The Your Party homepage takes about forty seconds to read. Tax the very richest in our society. An NHS free of privatisation, with energy, water, rail and mail brought into public ownership. A massive council-house building programme. Standing up to fossil fuel giants putting their profits before our planet.
Read it a second time and the grammar starts to matter. Taxing. Bringing. Investing. Standing up to. Four gerunds and not a subject among them. Who taxes the very richest? Who brings the water back? Somebody does, at some point, in some chamber, and the sentences decline to say who. The declining is the politics.
A comrade put the objection to me this week, in a form sharp enough that it has been rattling around since: everything is a demand on the bourgeoisie until the seizure of power. Which sounds unanswerable, and which would make the complaint about those four gerunds a matter of taste.
It is worth being slow about what the sentence is claiming, because it can mean three different things and only one of them is interesting.
It can mean that nothing won short of power is safe from being taken back, which is true, and which nobody in this argument disputes, and which decides nothing about what to do on Friday.
It can mean that every demand the movement raises is addressed to the bourgeoisie.
And it can mean the strong version: that until the state is taken, the ruling class is the party that decides, so everything we do short of that is a petition with better or worse manners.
The second version is false as a description. The third is false as a strategy, and it is false for a reason that the Marxist tradition worked out under conditions considerably worse than ours.
Concede the narrow version first
Wage claims, rent freezes, an arms embargo, the reversal of a hospital closure: these are extracted from a class that owns and from a state built to defend the owning, and no amount of throat-clearing about soviets changes it. The eight-hour day was extracted from the bourgeoisie. So was the National Health Service. The currents that greet each strike wave by explaining that nothing short of dual power will serve have organised nobody and will organise nobody, and their purity has cost the British working class more than their numbers would suggest.
Now refuse the general version, because on the evidence it is simply false.
Open the Transitional Programme at the section on picket lines. “Strike pickets are the basic nuclei of the proletarian army. This is our point of departure.” Who is being petitioned in that sentence? A picket line is not granted. It is mounted, at four in the morning, by people who have decided among themselves who is bringing the flask. Trotsky goes on: it is imperative “to organize groups for self-defense, to drill and acquaint them with the use of arms”, and to advance the slogan of a workers’ militia as “the one serious guarantee for the inviolability of workers’ organizations, meetings and press”. Not one of those demands has a bourgeois addressee. You cannot ask the ruling class for a defence squad, and it would be an odd sort of militia that arrived by statutory instrument.
The demand for self-defence against the far right is a demand the workers’ movement makes on itself. So is the demand for a united front against austerity. So, for that matter, is the demand for committees of action with recallable delegates. These are the load-bearing demands of the transitional method, and the formula does not describe them at all. It is not merely too coarse. It has the wrong number of parties in it.
Who is actually being asked
Even where there is a bourgeois addressee, the addressing is rarely direct, and this is where the argument gets interesting rather than merely corrective.
In very few countries does the bourgeoisie now govern in person, in the manner of the mill-owner who sat on the corporation he had paid for. Hardly anybody works for the person who owns the firm. The manager who refuses the pay claim is an employee on a contract with a performance review, answerable upward to a board answerable in turn to institutional shareholders who have never seen the building and could not find it. The officer who signs off the cuts is a professional appointed under section 151 of the Local Government Act 1972, and when the money runs out it is that officer, not the councillors, who issues the section 114 notice under the Local Government Finance Act 1988 and halts all spending outside statutory services. Birmingham in September 2023. Nottingham, Woking, Thurrock, Croydon three times over. The elected chamber is not where the decision sits and everybody in the room knows it.
The temptation at this point is Burnham’s, and it should be named so that it can be avoided. Managers are not owners; from which The Managerial Revolution concluded in 1941, a year after its author left the American Trotskyist movement, that a managerial class had displaced the capitalists and would inherit the earth. The conclusion was wrong then and it is wrong now. What the layering means is not that a new class rules but that the old one rules at a remove, through an apparatus with duties and personnel of its own, and that the administrative superstructure catches up with the economic base unevenly and late.
The Fourth International’s 1979 World Congress described the mechanism precisely. The real decision-making power of parliamentary bodies is rapidly shrinking. The power of the executive branch is growing, and inside it a handful of committees setting policy on finance, industry, the military and the repressive apparatus, bodies which escape the hazards of political and parliamentary life, and ensure that the interests of big business are directly represented. Then the rider that matters more than the description: But a good many of the decisions dreamed up in these exclusive clubs are being called into question by the stubborn reality of the class relationship of forces.
That unevenness is not an inconvenience for the transitional method. It is the opening the method exists to exploit. Business secrets can be abolished precisely because the books are administered rather than owned, kept by salaried people in a system that generates paper, and Trotsky’s formulation depends on it: “The abolition of ‘business secrets’ is the first step toward actual control of industry.” A demand aimed at an intermediary who must go away and ask forces the chain of command into view. That is the point of aiming it there, and it is why “open the books” is a different order of demand from “fund our council properly”, though both are addressed to the same building.
The apparatus includes our own side
Here is the part the formula obscures most damagingly. The layer standing between the working class and the bourgeoisie is not made up only of managers and officers. It includes the labour movement’s own leadership.
The 1979 document is blunt: the trade union bureaucracy’s “long years of integration into the various cogs of the bourgeois state apparatus has prepared these leaderships to come to the rescue of bourgeois regimes in distress”. Which means that a great many of the decisive demands in any real campaign are addressed neither to a capitalist nor to a manager, but to a general secretary, a trades council, a mosque committee, a branch that has not yet voted.
Trotsky understood the united front as exactly that kind of demand and never pretended otherwise. On 8 December 1931, arguing with the German Communist Party as the clock ran down: “No common platform with the Social Democracy, or with the leaders of the German trade unions, no common publications, banners, placards! March separately, but strike together! Agree only how to strike, whom to strike, and when to strike!” And, in the same text: “On this basis, an agreement with the Social Democratic and trade-union organizations is not only permissible, but a duty.” There is no bourgeois anywhere in those sentences. The addressee is a rival workers’ organisation whose leadership he despised and whose members he needed, and the demand was to be made publicly, repeatedly, in a form that could be accepted.
“Every factory must become an anti-fascist bulwark, with its own commandants and its own battalions”, he wrote a few lines later. Not a request. An instruction to our own side, which our own side was free to refuse and did refuse, at a cost that is still being paid.
What Luxemburg was arguing about
Which returns us to the Reform or Revolution passage, usually quoted too short. Luxemburg wrote that people who pronounce themselves in favour of the method of legislative reform “in place and in contradistinction to the conquest of political power and social revolution, do not really choose a more tranquil, calmer and slower road to the same goal, but a different goal”.
The sentence is not comparing the contents of two shopping lists, and it does not say that reform is a smaller ambition with revolution as the same thing scaled up. The claim is about the destination. Bernstein’s was elsewhere: “Instead of taking a stand for the establishment of a new society they take a stand for surface modifications of the old society.”
The obvious reading is that Luxemburg counterposed demands to power, and that a movement serious about power should be faintly embarrassed by demands. That is not quite right either. Look at what the Spartacus League put its name to in December 1918. Disarm the police and the officers. Confiscate the weapons. Arm the workers. Form a workers’ militia. Then expropriation of the banks and the large enterprises, and a six-hour day. A list of demands, and a conventional-looking one, until the sentence that governs it: “From the uppermost summit of the state down to the tiniest parish, the proletarian mass must therefore replace the inherited organs of bourgeois class rule”, meaning the assemblies and the city councils, “with its own class organs, with workers’ and soldiers’ councils.”
The demands did not change. The addressee did. And the same programme carries the line that ought to be read aloud wherever somebody proposes that a small organisation act on behalf of a class which has decided nothing: “The Spartacus League will never take over governmental power except in response to the clear, unambiguous will of the great majority of the proletarian mass of all of Germany.” The guard rail against substitutionism sits in the same document as the call for councils, and the two halves are one argument seen from either end.
Luxemburg had already worked out why the layering does not paralyse anything. In The Mass Strike the economic and the political struggle are not two stages waiting on each other: “The economic struggle is the transmitter from one political centre to another; the political struggle is the periodic fertilisation of the soil for the economic struggle.” Cause and effect, she wrote, continually change places. Which is the answer to any account of the modern state so impressed by its own insulation that it concludes nothing can be built until the whole thing is taken.
Ernest Mandel put the same point against Nahuel Moreno in the late 1970s, and the metaphor is the thing to hold on to. Trotsky’s bridge was not a bridge between backward consciousness and objective necessity. It was a bridge between the present demands of the masses and the programme of the socialist revolution, which is to say the seizure of power by the proletariat. Moreno’s bankruptcy was to put immediate, democratic and transitional demands on the same footing, which collapses the method back into the old Social Democratic split between a minimum programme for now and a maximum programme for the millennium.
What the Federation has written down
This debate will come to Coventry, to the Socialist Federation conference.
The Socialist Federation was constituted on 31 May 2026 on a call with something over 220 people on it, out of the Members’ Charter grouping that spent the winter arguing for internal democracy inside Your Party and losing. Its 28 June conference carried an Interim Platform and a structure document, both as amended, and voted 68 per cent to delay forming a party. A founding congress follows this autumn.
Read the platform and the architecture is there, adopted. “We reject the owners’ dictatorship in the workplace and the so-called ‘right of managers to manage’. We fight for workers’ control and management.” Nationalisation of the top hundred corporations without compensation. Then the two sentences that decide the argument: “We campaign for committees of action in every city and every town, made up of recallable delegates from the workplaces, working class estates and communities, schools and colleges”, and “A workers’ government will need to break with the ruling class and their state and pass power directly into the hands of working-class organisations to begin transition to a socialist society.”
Recallable delegates from the estates are not a lobbying strategy, and the founding documents put defence and joint action in the same breath as education. Whoever wrote that understood what sort of demand they were making and on whom.
The anxiety persists for a reason that has nothing to do with wording. A platform is a hierarchy and nothing in this one establishes which clause governs. The committees of action sit alongside thirty-odd other commitments: proportional representation, cancellation of tuition fees, citizenship for all, legal protection for trans people, a thirty-hour week, abolition of the monarchy. Each defensible. Each, on the page, of exactly equal weight. A platform in which recallable committees of action carry the same typographical authority as proportional representation has not decided whether the committees are the method or another item, and the difference between those two readings is the difference between the two organisations the Federation might become.
The comrades know it. The report Democratic Socialists published of their 9 June conference records the split: proposals from Richard Gerrard built around immediate agitational demands, others from Raz O’Connor concerned with defining Marxist concepts, and underneath both an unresolved argument about whether a programme exists to establish theoretical agreement or to define a strategic horizon for working-class power. The report notes that it stayed unresolved. It also notes that the gathering was disproportionately older, male, and white, and that the sheer number of proposals crowded out the political debate. Anyone who has sat through an event where the compositing runs longer than the argument will recognise the shape of it.
Two illustrations, and only one of them cheering
Greens Organise, founded in September 2024 by around 150 members including Zoë Garbett and endorsed by Siân Berry, asks Green council candidates through its Austerity Pledge to hold emergency summits, open the council books, demand a wealth tax and rent controls and a national care service, and resist the managed decline of local services. Open the council books is a transitional demand in classical form, arrived at without anyone from our tradition putting it there. As Red Mole argued when the pledge appeared, it remains a programme of refusal, a statement of what Greens will not accept when the Finance Settlement squeezes. Opening the books can mean councillors publishing a spreadsheet and lobbying the ministry. It can also mean the UNISON branch and the tenants’ federation reading the accounts alongside the people who use the care service, and deciding from outside the chamber which cuts will not be implemented. The pledge does not say, and the section 151 officer is watching either way.
Your Party is the discouraging one, and it has run the experiment for a year. Fifty-five thousand members by December, then a Central Executive Committee elected in February over a factional slate war, twenty candidates across seventeen wards in May with none elected and under five thousand votes nationally. The detail that matters most, though, is April, when the CEC banned dual membership with the SWP and the Scottish Socialist Party. Set that beside everything above. A party whose demands are all addressed to a parliamentary majority it does not have went out of its way to foreclose the one category of demand with a live addressee today: the demand on other workers’ organisations to act together. That is not electoral misfortune. It is a choice about who is being talked to, made in a committee room, in the spring, by people who had the option of choosing otherwise.
The part I cannot finish
Where this gets harder is at the point of contact, and I am less certain the distinction survives it than the argument above implies. Take a rent strike on a particular estate. The tenants want the rent reduced and will take the reduction from the landlord, the council, a court, whoever offers it first, and they will be right to. Does their committee become an organ of workers’ power because a Federation branch turned up with a leaflet about recallable delegates, or only if it outlives the settlement, and how many of them do?
Worse, and this is the strongest thing that can be said for my comrade’s formula: the united-front demand has a real addressee, which means it can be refused. A general secretary who says no has demonstrated the limits of your forces rather more publicly than a demand on a government that was never going to answer. Demands with no bourgeois addressee are falsifiable in a way that gerunds are not, and that is exactly why a small organisation frightened of its own size will drift back towards the gerunds. The transitional method describes what a struggle can become without guaranteeing the becoming, and the international experience that produced the FI literature is a good deal more confident about this than the defensive experience of the working class on these islands warrants. I have no satisfactory answer to that, and I do not think one exists on paper: we only learn through experience.
What I do think is that the Socialist Federation congress will not settle the question by a vote. It will settle it, or fail to, in what gets prioritised afterwards: whether a committees of action clause becomes a campaign with an actual first town and an actual first dispute, and whether anybody in the Federation picks up a telephone to the organisations Your Party spent April excluding.
Go back to the homepage and the four gerunds. The reason those sentences have no subject is not stylistic timidity. The working class as a subject, an actor making history today, has not been rebuilt, and a sentence cannot name what does not exist. A committee of action with recallable delegates from three workplaces and two estates is, whatever else it is, a subject. It can be named. It can be asked. It can refuse. Luxemburg’s distinction was never between two vocabularies. It ran between an organisation that asks and an organisation that builds the thing capable of taking, and the second is duller work, done mostly in rooms that swelter in summer and shiver in winter, for years before anyone can say whether it was the right call.
Sources. The Transitional Programme quotations are from The Death Agony of Capitalism and the Tasks of the Fourth International, 1938, at the sections on business secrets and on picket lines, defence guards and workers’ militia. The united-front passages are from Trotsky, For a Workers’ United Front Against Fascism, 8 December 1931. Luxemburg is quoted from Reform or Revolution, 1900, chapter 8, and The Mass Strike, the Political Party and the Trade Unions, 1906, chapter 4; the Spartacus material is What Does the Spartacus League Want?, 14 December 1918. James Burnham, The Managerial Revolution (John Day, 1941). The two passages attributed to the Fourth International’s 1979 World Congress, and Mandel’s formulation against Nahuel Moreno, are quoted from the Red Mole archive’s working copies. Section 151 of the Local Government Act 1972 and section 114 of the Local Government Finance Act 1988 are as cited; the section 114 notices referred to are Croydon (November 2020, December 2020 and November 2022), Thurrock (December 2022), Woking (June 2023), Birmingham (September 2023) and Nottingham (November 2023). The Socialist Federation’s Interim Platform and structure document were carried as amended at its conference of 28 June 2026; the conference report cited is the one published by Democratic Socialists on its 9 June meeting. Greens Organise material is from its Austerity Pledge. Your Party membership, ballot and Central Executive Committee decisions are as reported at the time.
I have long been intrigued by Lacan's concept of "the hysteric's demand", a demand which is not supposed to be fulfilled, since the purpose of the demand is to assert a relationship between subject and object. If the demand were to be fulfilled, it would immediately be replaced. This has been what most of the programmes of small socialist groups have looked like to me for a long time, and I've seen that as both a symptom and a condition of their powerlessness. Thank you for adding another conceptual layer to that thought.