From Ceaușescu to Corbyn: Why the Belgian Workers' Party Is No Blueprint

What Your Party Members Need to Know About the Belgian Workers' Party

Liverpool, November 2025. The founding conference of Your Party, Jeremy Corbyn’s new formation, gathers in a city synonymous with Labour’s left-wing tradition. At 2:20pm on the first day, Benjamin Pestieau takes the stage. The Deputy Secretary General of the Workers’ Party of Belgium (PTB/PVDA) has travelled to present his party’s model to the British left.

Pestieau outlines three pillars. First: “A principled party, a Marxist party, a party based on democratic centralism. Why? Because democracy is important, but unity in action is important. We have both of them if we want to win.” Second: “A party who is master in the art of tactics”; the PTB/PVDA has developed thirty principles of tactics, he explains, including the imperative to “touch not only the mind, but also the heart of the working class” and to maintain “a positive narrative, not a depressive narrative.” Third: “A party of the working class,” with branches in workplaces and trade unionists holding “a central place” in the organization.

The pitch is compelling. Pestieau describes a Belgian working class in motion: thirteen major union mobilizations in the past year, five mass actions in solidarity with Palestine, general strikes bringing 140,000 people onto the streets of Brussels. “We can see who keeps the society running,” he tells the conference. “It’s not the billionaires. It’s not the politicians. It’s the working class.”

A documentary featuring Peter Mertens, the PTB/PVDA’s Secretary General, has been circulating in British left circles for months, amplifying the message. In it, Mertens sits opposite Brian Becker of the Party for Socialism and Liberation in the US, outlining the organizational model: five thousand cadres, twenty thousand card-carriers, a “multi-layer” approach combining revolutionary discipline with mass appeal. The companion book, Mutiny, is published by 1804 Books. George Galloway’s Workers’ Party of Britain promotes the interview. The message is consistent: here is a Marxist party that actually grows.

For Your Party members wondering whether to take the Belgian model seriously, the answer is yes; but not in the way the PTB/PVDA’s emissaries intend. Every claim deserves scrutiny. What the Liverpool speech and the Mertens documentary present as strengths are, under examination, symptoms of a strategic dead-end. Belgian Fourth Internationalists have diagnosed the pathology for a decade. The PTB/PVDA offers electoral growth without revolutionary strategy. Its trajectory leads not to anti-capitalist rupture but to social-democratic restoration; a new reformism dressed in the costume of the old communism.

I. The Maoist Crucible

The origins matter. Not because parties cannot change, but because the PTB/PVDA’s 2008 “renewal” changed its presentation without rupturing its organizational DNA.

Pestieau told the Liverpool conference that “at the beginning of the century, we had a big debate in our party: have to change our approach, or we are going to die.” What he did not mention is what the party was before that debate. When Mertens tells the story of his party’s origins, he dates its birth to 1979. This is a convenient elision. The party’s actual precursor, Alle Macht aan de Arbeiders (AMADA), was established in 1970 by radicalized Flemish students at the Catholic University of Leuven who had broken with the established Communist Party of Belgium over its “revisionism.” The new formation aligned itself with Beijing, then with Tirana, then with the most isolated regimes of the collapsing socialist bloc. The party’s central organ, Solidaire, offered its support to Nicolae Ceaușescu as late as December 1989; days before his execution. The party defended the Chinese state’s repression at Tiananmen Square. It maintained fraternal relations with the leadership of North Korea.

Under the long presidency of Ludo Martens, the party published Another Look at Stalin in 1994: a rehabilitation of the Soviet dictator that appeared five years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, when even the most ossified Stalinist parties were quietly burying their iconography. The PTB/PVDA doubled down.

The 2008 Renewal Congress is presented by current leadership as the decisive break. The hammer and sickle disappeared from the branding. Explicit references to Stalin and Mao were dropped. The party adopted a “populist” style focused on bread-and-butter issues: energy prices, pensions, tax justice. But what did not happen is as significant as what did. There was no comprehensive public self-criticism of the Ceaușescu telegram, the Tiananmen defense, the Stalin rehabilitation. The party’s congress documents describe a strategic pivot, not an ideological reckoning.

The Mertens interview confirms how cosmetic the transformation has been. The PTB/PVDA maintains its analysis of social democracy as a “bourgeois party”; the classic Stalinist formulation that justified the Communist International’s catastrophic “Third Period” sectarianism in the early 1930s. More significantly, the party remains a faithful ally of the Chinese Communist Party. Mertens speaks of China pursuing “socialism on two legs”; a formulation that treats the CCP’s state-capitalist development as a legitimate path to socialism rather than the bureaucratic restoration of capitalism it represents.

Academic observers describe the result as a “kitchen and restaurant” model. The internal “kitchen” maintains revolutionary goals among a disciplined cadre; the external “restaurant” serves a mild, reformist menu to the voting public. This is not tactical flexibility. It is strategic duplicity; the separation of what the party says to its base from what it says to the electorate.

Compare this with the Fourth International’s Belgian section. The Trotskyist current has passed through multiple organizational forms: LRT, POS/SAP, LCR, and now Gauche Anticapitaliste and SAP-Antikapitalisten. Each transition involved open debate, published disagreements, genuine pluralism. The renewal was visible. The PTB/PVDA’s “renewal” produced no such transparency. The party changed its face while preserving its spine.

II. The PTB-GO! Betrayal

If the Maoist heritage seems like ancient history, consider what happened in 2014.

The sequence begins in 2012. The FGTB of Charleroi, the socialist trade union federation in Belgium’s industrial heartland, adopts an explicitly anti-capitalist program. The document, “Together, We Can,” calls for the socialization of the banking and energy sectors, the banning of redundancies in profitable companies, the expropriation without compensation of enterprises that close or relocate while making profits. This is not reformism. This is a union federation demanding measures that would break capitalist property relations.

The radical trade unionists seek political expression. A regroupment process begins. In 2014, the PTB-GO! (Open Left) electoral cartel is formed, bringing together the PTB, the Communist Party (PC), the Revolutionary Communist League (LCR, the Belgian section of the Fourth International), and independent trade unionists. The cartel wins two deputies to the Chamber and the Walloon Parliament.

Here is what happened next. Every elected position went to PTB members. Not a single Communist Party or LCR candidate won a seat; they had been placed too far down the lists. And on the evening of the 2014 elections, having achieved its first parliamentary breakthrough, “the Party blew the whistle on the end of the playground.” The phrase comes from Gauche Anticapitaliste’s own analysis. The PTB unilaterally terminated the regroupment.

Former partners from the PC and LCR documented their experience: the PTB “does not accept a unitarian initiative except on the condition that it can control it.” A Rosa-Luxemburg-Stiftung study summarized the arrangement: the lists were dominated by the PTB, which claimed the electable positions for itself.

This is not coalition politics as usual. This is the instrumentalization of unity; using broader forces as electoral vehicles, then discarding them once the seats are won. The pattern has a name in the Stalinist tradition: “the Party directs the front.” The PTB’s conduct in 2014 demonstrated that the slogan remained operational doctrine.

Pestieau spoke in Liverpool of the PTB/PVDA’s efforts to build “the art of unity” against capitalist division. The PTB-GO! experience suggests a different art: the art of hegemony, of using unity as an instrument of party-building rather than as a genuine strategic commitment to pluralistic regroupment.

III. The Architecture of Verticalism

Mertens boasts of twenty thousand members “learning through struggle.” Pestieau celebrates trade unionists holding “a central place” in the party. The figures require disaggregation.

According to Article 20 of the party statutes, “consultative members” recognize the party and pay fees, but they do not possess the same rights as “effective members.” The effective members; roughly five thousand; are organized into base groups required to study Marxism and carry out assigned tasks. Article 40.6 mandates that cadres must “study Marxism and apply it creatively to advance the party.” Article 33.5 provides a co-option mechanism allowing the leadership to integrate trusted individuals into the National Council without a direct vote from the broader membership; provided they receive a two-thirds majority from the council itself.

The twenty thousand card-carriers cannot vote on program. They cannot form organized tendencies. They cannot challenge the Political Bureau. They are an electoral base, a mobilization reserve, a source of dues; but they are not a democratic movement. The “multi-layer” structure Mertens celebrates is precisely a mechanism for concentrating decision-making power in a small core while maintaining the appearance of mass participation.

Pestieau’s formulation is revealing: “Democracy is important, but unity in action is important.” The “but” does the work. In the PTB/PVDA’s version of democratic centralism, the centralism is structural and the democracy is rhetorical. When the Political Bureau determines that the party will not enter a Brussels regional government despite holding the strongest electoral position, twenty thousand members have no mechanism to contest that decision. When the leadership decides that solidarity with Ukrainian trade unions falls outside the party’s international priorities, there is no internal current that can force the question onto the agenda. The structure prevents the emergence of organized dissent.

The 8th Congress brochure states it plainly: “Lower bodies and members are bound by the decisions of the higher organs.” This is democratic centralism with the democracy evacuated; a transmission belt running in one direction only.

IV. Breaking Points That Break Nothing

As the PTB/PVDA’s electoral results have improved, the party has been forced to articulate its conditions for government participation. These “breaking points” are presented as non-negotiable demands that would force a genuine break with neoliberalism. They are nothing of the sort.

Consider the millionaire’s tax, the party’s flagship demand. The PTB/PVDA proposes a 2% levy on fortunes exceeding five million euros. The threshold sounds radical until you examine Belgian wealth distribution. The top 1% of the population begins at approximately 2.9 million euros. By setting the bar at five million, the party exempts the bulk of the bourgeoisie and the wealthy petty-bourgeoisie from its signature policy. Gauche Anticapitaliste’s verdict is precise: “The tax threshold is clearly too high.”

On banking, the retreat is starker. The FGTB Charleroi’s 2012 program; the one the PTB was supposedly allied with; demanded “the socialization of great banking and industrial trusts” under the democratic management of workers and consumers. By 2024, the PTB/PVDA’s program calls only for “significant public control” and the creation of a public investment bank. This is not anti-capitalism. This is Joseph Stiglitz; progressive regulation within capitalist property relations, not the expropriation that would break the power of finance capital.

The 1996 Law on Competitiveness provides another test. This legislation imposes a strict ceiling on Belgian wage increases, tying them to the average wage growth of neighboring countries to ensure export competitiveness. The law is a structural straitjacket on the labor movement. Gauche Anticapitaliste and radical trade unionists demand its total abolition. The PTB/PVDA demands “revision.” The linguistic shift matters: revision means negotiation within the existing framework; abolition means rupture with it.

And what is absent from the breaking points? GA’s analysis is damning: “There is no ‘breaking point’ on racism, Islamophobia, violence against women, or LGBTQ-phobia.” These “divisive issues” are sacrificed to hold together a cross-class electoral bloc that might otherwise fracture along lines of social conservatism.

The EVRAS controversy crystallized the pattern. The PTB’s Liège program explicitly supported implementing the mandatory two periods of EVRAS (relationship, affective, and sexual life education) in schools. When conservative and religious groups launched a backlash campaign, falsely claiming the program would hypersexualize children, what was the party’s national response? Silence. No robust defense of scientific sex education. No confrontation with reactionary forces. The local program support vanished into strategic ambiguity.

Gauche Anticapitaliste names the trajectory: “The move from maximalism to minimalism is a classic of parties in the Stalinist tradition.” And: “This logic of small steps has a name: reformism.”

V. Internationalism Without the International Working Class

The war in Ukraine has become the defining test of internationalism for the contemporary left. The PTB/PVDA fails it.

The party’s position is articulated clearly enough. A July 2022 statement declares: “We oppose an escalation strategy that makes peace impossible. This path carries nuclear risks and would be dramatic for all of Europe.”

The framing is revealing. The war is analyzed as a “proxy conflict” between NATO and Russia, driven by Western expansionism and the scramble for resources. While the PTB/PVDA formally condemns the Russian invasion, its political energy is directed almost entirely against Western arms deliveries and sanctions. The agency of the Ukrainian people; their right to resist occupation, their demand for weapons to defend themselves; disappears into the geopolitical abstraction.

But what the party does not say matters as much as what it says. Search the PTB/PVDA’s international department website, its press releases, Peter Mertens’ speeches and interviews. You will find no mention of Sotsialnyi Rukh, the Ukrainian democratic socialist organization that has appealed repeatedly for international labor solidarity. You will find no reference to the KVPU, the Confederation of Free Trade Unions of Ukraine, whose members have maintained logistics under bombardment while fighting both Russian aggression and the Zelensky government’s neoliberal labor reforms. You will find no solidarity statement naming any Ukrainian left or labor organization.

This is not an oversight. It is a choice. The PTB/PVDA’s “anti-imperialism” is state-centered, not class-centered. It supports governments that oppose Washington while ignoring the workers who oppose those same governments. When the Fourth International’s resolutions express “total solidarity” with the Ukrainian resistance, including its right to armed self-defense, they are practicing internationalism from below. The PTB/PVDA offers geopolitics from above.

The “double mutiny” doctrine that Mertens promotes in Mutiny makes the orientation explicit. He identifies a “mutiny below deck”; grassroots movements for land, democratic rights, and wages in the Global South. But he simultaneously advocates for a “mutiny on the upper deck”; the efforts of states like China, India, and the BRICS+ bloc to create a multipolar world. Mertens argues that the left must support this “upper deck” mutiny because it creates space for an alternative world order.

The question the doctrine evades: what happens when the upper deck crushes the lower deck? What happens when Chinese workers organizing independent unions are arrested? When Indian farmers protesting Modi’s agricultural reforms are beaten? When Brazilian land reformers face Bolsonarista violence? The PTB/PVDA’s answer is silence; or worse, the framing of reports on Uyghur repression as “new cold war” propaganda “destined to weaken” a geopolitical rival.

Mertens suggests that “genuine Marxists” in the Chinese Communist Party may yet “ride the tiger” of state capitalism. This is not solidarity with the Chinese working class. It is an alibi for the Chinese state.

VI. The Party of the Car

The climate crisis demands a rupture with capital’s growth imperative. The PTB/PVDA offers investment programs.

The party’s ecological politics are marketed as a “social-ecological revolution,” but the underlying framework remains productivist and neo-Keynesian. Search the PTB/PVDA’s programmatic materials for “degrowth.” You will not find it. The concept appears only in the writings of Daniel Tanuro and other ecosocialists associated with the Fourth International. Party representatives have explicitly refused to support degrowth agendas in parliamentary debates, dismissing them as “anti-social” attempts by green politicians to shift the burden of transition onto the working class.

Gauche Anticapitaliste’s assessment is blunt: “Raoul Hedebouw and his comrades are not anti-productivists; we know that. They do not demand the suppression of useless or harmful production.”

The party’s stance on transportation has earned it a nickname: “Partij Van De Auto.” The Party of the Car. The PTB/PVDA opposes paid parking. It opposes kilometric taxation. It opposes measures presented as ecological taxation, arguing they are “anti-social.” It supports airport expansion while claiming climate concern. GA’s verdict: the party “remains productivist: it supports airport expansion, maintains illusions about the power of technological innovation, and takes a demagogic attitude toward car use in cities.”

When the PTB/PVDA’s climate “breaking point” reduces to free public transport; necessary but wildly insufficient; Gauche Anticapitaliste asks the obvious question: “While the planet burns, can we be satisfied with free public transport as the only breaking point?”

Ecosocialism requires the suppression of harmful and useless industries; the dismantling of the fossil-fuel infrastructure, the conversion of arms production, the democratic planning of the economy by workers and consumers. The PTB/PVDA offers public investment, making polluters pay, and the preservation of purchasing power. The framework remains capitalist accumulation with green characteristics.

VII. The Dutch Warning

The PTB/PVDA is not unique. The Socialist Party of the Netherlands followed the same trajectory. The ending is instructive.

The SP emerged from the Maoist KPN-ML in the early 1970s, maintaining a highly disciplined cadre structure and operating through front organizations. In the 1990s, the party executed a “populist renewal,” rebranding itself as the “party for ordinary people” and achieving a significant electoral breakthrough. By 2006, the SP had reached 16.6% of the vote and seemed poised to become a permanent fixture of Dutch politics.

Then came the decline. The SP adopted increasingly nationalist rhetoric on migration, attempting to compete with the far-right PVV of Geert Wilders by talking “tough on borders.” The strategy failed in both directions: it did not attract voters who preferred the original far-right message, but it succeeded in alienating the SP’s progressive and migrant-background base. Simultaneously, the party’s focus on parliamentary “prudence” and potential coalition participation led it to withdraw from the ties connecting it to social movements and trade unions.

By 2025, the SP had collapsed to three seats. A party that once commanded nearly a sixth of the Dutch electorate had become marginal. The “tamed” populist strategy; left economics, social conservatism, distance from movements; had produced not stability but disintegration.

The PTB/PVDA leadership has studied the SP’s trajectory. They appear to be reproducing it anyway. The parallels are structural: Maoist origins, cadre discipline, front organizations (MPLP, Comac, RedFox), populist rebranding, electoral surge, and now the cautious avoidance of “divisive” social questions to maintain broad appeal. In Flanders, the PVDA faces constant pressure from Vlaams Belang and the N-VA, which have successfully captured large segments of the working-class vote. If the party continues to respond by de-emphasizing social questions and focusing on a minimalist economic program, it risks the same fate: a “tamed” populism that offers no genuine alternative to the existing order.

VIII. 542 Days of Refusal

Brussels provides the test case. The city has a left mathematical majority. The PTB polls first. And nothing happens.

Following the June 2024 elections, Brussels entered a period of unprecedented political deadlock. By December 2025, the city had gone 542 days without a regional government; a Belgian record. The arithmetic for a left coalition involving PS, Ecolo, and the PTB exists. The PTB has the electoral strength to lead it. The party refuses.

Gauche Anticapitaliste has pushed for the PTB to adopt an “emergency program” for Brussels: a 150 million euro annual tax on tourist overnight stays, a total freeze on social housing rents, immediate requisition of vacant buildings, the declaration of Brussels as a “sanctuary city” with protection for undocumented migrants. These measures would not overthrow capitalism. They would, however, demonstrate that a left government can implement policies that materially improve working-class lives while confronting property interests.

The PTB’s response? Focus on federal refinancing. Demand constitutional revision as a prerequisite for regional governance. Stay in opposition. Maintain “authentic left” purity.

The strategy reveals itself. A party that refuses power when offered cannot credibly claim to seek rupture. The PTB/PVDA prefers eternal opposition to the test of implementation. In opposition, it can denounce the system without managing its contradictions. At the regional level, even in government, it would face the choice between capitulating to fiscal constraints and confronting capital. The party has calculated that opposition preserves its brand. The calculation may be correct. But it is not revolutionary politics. It is the politics of a party that has made its peace with permanent marginality dressed up as permanent critique.

IX. The British Question

Why does any of this matter to British socialists? Because Benjamin Pestieau stood on that Liverpool stage for a reason.

Your Party is not the only British formation seeking inspiration in Belgium. George Galloway’s Workers’ Party of Britain mirrors the PTB/PVDA’s formula: left-wing economics, social conservatism on “culture war” issues, campist foreign policy, charismatic leadership substituting for internal democracy. The affinity is political and structural rather than organizational; there is no evidence of formal relations between the parties. But they occupy the same political space, and the PTB/PVDA’s apparent success provides a template that campist formations internationally seek to emulate.

The template should be rejected. Not because electoral growth is unimportant; it is. Not because organizational discipline is unnecessary; it is. But because the PTB/PVDA’s version of growth and discipline comes at the cost of everything that would make a socialist party worth building.

Internal democracy that permits organized tendencies and genuine debate. Internationalism that supports oppressed peoples against all ruling classes, not just the Western ones. A program for rupture with capital, not for managing its crises more humanely. Ecological politics adequate to the planetary emergency. Solidarity with the most oppressed; migrants, LGBTQ+ people, racialized communities; as integral to class struggle, not as “divisive” distractions from it (Your Party can learn from its Irish analogue, People before Profit).

The PTB/PVDA offers none of this. Its success proves that working-class anger can be mobilized. Its strategic choices prove that electoral growth is not the same as building working-class power.

X. The Fourth International Alternative

Gauche Anticapitaliste’s verdict on the PTB/PVDA is carefully calibrated: the party is “indispensable but deeply flawed.” A strong PTB/PVDA is good for the social camp. It has destabilized Belgian politics. It has provided a vaccine against the rightward drift that might otherwise have delivered more votes to Vlaams Belang. Its infrastructure; the clinics, the youth organizations, the trade union presence; represents genuine organizational achievement.

But the Trotskyist verdict remains uncompromising. The populist-minimalist path leads to a strategic dead-end. The PTB/PVDA’s internal structure prevents the development of the pluralistic, bottom-up democracy necessary for a genuine socialist transition. Its internationalism prioritizes state-level geopolitical shifts over the global solidarity of the working class. Its retreat on social questions and its productivist ecological program suggest a party more interested in managing the crisis of capitalism than in transcending it.

The Belgian working class deserves better than a new social democracy in revolutionary costume. So does the British working class. So does the working class everywhere that campist formations promote the PTB/PVDA as a model.

The task remains what it has always been: building pluralistic, intersectional, ecosocialist organizations capable of leading genuine rupture with the capitalist order. Organizations where different currents can coexist and debate openly while engaging in common action. Organizations that recognize the specific, structural nature of racism and patriarchy as integral to the capitalist system. Organizations that practice internationalism from below; solidarity with Ukrainian railway workers, with Chinese labor activists, with Brazilian land reformers, with all those who struggle against their ruling classes regardless of those ruling classes’ geopolitical alignment.

The PTB/PVDA shows this cannot be done through electoral pragmatism alone. The speech Benjamin Pestieau delivered in Liverpool is not a blueprint. It is a cautionary tale.