labour councillor resigned from the party after voting for it. The Conservatives then made a better deal with the other groups and took all seven. Kemi Badenoch has said openly that the Conservatives have governed councils in coalition with Labour before. No ultimatum went out over any of this.

The reason is not arithmetic. It is about which forces count as respectable. The Conservatives are a party of the British state. They share Labour’s commitment to NATO, to the Atlantic alliance and to Israel as an ally. They also share the assumption that the foreign policy of the British state is not a matter for municipal politics. On those questions, the Tories are a rival, not a threat. A party that calls Zionism racist challenges something Labour’s leadership treats as off-limits: the alignment of British foreign policy. That is the line being policed. Bin collections were never the issue.

This is not new. In April 1987 Mick Archer wrote in Socialist Action about two developments that had arrived together. The Labour right had begun openly to talk of coalition, then with the SDP–Liberal Alliance. At the same time a new witch-hunt was under way against the Labour Party Black Sections. “Witch hunters, new realists and teachers” argues that the two were one movement: openness to the centre went with exclusion of the left and the oppressed. Thirty-nine years later the pattern is the same. Labour will deal with anyone to its right and treats anyone to its left as a disciplinary matter.

What Labourism was, and what it is now

To see why, it helps to ask what Labour was in the twentieth century.

Labour was founded by the trade unions to get working-class representatives into Parliament. It was never a revolutionary party, and the Communist tradition never pretended it was. In 1920 Lenin called it a party of workers led by reactionaries. As the Socialist Outlook “Our history” column recalled in 1993, his judgement was that “the Labour Party is a thoroughly bourgeois party”. In the same breath he called it a “very peculiar party”, and in some ways not really a party at all. Its federal structure — unions, socialist societies and constituency parties — left room for socialists to organise and argue inside it.

That combination was Labourism: a workers’ party with a bourgeois programme. Its reforms were paid for by the strength of British capitalism and its empire, and delivered through Parliament. Archer’s 1987 article put the material basis exactly. British imperialism had been strong enough to grant concessions to the working class, unequally but widely, and so to hold a single reformist labour movement together. The 1945 government was the high point of that arrangement. The crisis that began in the 1960s, and Thatcher after 1979, broke it.

Is today’s party the same thing? The union link survives, and so does the voting base. The rest has changed. There are no longer concessions to buy consent. The federal party that Lenin thought socialists could work inside has been centralised: candidates are vetted, affiliated groups are proscribed, members are suspended by administrative decision. What is left is the bourgeois leadership without the reforms. Today’s Labour is defined less by what it delivers than by what it rules out. An ultimatum to the Greens is the natural way for such a party to conduct a coalition.

Freedom of criticism, and who is next

The workers’ movement has a long-tested method for parties that disagree but need to act together: the united front. Its first condition is that nobody gives up the right to say what they think. Trotsky put it plainly in March 1922, writing on the united front:

we cannot possibly accept any agreement which in any way limits our freedom of criticism and agitation.

Common action on agreed and limited questions, and full freedom to criticise one another: that is the deal. Labour’s demand to the Greens turns it upside down. Cooperation over practical council business is made conditional on the partner giving up an opinion that has nothing to do with that business.

Will Labour use the same method elsewhere? It already has. The 1987 article was about expelling Black Section activists. In 2016 Roland Rance wrote in Socialist Resistance about the “dead cat” of antisemitism smears aimed at the Labour left. Later that year he wrote about the suspension of Jackie Walker and a parliamentary move towards making anti-Zionism itself a crime. In 2020 Jeremy Corbyn was suspended. In 2021 the NEC proscribed four left groups, so that membership of them, or support for them, became grounds for expulsion. That was on 20 July 2021, and the four were Socialist Appeal, Labour In Exile Network, Labour Against the Witchhunt and Resist. The argument about Israel came first, and it built the machinery. By 2021 the machinery no longer needed that argument: Socialist Appeal was not proscribed over Palestine.

There is no reason it should stop with Palestine. A test that a coalition partner must publicly disown its own party’s position works on any question. It could be used on rearmament and NATO, on migration, on climate protest, on strikes. Once Labour’s leadership claims the right to decide what its partners may believe, the only question is which issue it picks next. Anyone who hopes to work with Labour, inside or outside the party, should take note.

Who will you govern with instead?

The real test comes when the deadline passes. In councils where Labour cannot govern without the Greens, Labour groups will have to choose. They can walk away from administration. Or they can look for the other arithmetic.

Sheffield, Lewes and Warwick are the places to watch. Sheffield has no Conservative councillors at all. There, the only way back to a majority without the Greens runs through the 22 Liberal Democrats, or through Reform. Elsewhere, the other arithmetic includes Tory seats. Wherever Labour groups decide they would rather govern with the Lib Dems, Reform or the Conservatives than share power with anti-Zionists, they should be made to say so plainly. Some on the left think the motion was tactically blind, a feel-good text that handed the Labour right an easy weapon. But a party that would rather not govern at all than govern with people who call Zionism racist has made a political choice, not a tactical one. If voters then conclude that Labour, not the Greens, misjudged the tactics, they will be right.

Socialists should say three things. Local Green groups have the right to answer to their own voters and members, not to Labour HQ. The basis for working together on a council is the budget, housing and services, not loyalty tests on foreign policy. And to every Labour group in those eighteen councils, there is one question: who will you govern with instead?

Methuen published Winnie-the-Pooh on 14 October 1926. A million miners had been locked out since 1 May. The TUC called the General Strike off after nine days and left them to it, and hunger sent them back at the end of November on lower wages and longer hours. Milne’s book appeared in the middle of that defeat, and it describes an England with no work in it, no money, no state, and no scarcity that a friend turning up cannot solve. It has been read ever since as the least political book in the language. It is nothing of the kind.

The Hundred Acre Wood is a class society whose inhabitants have naturalised their social relations so completely that none of them experiences them as political. That is not a failure of the book but its achievement: an order its own members cannot see is the most durable kind there is.

The honey

Start with the honey, and start with what it is not. Nothing in the Forest is bought or sold. There is no money, no market, no wage and no exchange, so the honey is not a commodity and Pooh is not a consumer. What happens to it is older and plainer. It is taken.

Pooh gives his grounds on the first page he appears. He hears buzzing and reasons it out: something is making that noise, the only thing that makes it is a bee, “the only reason for being a bee that I know of is making honey,” and then the conclusion, which he delivers standing up. “And the only reason for making honey is so as I can eat it.”

That is not greed. It is a complete theory of the bees, reached in three steps, in which their labour has no purpose of its own and exists in order to be taken. Pooh needs no justification, because on his account the honey was never theirs to lose. Property law would be redundant here, and so would a police force. You cannot steal from something that is not a somebody, and the bees are not somebodies. This is the most telling fact in the book and it is invisible because it is total. Every creature in the Forest talks. Owls talk, donkeys talk, a stuffed bear talks. The bees are the only producers in the Wood and the only inhabitants with no name, no speech and no part in any conversation. They buzz. They are treated as weather.

Watch what happens when they object. Pooh rolls in mud, floats up under a balloon and sings that he is a small black cloud, because “the great thing is not to let the bees know you’re coming.” They know. They leave their nests and circle him, and one settles on his nose, at which point the cloud says “Christopher, ow, Robin.” Pooh announces a finding: “These are the wrong sort of bees,” who would make the wrong sort of honey. Producers who defend their product are not resisting, they are defective. Then he calls down to Christopher Robin to shoot the balloon, and Christopher Robin does, because he has his gun, as he always does.

Nor is any of this abundance. Pooh is chronically short. By chapter five his larder is down to a single jar, and the plot of that chapter is what becomes of it.

Around him the division of labour is exact. Rabbit has a garden, boundaries, trespassers and a permanent anxiety about all four. Owl produces explanation, and his authority survives the discovery that his version of “A Very Happy Birthday” is HIPY PAPY BTHUTHDTH THUTHDA BTHUTHDY. Kanga does the work the Wood does not count as work, the feeding, washing, medicine and discipline by which Roo, the next generation of labour power, is daily reproduced. Piglet supplies the status anxiety of the very small proprietor, and Tigger, undisciplined and unproductive, is solved by being made entertainment.

Two things that happen to Eeyore

Eeyore loses his tail. Pooh finds it at Owl’s house, in use as a bell-rope. Owl’s account of how he came by it is the whole ideology of appropriation in one breath: it came off in his hand, “and as nobody seemed to want it, I took it home.” A part of the worker’s body has been detached, taken into the intelligentsia’s household and made a domestic convenience on the grounds that it looked unclaimed. Christopher Robin nails it back on. Pooh goes home, eats, and composes a song beginning “Who found the Tail? ‘I,’ said Pooh.”

In The House at Pooh Corner, Pooh and Piglet decide to build Eeyore a house out of a heap of sticks Piglet knows of, “lots and lots, all piled up,” on the other side of the wood. The sticks are Eeyore’s house. They dismantle it, carry it across the wood and rebuild it, and when Eeyore protests that his house was over there they tell him it was always over here. He inspects it, concludes the wind must have moved it, and finds it “better in places.” Then he lectures them on the dignity of labour: “Brains first and then Hard Work. Look at it! That’s the way to build a house.” They do not correct him. They tell Christopher Robin, and he laughs.

That is not a joke about a donkey. It is expropriation handed back to the expropriated as a gift, accepted with gratitude, and reported to the authorities as an amusing mistake.

One episode is usually skipped. When Kanga and Roo arrive, the residents hold a meeting, and Rabbit puts the case: “we wake up one morning and, what do we find? We find a Strange Animal among us. An animal of whom we have never even heard before!” His proposal is to steal Baby Roo and hold him until Kanga will “promise to go away from the Forest and never come back.” The comedy is that Rabbit, objecting to a newcomer with one child in her pocket, has fifteen-odd relations of his own. The politics is that a settled community met immigration with a hostage plan drafted by the property owner.

Christopher Robin, or the uses of an unfamiliar word

Christopher Robin neither works nor produces, and he does not rule. He appears, settles disputes, distributes attention and goes back to a world the others cannot enter. He is also the only armed inhabitant of the Forest, which nobody has ever thought worth remarking on.

The obvious reading in our tradition is Bonapartist: an apparently neutral authority standing above the classes and holding the order beneath it together. That is incomplete, because his power is not generated inside the Wood at all. It is derived. He can leave and they cannot. He returns with knowledge and decisions whose origin is never explained.

The word for that is comprador, and I use it deliberately, because it is not one of ours.

It comes from the Portuguese for buyer, and it named the Chinese managers who ran foreign firms’ business in the treaty ports. Mao made it a category of class analysis in March 1926, five months before Pooh, in “Analysis of the Classes in Chinese Society”, where the comprador bourgeoisie is separated from a national bourgeoisie held capable of a progressive role. It has been Maoist and dependency-theory currency ever since, and it is rare in ours for a reason. Mao’s distinction was the theoretical basis of the bloc of four classes, and the bloc of four classes ended on 12 April 1927 in Shanghai, with Communists killed by the ally the line had told them to trust. Permanent revolution denies the premise. The colonial bourgeoisie’s subordination to imperialism is structural, not a question of which fraction holds the better contracts.

We can borrow the description without taking the strategy. Comprador names a local authority that is entirely real where it operates and entirely borrowed in origin. Christopher Robin’s authority over the Forest is genuine. Its source is elsewhere, and he does not control it. What must not come with the word is Mao’s conclusion: there is no patriotic Christopher Robin waiting behind the compradorial one.

The source never appears. His parents are offstage throughout, and their absence is the structure rather than a gap in it. They own the world outside, the Wood is a dependency of it, and their representative is a child whose writ is entirely on loan. He is also, within the Forest, kind. That is not a claim about colonial administrators, who were frequently and inventively cruel. The point is narrower and worse: cruelty was never what held the relation in place, which is why kindness cannot loosen it. Christopher Robin can love Pooh, and does, and the structure is untouched.

The spectre

Now watch the Wood acquire its enemy.

Christopher Robin mentions, carelessly, that he saw a Heffalump. Piglet immediately says he saw one once, “at least, I think I did.” Pooh says so did he, “wondering what a Heffalump was like.” Christopher Robin adds that you don’t often see them. “Not now,” says Piglet. “Not at this time of year,” says Pooh. In eight lines a threat has been introduced by the authority, corroborated by two witnesses who have seen nothing, and furnished with a seasonal habit.

Then they arm against it, and the cost is instructive. Piglet proposes baiting a trap with honey rather than acorns, having worked out that acorns would come from him and honey from Pooh, which is how defence budgets have always been settled. Pooh fetches his jar and eats his way down it on the way, to check that it is honey all the way to the bottom. What reaches the pit is not quite a full jar, and it is the last one he has.

In the morning Pooh goes back and eats the bait, gets his head stuck in the empty jar, and lurches about the Forest making a roaring noise of Sadness and Despair. Piglet looks down, screams that there is a Horrible Heffalump, and does not stop running until he reaches Christopher Robin’s house.

The panic returns to its author for reassurance, which is the mechanism. But the chapter goes further, because the Forest has put its last stock of anything into a hole in the ground to defend itself against a creature nobody has seen, and the creature that comes out of the hole is the appropriator with the empty jar on his head.

Marx opened the Manifesto with a spectre haunting Europe. The Wood has turned that spectre into a monster, which is the labour of ruling-class ideology compressed into a single nursery word. The Heffalump is not coming to destroy the Forest. The Heffalump is the name the Wood’s ruling ideology gives to the possibility that the Forest might one day belong to everyone living in it.

Which makes Eeyore the interesting character rather than the sad one. He is read as a depressive. He is better read as the only inhabitant who has understood his position and been taught to dread the remedy. He owns nothing, his housing is not his own, his body is subject to appropriation by his betters, and he has been persuaded that if the Heffalump comes it will go worse for him than for anybody. That is not pessimism. It is what an ideology has achieved when it can make the exploited frightened of their own emancipation, and it is a commoner condition in Britain in 2026 than gloom.

So the revolutionary question in Hundred Acre Wood is not how to overthrow Christopher Robin. He is a child with a borrowed writ, and removing him would leave the world beyond the Forest exactly as it was. Nor is it who makes the honey, because the Forest already knows: Pooh settled that on his first page, and the answer was that the bees make it for him.

The Forest has a name for the enemy it invented, and an eight-line procedure for confirming that the enemy exists. It has no name at all for the bees.

Burges Salmon’s note to its construction and infrastructure clients went out on 1 October, the day after Labour’s conference in Liverpool closed. It reads the Prime Minister’s announcements the way a firm like that reads anything, for what they will mean to the people paying for the advice, and it finds “significant opportunities” if the proposals become funded programmes. The new equity loan, Your First Home, lends a first-time buyer a fifth of the price of a new build on a 2.5 per cent deposit, and the firm sees in it more demand for new housing and a longer pipeline of work for developers. A sensible reading, and a calm one, written for clients who expect to be building whatever the Budget on 28 October ends up paying for.

Water was the centrepiece. Burnham told the hall on 29 September that a strengthened Water Bill would repeal Thatcher’s ideological ban on public ownership; the Water Act 1989 caps the state’s holding in each of the major water and sewerage companies at between one and three per cent. Water was the symbol of what has gone wrong with Britain, he said, a service where the shareholders never lose and the public never win. Where private companies serve the public interest, the government will support them. Shares in Severn Trent, Pennon and United Utilities closed the day between 0.9 and 1.6 per cent lower. Thames Water, the one company whose condition would put any of this to work, is where the government has moved least. The company has warned its money could run out by the end of the year, the government still will not say whether it will approve the creditors’ £10bn takeover or put Thames into special administration, and the creditors are preparing a revised offer with deeper write-offs.

At the ACR summer camp at the end of August, with a quiz sheet on Burnham still on the table, the talk turned to proportional representation, and I reached for the gym. I am in favour of going every day. I had not gone that day, or the day before, and in any operational sense I was against it. Burnham is in favour of proportional representation in the same way. At conference he promised a manifesto commitment and a national commission, which puts any change beyond the 2029 election, from a government whose majority could legislate for it this session. The promise does its work now, on the Liberal Democrat voters and the Green Party of England and Wales voters Labour wants back, and the reform waits for a parliament nobody has yet elected, which is roughly where the water announcements leave Thames.

Dave Kellaway saw the shape of this before most of us. Writing in International Viewpoint at the end of June, he refused the easy reading that Burnham changes nothing. Burnham, unlike Starmer, has an actual political project, rooted in the Manchester work and in what he calls the politics of place, with the Preston model behind it, and water is on the table where Starmer kept it off. “Socialists will need to adapt our campaigns and demands to relate to the new political issues and debates that are emerging,” he writes, and we “still need to build our eco-socialist alternative independent of the Labour Party and the Greens”. Liverpool bore out every word, and his conference follow-up catches both halves of it, real shifts on electoral reform and public control and policies that are still mostly promises. A left that greets a real differentiation by announcing that nothing has changed has stopped doing analysis and started doing liturgy, and Dave has done as much as anyone in the ACR to keep us out of that habit. An opening is not yet a programme, and a document from 1977 shows what a serious left did with an opening once it had one. Livio Maitan read the PCI’s Proposta di progetto a medio termine that summer and gave his reading to a seminar in Turin over 3, 4 and 5 September. His first move is to concede. A medium-term project drawn up by the workers’ movement, political and trade union alike, is “by no means to be rejected”, and the Leninist tradition always refused the sterilising separation between a programme of immediate demands and one attached to the conquest of power. He then reads it clause by clause.

Then comes the question that decides the matter. A transitional programme, “far from concerning itself with respecting certain ‘compatibilities’, tends to heighten the ‘incompatibilities’”. The PCI’s planners went hunting for compatibilities, and their text handed the evidence over in a clause its authors thought reassuring. Expansion and reconversion of the productive base imply profound changes in social relations, it says, “but such an undertaking can be achieved only through consent”. Consent from whom? A programme that must command the assent of both classes has drawn its boundary in advance, short of the point where capital’s return stops working. The drafters set the boundary down in the chapter on social relations, a few lines from the passage on new ideals.

The test can be checked against the people whose compatibility is at issue. On 27 December 1977 the CIA circulated a memorandum on the economic consequences of a larger Communist role in Italian government. Bankers would not react adversely. “The commitment of the PCI to austerity is strong,” it reads, “and admission of the Party to the parliamentary majority would enhance the ability of PCI leaders to sell austerity to the Party base.”

The 2026 version needs no clandestine service. Irwin Mitchell’s head of international, writing for overseas investors on 30 June, set out the condition in a sentence: global capital is comfortable with active government “provided rules are clear and returns are predictable”. The Chancellor gave the answer from the conference platform. John Healey reminded the hall that on his first day as Chancellor he had called fiscal discipline his first duty, and that “it underwrites every promise this Government makes”. His audience was the gilt market.

Housing is the clearer case, because there the instrument is built and explains itself in print. The National Housing Bank opened inside Homes England at the end of March with up to sixteen billion pounds of debt, equity and guarantees. Homes England’s prospectus says what the sixteen billion is for: it has the “potential to unlock over £50 billion of additional private capital”. On the equity products the bank “will require a return appropriate to the risk taken and will seek to unlock a significant multiple of the public sector’s investment from private sector partners”. Its own portfolio returns will “only seek to cover the cost of government borrowing used to capitalise and operate” it. Its first deal was a hundred-million-pound partnership with Aviva for build-to-rent homes, the first sites in Liverpool and Manchester, an insurer’s rent roll with public money underneath it. Read it from the other side of the class line. The state takes the cost of its borrowing, the private partners take a return appropriate to the risk, the ratio runs at better than three private pounds to every public one, and the council houses arrive as a consequence of that arrangement paying. Your First Home adds a public loan at the buyer’s end, Osborne’s Help to Buy revived with a smaller deposit. Whose returns the public purse underwrites was settled before a brick was laid, in the section on products.

“The Buses Have Gone Yellow” said the franchised network left nobody with anything except a timetable. That was too harsh, and the way it was harsh is worth more than the sentence. Bee Network drivers at Metroline and Stagecoach were on £19.06 an hour this spring. Nearly six hundred at Go North West, on Bee Network routes out of Bolton, Denton, Heywood and Wigan, were on £15.51 for the same job, and in May they balloted for strikes. The deal they accepted on 16 June takes them to £18 from April 2026, £19.50 from April 2027 and £21 in 2028, between twenty-three and fifty-six per cent across three years depending on grade. No strike was needed. The ballot was enough, and the company settled two days before the Makerfield poll.

What the franchise gave them was a published rate for the identical job a few miles up the road, and a public authority with its name on the vehicle. The transitional content sat in what the franchise made fightable, the drivers were the ones who noticed, and a reading of franchising as service delivery keeps none of that in the ledger.

Manchester Airports Group settles the argument, because there the public ownership exists. Manchester City Council holds 35.5 per cent, the nine other Greater Manchester boroughs twenty-nine per cent between them, IFM Investors of Australia the remaining 35.5. In the year to March 2018 the group paid the councils £107.1m, £58.9m of it to Manchester and £5.4m to each of the others. The councils are lenders as well as owners: in November 2017 Rochdale’s cabinet approved up to £11.3m of shareholder loans for the terminal programme, so part of what the ten receive arrives as interest. When Covid emptied the terminals the councils put about £260m back in, some £143m from Manchester and £13m from each of the nine, and Tameside was still asking in February 2025 for the dividend to return sooner than the 2028–29 it had been told to expect. The investor report for the year to March 2026 records £134.4m leaving for the shareholders: £47.6m of shareholder loan interest in September 2025, a c-share dividend of £4.5m to the council shareholders that same month, £47.6m more interest the following March, and £34.7m of deferred interest with it. Passengers were up 3.6 per cent to 32.3m and £1.3bn had gone into doubling Terminal 2. Maitan’s parenthesis on electricity in 1962 was that paid nationalisation transfers the asset and leaves the wealth behind. In Greater Manchester nobody had to buy anything. Ten councils own an airport, and ten council budgets now have an interest in the aircraft movements going up.

So the demands have to put their claim on control.

• Water and energy run by the workers who operate them and the households that depend on them, accounts open to both. The bill going to Parliament lifts a shareholding cap and gives mayors powers it has not defined. Control is the half a programme built on consent cannot accommodate, because planning by agreement means planning the partners can accept. The bill covers England only. Cymru has run its main water company since 2001 through Glas Cymru, a company limited by guarantee with no shareholders and its surpluses kept for customers, which is the nearest working answer to the question of what public control looks like when nobody is paid to own the pipes.

• Free public transport across Greater Manchester, paid for out of the airport dividend. The present arrangement runs the other way, with the dividend underwriting the absence of everything else. Inverting it claims the airport’s surplus and takes the growth incentive out of ten treasurers’ hands.

• Conversion decided by the people doing the work, hours cut and no loss of pay as the form the transition takes for them. Maitan made the redistribution of existing work the central axis because it takes hours out of capital’s hands and returns nothing. No employer concedes that in a crisis of profitability. Which is the point, or near enough to it: the fight over the working day puts the question of who decides in front of people who were not asking it, which is also why it stays out of the programme.

The Italian timetable is worth having in view. PCI abstention gave Giulio Andreotti’s monocolore, a single-party Christian Democrat cabinet with no other party in government, its confidence in August 1976, 258 in favour, 44 against, 303 abstentions, under the formula non sfiducia, “non-no-confidence”, which let the Communists keep a government in office without voting for it. A year of sustaining measures the party had campaigned against. Municipal compatibilism, or what the Italian comrades would have called bankruptcy, dressed as prudence. Then the medium-term project in June 1977, as the thing to show the members. The metalworkers moved ahead of the leadership, the FLM calling a mass strike and demonstration in Rome late that year against the party’s public warnings, strong enough to push the Communists into demanding more from Andreotti, which produced a cabinet crisis running to March 1978 and ending in a reshuffle that brought the same people back with a few independents added. An ultimatum in 1979, answered by early elections and a four-point fall. Fiat in the autumn of 1980, thirty-five days, Agnelli’s victory.

Dave’s answer to the difficulty is the one the ACR works with, and I have no better one to put beside it. Relate to the new contest, push from the openings, keep the ecosocialist alternative independent. Maitan’s Italy had something Britain does not have. The FLM could put hundreds of thousands on the streets of Rome against its own party’s wishes, and that is why there was a cabinet crisis to lose. The ACR could mobilise a few hundred people, and the Socialist Campaign Group issued demands that a coronation made it unnecessary to answer. Unite won six hundred drivers a pay rise worth having and could not have forced a crisis over water with it, and the distance between those two facts is what the test cannot touch, since it tells you what a programme costs capital and nothing about who is available to make it cost more, which leaves a method without an instrument, and this article without an answer to that.

The obvious reading is that the Budget settles it. The numbers arrive on 28 October and the programme can be marked. Half of that holds. Caution about prejudging a Budget nobody has seen is good practice, and the figures will matter. The other half runs into Maitan’s narrower claim: a programme can be read before the fight from its own documents, because the documents already say where the line falls. The prospectus is public. The investor report came out in July. The devolution package of 31 July has already told us what kind of transfer the mayors will get, a share of income tax from 2028 in place of grants, so that an area keeps more when its tax base grows, which settles one of the questions this piece meant to ask before the Chancellor stands up.

Maitan’s programme was never carried into a fight, so it left no record and cannot be marked. The PCI’s was. Manchesterism is being implemented, which puts it in the scoreable column, and the remaining criteria are cheap to set down now: whether an equalisation mechanism arrives with business rates retention, and whether the water money buys Thames or pays for an administration with the debt honoured in full. Under them sits one question. Does anything in the package raise a claim on capital’s control, or only on its returns? That much can be done inside forty-eight hours of the Budget, and done together. The other half of Maitan’s argument cannot, and nobody in 1977 managed it either.

By Duncan Chapel

ALAN THORNETT, who died aged 89, was the best-known militant in the British car industry during the decade when the industry settled the fate of British trade unionism. He spent the next forty years explaining, with names and dates, why that fight was lost and why it need not have been. He never stopped writing. His last article appeared in September 2026, on a Labour government’s energy policy. He died in Oxford on 9 October 2026.

Alan was born on 15 June 1937, near Oxford. He worked four years as a farm labourer and served three in the army. In the summer of 1959, he started at the Morris Motors plant in Cowley, driving a forklift truck in the South Works to feed the track for the new Mini. The same year he joined the Communist Party. He left it in 1964. By then he had a shop steward’s card, held from 1963, representing the lorry drivers who moved cars and components around the site. In 1967 he became the TGWU’s deputy convenor in the plant, and he chaired both the Joint Shop Stewards Committee and the union’s 5/55 branch.

Eddie Coles, a friend of the same age, came the same road from the farms, through the air force rather than the army, and started on the Cowley tracks that same summer. When Eddie died in 2002, Alan wrote his obituary. Eddie never held a union post above shop steward, and Alan’s verdict was that he and others like him “were the bedrock of the trade union movement in the plant”. That bedrock was a key aspect of what Alan spent his life defending; our movement talks a great deal about working-class leadership and produces it rarely. Most of the left’s writers and theorists, then and now, came through universities. Alan came to politics from a farm and an army barracks, and he went to work on the farm at about fifteen. Everything he knew about Marxism and the economics of the car industry he taught himself, and decades later he did the same with Earth sciences. He ended up writing four books and several hundred articles. The habit that made him a good steward, having the facts and the figures before the meeting started, is the same habit that made him a good writer.

Cowley was one of the most militant plants in Britain. Unionisation came late and hard. By the end of the 1960s the plant averaged more than three hundred stoppages a year, and it struck against both Harold Wilson’s In Place of Strife and Edward Heath’s Industrial Relations Act. In Militant Years (2010) Alan is clear that the workers on the line built that movement themselves. He is just as clear about who set out to take it apart. The company, of course, but also the full-time officials of his own union. Stewards elected on the track answered to the people working beside them. The officials answered to the union machine, and for most of the decade they worked with management to break the stewards’ organisation. Around 1974 an unnamed Sunday Times reporter decided, “for no apparent reason”, as Socialist Press put it, to call Alan “The Mole”. The name went round Fleet Street.

What the stewards built at Cowley was, in Alan’s description, a form of workers’ control inside the plant. The clearest example came in the winter of 1971. Management wanted to bring in work study under the new Measured Day Work system, with industrial engineers timing every job on the track. Whenever the engineers appeared, the line stopped. Within days, the new plant manager, John Symonds, conceded what Alan calls in Militant Years a breakthrough unique in the car industry. No job could be timed or changed without the stewards’ agreement, and until a final deal was reached, they held a veto. It was called mutuality. In plain terms, the pace of work on the track was negotiated with the people doing it, not imposed on them. A few weeks later, in January 1972, the same stewards’ committee voted to block the movement of coal inside the plant in support of the miners, knowing that it would stop the North Works.

I was once told that Cowley stewards on a picket line in a long hot summer put in a claim for the cost of their sun cream. It may be an urban myth. But the point it makes is not a myth: before Thatcher, workers’ self-organisation was sometimes strong enough that a claim like that sounded winnable.

For ten years Alan was a member of Gerry Healy’s Socialist Labour League and then its successor, the Workers Revolutionary Party, and it was there that he first faced the apocalypse. Healy’s party had predicted an imminent military coup and organised to prepare for it. In 1974 he wrote an opposition document inside the WRP that said plainly, “I think this prediction was wrong.” Against what his second document would call the party’s “ultimatistic and catastrophic approach to the organised working class”, it argued for a return to the method of the Transitional Programme. Concretely, it said the party should put demands on the left Labour MPs, so that their refusal to fight the Wilson government would be exposed in front of the people who had voted for them. On 24 November 1974, at a Western Area aggregate meeting, Healy challenged Alan to answer a series of questions on the degeneration of the WRP. Alan asked permission to answer them in a second document. First thing the next morning, Healy convened the Control Commission. It overturned a decision the Central Committee had taken only two days earlier and expelled him forthwith. At the beginning of December, about two hundred members who supported the document, or were suspected of doing so, followed him out, and the WRP’s organisation in Oxford, Reading and Swindon was wound up. In the same year the TGWU’s Midlands region split the 5/55 branch that was Alan’s base and removed him as deputy convenor. The expelled comrades founded the Workers Socialist League on 19 October 1975, with Socialist Press as its paper. By December 1977 the left had won back the leadership of the reconstituted Cowley branch.

The next five years were a war of attrition. In the plant’s union elections of January 1976, seven national dailies and three television networks campaigned against him, and the company let it be known that it would refuse to recognise him if he won. The right-wing slate took the election, and Alan came tenth of thirty-four, with 526 votes. British Leyland went on refusing, year after year, to recognise him as deputy convenor, and the union held inquiries and threatened to put him out. The Communist Party, in partnership with the TGWU officials, left the witch hunt unreported. Derek Robinson, the Communist convenor at Longbridge, was sacked by Michael Edwardes in 1979 after four years of selling worker participation to the Leyland stewards. Alan had opposed that policy throughout. He wrote Robinson’s obituary in 2017, and he did not pretend the argument between them had never happened. Alan himself was sacked on 17 November 1982, nominally for failing to renew a heavy goods licence. In fact, as he argued in print within days, it was a strategic decision to clear the plant before a new model went into production.

Much of what he wrote in those years did not carry his name. A paper short of hands needs one writer to carry several items in an issue, so Alan wrote as Bill Peters in Socialist Press and then in Socialist Organiser, the paper of the WSL’s fusion with the International-Communist League from 1981 to 1984. (Decades later, writing on Brexit, he did the same as Alan Davies.) Some of the best ‘Peters’ pieces report his own victimisation in the third person, because he was the person in the plant who had the information. In 1983 he wrote a five-part series on the Japanese car industry, which began with a visit to Toyota’s Takaoka plant and set it beside Cowley. Lifetime employment and the company union, he showed, rested on the smashing of Japan’s independent unions after the war. The Japanese model was not a stage of technology. It was a defeat that had been exported. This was internationalism of a practical kind: go and look, then tell Cowley what you saw.

He spent the miners’ strike without a workplace and without a vote, writing in Socialist Viewpoint, launched in the autumn of 1984. His argument then, held for the rest of his life, was that the government had no capacity to take on another major union at the same time as the NUM. Every route to a second front was open at some point in the year. The unions’ leaderships declined each of them. In December 1985, he identified the story the movement was already telling itself: that the strike had been wrong to fight, and that compromise had been right all along. He spent the next decade arguing against it. Inside Cowley (1998), with a foreword by Ken Loach, set out the 1970s in detail. The Social Contract was the deal under which the unions held down wage claims in return for promises from the Labour government of 1974–79. The industrial relations historian John McIlroy, reviewing the book, found that it showed how enforcing that deal had softened up workplace trade unionism for the offensive of the 1980s.

In May 1987 Socialist Viewpoint merged with International, the journal of the International Socialist Group, to form Socialist Outlook. From then on Alan was a leader of the British section of the Fourth International. He was elected to the International’s leading body, the International Committee. His reports from its meetings and congresses, among them the 2010 world congress at which the International declared itself ecosocialist, were often the only account British readers got. He had been inside Healy’s version of an international and knew what it did to its sections. When Healy died in 1990, Alan wrote the obituary, and he made the case historically rather than personally, which was a harder thing to do. He allowed himself one line of irony: by the 1980s Healy had done “more to discredit the Trotskyist movement, and the left in general than anyone else claiming to be a part of it”, and he added, “despite other strong contenders for that distinction”.

I worked with Alan day to day in the 1990s on the staff of Socialist Outlook, when he already had decades of experience as one of the country’s most respected revolutionary leaders. Our organisation was vibrant but fractious, grappling with the closure of historical cycles; the dissolution of the USSR; the Clause 4 defeat of the Labour left; and the definitive victory of neoliberalism. That time marked the transition from a Europe in which different economic futures were still openly contested to one in which market discipline, fiscal restraint and global integration increasingly appeared as the only realistic future once the labour bureaucracy had effectively condemned the working class in many countries to a long defensive struggle. Despite his frustrations with how well the national and international interventions of Marxist groups responded to this shift, Alan rose to the struggle both as a political and organisational leader.

When the war came to Bosnia, he threw himself into solidarity. After a bruising attempt at working with the remnants of the Workers’ Revolutionary Party in Workers’ Aid for Bosnia, International Workers Aid (IWA), constituted at Manchester in the autumn of 1993 to take the labour movement’s solidarity to the multi-ethnic resistance. He spent the next years reporting on convoys trying to get lorries through to Tuzla: Alan actually drove trucks on their way to Tuzla several times, and his role was highlighted in Solidarity is More than a Slogan, the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation book about IWA.

He was building broad parties long before the phrase was fashionable, and he never pretended it was easy. He worked in the Socialist Alliance, helped found Respect in 2004 and fought its split in 2007, and argued for Left Unity after that. He was a founder of Socialist Resistance and then of Anticapitalist Resistance. His reasoning was always rooted in class. The defeats of the 1980s, he wrote in 2000, were what made British politics unlike anywhere else in Europe. In 2008 he put the case that a party to the left of Labour was part of regenerating the unions, not a substitute for it. Uniting the left was a means to that end.

Alan wrote as he talked, plainly. The facts came in date order with the ballot figures attached, and where another writer would reach for a flourish he put an aside in brackets. He was an organiser, not a theorist, and every piece ended on what had to be done next. Above all he was fair to the facts, even when the left’s reflex ran the other way. In 2009, he opposed the ‘British jobs for British workers’ approach of unions (and some of the left) at the Lindsey Oil refinery, opposing skilled workers from Italy. After the defeat at Grangemouth in 2013, much of the far left was denouncing Len McCluskey. Alan set out the evidence that the stewards had recommended acceptance and the workforce had voted for it. He granted that the union leaders were responsible for the state of the unions. Then he wrote: “Denouncing McCluskey, however, irrespective of the circumstances or the facts, does not advance the struggle to regenerate the unions very much.”

Alan had an immediate reaction to David Cameron’s plan for a Brexit referendum which he saw, presciently, as likely to lead to a carnival of reaction. He successfully convinced many on the British left that, despite traditional opposition to the EU’s neoliberalism, that was not the occasion or way to leave it. He assembled the arguments in a powerful book, The European Union and the Referendum: For a critical ‘in’ vote to oppose xenophobia.

The second apocalypse was real. Ecology became the main subject of his last twenty years, and he got there earlier than most of the British far left. In February 2020 he wrote a preface for the Chinese translation of Militant Years, and in it he did something few veterans do. He named the one part of the Cowley record he would not defend. The stewards had the strength and the influence to make people take the ecological crisis seriously, and like the rest of the union movement, they never used it. He had changed his mind over the previous twenty years, he wrote, because there is no improving workers’ conditions on a planet that is dying, and no building a socialist future on one.

He reported on the Fourth International’s 2010 congress when it declared itself ecosocialist, noting the role of comrades from Latin America and in particular from the Philippines in understanding the centrality of environmental questions. In 2013, as Left Unity was taking shape, he argued that a new left party must be both democratic and ecological from the start. He read the Earth-system scientists and explained them for socialists: in 2016 he wrote about the Anthropocene Working Group’s case for a new geological epoch, and why the left should care. Facing the Apocalypse: Arguments for Ecosocialism (Resistance Books, 2019) started from the left’s “bleak” record on the environment. It set out planetary boundaries, water, pollution and the sixth extinction, and it traced the ecological thread in Marx, Engels, William Morris and Edward Carpenter. It was launched at meetings from Edinburgh to Waltham Forest. As Covid-19 spread in 2020, he argued that pandemics were part of the ecological crisis and not something running alongside it. Ian Parker called him the David Attenborough of the revolutionary left. The line stuck because it caught something real: he made the science plain for people who had never read it.

He wrote for Anticapitalist Resistance on the climate until weeks before his death, and he treated it as a class question. Who would pay for the transition, and who would have to be made to concede it? He defended the electric car against comrades who called it a technical fix, and he argued that the left should contest the COP process rather than boycott it. His most repeated line was that “nothing can be built on a dead planet”. Yet he never let the catastrophe become an ultimatum. The point he pressed hardest was the one he had made against Healy in 1974: a movement that cannot force change under capitalism cannot overthrow it.

Speaking in London in February 1987, a week after the death of the Argentinian Trotskyist Nahuel Moreno, Alan addressed a room full of currents that had spent decades expelling one another. He said of the man being honoured: “He did not have the whole answer and none of us have the whole answer.” He would not want more claimed for himself than that. What he had was the habit of writing it down in the week it happened, with the names in. The record is there, and it is worth reading: some 371 of his pieces, from 1976 to 2026, are already collected at thornett.redmole.org, with translations and a link to his own blog.

His papers for 1951 to 1997 are held at the Modern Records Centre at the University of Warwick (MSS.391).

Alan Thornett, trade unionist and socialist, born 15 June 1937; died 9 October 2026.

Alan Thornett archive

Publicado originalmente en inglés en Anticapitalist Resistance el 27 de octubre de 2023, con el título «Degrowth – facing up to harsh reality»: https://anticapitalistresistance.org/degrowth-%c2%ac-facing-up-to-harsh-reality/

Este artículo se basa en la introducción sobre el decrecimiento que presenté el 10 de octubre en una reunión de la West Midlands Climate Coalition [Coalición por el Clima de West Midlands]. Fue una reunión excelente, con veinte activistas muy bien informados, que dio lugar a un debate muy bueno que he intentado resumir al final. He incluido varios puntos que no llegué a desarrollar en mi exposición, en particular sobre la población en relación con el informe Los límites del crecimiento y, al final, sobre el método transicional.

Empecé señalando el reciente auge del interés por la idea del decrecimiento, que responde sin duda a la aterradora aceleración del calentamiento global que estamos viviendo. La temperatura media mundial del pasado mes de septiembre ha registrado un aumento sin precedentes (y enorme): 0,93 °C por encima de la media de septiembre del periodo 1991-2020. (Mi artículo anterior, «Decrecimiento: un renacimiento notable», puede leerse aquí.)

Esa misma tarde, sin embargo, acababa de ver el discurso de Keir Starmer ante la conferencia del Partido Laborista, cuyo tema principal fue el crecimiento, el crecimiento y más crecimiento. La conferencia conservadora de la semana anterior había sido igual. Toda la clase política ve el crecimiento como el santo grial que abre la puerta a todo y a cualquier cosa, con la implicación de que no hay alternativa. Es una propuesta absurda en un planeta finito, y hay que combatirla.

Yo intervenía, sin embargo, precisamente para defender una posición muy distinta: que el crecimiento económico es el mayor generador de emisiones de carbono y de calentamiento global, y que la alternativa estratégica es el decrecimiento, es decir, la reducción planificada del tamaño de la economía para ajustarla a los límites naturales del planeta.

El decrecimiento sigue siendo, por supuesto, una propuesta controvertida. Las élites gobernantes lo rechazan porque contradice la lógica del capitalismo, cosa que efectivamente hace, y la mayor parte de la izquierda socialista lo rechaza porque choca con el apoyo que ha dado al crecimiento económico y al productivismo durante todo el siglo XX y lo que llevamos del XXI, y con el que no ha conseguido romper.

El elefante en la habitación

La dura realidad es que, nos guste o no, el crecimiento económico exponencial es una amenaza directa para el futuro de la vida en el planeta, incluida la nuestra. Es el elefante en la habitación del que no se puede hablar en sociedad. Y, sin embargo, sin decrecimiento caminamos como sonámbulos hacia un colapso ecológico y social de desenlace profundamente incierto.

Las cifras son contundentes. Con una tasa media de crecimiento del PIB mundial del 3 % anual, la que se ha registrado en los últimos cincuenta años y la que se prevé que continúe, la economía mundial se duplica cada 23 años. Esto significa que se habrá duplicado hacia 2046 y cuadruplicado hacia 2069. La idea de que esto pueda contenerse siquiera remotamente en un planeta finito resulta inconcebible.

Hay quien sostiene —Kate Raworth, por ejemplo, en Economía rosquilla— que el problema no es el crecimiento como tal, sino la forma de medirlo, es decir, el PIB, y que si encontramos un indicador mejor, como la propia economía rosquilla, todo irá bien. Esto no tiene sentido. Aunque no usaríamos el PIB para medir una futura sociedad ecosocialista, hoy, bajo el capitalismo, nos proporciona información crucial sobre el crecimiento de la economía capitalista, nacional e internacional, y por tanto sobre lo que implica para el futuro del planeta. (Mi reseña de Economía rosquilla puede leerse aquí.)

En cualquier caso, existen también otros indicadores.

La tecnosfera física total, por ejemplo, mide el conjunto de la infraestructura física necesaria para sostener la vida humana en el planeta a su nivel actual: carreteras, edificios, suministro de energía y de agua, transporte, vehículos, plásticos, transporte marítimo, hospitales, tratamiento de residuos, etc. Suma en total 30 billones de toneladas, es decir, 4.000 toneladas por cada ser humano del planeta, y, como el PIB, se duplica cada veinte años.

Está también el consumo mundial de cemento, que refleja fielmente la expansión de las infraestructuras y que también se duplica cada veinte años.

Los límites del crecimiento

No es un debate nuevo, por supuesto. A mi juicio, el estudio fundamental sobre los efectos del crecimiento económico exponencial en el planeta lo realizó en 1970 un grupo de jóvenes científicos ambientales del Instituto Tecnológico de Massachusetts (MIT) dirigido por Donella Meadows. Sus conclusiones se publicaron dos años después, en 1972, con el título Los límites del crecimiento.

Al mismo tiempo, aunque por separado, el reconocido filósofo social de origen austriaco y pionero de la ecología política André Gorz planteaba la pregunta: «¿Es compatible con la supervivencia del sistema capitalista el equilibrio de la Tierra, para el cual es condición necesaria el no crecimiento —o incluso el decrecimiento— de la producción material?». Y añadía: «Hoy podemos responder a esta pregunta con un “no”».

La conclusión de Los límites del crecimiento iba en la misma línea. Lo formulaba así: «Si se mantienen sin cambios las tendencias actuales de crecimiento de la población mundial, la industrialización, la contaminación, la producción de alimentos y el agotamiento de los recursos, el planeta alcanzará los límites de su crecimiento en algún momento de los próximos cien años. El resultado más probable será un declive bastante repentino e incontrolable tanto de la población como de la capacidad industrial» (p. 24). Dicho de otro modo, nos dirigíamos (y nos dirigimos) hacia una catástrofe ecológica mundial a corto o medio plazo.

La respuesta a Los límites fue espectacular. Se vendieron doce millones de ejemplares en todo el mundo, se tradujo a 37 idiomas y sigue siendo hoy el libro sobre medio ambiente más vendido de la historia.

También fue un motor importante —junto con Primavera silenciosa, de Rachel Carson, publicado una década antes— del surgimiento del movimiento ecologista de los años sesenta y setenta. Y en 2002 inspiró el nacimiento del movimiento por el decrecimiento, primero en Francia y después a escala mundial, que creó un instituto de estudios sobre el decrecimiento y organizó una serie de conferencias internacionales que han mantenido viva la idea —en sus múltiples variantes— desde entonces.

La izquierda socialista, sin embargo, ya fuera radical, socialdemócrata o estalinista —con algunas excepciones importantes—, rechazó de plano el informe y despreció al movimiento ecologista emergente y al Partido Verde como distracciones de clase media respecto de la lucha «real». En su lugar, siguió apoyando el mantra productivista dominante del capitalismo. La Política Económica Alternativa de Tony Benn en los años ochenta, por ejemplo, se basaba por completo en el crecimiento. El informe ponía en cuestión, además, la idea de un futuro próspero basado en la abundancia material, que durante muchos años había sido el modelo de la izquierda.

La postura de la izquierda supuso no reconocer la importancia histórica de la llegada, bastante tardía, de la agenda ecológica, que cada vez sería más imposible de ignorar. También la incapacitó para cuestionar las agendas del crecimiento y el productivismo que suscribían los sindicatos y el Partido Laborista, y que hoy siguen sin cuestionarse.

Además, abrió una dañina división histórica entre socialistas y ecologistas que todavía padecemos: los socialistas veían a los ecologistas como poco socialistas, y los ecologistas veían a los socialistas como poco ecologistas, lo que por desgracia era cierto y sigue siéndolo.

El rechazo de la izquierda a Los límites se debió en parte a que el informe incluía en sus cálculos el aumento de la población, un tema que la izquierda, y en particular la izquierda marxista, se niega a discutir. Era difícil, sin embargo, sostener que esto tuviera un peso desproporcionado, ya que los autores basaban sus conclusiones en cinco factores principales: población, producción agrícola, recursos naturales, producción industrial y contaminación. Hace tiempo que considero que su decisión fue acertada. La población mundial aumentó en 74,6 millones de personas en 1972, y desde entonces ha seguido creciendo cada año en torno a esa cifra.

El decrecimiento en la práctica

Los principios del decrecimiento están claros. Rechaza el crecimiento y el productivismo en favor de la producción útil, la democracia, la redistribución económica y el bienestar.

El mejor libro que expresa este punto de vista es, en mi opinión, The Case for Degrowth, de Giorgos Kallis y otros. Insiste en que tenemos que producir y consumir de otra manera para que las personas puedan vivir vidas socialmente ricas y con sentido, en sociedades resilientes, al tiempo que reducimos nuestro impacto sobre el planeta y el mundo natural. Propone pactos verdes sin crecimiento, una renta básica universal y unos servicios básicos universales que protejan a la población durante la transición a las energías renovables, una gran reducción de la jornada laboral y poner freno a la industria publicitaria. Son todas reivindicaciones importantes por las que tenemos que luchar aquí y ahora.

La primera responsabilidad en esto corresponde, por supuesto, a los países ricos del Norte Global, que además deben financiar a los países empobrecidos para que puedan hacer la transición y, a la vez, alcanzar su nivel.

No podemos dar por hecho, sin embargo, que el calentamiento global vaya a detenerse de forma gradual —ni, desde luego, pacífica—, a pesar de todos nuestros esfuerzos, antes de que nos alcancen el caos climático desbocado, los colapsos sociales y ecológicos y los disturbios civiles, con una ultraderecha autoritaria que detesta todo lo «woke» esperando entre bastidores. Como nos advirtió Los límites del crecimiento, esos colapsos son muy probables y, por tanto, tenemos la obligación de prepararnos para ellos; sin embargo, de momento ni siquiera forman parte del debate.

En esas condiciones, la defensa del planeta implica construir un movimiento de masas de contenido progresista, desarrollado en el curso de la lucha, capaz de comprender la importancia crucial de una economía más pequeña, que reduciría la presión sobre los recursos y la biosfera del planeta. En otras palabras, ese movimiento tendría que tener como reivindicación central el decrecimiento —es decir, una reducción planificada de la economía mundial— para ajustar el impacto humano a los límites planetarios.

Ese movimiento de masas tendría que incluir a todas las personas dispuestas a luchar por salvar el planeta desde un punto de vista progresista: el movimiento ecologista en todas sus formas, los movimientos indígenas, campesinos y de agricultores, así como los sindicatos y los partidos políticos progresistas.

También tendría que exigir, a mi juicio, que los grandes contaminadores paguen la transición a las renovables mediante una fuerte fiscalidad sobre la producción de combustibles fósiles, para hacer posible una gran redistribución de la riqueza de los ricos a los pobres y, con ello, una transición socialmente justa capaz de ganar un amplio apoyo popular. Es lo que yo llamaría, puesto que no estamos en un periodo revolucionario, un enfoque transicional, que debe ser la piedra angular de la estrategia ecosocialista si queremos contribuir a salvar el planeta de la destrucción ecológica y avanzar hacia una sociedad futura poscapitalista y ecológicamente sostenible.

El debate

Como he dicho, fue una reunión excelente, con veinte activistas muy bien informados y un debate excelente al final. Nadie se opuso al decrecimiento por principio, pero se plantearon muchas preguntas, sobre todo acerca de cómo aplicarlo.

Carol Hyatt, concejala laborista de Wolverhampton y miembro de la Autoridad Combinada de West Midlands [el órgano de gobierno metropolitano de la región], dijo que apoyaba gran parte de lo que yo había dicho, incluida la necesidad de una renta básica universal y de servicios básicos universales, pero que había muchos detalles que discutir. No supe darle una respuesta adecuada, y está claro que queda mucho trabajo por hacer. Mencioné la cuestión de las ciudades de 15 minutos y los barrios de bajo tráfico, que en mi opinión encajan perfectamente en un marco de decrecimiento.

Rick Hatcher, de Birmingham Against the Cuts [Birmingham contra los Recortes], intervino sobre la Autoridad Combinada de West Midlands y el decrecimiento. Después me hizo llegar su intervención por escrito, en la que decía lo siguiente:

«Aquí, en West Midlands, el desarrollo económico lo impulsa, en nombre del Gobierno, la Autoridad Combinada de West Midlands (WMCA). Su objetivo es el crecimiento económico. La WMCA tiene una Junta de Crecimiento Económico formada por concejales de las autoridades locales y representantes empresariales; tiene un plan de negocio, “Global West Midlands”, y dispone de 84 millones de libras para apoyo a las empresas. La pregunta es: ¿qué significa esto para la crisis climática? La WMCA tiene un Programa de Descarbonización y Cero Neto que ofrece “asesoramiento experto” a las empresas. ¿Qué impacto tiene en el contexto de la búsqueda del beneficio a través del crecimiento?

La respuesta corta es que no lo sabemos. El movimiento sindical de West Midlands no tiene ningún análisis del impacto climático de las políticas de la WMCA, ni de ninguna de sus políticas económicas. No hay nada en la web del Midlands TUC [la organización regional de la confederación sindical británica], a pesar de que su secretario es miembro de la Junta de Crecimiento Económico de la WMCA. No hay absolutamente nada sobre la Autoridad Combinada, ni ningún análisis de la economía de West Midlands, en las webs de los consejos sindicales locales (trades councils) de Birmingham, Coventry o Wolverhampton.

Es una debilidad enorme. No basta con esperar a que los trabajadores de West Midlands sufran los golpes repetidos de la política económica capitalista local para reaccionar. Necesitamos análisis actualizados de cómo se concretan las políticas nacionales en las economías locales y del papel de organismos estatales como las autoridades combinadas, para poder desarrollar ya políticas preventivas; y la cuestión del crecimiento económico y su impacto climático es central.»

Bob Whitehead, de Birmingham, sostuvo que hay que examinar por separado el crecimiento y el decrecimiento. Necesitamos que crezcan, por ejemplo, el tiempo libre; la oferta educativa, sanitaria y de servicios sociales; el transporte público; la vivienda social; el aislamiento de los edificios; las energías renovables; la cultura; el deporte participativo; los equipamientos comunitarios, como lavanderías, comedores, cuidado infantil y actividades sociales; y los derechos educativos y reproductivos de las mujeres.

Lo que tendríamos que hacer decrecer sería, por ejemplo, los productos innecesarios, el consumismo, la publicidad, la propiedad individual del automóvil, la construcción de carreteras, el plástico, la producción de carne de vacuno y de carne en general, la aviación, el armamento y, por supuesto, el uso de combustibles fósiles. El equilibrio entre ambas cosas, dijo, se plantearía de forma distinta en distintas partes del mundo —en el Sur Global, por ejemplo—; la lista presentada aquí se refiere sobre todo al Norte Global. Todo ello iría unido a un enfoque cooperativo, de compartir, con una forma social, y no individual, de hacer las cosas.

Me preguntaron en qué lugar quedaba con todo esto el Sur Global, y pude reiterar que, aunque con el tiempo el decrecimiento tendrá que aplicarse a todo el planeta, la principal responsabilidad en esta fase recae en los países ricos del Norte Global —que son, en cualquier caso, los mayores contaminadores—, que no solo deben reducir drásticamente su propio impacto sobre el planeta, sino también financiar íntegramente a los países empobrecidos del Sur, tanto para que descarbonicen sus economías como para que, al mismo tiempo, converjan con el Norte Global en nivel de vida.

TL;DR: Twenty candidates stood under the Your Party name in the May 2026 English local elections, took around 6,260 votes between them and won nothing. The party did not contest the by-election the Greens took from Labour, could not stand for Holyrood, fielded nobody in Wales and was polling at zero by Clacton in August. Its entire declared income, £670,067.82, arrived inside a fortnight in November 2025 from two companies. Its statement of accounts was due on 7 July 2026 and the officer legally responsible for delivering it is Jeremy Corbyn. The forecast that electoral pressure would break the party on migrant and trans solidarity was wrong about the mechanism: there was no electoral pressure, because there was almost no election, and the attack on trans liberation came from an organised internal current. A branch meeting in Lambeth defeated it by 35 votes to 5.

The forecast

In August 2025, four weeks after Your Party UK Ltd was incorporated and long before anybody in Britain had voted on anything, Tomi Amole of rs21 set out his organisation’s approach to the new party at the Anticapitalistas summer university in Spain. Part Seven of this series takes up what he argued and where it fails. What matters here is that he made one forecast which can be checked, and that checking it is the quickest route into the party’s actual record.

Electoral pressure, he said, would crack the party first on migrant solidarity and trans solidarity, out of the wish to appear electable. He did not want Corbynism two point oh.

The party barely fought under its own name

The pressure he described never arrived, because the party barely fought under its own name. Twenty candidates stood as Your Party in the May 2026 English local elections, taking around 6,260 votes between them and winning nothing: five in Birmingham for 3,543 votes, two in Greenwich for 1,064, two in West Lancashire for 450, one in Waltham Forest for 180. What the leadership announced instead was a programme of 250 endorsements, most of them for independents and community groups rather than for party candidates, and in the event around fifty individuals were backed. Some of them won. Two in Oldham, Pamela Fitzpatrick for Arise in Harrow, Shah Abdul Majeed Bakth in Camden on 999 votes, Ashfaq Ahmed in Walsall on 1,419. Candidates in Stockport, Cambridge, Coventry, Salford and Waltham Forest scored under five per cent.

Everywhere else the party was absent. It did not contest Gorton and Denton in February 2026, the by-election the Greens took with Hannah Spencer, a local plumber, on nearly forty-one per cent, with Reform second and Labour third. In Scotland the members had voted on 8 February to stand in selected regions; the Interim Scottish Executive Committee asked HQ and the CEC repeatedly to open a process and was ignored until it was too late, after which a consultation on the “election focus” was launched that Scotland’s own CEC representative, Niall Christie, confirmed he had not been consulted about. Your Party Scotland announced it could not stand for Holyrood because of inaction from the national party, and the interim Scottish committee resigned in April along with Christie. In Wales, Beth Winter stood as an independent socialist for Pontypridd, Cwm Taff and Merthyr precisely because the party had failed to field candidates. By the Clacton by-election on 13 August it was polling at zero and announcing it would not stand in seats like that.

The register tells the same story in a different vocabulary

The register tells the same story in a different vocabulary. Your Party, PP18172, went onto the Great Britain register on 30 September 2025, cleared to field candidates in England, Scotland and Wales, with one emblem and no registered descriptions at all. Its entire declared income is £670,067.82, and all of it arrived inside a fortnight: six payments of £100,000 from MOU Operations Ltd on 13, 19 and 26 November 2025, and £70,067.82 from Zarah Sultana Campaigns Ltd on the 27th. Sultana had become MOU Operations’ sole director on 28 October, sixteen days before the first of those payments. There is no campaign spending return on the register, which is what you would expect of a party that fought no regulated election. There is no statement of accounts either. A party whose financial year ends on 31 December and whose income or expenditure passes £250,000 had to deliver its accounts to the Commission by 7 July 2026, and Your Party’s declared donations alone are close to three times that threshold. The register holds 768 sets of accounts for financial years ending in 2025. They include the Alliance for Green Socialism on an income of £3,975 and Independent Green Voice on £25. Your Party’s are not among them, and on the day this was written they were fifty-six days late. The officer who must deliver them is the treasurer, and the treasurer is Jeremy Corbyn. In February the Commission fined the Irish Republican Socialist Party £350 for precisely this failure, over accounts three years older. The officers currently listed are Jeremy Corbyn as Leader and Treasurer, and Dawn Aspinall as Nominating Officer. The man who refused to recognise the 12 July no-confidence votes carries the treasurer’s personal statutory liability for the party’s finances, and the officer who certifies candidate nominations is one of the people that vote purported to remove.

Landlords and ex-Tories

What the party did with its name where it did use it is also on the record. Mehmood Mirza, a solicitor and the landlord of ten properties in Newham, stayed on the endorsed candidates list. On 14 February Corbyn spoke at the launch of the Walsall Community Independents with three former Conservative councillors in the front row. The compromise was not with anti-migrant sentiment. It was with landlords and ex-Tories.

On migration there was nothing to capitulate from. The Many’s silence was the position, sharp enough that even the Greens, whom its own people cite approvingly as a model, hold clearer lines on migration and foreign policy than anything the leadership has been willing to offer.

Nobody knows who decided any of it

One further thing about this record connects it to Part Five. When the three CEC members resigned in August they listed the areas in which they, and the members of the regions they had been elected to represent, had been kept in the dark. Electoral policy was on that list, alongside party finances, staff appointments, recruitment and pay, membership numbers and the rationale behind branch formation. So the decision to fight almost no seats under the party’s own name, the decision to spend the campaign endorsing around fifty other people instead, and the decision about which of those fifty were acceptable, were not taken by the elected executive of the party. A landlord of ten properties and a platform shared with three former Conservative councillors were not the outcome of a vote that anybody lost. They were the outcome of a process nobody outside the officers group can describe.

What it looks like when somebody reads the rules

Cian Prendiville of RISE spoke in the same session in Spain, about the Irish left rather than the British one, and the contrast belongs here rather than in the strategic argument.

His method is worth noting on its own. He analysed the Irish left through electoral law, on the grounds that revolutionaries cede that ground to reformists and are then told what is impossible by people who have read the rules and know that they have not. A lawyer tells you how to obey the law, he said. A revolutionary works out how to bend it. Under proportional representation by single transferable vote, roughly forty constituencies returning three to five members each, a candidate with ten per cent in a specific geography plus transfers can take a seat, which is why the Workers’ Party in the 1980s could build in particular working-class communities on grass cutting and boarded-up houses and funding for a community centre, and turn that into parliamentary representation. It is why Joe Higgins won Dublin West in 1997 off the back of the water charges movement, having been arrested and imprisoned during it, and proved that being elected did not require selling out. It is why the two per cent national threshold for state funding worked as glue for the United Left Alliance. None of that transfers to Britain under first past the post, which is the point. He was demonstrating a method, not exporting a model.

Set that beside a party which registered one emblem and no descriptions at all, contested twenty wards out of several thousand, endorsed around fifty other people through a process its own executive cannot describe, and told its Scottish members they could not stand for Holyrood because the national office had not opened a process in time. Prendiville’s point was that revolutionaries who will not read the rules end up being told what is impossible by people who have. Your Party never needed to be told. It never asked.

Trans liberation, and where the pressure actually came from

Trans liberation is where Amole was right about the target and wrong about the cause. The pressure came from an organised internal current, not from voters. The Your Party Materialist Left ran a candidate in the February CEC elections, Valerie Coultas, on stated objectives that include segregating trans people from single-sex spaces and breaking the political alliance between LGB people and trans people. The Trans Liberation Group had already published a founding statement grounding trans liberation in class struggle and warning that without member democracy, exclusionary figures in the leadership would use structural power to write their positions into party policy. In early March the Lambeth branch defeated a no-confidence motion in Coultas by 21 votes to 20, then voted 35 to 5 with 5 abstentions to affirm support for trans liberation in line with party policy. Coultas resigned. The branch chair resigned with her.

Read that sequence again. The membership held the line, in a branch meeting, by seven to one, under no electoral pressure whatsoever. The safeguard that made it possible was the one the Trans Liberation Group had named in advance, and it was the same safeguard the CEC spent the spring dismantling.

Two things follow from that sequence and they point in opposite directions. The membership was capable of holding a line without being told to. The machinery through which it did so was the machinery the executive spent the spring taking apart. Part Seven is about what conclusion to draw from that.

Sources. Electoral Commission facts are from the register itself, queried on 1 September 2026: registration PP18172, approved 30 September 2025, Great Britain register, England, Scotland and Wales, officers and emblem as listed; seven donation records totalling £670,067.82, all in reporting period Q4 2025; no campaign spending return. The accounts search was run with the register’s own filters and returns 768 filings for financial years ending 2025, none of them Your Party’s; the 7 July 2026 deadline is the Commission’s own published key date for parties with a 31 December year end and income or expenditure over £250,000. The Commission publishes closed investigations only, last updated 17 February 2026, so whether it has opened a case here is not public. Local election figures are from the published results and from Socialist Worker’s count of 9 May 2026. Company facts are from the public register: Your Party UK Ltd, 16619803, incorporated 31 July 2025, dissolved 21 April 2026, no accounts and no confirmation statement filed.

Eight collections now open at redmole.org: Fourth International resolutions and congresses in English and French, the International’s periodicals from 1958, and four decades of British section papers.

Most of what the British left believes about the Fourth International it learned secondhand. Someone half-remembers a world congress resolution, someone else remembers a rival paper’s account of it, and the text sits in a box in a loft. Arguments about who said what get settled by whoever owns the photocopies.

As of this today a large part of that record is online, free and searchable, across eight sites at redmole.org. They are the product of about two years spent scanning, correcting and encoding Fourth Internationalist material. It began with work I did at the IIRE to find works by Ernest Mandel not available in English, like Ideology and Society.

The centre of the collection is fi.redmole.org, which carries the International’s resolutions, statements and world congress documents in English. Its French counterpart, qi.redmole.org, holds the conferences, congresses and resolutions in their French text. Where a translation and its original part company, readers can now check for themselves. The FI collection belongs to a wider project by the Fourth International to improve access to its historic documents. Resistance Books has endorsed it, and Pathfinder Press has given permission to use its translations of FI resolutions and documents and its FI readers. Without that permission much of the English-language record would have had to be retranslated from scratch by volunteers who, on the evidence of the last thirty years, would not have found the time.

Then the press. fipublications.redmole.org gathers the International’s English-language periodicals from 1958 to 1994: World Outlook, Inprecor and the publications that ran alongside them. International Viewpoint from 1983 to 2000 has its own site at iv.redmole.org, in full text. A scanned page can be read. Full text is different: it can be searched, quoted and linked down to the paragraph. The run has gaps. We are missing Nos. 5, 23, 27, 31 and 42 to 44, and if any of them are sitting on your shelves we would very much like to hear from you [write to duncan at red mole dot org.

The British papers make up the rest. socialistoutlook.redmole.org holds Socialist Outlook together with Socialist Viewpoint, International and Liberation!; socialistresistance.redmole.org covers Socialist Resistance from 2006 to 2021. And thornett.redmole.org collects Alan Thornett’s post-WRP political journalism, from the Cowley shop floor to ecosocialism. The obvious way to read that last collection is as one militant’s road from the car plants to the climate. It undersells it, though. Thornett’s writing is also the record of an argument the British section conducted with itself for years, about whether the ecological crisis rewrites the transitional programme or merely adds a chapter to it, an argument the current generation of ecosocialists is still having, mostly without knowing how much of it has been had before.

Why bother? Because the people now arriving in the Green Party and around Your Party bring inherited caricatures of every Trotskyist current, ours included, and most of those caricatures were drawn by people who had not read the documents either. Regroupment on the basis of what each tradition actually argued has some chance of holding. Built on folklore, it splits along the lines of the folklore.

All of this has been paid for by Red Mole’s paid subscribers. The next stage is Inprecor in Castilian, the magazine of the Liga Comunista Revolucionaria, drawing on extensive collections gathered by former members of the LCR in the Spanish state. [a fragile concept version exists: inprecor.redmole.org the site is live, but partial.] If you want the next tranche sooner, a paid subscription is what funds it.

None of this guarantees that anyone reads it. Collections like these tend to be visited by the same few dozen people who already knew where the boxes were, and putting a resolution online does nothing by itself to put it in front of a new member at her first branch meeting. How a searchable database becomes a movement that argues with its own history is a problem we have not solved. We suspect the answer lies less with the sites than with what branches decide to read together, which is a question for the branches, and one on which we would genuinely like to hear from readers who have tried something that worked.

The collections

• Fourth International. Resolutions, statements and world congresses. fi.redmole.org

• Documents de la IVe Internationale. Conférences, congrès et résolutions, dans leur texte français. qi.redmole.org

• Fourth International press. World Outlook, Inprecor and their companions, 1958–1994. fipublications.redmole.org

• International Viewpoint 1983–2000. Full text. Missing issues: Nos. 5, 23, 27, 31 and 42–44. iv.redmole.org

• Socialist Outlook. With Socialist Viewpoint, International and Liberation! socialistoutlook.redmole.org

• Socialist Resistance. 2006–2021. socialistresistance.redmole.org

• Alan Thornett. Writings from the Cowley shop floor to ecosocialism. thornett.redmole.org

• Inprecor en castellano. Revista de la Liga Comunista Revolucionaria (IV Internacional), nueva serie, 1979–1991. inprecor.redmole.org (conceptual site, still in progress).

Livio Maitan on the Communist Psrty of Italy (PCI)'s medium-term project, Bandiera Rossa no. 15, 1 October 1977

Translated into Englsh for the first time from the Italian, with Red Mole's introduction.

Introduction

The Proposta di progetto a medio termine was completed by a commission of the PCI Central Committee in June 1977 and published by Editori Riuniti in time for the summer. Maitan read it and gave the substance of this article to a seminar in Turin over 3, 4 and 5 September, held on the nature and contradictions of the PCI and on the party question as it was then being argued out in the far left. The charge he brings is that the document contains almost nothing an intelligent capitalist planner would need to refuse.

Expansion and reconversion of the productive base require “profound changes in social relations”, the project says, and the changes turn out to mean reducing the pockets of parasitism and unproductive labour, removing rigidities and degenerate equilibria, concentrating material and human resources in productive activity. Read those words from the other side of the class line. Productivity up, unproductive employment squeezed, investment redirected towards whatever the modern sectors are held to be. Confindustria could have signed most of it, and the Andreotti government was already doing a coarser version of it, sustained by PCI abstention. Then comes the clause that gives the game away: such an undertaking “can be achieved only through consent”. Consent from whom? A programme that must command the assent of both classes is a programme confined in advance to what capital can live with, and its yardstick is compatibility.

Austerity gets a chapter of its own at the very front, and a definition long enough to cover the retreat: a permanent reordering of consumption, investment and public spending, reaching into the models of culture and behaviour of entire sectors of Italian society. Whatever that describes, the austerity actually available in Italy in the autumn of 1977 was the one Andreotti had begun to impose, with some success from his own point of view, and which the PCI had spent a year declining to oppose. The arrangement had a name and a procedure. A Christian Democratic monocolore kept alive by abstention, 258 in favour, 44 against and 303 abstentions when the Chamber gave it confidence in August 1976, and the formula the party used for what it was doing was non sfiducia, no-confidence withheld. Maitan’s phrase for it, “support, directly or indirectly, or at the very least not opposing”, is a description of procedure, and the procedure let a party sustain a government’s economic measures for a year without ever having to defend a vote in favour of them to its own members.

Three months after Maitan wrote, on 27 December 1977, the CIA circulated a memorandum on the economic consequences of a larger Communist role in the Italian government. Bankers would not react adversely, it judged, with Italy’s short-term debt to foreign banks running at about seven billion dollars and exposure set by the surety of the investment and the rate of return. “The commitment of the PCI to austerity is strong,” the memorandum says, “and admission of the Party to the parliamentary majority would enhance the ability of PCI leaders to sell austerity to the Party base.” Many businessmen, it adds, would rather see the party gradually admitted to the governing process than risk it ceasing to cooperate with Andreotti and exerting its influence with labour in a negative manner.

The intelligence article attached to that memorandum goes through the medium-term project itself. It notes that the plan steers clear of wage reform, and of any modification of the wage indexation system in particular, exhorting workers to be more productive and promising voluntary restraint once the grand transformation has been achieved. On social insurance the project is franker. Take-home pay would rise at the expense of fringe benefits and contributions, and the deficit in the insurance system would be closed by scaling down health benefits and charging for medical services. Unlike their French counterparts, the analyst observes, the Italian Communists do not call for outright nationalisation of industry.

Set against that, those same analysts thought the planning section went further than earlier PCI documents, “broader and more strident”, and recorded that the Christian Democrats’ deputy secretary Galloni had called the plan duplicitous and predicted that carrying it out would end the free market in Italy. Somebody on the other side, then, read the document as a threat. The reading is worth keeping, with the qualification that it comes from a market-liberal analysis which treats the elimination of small farms as one of the benefits of EC membership and any diversion of resources from what the market shows to be efficient as a cost. What alarmed Galloni was the planning machinery, and machinery of that kind is neutral about who ends up operating it, which is where Maitan’s objection bites: the project asks for control over investment and concedes in the same breath that it will be exercised by consent.

The photograph at the foot of page 22 takes a moment to place. Lucio De Carlini, secretary-general of the Milan Camera del Lavoro, walking the line of the union’s own stewards, photographed by Lucas. The caption gives his office and nothing else, and somebody at Bandiera Rossa put the picture under an article about a programme built on consent.

Against this the article sets the bridge. Maitan is careful to concede that a medium-term project is legitimate, and that the Leninist tradition always rejected the sterilising separation between a minimum programme of immediate demands and a maximum programme attached to the conquest of power. The two methods part over what the connecting link is for. A transitional demand is chosen because the masses feel it and because winning it strikes at the framework of the system, so that its function is measured in the balance of forces it leaves behind. Where the PCI’s planners hunt for compatibilities, the transitional method sets out to heighten the incompatibilities.

The redistribution of existing work with no reduction of pay is the clearest case. It answers unemployment as workers actually experience it, which is why it can be fought for by people with no interest in Leninism whatever. It also takes hours out of capital’s hands and gives nothing back. No employer concedes that in a crisis of profitability, and the fight over it puts the question of who decides in front of people who had not been asking it. Nationalisation without compensation and under workers’ control does the same work from another direction. The compensation clause carries the argument, because paid nationalisation transfers the asset and leaves the wealth, and the electricity industry in 1962 had already taught Italian workers what that produces. Control is the other half, and it is the half a plan built on consent cannot accommodate, since planning by agreement means planning that the planners’ partners can accept.

The obvious reading is that all this is a quarrel about pace, the reformists going slowly and the revolutionaries going fast. But that is not quite right either. Maitan’s own preference in this article is for a trial of strength at medium term over an immediate confrontation, and his reason is the crushing preponderance of the reformist organisations inside the class. He too is arguing for a period of preparation. The difference lies in what the preparation prepares: a working class stronger at the end of it than at the beginning, as against an accumulation cycle restored.

Which leaves the difficulty the article states and does not solve. A medium-term programme conceived in the logic of transition needs organisations willing to fight for it, and the organisations with the members were the ones whose entire strategy the preceding pages have just demolished. The GCR could write the programme. It could not deliver the metalworkers. Though the metalworkers, as it turned out, did not need delivering. By late 1977 the FLM was impatient enough with the government’s slowness to call a mass strike and demonstration in Rome, against the PCI’s public warnings and its private pressure, and the mobilisation was strong enough to push the Communists into demanding more from Andreotti, which produced a cabinet crisis that ran to March 1978 and ended in the party’s complete humiliation, a reshuffle bringing back the same people with a few acceptable independents added. So the base moved, and the leadership spent the movement on a bid for ministries that failed. Maitan’s answer is that more than three quarters of the active population had an interest in an anti-capitalist dynamic, and that decisive matches would be played in France and Spain in the years immediately ahead. An interest is not an organisation, and the article does not say how the first becomes the second, or perhaps it says as much as anyone could say in August 1977, which is not very much.

The scala mobile appears in the article as the sole partial guarantee of workers’ incomes, to be defended intransigently, with workers’ control running from production costs through to shop prices. It was defended, and for a while the defence held. Near-full indexation under the 1975 agreement protected the lowest paid and compressed differentials through the rest of the decade, which is what made it the thing employers and governments most wanted rid of. Craxi’s decree of 14 February 1984 cut three points off the escalator and was law by that June. The PCI carried the fight to a referendum on 9 and 10 June 1985 and lost, 54.3 per cent against abrogating the cut and 45.7 per cent for, on a turnout of 77.9 per cent, which in a country that had been voting at eighty-five and ninety was the lowest a national ballot had drawn since the war. Turin and Genoa could barely muster half for putting the money back. Confindustria announced immediately afterwards that it would no longer honour the egalitarian 1975 agreement on the escalator, and the union confederations had already renounced their unity pact in the run-up to the vote, the Communist component of the CGIL alone balking at the concessions its Socialist wing, the UIL and the CISL were prepared to make. The mechanism itself lasted until the tripartite protocol of 31 July 1992. The workers’ control over costs and prices that Maitan attached to the demand was never fought for at all, and by the time of the referendum the argument had narrowed to points on a scale, with nobody on the union side in any position to say what a price was.

Employment was defended by other means. The cassa integrazione carried the redundancies and the state paid the wages of workers who were no longer working. Reductions in hours came later as a bargaining chip inside restructuring agreements, traded against flexibility, instead of a claim on capital’s control of the working day. Nationalisation without compensation and under workers’ control never became the axis of anything. Fiat settled that in the autumn of 1980. A militant strike against mass lay-offs and restructuring divided the shop floor, brought the white-collar grades out against the pickets, and ran to a full walkout of thirty-five days that ended in Agnelli’s victory, after which the private sector moved quickly to reassert control across Italian industry. Berlinguer went to the gates and told the strikers they would have Communist support even if they occupied the plants, and his own people spent those weeks working behind the scenes to head off the defeat that was coming anyway. After that the question of who decides in the factory was handled, where it was handled at all, at national level between three parties, one of them the government.

So the demands were never really tested, which is the difficulty with asking whether Maitan was right. A programme that is not carried into a fight leaves no record of its own, and what the years after 1977 do record is the other side of the ledger, the project’s own promises about employment and the Mezzogiorno set against what the PCI had to show when the compromise collapsed, an ultimatum in 1979 answered by early elections in which its vote fell four points, and a membership that never recovered the 1976 peak. The compatibility strategy can be scored. The other one cannot, and a reader coming to the article at nearly fifty years’ distance has to decide what weight a scored test carries against an unplayed one, which is not a question the archive answers.

A programme of capitalist re-stabilisation or a programme of transition?

On the PCI’s medium-term programme

On 3, 4 and 5 September a seminar was held in Turin on the following themes: 1. the nature and contradictions of the PCI; 2. the problem of the party through the current debate in the far left (crisis of militancy, theory of needs, etc.). We publish below extracts from a contribution made in the course of the debate on the first point by comrade Livio Maitan.

The drawing up of a medium-term economic programme undoubtedly answers to a requirement of this phase. It is clear to everyone that the Italian economy will not emerge from the deep crisis in which it finds itself simply by means of cyclical measures, emergency provisions, or international loans and facilities. At the same time, the real significance of the short-term decisions themselves can only appear within the framework of a wider perspective.

The PCI leadership feels this problem all the more acutely in that over the past year it has found itself supporting, directly or indirectly, or at the very least not opposing, a series of measures by the Andreotti government which have obtained certain results, though not exactly in the direction of the perspectives and indications the PCI had expressed during the 1976 election campaign and which still today constitute the leitmotiv of its propaganda and its agitation. The rate of inflation has been brought down, the balance of payments deficit contained, commitments to foreign creditors have been honoured, productivity has risen, hours worked have risen with it, some important industrial sectors have begun to climb back, wage dynamics have been slowed and, taken as a whole, working-class incomes have suffered a contraction in terms of real purchasing power. But quite apart from the fact that this schematic list already shows how the bourgeoisie has managed, thanks to the skill of the employers’ side and the shrewd manoeuvres of the Andreotti government, to shift the burden of the crisis onto the shoulders of the workers far more than it had managed to do in previous years, what has not taken shape at all is the hoped-for revival of production on a sufficiently broad scale, even if not a wholly generalised one. Investment, for its part, continues not to move. The Gioia Tauro affair, that steel giant in gestation condemned to death before ever seeing the light of day, is the symbol of the persistent absence of any real perspective for an organic industrialisation of the Mezzogiorno, while the crisis of the public sector, from the steel “colossus” of Italsider to the food “colossus” of Unidal, hardly adds to the credibility of the leading role this sector is supposed to play in the hoped-for transformation and recovery. The continuing fall in employment, finally, and the threats hanging over important industries in the coming months, if not indeed in the coming weeks, are the most dramatic translation of a situation of impasse and paralysis.

It is clear, lastly, that the PCI cannot content itself with continuing to hold out to its militants and its voters the less than inspiring perspective of support for the Andreotti government and its emergency measures, nor that of the agreement concluded in July between the six parties of the so-called constitutional arc. It has to show, or at least give the impression, that its present attitudes and objectives form part of a design of wider scope, whose realisation would carry a far greater weight than the measures put into practice over the past year or held out for the short term, and could actually secure some economic and political advantage for the working masses and the exploited layers. The draft medium-term project, drawn up by a special commission of the Central Committee and completed in June, is intended among other things to serve this purpose.

The objectives of transforming Italian society

Starting from the premises we have referred to, the PCI’s project can only end up setting itself objectives internal to the system, and restating for the umpteenth time aims so obviously desirable as to appear an almost cloying repetition of pious wishes (development of the Mezzogiorno, full employment above all). We shall see later what the real achievability of these objectives is, in the given context and even in the context the PCI leaders themselves postulate for the short and medium term.

Consistent with its analysis, the project sets itself, in more concrete terms, the elimination of the more specific causes of the crisis rather than the rupture and supersession of the mechanisms of the capitalist economy: the overcoming of the distortions, malfunctions and deformations of those positions of rent, or more generally of parasitism, which have long been the central element in the PCI leadership’s criticism and denunciation. In the part which concerns, note well, not the medium term of three to five years but social transformation in the broader sense, the project says:

“The fundamental objective of an expansion and reconversion of the productive base implies profound changes in social relations. What is involved is effectively reducing the vast pockets of parasitism and unproductive labour, removing positions of privilege, rigidities and degenerate equilibria which obstruct the setting in motion of a healthier and more organic process of economic and social development, of a broad concentration of material and human resources in productive activities, in the sectors essential to the country’s evolution in a modern and progressive direction. But such an undertaking can be achieved only through consent, and can therefore be built only around new ideals and new aims, developing at one and the same time as an economic reform and as an intellectual and moral reform of society.” (Proposta di progetto a medio termine, p. 25, Editori Riuniti, Rome)

The flimsiness and the almost banal generality of the objectives are not made good by the proclamation which immediately follows, on the need to fight for “humanly and socially advanced values and firm orientations of struggle for the liquidation, etc.” (ibid.). On the contrary, the attempt to lend a certain ideological dignity to an ultra-moderate gradualism produces nebulous formulations (”productive and creative labour”) about “a new scale of values” founded on “a revaluation of socially useful productive labour” (p. 26). It is telling that this notion has already been taken as a target in some of the contributions on the project published by the party weekly Rinascita. One need only recall an article by Claudio Napoleoni, an economist elected as a deputy on the PCI lists, who even recently has not hesitated to use explicitly revisionist concepts and formulas in support of the Berlinguer leadership’s underlying strategy. “The pairing of these two qualifications (productive and creative)”, writes Napoleoni, “seems to me a constant of the text, which almost tends to treat them as reciprocally implying one another. The difficulty that arises here is the following: if the term ‘productive’ is given the meaning it has in capitalist society, the two terms not only do not imply one another, they positively exclude one another. For ‘productive’ means ‘productive of surplus value’ and therefore refers to abstract or alienated labour, which is the contrary of creative labour realised by man.” (Rinascita, no. 31, 5 August 1977)

Elsewhere, and on particular questions, the rest descends into the emptiest rhetoric: when it declares that Italian schooling must have “its dignity and seriousness restored”, when it writes that we must “expand the personal capacities of every individual and the bonds of solidarity between all men” (p. 30), or when it speaks of sport as “a means of physical and moral enrichment of individuals and the conquest of an important collective dimension” (p. 31). The question of equality itself is posed in generically idealist and democratistic terms, while the paragraph devoted to “social relations” can be summed up in a proposition that any well-intentioned liberal or philanthropist could make his own:

“It is necessary to promote, on the one hand, a substantial raising up of the great mass of the people, and first of all of the neediest and most backward layers, including through policies of income redistribution, to be pursued systematically by cutting into positions of privilege which sustain intolerable wastes of wealth.” (ibid., p. 32)

If, for that matter, the themes of the women’s movement are touched on, the fact remains that the solution of the problems is presented as achievable within the framework of the family, without even the most cautious hint at a supersession of that institution (pp. 30 and 34), which is one more sign of the inspiration of the project under discussion, gradualist and beyond that moderate.

It is telling, besides, that right at the beginning of the first part the theme of austerity should be introduced in a separate chapter. “Austerity”, one reads, “is an undeniable necessity if the present economic difficulties are to be faced. It therefore has no alternative. But in our conception austerity is not a temporary expedient, a brief period of painful sacrifices in order then to return to the old orientations, it is not a momentary reduction of consumption conceived as unchangeable, but rather a proposal aimed at changing, according to a precise programme, the way the economic mechanism functions and its social ends, the orientation of investment, of production and of public spending, the very quality of consumption, and thus at affecting the ways of life bound up with it, the models of culture and behaviour of entire sectors of Italian society” (ibid., p. 21).

To put it a little crudely, here the worthy drafters of the text are prevaricating. Not insensible to the reactions which the sermons on austerity have provoked among substantial sections of the party’s working-class voters and among its own members, they have taken pains to sugar the pill by mixing different concepts together and unduly broadening the notion of austerity. But the mystification, and the word is more than ever apt, consists precisely in this: behind future perspectives of at best uncertain realisation, or behind rhetorical smokescreens, the real content lies concealed, that is to say the positions already taken and in all probability destined to be repeated in the period immediately ahead, not with regard to some metahistorical concept of austerity but in the face of the concrete, prosaic austerity which the Andreotti government has already begun to impose, from its own point of view not without a certain success, on the working masses of the country.

For the rest, the project advances no new themes or objectives. Thus in substance the notion of a new phase of the “democratic and anti-fascist revolution” returns, with the wish expressed for the “valorisation of the anti-fascist matrix and of the progressive character of the constitutional pact”; thus the familiar motifs recur, on the “democratic government of the economy”, on “decentralisation and the reordering of the structures of the state”, on the “development of democratic, social and political pluralism”, on “the renewal and democratisation of the European Economic Community” (pp. 36–41).

Naturally the motif of the “elements of socialism” which could be introduced gradually “into the functioning of the economy and of society” is taken up again as well. But these elements appear, if it is possible, still more diluted and insubstantial than in earlier formulations. They are, to take the exact words of the text:

“... first of all the necessity and the choice of a conscious direction of the development of society, of an effective planning of the economy, placing at the basis of such a process requirements of justice, of solidarity, of freedom, of the raising up of the human condition.” (ibid., p. 19)

It is obvious that on “requirements” of this kind there can be, in theory at least, the widest convergences. Such convergences are held out for this phase of “transformation and renewal of Italian society” as well, and not only for the medium term, on a multi-class basis: the hypothesis being that “forces of differing political inspiration, in respect of the general conceptions proper to each component of the democratic and popular movement” can contribute to satisfying them.

The reality is that there no longer exists, in general, any clear distinction between the programme of more general transformation and the medium-term project. This is the logical consequence of a gradualist conception which tends to eliminate every qualitative leap in terms of power and of class content, and to reduce, so to speak, the clashes between opposed classes to “confrontations” within the given institutional framework, between honoured protagonists of an almost idyllic political and social pluralism.

The battle for a transitional programme

The drawing up of a medium-term project by the workers’ movement, political and trade union alike, in this phase, is by no means to be rejected. The Leninist conception – with all due respect to revisionists old and new and to all the more or less fanciful “inventors” of truths about the transition – has always rejected the sterilising separation between a minimum programme of immediate demands and a maximum programme with the objectives bound up with the conquest of power. It has always insisted on the essential character of the bridge, of the connecting link constituted by a transitional programme. But the purpose of such a programme – put forward in terms of immediate relevance in periods of great social and political crisis, in revolutionary or pre-revolutionary situations – was never conceived as that of correcting or eliminating the “distortions” of the system, of promoting its “democratisation”, but rather as that of indicating to the mass movements objectives to which the masses were responsive and whose attainment entailed an attack on the framework of the system itself. To use a current terminology, a transitional programme inspired by Leninist criteria, far from concerning itself with respecting certain “compatibilities”, tends to heighten the “incompatibilities”, in the perspective of a struggle for power.

In the contribution on the project which we have already cited, Claudio Napoleoni wrote:

“We are in a situation in which the working class has obtained results which are not compatible with the maintenance of a privatistic mechanism of economic development, but in which, on the other hand, the production of material wealth depends more and more on that mechanism.”

Leaving aside the overstatement in the first assertion, the observation is broadly correct. It should be added at once that a situation of this kind cannot be prolonged indefinitely, and that it would be wrong to regard it as irreversible (as Napoleoni appears inclined to do).

Antagonistic social forces, unlike the players in a game of chess, cannot accept that a stalemate should bring their contest to an end. The problem is in which direction the present relative equilibrium of the opposing sides will be broken, and which class will succeed in gaining the upper hand by imposing its own solutions. The bourgeoisie has to aim at a more or less far-reaching restoration, not out of reactionary obtuseness or political insensitivity, but because of the vital requirements of accumulation and of the functioning of the system. If it does not succeed, it will have to face an explosive situation at home and on the international market, and it will fall prey to the sharks who, contrary to what the authors of the project appear to dream, are not prepared to apply any “correct” rules.

The working class must not delude itself that it can remain entrenched on the defensive indefinitely without suffering a serious defeat. In the abstract, it can choose between moving towards an early confrontation and preparing for a trial of strength at medium term. For a whole series of reasons – in the first place because of the political relationship of forces within it, that is, given the crushing preponderance of the reformist organisations – the second alternative is without doubt preferable. A medium-term economic project, conceived in the logic of a transitional programme, that is, from the standpoint of revolutionary rupture and not of reformist gradualism, can and must be a valid instrument for building it.

To confine ourselves to a few indications by way of example, the defence of employment will have to be posed from the standpoint of the priority of workers’ interests, in the full awareness that lacerating contradictions will follow from it which cannot be set on the road to solution except through the establishment of a new political power, a new social system. The central axis of the struggles will have to be a redistribution of the existing work which implies a reduction in hours with no reduction in pay. In parallel, the objective must be posed of striking, through nationalisation without compensation and under workers’ control (so that what happened with the nationalisation of electric power is not repeated), at the big groups responsible for the crisis and profiteering from it, and at big commercial intermediation, beginning with that which operates in the import of essential foodstuffs. Against inflation, an intransigent defence of the scala mobile, the sole partial guarantee of workers’ incomes, imposes itself and will impose itself, together with forms of workers’ control extending from the level of production costs to that of consumer prices.

The reformists of the PCI will object that this is a perspective of war between the classes, and on an international scale. But is it in fact possible to evade this war? Is it possible, without being reckless, to ignore or underestimate how dramatic the situation is? The problem is to put ourselves in a condition to win. The basis for a reasonable optimism – beyond the enormous difficulties and the tremendous risks – is that more than three quarters of the country’s active population have an interest in a dynamic of anti-capitalist struggle; and that important matches are to be played in the coming years in decisive countries such as France and Spain, where the workers’ movement is still on the rise.

28 August 1977 – Livio Maitan

The Green Party’s biggest conference showed a party with a great deal to be proud of, and a left with a growing audience. To turn that audience into influence, the left has to change how it works.

When Die Zeit sent Jochen Bittner to the Green Party conference in Brighton, he did not like much of what he saw. But the most quotable passage in his report came from an 18-year-old helping on the Resistance Books stall. “They sold us this dream,” Laurence Liu told him. “Go to university and you will get an excellent job. That dream has turned out to be a nightmare.” Laurence reached for the Greek proverb that a society grows great when old men plant trees whose shade they will never sit in. The generation before his, he said, did not plant them.

Bittner, to his credit, took the point. He noted that youth unemployment in Britain has reached 16.4%, and he conceded that the capitalism which offered young people’s parents opportunities now stands in front of them like a cliff face with no first foothold. That, more than anything said on the stalls in the foyer, is why the Green Party now has around 200,000 members.

The question for socialists in the party is what that membership, and the conference it produced, add up to, and what the left should do next.

A conference to be proud of

The party as a whole can be proud of Brighton. It was the biggest conference the Green Party has ever held. When the hall was asked for a show of hands from first-time attenders, it looked like three-quarters of the room or more. Membership roughly tripled in well under a year, and the growth runs across every generation: the older layer who came through the Corbyn movement, and a much younger cohort, including many young trans members, who have joined a party that stands up for them when others will not.

The mood was optimistic and positive. The conference held its ground on bringing water back into public ownership. It also kept the party’s long-standing culture of consensus, which is less toxic and more supportive than much of the left is used to. That culture has real strengths. It keeps a fast-growing party moving forward together.

Zack Polanski’s speech set the tone. He went out of his way to praise the party’s MPs, its deputy leaders and his predecessors, including Natalie Bennett and Caroline Lucas, and he pointed out that his election was part of the party’s growth, not its cause, though he has certainly turbo-charged it. He called for an immediate three-year freeze on private rents, public ownership of water and other utilities, and wealth taxes. After the summer’s heatwave, he praised Hannah Spencer’s bill on workplace heat and restated the party’s opposition to the Rosebank and Jackdaw oil and gas fields. He named Palestine and trans rights as non-negotiable red lines, and both drew standing ovations. He called for Palestine Action to be de-proscribed. His slogan, “Vote Green, move Labour”, sums up what a small party with few seats can do: pull the agenda left when so much else is pulling it right.

The Zionism motion and a mature response

The vote that drew the headlines was the motion declaring that Zionism is racism. It passed by roughly 1,000 votes to 800, a bigger margin than many of us expected. Opponents demanded a card vote on every single vote in the debate, which amounted to filibustering. I opposed those tactics. They showed how much obstruction can disrupt a conference, but enough time had been allotted, the chair handled it superbly, and the motion passed anyway.

The debate had real substance. Two amendments argued that Palestinian self-determination might take forms other than a single democratic, secular state, and that it was not for the Green Party to prescribe which. They were supportable, and they fell. An amendment from Jewish Greens conflated Zionism with Judaism and recast the question as one of safeguarding Jewish members. It fell too, after delegates heard that the motion has no bearing on party discipline. Outside, on the Saturday, a pro-Israel demonstration joined by local fascists and self-styled patriots chanting “God bless the IDF” did its own cause no favours. The party that exists today has been formed in the crucible of the genocide in Gaza, and its members know it.

It would be easy to tell this as a story of conference defeating the leadership. That is not quite what happened. The leadership put real effort into a consensus alternative, and it was not a bad text. It reflected where much of the party stands, and it too spoke of genocide in Gaza. The leadership was also divided: Caroline Lucas spoke against the motion, and Deputy Leader Mothin Ali spoke for it. In an extreme situation, the leadership let its differences show rather than whipping the hall.

What matters now is how the party lives with the decision. The leadership’s initial response has been mature and constructive. The joint statement from the party’s MPs after the vote was measured. Some saw it as too modest. I think it was helpful, and it is the kind of response that lets a democratic party hold together through a hard argument.

There is also a lesson here for the left. The motion succeeded because it rested on one simple proposition that could gather a majority. That is a model for how the left can win other arguments in this party, though on most questions it will take more than one conference.

A more visible left

Brighton also showed the left in the party to be more visible, and to have a growing audience. Green Left, frail as it still is, made a real impact. ACR comrades helped staff its stall, where members came to talk about socialism, Marxism, ecosocialism and how a transition beyond capitalism might work. Its team put Marxist ideas clearly and won a hearing. Its bulletin, Watermelon, gave delegates detailed voting advice on the motions, something Greens Organise did not offer beyond backing the trade union motion. Watermelon has appeared at every conference for many years, but with most delegates at their first conference, few already knew Green Left or its bulletin. So we took it to them and explained what it was: free, written by party members, and full of practical voting advice. That advice is the most useful thing the left can give delegates, and it should be built up.

The Resistance Books stall did a great trade, thanks in no small part to Laurence, and Bittner’s was only one of many conversations there. We will be thanking the party’s executive and offering to help local parties set up bookstalls of their own. Greens Organise brought energy to the conference, and helped run the Undercurrents programme next door, with a strong line-up of progressive speakers. The left’s wins on rents and water came from pressure from below that the leadership was willing to take up. The leadership is not one thing. It is a team of people with different views, and the left can work with that.

But a growing audience is not the same as growing influence. Three weaknesses stood out.

Three things the left needs to change

1. Learn how the party actually makes policy

The Green Party’s policy is not really made at conference. It is made in the policy working groups, and it reaches conference after online workshops whose views and votes are reported to delegates before they vote. Fewer than twelve motions arrived at Brighton without a working group’s recommendation. Conference is less the engine of policy than its emergency brake.

The hall rewards that process. In the health debate, a working group asked delegates to vote down an amendment it agreed with, because the amendment had not come through the group. Delegates did so. Most amendments fall, including good ones. When time ran short, the ecosocialist policy motion, which members had placed high on the agenda in the priority ballot, was simply skipped, and nobody objected from the floor.

The left can complain about this, or it can adjust to it. Culture eats strategy. If socialists want an anti-capitalist break in party policy, they need to be in the working groups and the pre-conference workshops early, not arriving at conference with amendments the process has not seen. And when they do go to conference, they should do what the Zionism motion did: build consensus around one clear proposition, and be prepared to win it over two or three conferences.

2. A clearer line on being in and against the state

The Greens now run councils and have MPs. They may soon hold more power. That raises the oldest question the socialist left faces: what do you do when you hold office inside a state, and an economy, that are built to stop you?

Any Green administration that tried to carry out its programme would be frustrated, by the state and by the markets. We do not need to reach for old arguments about the bourgeois state to see this. Syriza and Podemos showed that even mild social democracy can be blocked, not only by state institutions but by international finance. What Brighton makes more likely is that a Green Party in power would be on the left and stay there. It is the reality of capitalism, not the character of the Green Party, that makes the clash likely.

The left needs a stronger and clearer line on this, and it needs to offer it to the whole party, not keep it for its own meetings. Too much socialist talk in the party treats ecosocialism as a destination somewhere over the horizon, while the day-to-day work is about winning council seats. That is a minimum-maximum programme with a large gap in the middle. What fills the gap is a strategy for being in and against the state: using office to support struggles outside it, refusing to become the local managers of austerity, and building the movements that can defend a Green council or government when the pressure comes.

3. Organise locally, and at conference

Only around one per cent of the party’s members came to Brighton. That is not a scandal: if policy is made elsewhere, there is less reason to come. What matters more is what happens in local parties, and there the picture is better. Attendance at branch meetings is improving. But a party where people turn up to meetings is not yet a party of activists.

At conference itself, the left was more visible than coordinated. There was good voting advice, but no serious attempt to organise vote by vote. A left that wants to shape the outcome needs a caucus at the end of each day to review what has happened and agree what to do next, an online voting guide that can keep up with a complex and fast-changing agenda, and a fringe event of its own.

What to do next

That points to three tasks.

• Get local Green parties campaigning. Local parties should turn outwards into their communities, and not only through electioneering or listening campaigns, which are canvassing by another name. They should be building and supporting the anti-racist and anti-austerity movements, and offering a vision of the Green Party as an activist party rooted in united-front community campaigning.

• Get the left coordinated and working productively in the policy process. The broad left in the party, including Green Left, Greens Organise and the Green Party Trade Union Group, needs a shared view of which policy working groups and which debates are strategic, and how to change what local parties do. It needs to be in those working groups early, drafting with them rather than amending against them.

• Build a clear anti-capitalist pole in the party. That means a current that relates to the whole party with a visible political alternative, not one that blends in or, at the other extreme, stands outside shouting that the Greens can never become socialist. Green Left gives the party’s socialists a real lever for this work, and its impact at Brighton shows the audience is there.

Laurence Liu was right that his generation has been left to build almost everything anew. Brighton showed that many of them have chosen the Green Party to do it. The left’s job now is to help them plant the trees.

TL;DR: A WhatsApp debate about Cuban press freedom became an argument about George Galloway. It shouldn't have. Galloway was detained for nine hours at Gatwick, not arrested, not charged, not exiled. Abraham Jiménez Enoa was driven from Cuba for running an independent magazine. These are  not the same thing. The Workers Party of Britain co-mobilises with neo-nazi-aligned networks, refuses to spurn BNP endorsements, and has  chosen to compete with Reform on Reform's terrain. The campist logic that  makes Galloway a martyr is the same logic that silenced Your Party on  Iran. Galloway's friends are not ours.

Start with a simple proposition. The enemies of your enemies are not automatically your friends. The left has always known this, or claimed to. The history of the twentieth century is littered with the wreckage of movements that forgot it.

A few months ago, a Guardian piece on Cuba’s first independent magazine triggered a discussion on a socialist WhatsApp thread that revealed, with uncomfortable clarity, how thoroughly campism has colonised even the instincts of people who consider themselves on the left. Someone raised George Galloway as a comparable case. Press freedom, they said. State intimidation. The same logic.

It isn’t the same logic. It is precisely the opposite logic (indeed, the WhatsApp group later purged supporters of Iranian and Chinese trade unions persecuted by those regimes, showing the organisers’ limited support for freedom of speech).

Abraham Jiménez Enoa co-founded modern Cuba’s first independent magazine, El Estornudo, and was driven into exile by a state that could not bear to hear the truth from its own citizens. He had no sponsors. He was not a broadcaster for a foreign state. He reported on flooding, on poverty, on the daily texture of life under a system that preferred silence: on the baseball stars the regime had erased from history, on the internet dealers in Havana’s parks selling illegal connections in whispers, on the ordinary Cubans whose stories the state wanted buried. The Cuban security services monitored him for years, subjected him to strip searches, broadcast his interrogation on national television to destroy his reputation, and eventually made it impossible for him to remain. The comparison to Galloway fails on every particular.

On 27 September 2025, Galloway was detained at Gatwick under Schedule 3 of the Counter-Terrorism and Border Security Act 2019, held for nine hours, his phone and laptop confiscated, then released without charge. Neither he nor his wife was arrested. The Metropolitan Police confirmed this explicitly. No medical incident was documented. He has since relocated to Malaysia, describing his departure as self-imposed exile; the contrast with Jiménez Enoa, driven from Cuba by a state that gave him no choice, is the whole argument in miniature.

There are real cases. Richard Medhurst, a British journalist, was arrested at Heathrow in August 2024 and held for almost 24 hours on terrorism grounds; six months later, Austrian authorities detained him, threatened to revoke his residency, and confiscated his electronics, including the manuscript of a book he had spent years writing. PEN America lists his case as active, status: continued harassment. His politics on Ukraine and Gaza are not Red Mole’s politics. That is precisely the point. Press freedom defence does not require political agreement with its beneficiaries. It requires factual precision about what is and is not happening to them. Medhurst was arrested. Galloway was not.

Schedule 3 is a genuinely troubling power. It permits border detention and device seizure without arrest, without charge, without suspicion of a specific criminal offence. Its misuse deserves consistent opposition. That opposition does not require treating its targets as comrades.

Galloway is not a comrade. He is the leader of the Workers Party of Britain, a formation that combines left-wing economic rhetoric with anti-immigration politics, transphobia, and a documented, systematic pattern of co-mobilisation with the far right. Not an occasional bad booking. A pattern. In May 2023, Galloway shared a No2NATO platform with David Clews of Unity News Network. In August 2024, Clews was on the publicity for a Glasgow rally alongside WPB representatives. On 2 May 2026, a gathering outside the Ukrainian Embassy in Holland Park was co-promoted by Clews and headlined by Chris Williamson, until recently the WPB’s deputy leader. Searchlight Magazine has documented Clews’s record: Patriotic Alternative conferences in 2022 and 2023, self-described ‘race realist,’ white genocide conspiracy theorist, one of those who helped incite the 2024 Southport anti-Muslim riots by spreading a false Arabic-sounding name for the alleged killer. In Manchester, a WPB local election candidate addressed a Patriots of Britain rally alongside the UKIP leader. The party’s Runcorn by-election candidate regularly sat at meetings with Holocaust deniers. When Nick Griffin endorsed the party during the 2024 Rochdale by-election, stating that Galloway ‘understands the position of working-class white Britons on immigration,’ Williamson was asked on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme whether he would distance himself. He said he would not ‘spurn endorsements.’ Mishal Husain offered him the opportunity right there on air. He declined.

Galloway’s own explanation of his project, offered in December 2024 and cited approvingly at the WPB’s Political Committee, is worth taking seriously: ‘The rising tide is with Reform. Right populism is looking unstoppable for this period. We have to develop a left populism that competes against it in a language that the mass of the people can understand and relate to.’ In the same month, he told Piers Morgan that Trump’s ‘instincts are right’ on America First economics, though he has since described Trump as ‘a clear and present danger to America and the world.’ The oscillation is not incoherence. It is the structural logic of a politics that defines itself primarily against liberal internationalism and finds, reliably, that it shares its conclusions with the nationalist right: oppose arms to Ukraine, legitimise Russian territorial claims, treat NATO expansion as the primary cause of the war. Different premises, identical outputs. That is what red-brown means in practice.

There is a name for the broader politics this represents. It is campism. The logic is structurally simple: the enemies of American hegemony are, by that fact alone, objectively progressive. So Galloway becomes a press freedom martyr. The Iranian theocracy becomes a force for anti-imperialism. The Kremlin’s invasion of Ukraine becomes a defensive response to NATO provocation. The people who suffer under those regimes become invisible, or worse, are recharacterised as Western agents.

The BSW in Germany runs the same logic on different terrain. Sahra Wagenknecht’s party combines economic grievance rhetoric with anti-immigration politics, scepticism about climate policy, and a ‘peace’ position on Ukraine that amounts to endorsing Russian territorial gains. Within two years of its founding it was forming regional coalition governments with the CDU. The AfD did not absorb BSW. BSW absorbed BSW. The scratch became gangrene by accumulated daily logic, not by crossing a bright line. The WPB is its British sibling: same Stalinist aesthetic, same identification of progressive content with state power, same drift from economic radicalism toward cultural reaction.

At Rochdale, Galloway ranked joint last among all eleven candidates on environmental protection measures, level with the Reform candidate; the WPB's position, according to a former member, is that 'environmentalism as a thing is anti-working class.' Wagenknecht's party says something structurally identical in different language.

The Iranian uprising of January 2026, triggered by 75% inflation and the collapse of the rial, made the stakes concrete. When workers took to the streets across 110 cities, when factories in Arak began forming workers’ councils, when protesters chanted ‘neither Shah nor Supreme Leader,’ Your Party issued no official statement. Not a cautious one. Not an insufficient one. None. Jeremy Corbyn appeared instead at a London demonstration in March 2026 calling for an end to US and Israeli strikes on Iran. The people shot by Revolutionary Guards in Lorestan and Ilam, the wounded protesters dragged from hospital beds in Ilam City, the council organisers in Arak: they were not the subject of that demonstration. This is not silence. It is something worse than silence; it is the campist substitution, replacing solidarity with the oppressed with solidarity with the oppressing state, because the oppressing state happens to be an enemy of Washington.

The campist logic produces this pattern reliably. First: establish the hierarchy of crimes, US sanctions caused this crisis, which may even be partly true, but whose function is to suggest that crimes must be addressed in sequence. Second: the ground reports, someone is ‘in the region,’ the violence is ‘not organic,’ external forces are manufacturing it. Third: the geopolitical trap, any change will only bring something worse, the oppressed must wait until the imperialist core is weakened. Fourth: the accusation, those who disagree are not merely wrong but ‘deluded’ and ‘dangerous,’ backing regime change. The result: no solidarity actions, no international workers’ connections, nothing offered to those in struggle except the advice to wait. Red Mole has examined this pattern in detail.

The press freedom principle is worth defending. Galloway is not. Those are different sentences. A left that cannot hold both simultaneously, that collapses the distinction between opposing Schedule 3 detentions and treating their target as a comrade, is a left that has lost the analytical clarity it needs for everything else.

Abraham Jiménez Enoa is in exile because a state decided he was its enemy. Galloway is in Malaysia because a border power inconvenienced him for nine hours. Iranian workers formed councils in Arak and were shot in the streets. The campists know which of these requires their solidarity.

That is the problem.

Red Mole’s analysis of the WPB’s co-mobilisation with the far right and the campist response to the Iranian uprising are available on this Substack.

Source: Socialist Press (Workers Socialist League), no. 68, Wednesday 31 August 1977, pp. 6–7.

Why did fascists not come to power in Britain? The workings of capital are international and the needs of capital are international. How was it that capital did not require the fascist solution in Britain?

The answer to this question will not be found in any notions such as British love of “justice” or democracy or British “character”. These sort of bogus notions are swept aside when capitalism, in crisis, is fighting for its life.

For it is in response to capitalist crisis that fascism emerges. Unable to solve the endemic problems of slump and stagnation in the 1930s, the capitalist class could only impose the economic measures necessary for survival by attacking the working class; in Germany, Spain, Italy and Portugal by entirely breaking the back of the working class.

CRUSHED

In that situation of economic catastrophe, with bourgeois democracy unable to maintain a stable social order, the “little men”, feeling themselves crushed by the growth of monopoly, not wishing to identify with the workers’ movement, turned in desperation and panic to fascism.

Small shop keepers, farmers, small businessmen, lower professionals and the peasantry form the social layer from which fascist parties take their recruits. These fascist parties none the less served the interests of capital.

Why in Britain did these layers not turn in such numbers towards fascism? There was of course no peasantry in Britain and the small capitalist farmers were also very few in number. Despite the size of the urban petty bourgeoisie the class nature of British society was one where there were fewer of the kinds of social groups that fascism incites to action.

WEAKENED

The answer to the question, however, lies mainly in two areas. Firstly the nature of the capitalist crisis and the relation of class forces were not such in Britain as to demand a fascist solution. It was possible, because of the earlier defeat of the working class in the 1926 General Strike, for solutions to be imposed by the capitalists on a working class greatly weakened by the earlier betrayals of its leaders.

The British ruling class did not need to call the fascists to power to break the working class; the British ruling class could rattle the sabre of fascism but did not need to hand over state power to the fascists.

But secondly, at crucial moments the British fascists were physically taken on by the workers’ movement and were physically halted on the streets. These events demand special attention today as once again street battles break out against the fascists.

But before looking at the dramatic climax of the rise and fall of the fascists in Britain, we should see in some more detail how the ruling class managed without putting the fascists into power.

Britain at the end of the 1920s experienced the economic depression which was world-wide. Between 1929 and 1932 the British official index of industrial production fell by 17%. Coal output in 1931 was no higher than it had been in 1900; and iron production was down to that of 1927. Unemployment reached 3 million. In the twelve months to June 1933 the world tonnage of merchant shipping showed a net decrease of 1,814,000 tons—more than half this decrease being tonnage owned in the UK. In many ways, however, this crisis in Britain was less precipitate than in other major capitalist countries because British capitalism had failed to achieve even the modest, short-lived boom of the 1920s.

Following 1926, when the General Council of the TUC handed the working class on a plate to the government, British capital was able to operate with the most abject collaboration of the leaders of the labour movement. Thousands of militants in the factories had been sacked at the end of the strike and the Tory government passed the anti-union Trades Disputes Act in 1927. Then, in 1931, MacDonald and Snowden betrayed the labour movement by entering a coalition government with the Tories. What was left of the Labour Party went down to a catastrophic electoral defeat.

TAMPERING

The “National Government” engaged in repressive measures against the working class. As a commentator at the time put it:

“The record of the National Government is largely the history of a movement away from democracy. The tampering with parliamentary forms, the reorganisation of the police and their increasing violence, the restrictions on free speech and assembly, the Royal Defence Corps (a new body of the Territorial Army to deal with ‘foreign agents’ i.e. the left) the Unemployment Act (cutting the dole and means testing), the Incitement to Disaffection Act—behind all these is a purpose essentially fascist . . .

It is the good fortune of British capitalism that it has so far only needed to adopt a part of the authoritative fascist procedure. It has been able to achieve its purposes—the partial subjugation of the working class without resort to anything glaringly undemocratic, without the trouble of dressing in coloured shirts.”

(W.A. Rudlin, The Growth of Fascism in Britain).

BEATEN

Yet there were those who dressed in coloured shirts and they did need to be physically beaten. This was the movement that Mosley built. There were fascist bodies in Britain prior to the formation of Mosley’s British Union of Fascists but it was this movement that was most significant. Indeed the history of the British fascist movement is often seen as the history of one man—viewed by the bourgeoisie as brilliant but erratic, as a maverick who could have been Prime Minister. Beatrice Webb, the Fabian, described Mosley in 1923:

“Here is the perfect politician who is also a perfect gentleman.”

This gentleman was to lead a movement which marched through the East End of London chanting “The Yids, the Yids, We gotta get rid of the Yids” and initiated and ordered the worst scenes of thuggery seen in British politics this century. This was Mosley.

ARISTOCRAT

He was an aristocrat who entered Parliament as Conservative member for Harrow in 1918—yet by 1920 he had crossed the House and joined the Independent Labour Party in 1923. By 1926 he reached the Labour Party national executive and became Labour MP for Smethwick (having ironically been defeated in Birmingham Ladywood).

In 1930 he was defeated at the Labour Party conference on a resolution urging a programme of action on unemployment. He straight away began to build a new party which was to move rapidly right towards fascism.

Like Mussolini, he moved from the left to the far right.

Mosley was supported financially by big business: to begin with by William Morris the motor manufacturer, one of the fathers of what is now British Leyland, followed later by Lord Rothermere, owner of the Daily Mail and Evening News.

Mosley began building the action wing of his movement in his youth clubs where young thugs were trained in physical combat.

Various intellectuals, such as Harold Nicholson [sic; Nicolson] and Osbert Sitwell dithered at the edge of Mosley’s movement, not quite able to commit themselves nor to break from its horrid appeal.

The New Party failed resoundingly and Mosley moved to model his movement more closely on the continental pattern and came out in favour of that key aspect of fascist policy, the corporate state.

HARMONY

“A society working with the precision and harmony of a human body, every interest and every individual is subordinate to the overriding purpose of the nation.”

He toured Spain, Germany and Italy (as honoured guest of Mussolini) and came back a convinced fascist.

The British Union of Fascists, which by 1934 had 370 branches and perhaps 5,000 active members had 3 conditions of membership, loyalty to King, Empire and leader, acceptance of discipline and payment of one shilling a month.

Its themes were its appeal to youth, nationalism, anti-communism and anti-semitism. It relied on the politics of action, of marches, demonstrations and rallies, in its moves to set up a corporate state where the employers, workers and consumers would be equally “represented”; there would be no strikes, no trade unions and decisions of the state would be unchallengeable.

The Mosley movement, dressed in its black shirts and black boots, made scapegoats of the Jews—blaming them for unemployment. There was, they said, a conspiracy of Jews and Bolsheviks which must be physically fought. From the beginning the Mosley movement engaged in physical violence against its opponents. It was at the rally in Olympia in 1934 that it reached its peak and revealed most sharply the dangers of fascism. Mosley stood, picked out by a spotlight in the vast hall. When he was repeatedly heckled by anti-fascists in the audience he stopped speaking and the spotlight turned on them and they were beaten up.

Even a Conservative member of parliament who was present was shocked:

“Men and women were knocked down and were still assaulted and kicked on the floor. It will be a matter of surprise for us if there were no fatal injuries.”

The extreme violence of the Mosleyites lead to the timid dithering calls by the Mervyn Stockwoods and Mayor of Lewishams of those days that “the government ought to ban fascist marches”.

PUERILE

The Communist Party, too, lent support to the demands for the government to do something—rather than relying on the strength of the working class. But as the Trotskyist paper Militant put it just before the Cable Street march:

“The methods with which the Labour Party and Communist Party are opposing Mosley’s proposed march are equally puerile. To ask a capitalist government to ban the activities of the Fascists, the agents of capitalism, but to leave unhampered the activities of the working class, the enemies of capitalism, must appear ridiculous . . . to anyone who recognises the existence of the class war instead of talking only about democracy.”

Nowadays the Communist Party presents the crucial battle in which the workers defended themselves in Cable Street in 1936 as if it was entirely the Party’s idea. This is an unconvincing falsification. Such a position would have been totally out of keeping with the policy of Stalin and the Comintern to “fight” fascism through class collaboration in “democratic” fronts with the “progressive” bourgeoisie. It was the Stalinists’ refusal to see the fight against fascism as a class question which throughout the 1930s strengthened the hand of the fascists.

SHARPNESS

There is other more concrete evidence available on the role of the Communist Party in Cable Street, a role initially very like that of CP leaders in Lewisham on August 13, of avoiding the sharpness of the fight in the interests of class collaboration.

The following letter was sent to a CP member in the East End by the East London organiser of the CP.

28.9.36

Dear Joe,

Arrangements re Mosley’s march. A party meeting at Salmon and Ball and another at Poplar, i.e. near to each end of the march. Meetings to be kept orderly. Avoid clashes, keep order: no excuse for government to say we, like BUF, are hooligans. If Mosley decides to march, let him. Don’t attempt disorder (time too short to get a “they shall not pass” policy across). It would only be a harmful stunt. Best see there is a strong meeting at each end of the march. Our biggest trouble will be to keep order and discipline. *

The party line changed only 3 days before the march after it was evident that the decision to stop Mosley had already been made by the workers of East London despite the line of the CP.

The Mosleyites, with their usual police protectors, planned this provocative march on October 5, 1936 [sic — the march was Sunday 4 October], through London’s poorest area, with its high proportion of Jews, as a gesture of intimidation.

The fascists were held out of the East End at Gardners Corner [sic; usually Gardiner’s Corner] by 100,000 anti-fascists; and in the barricade battle at Cable Street some of the police surrendered to the anti-fascists.

This enormous physical show of strength was a decisive turning point for Mosley—the march was unable to continue and the Mosleyites were unable to display that action and control essential to a fascist movement.

DECLINE

From that moment the BUF went into a sharp decline. It was the action of the working class on the streets which halted the advance of fascism, rather than gestures like the Public Order Act of 1936 forbidding the wearing of uniforms.

Mosley’s movement, not called upon by the ruling class, was smashed by working class awareness of the fascist danger; a danger which was understood in a political sense not only for its racism but as a deadly menace to the whole workers’ movement.

There could be no clearer lesson for today of the need to build workers’ defence organisations. The fight against the British Union of Fascists then, like that against the National Front today, is not just a battle against racialism; it is the defence of the independence and material conditions of the whole working class. The most important weapon in this fight is the Transitional Programme of the Fourth International.

*For opposing this line and similar positions, the recipient Joe Jacobs was finally expelled from the CP and spent the remaining 40 years of his life, first in the Trotskyist movement and later in the anarchist movement. He died earlier this year.

The letter to Joe Jacobs is published by kind permission of Solidarity.

Notes

• “the Trotskyist paper Militant“ is the paper of the 1930s Militant Group, not the later Militant tendency in the Labour Party. Do not conflate them.

• The 5 October date is wrong in the original. Cable Street was Sunday 4 October 1936.

• Written three weeks after the Battle of Lewisham (13 August 1977), and the argument is built for that moment: it reads the CP’s conduct at Lewisham back into 1936. The companion polemic is Socialist Press no. 69, 14 September 1977, p. 6, answering James Klugmann’s eulogy of the CP’s role and referring the reader back to this issue.

Presentación

Mandel empieza este texto negando que Marx fuera economista. No es una boutade. Es la afirmación de la que cuelga todo lo demás, y explica por qué su manera de razonar sigue chocando con la de casi cualquier persona formada en una facultad de económicas.

La economía académica busca leyes que valgan siempre: la oferta y la demanda en Babilonia y en Wall Street, la escasez como condición eterna. Marx sostiene lo contrario. Cada modo de producción tiene sus propias leyes, y esas leyes caducan cuando el marco social cambia de raíz. De ahí que su trabajo no consista en formular principios universales sino en descubrir las «leyes del movimiento» de sociedades concretas, una por una. Lo que vale para el capitalismo no valía para el feudalismo y no valdrá después.

La segunda idea es más incómoda. Detrás de lo que parecen relaciones entre cosas —precios, mercancías, capital— hay relaciones entre personas. La economía vulgar toma las cosas por lo que aparentan y no pregunta de dónde vienen. Mandel usa una palabra alemana para el vicio: Problemblindheit, ceguera ante el problema.

Y luego está la paradoja con la que cierra, que es la parte que más nos interesa en Topo Rojo. El capital no se publicó en edición de bolsillo en inglés hasta 1974. Noventa y un años después de la muerte de Marx. Casi nadie lo había leído. Y sin embargo, entre 1890 y 1940, partidos obreros de masas se reclamaban de él, y a partir de 1917 hubo Estados que decían fundar sus constituciones en sus conceptos. La influencia corrió por delante de la lectura, y buena parte de lo que hoy parece de sentido común —que los intereses económicos pesan en la lucha política, que las crisis son inevitables bajo el mercado capitalista— lo negaban en redondo los economistas serios del siglo XIX.

Quien quiera seguir el hilo puede ir después a Las leyes del movimiento del modo de producción capitalista, que es la continuación directa de este texto, o a Ideología burguesa y conciencia de clase proletaria, donde Mandel se pregunta cómo se abre paso una conciencia revolucionaria si la clase dominante controla la producción de ideas. En el archivo de Red Mole están también sus conferencias de 1976 sobre la revolución alemana, publicadas por primera vez en inglés, y el debate de Hull con Michael Kidron.

El texto

Conviene hacer una valoración general del método de análisis económico de Marx antes de exponer sus principales teorías económicas, sus tesis y sus hipótesis. Marx se distingue de la mayoría de los economistas importantes de los siglos XIX y XX en que no se considera en absoluto un «economista» a secas.

Ninguna ciencia económica separada

La idea de que la «ciencia económica», como ciencia especial completamente separada de la sociología, la historia, la antropología y demás, no puede existir, subyace a casi todo su análisis económico. De hecho, el materialismo histórico es un intento de unificar todas las ciencias sociales, si no todas las ciencias sobre el ser humano, en una sola «ciencia de la sociedad». Ciertamente, dentro del marco de esa «ciencia de la sociedad» general, los fenómenos económicos podían y debían someterse a análisis como fenómenos específicos. De modo que la teoría económica, la ciencia económica, tiene después de todo una autonomía definida; pero es solo parcial y relativa.

Cada modo de producción, sus propias leyes

Probablemente la mejor fórmula para caracterizar la teoría económica de Marx sería llamarla un empeño por explicar la economía social. Esto sería cierto en un doble sentido. Para Marx no hay leyes económicas eternas, válidas en cada época de la prehistoria y de la historia humanas. Cada modo de producción tiene sus propias leyes económicas específicas, que pierden su pertinencia una vez que el marco social general ha cambiado de manera fundamental. Para Marx, igualmente, no hay leyes económicas separadas y aparte de las relaciones específicas entre seres humanos, en las relaciones sociales de producción primarias (aunque no únicas, como ya se ha resumido). Todos los intentos de reducir los problemas económicos a problemas puramente materiales y objetivos, a relaciones entre cosas, o entre cosas y seres humanos, serían considerados por Marx como manifestaciones de mistificación, de falsa conciencia, que se expresa mediante el intento de desplazar las relaciones humanas. Detrás de las relaciones entre cosas, la ciencia económica debería tratar de descubrir las relaciones específicas entre seres humanos que aquellas ocultan. La ciencia económica real tiene, por tanto, también una función desmitificadora frente a la «economía» vulgar, que da por sentadas cierto número de «cosas» sin hacerse las preguntas: ¿son realmente solo lo que parecen ser?, ¿de dónde proceden?, ¿qué explica esas apariencias?, ¿qué hay detrás de ellas?, ¿adónde conducen?, ¿cómo podrían desaparecer, cómo desaparecerán? La Problemblindheit, la negativa a ver que los hechos son por lo general más problemáticos de lo que parecen a primera vista, no es desde luego un reproche que pueda dirigirse al pensamiento económico de Marx.

Relativismo histórico y leyes del movimiento

El análisis económico de Marx se caracteriza, así, por una fuerte corriente de fondo de relativismo histórico, con un recurso intenso al método de pensamiento genético y evolutivo (por eso se ha establecido a menudo el paralelo con Darwin, a veces de manera excesiva). También se ha empleado la fórmula «estructuralismo genético» en relación con el enfoque general de Marx del análisis económico. Sea como fuere, podría afirmarse que la teoría económica de Marx está orientada esencialmente al descubrimiento de «leyes del movimiento» específicas de los sucesivos modos de producción. Aunque su esfuerzo teórico se ha centrado principalmente en el descubrimiento de esas leyes del movimiento para la sociedad capitalista, su obra contiene indicaciones de tales leyes —distintas, desde luego— también para las formaciones sociales precapitalistas y poscapitalistas.

El trabajo social como bisagra

El vínculo principal entre la sociología y la antropología de Marx, por un lado, y su análisis económico, por otro, radica en el papel central del trabajo social como rasgo antropológico básico que subyace a todas las formas de organización social. El trabajo social puede organizarse de formas muy distintas, dando lugar con ello a fenómenos económicos («hechos») muy distintos. Formas básicamente distintas de organización del trabajo social conducen a conjuntos básicamente distintos de instituciones y dinámicas económicas, que siguen lógicas básicamente distintas, es decir, que obedecen a «leyes del movimiento» básicamente distintas.

Todas las sociedades humanas deben asegurar la satisfacción de cierto número de necesidades básicas para sobrevivir y reproducirse. Esto conduce a la necesidad de establecer alguna suerte de equilibrio entre las necesidades socialmente reconocidas, es decir, el consumo corriente, y la producción corriente. Pero esta banalidad abstracta no nos dice nada sobre el modo concreto en que se organiza el trabajo social para alcanzar ese objetivo.

Trabajo directamente social, trabajo privado

La sociedad puede reconocer todo trabajo individual como trabajo inmediatamente social. De hecho, así lo hace en innumerables comunidades tribales y aldeanas primitivas, como lo hace en el kibutz contemporáneo. El trabajo directamente social puede organizarse de manera despótica o democrática, mediante la costumbre y la superstición tanto como mediante un intento de aplicar la ciencia avanzada a la organización económica; pero siempre será trabajo social inmediatamente reconocido, en la medida en que se basa en la asignación a priori de los productores a su trabajo específico (de nuevo: con independencia de la forma que adopte esa asignación, ya sea voluntaria o forzosa, despótica o simplemente por costumbre).

Cuando el mercado decide qué contó como trabajo

Pero cuando la toma de decisiones social sobre la asignación del trabajo —y la asignación de recursos estrechamente ligada a ella— se fragmenta en unidades distintas que operan con independencia unas de otras, como resultado del control privado (la propiedad) de los medios de producción, en el sentido económico y no necesariamente jurídico de la palabra, entonces el trabajo social se fragmenta a su vez en trabajos privados que no son reconocidos automáticamente como socialmente necesarios, cuyo desembolso no es compensado automáticamente por la sociedad. Entonces los productores privados tienen que intercambiar parte o la totalidad de sus productos para satisfacer algunas o todas sus necesidades básicas. Entonces esos productos se convierten en mercancías. La economía se convierte en una economía de mercado, parcial o generalizada. Solo midiendo los resultados de la venta de sus productos puede el productor, o el propietario, determinar qué parte de su desembolso de trabajo privado ha sido reconocida —compensada— como trabajo social y qué parte no.

Incluso operando con herramientas analíticas tan simples como «trabajo directamente social», «trabajo privado» y «trabajo social socialmente reconocido», hemos de hacer un esfuerzo considerable de abstracción respecto de los fenómenos inmediatamente aparentes para comprender su pertinencia para el análisis económico. Esto vale para todo análisis científico, tanto en las ciencias naturales como en las sociales. El análisis económico de Marx, tal como se presenta en sus libros principales, no ha sido una lectura demasiado popular; pero tampoco hay todavía tantos científicos en esas circunstancias. Esto no tiene nada que ver con una oscuridad innata del autor, sino más bien con la naturaleza del análisis científico como tal.

Poco leído, muy influyente

El número relativamente limitado de lectores de los escritos económicos de Marx —¡la primera edición inglesa de bolsillo de El capital apareció solo en 1974!— está claramente ligado al rigor científico de Marx, a su empeño en un análisis sistemático y omnilateral de los fenómenos de la economía capitalista.

Pero mientras su análisis económico carecía de popularidad, sus proyecciones políticas e históricas fueron ganando influencia. Con el auge de los partidos obreros de masas independientes, un número creciente de estos se proclamó guiado o influido por Marx, al menos en la época de la Segunda y la Tercera Internacionales, aproximadamente el medio siglo que va de 1890 a 1940. A partir de la revolución rusa de 1917, un número creciente de gobiernos y de Estados afirmó basar sus políticas y sus constituciones en conceptos desarrollados por Marx. (Si ello era legítimo o no es otra cuestión.) Pero el hecho mismo atestigua la gran influencia de Marx sobre los desarrollos sociales y políticos contemporáneos, tanto evolutivos como revolucionarios.

Del mismo modo, su influencia difusa sobre la ciencia social, incluida la teoría económica académica, va mucho más allá de la aceptación general o incluso del conocimiento sustancial de sus escritos principales. Algunas ideas clave del materialismo histórico y del análisis económico que impregnan su obra —por ejemplo, que los intereses económicos influyen en gran medida, si no determinan, las luchas políticas; que la evolución histórica está ligada a cambios importantes en las condiciones materiales; que las crisis económicas, el «ciclo económico», son inevitables en condiciones de economía de mercado capitalista— se han convertido casi en perogrulladas. Basta reparar en con qué fuerza negaron su validez economistas e historiadores de primera fila a lo largo del siglo XIX y al menos hasta los años veinte, para comprender cuán profunda ha sido la influencia de Marx sobre la ciencia social contemporánea en general.

Los subtítulos son nuestros; el original de Mandel va sin divisiones internas.

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Créditos y agradecimientos

Este texto de Ernest Mandel se publicó originalmente en inglés en International Viewpoint con el título «Marx’s Economic Theory – General approach and influence», el 30 de diciembre de 2003. Mandel, economista marxista y dirigente de la Cuarta Internacional durante décadas, murió en 1995.

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