In the Greens, Against Absorption: What Anticapitalistas Can Teach the rs21 Comrades Debating the Question

At rs21’s ‘Ballot Box or Barricade?’ panel, part of its Festival of the Oppressed in London on 20 and 21 June, a session on electoral work circled one question and never closed it

TLDR

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Further reading on entrism

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

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

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