Not Siding With the Enemy Is a Prerequisite, Not a Destination

John Game Is Right About Tony Cliff. He's Wrong About What Came Next.

TL;DR  A former SWP member argues the workerist left is finished and the Fourth International, while better, offers only a correct negative. He is right about the exhaustion but wrong about the scale of what the FI tradition has actually built. PSOL in Brazil, the Left Bloc in Portugal, the Red-Green Alliance in Denmark: mass formations with democratic internal cultures, successful leadership transitions, and programmatic coherence on feminism, ecosocialism and democratic rights. The workerist decomposition, meanwhile, produces BSW in Germany, Galloway in Britain, and Stop the War’s accommodation of Russian aggression. The SWP’s collapse was not the revolutionary left’s failure generically; it was the failure of a specific organizational model. Understanding that distinction is not a footnote. It is the strategic question.

Writing publicly on Substack on 19 March 2026, John Game — a former SWP member — makes a point worth taking seriously. His argument runs roughly like this: the older workerist left had its historical moment and that moment has passed; too many of its remnants now produce their own variant of the illiberalism they claim to oppose; the Fourth International has, he concedes, turned out better; but not siding with the enemy is a prerequisite, not a destination.

He is right about the exhaustion. He is wrong, or at least significantly underinformed, about the destination. This piece is an attempt to supply what is missing from his account.

The workerist moment and its passing

The SWP tradition produced real things. The rank-and-file movement in the unions, a generation of working-class militants, the Anti-Nazi League: these were not nothing. At its best, the Cliffite tradition understood that socialist politics had to be built in workplaces and communities rather than decreed from study circles, and it built organizations with genuine social weight in the British labour movement.

But the industrial formation that anchored that politics has dissolved. When it did, parts of what had held together under the workerist banner reached for a substitute. The pattern is visible across Europe. In Germany, Sahra Wagenknecht spent decades as the most prominent figure of the Communist Platform within Die Linke before founding BSW in 2024: a formation that combines economic redistribution with anti-immigration politics, opposition to Ukraine aid, and explicit hostility to gender and climate activism. Research on BSW’s voter base shows it drawing from both Die Linke’s working-class constituency and the AfD, particularly in eastern Germany, by framing progressive social politics as elite lifestyle concerns disconnected from the interests of ordinary workers. This is not opportunism. It is what happens when a political identity loses its material anchor and reaches for a national-popular substitute.

In Britain, the trajectory is George Galloway. His current vehicle, the Workers Party of Britain, explicitly identifies as socialist, left-conservative and social conservative; his campaigns in Batley and Spen and Rochdale centred anti-trans rhetoric alongside Palestinian solidarity; his foreign policy is campist in the most straightforward sense, including promotion of Russian government positions. This is not a personal eccentricity. It is the political logic of workerism without the workers: a tradition that defined itself against middle-class progressivism finding, in the absence of a coherent class formation, that anti-progressivism is all that remains.

Stop the War is the collective version of the same story. Its resolutions since 2022 have consistently framed the Russian invasion of Ukraine as a NATO proxy war, demanded ceasefires without withdrawal, and treated the Ukrainian working class’s right to self-determination as a secondary consideration to Western foreign policy critique. Andrew Murray, Lindsey German and the broader ex-SWP orbit that anchors StWC have not moved to the right in any simple sense. They have remained consistent to a political framework — the primacy of anti-Western-imperialism as organizing principle — that was always latent in the workerist tradition and has become, in the absence of the class formation that once complicated it, increasingly indistinguishable from campism.

The sociological research on this migration is instructive. Analyses of the BSW voter base and the broader populist right find that the primary driver is not economic anxiety per se but a perceived decline in social status among routine workers whose position has been undermined by deindustrialisation. When left formations fail to offer an inclusive response to this decline, workerist political identity can be channelled into nationalist-populist frameworks that promise to restore status by defending traditional social hierarchies. A left that adopts the right’s divide-and-conquer logic on gender, race and immigration — as several workerist formations have done — deepens the divisions it claims to address.

The SWP’s specific failure

John writes from inside the SWP experience, and from that vantage point the collapse of 2013 probably looks like the revolutionary left’s generic problem. It is not. It is the failure of a specific organizational model, and understanding the distinction matters for what comes next.

The crisis began with allegations of rape and sexual assault against a leading Central Committee member, Martin Smith, known internally as Comrade Delta. The Disputes Committee that investigated consisted of seven members, five of whom were current or former CC members who had worked closely with Delta. The committee interrogated the accuser about her drinking habits and past relationships. The leadership described the power imbalance between a senior party official and a young member as irrelevant to the party’s work. When members attempted to discuss the case horizontally, they were expelled for secret factionalism. The Guardian described the process as a “kangaroo court.”

At the January 2013 conference, the membership voted to uphold the not-proven verdict by 231 to 209. Nearly half the active membership — approximately 1,800 people — left in the following months. Alex Callinicos published a theoretical defence of democratic centralism, arguing the model’s effectiveness justified its maintenance. Richard Seymour, China Miéville and others named what it actually was: a leadership cult in which the Central Committee’s authority was structurally insulated from accountability, making justice impossible from the inside.

This was not the revolutionary left failing. This was a specific organizational model, inherited from the Comintern’s worst period and defended as Leninist orthodoxy, producing exactly the outcome that model structurally guarantees when a leadership becomes unaccountable. The question is what organizational models produce different outcomes. That question is answerable.

What the Fourth International has actually built

John’s assessment of the FI as offering correct positions without a destination is understandable from inside the British experience, where the FI tradition is represented by small formations with limited reach. It is not accurate as an assessment of what the FI model has produced internationally.

Consider the two votes. In January 2013, the SWP’s conference voted 231 to 209 to uphold an internal verdict protecting a senior leader from accountability. In March 2026, PSOL’s National Directorate voted 47 to 15 against entering a full electoral federation with Lula’s Workers’ Party, preserving the party’s programmatic independence and its capacity to criticize the government’s neoliberal compromises. Two internal votes, two organizational cultures, two entirely different outcomes.

PSOL, founded in 2004 following a split from the PT, is a party of recognized currents with proportional leadership allocation: the largest tendency takes the presidency, the second-largest takes the treasury, and so on. This produces friction — there were physical confrontations at the 2025 convention over the division of the party apparatus. But it prevents the stagnation and leadership cults that the SWP model makes structurally inevitable, and it has produced successful generational transitions from the founding cohort to figures like Guilherme Boulos and Tarcísio Motta without the implosions that have characterized every comparable British organization.

In Portugal, the Left Bloc has been the primary political driver behind the legalization of abortion, equal marriage and death with dignity, and is the only Portuguese party to have consistently achieved gender parity at the head of its electoral lists. Its relationship to the Socialist Party government during the geringonça period (2015–2019) was conducted on the basis of a specific written programme to reverse austerity; when the PS shifted back toward big capital in 2019, the Bloc returned to opposition rather than defending a government it could no longer influence. The transition from Catarina Martins to Mariana Mortágua as national coordinator in 2023 demonstrated a democratic leadership change that most left formations cannot manage without fracturing.

In Denmark, the Red-Green Alliance holds 13 seats in the Folketing, won 24.6% of the Copenhagen City Council vote in 2021 to become the largest party in the capital, and is represented in 69 of 98 municipalities. It is the only party in the Danish parliament without an official leader, with a strict rotation rule preventing more than two consecutive terms. The absence of formalized leadership does produce informal power centres that can evade oversight — this is a real limitation of flat-structure models. But the contrast with the SWP’s experience of formalized leadership producing formally unaccountable power is instructive.

In Australia, Socialist Alternative, which holds permanent FI observer status, co-founded the Victorian Socialists in 2018. The VS won 5.65% in targeted districts in the 2025 federal election and has since voted to transform into a national formation, provisionally called the Australian Socialist Party, which has grown to over 5,600 members as of late 2025. This is not a small propaganda group.

In France, following the NPA’s 2022 split, NPA-Anticapitalistes has pursued tactical unity within the Nouveau Front Populaire while maintaining strict programmatic independence. In the March 2026 municipal elections, this orientation produced 15.2% in Alençon, over 25% in Toulouse, and 19.5% in Gérardmer, alongside significant contribution to left coalition results across multiple cities.

The FI’s record, including its failures

A comparative assessment requires honesty about the FI’s own history. The 1953 split between the International Secretariat and the International Committee, the LSSP’s entry into a bourgeois coalition government in Sri Lanka in 1964 and its subsequent expulsion from the FI, various episodes of ultra-left or opportunist blunders across different sections: these are real failures, not footnotes. The argument here is comparative, not hagiographic.

What the FI’s record demonstrates is a mechanism for managing failure and maintaining coherence that workerist formations have generally lacked. The LSSP was expelled when it capitulated. Socialist Action in the US was severed from the International in 2024 when it adopted pro-Moscow positions on Ukraine, describing the invasion as aid to Russian speakers. These are painful internal ruptures. They are also evidence of an organization capable of enforcing political standards rather than defending an apparatus at all costs.

On Ukraine, the FI adopted a resolution at its 2022 World Congress recognizing the Russian invasion as imperialist aggression and Ukraine’s right to self-determination including armed resistance, while maintaining opposition to NATO enlargement and all imperialist blocs. The FI built links with Sotsialnyi Rukh (Social Movement) in Ukraine, which joined as a permanent observer in 2024. This is not merely a correct position held in isolation; it is a sustained relationship with an actual Ukrainian left organization. The contrast with Stop the War’s refusal to recognize Ukrainian working-class agency could not be sharper.

The FI’s 18th World Congress in 2025 reasserted that gender equality and trans rights are integral to its mandate. FI-aligned formations have led the feminist strike movement in France, Spain and Portugal, linking reproductive labour to the struggle against capitalist exploitation in a way that no workerist formation has sustained.

Britain: the structural problem

Why has none of this been reproduced in Britain? The answer has three parts, and only one of them is political.

1. First-past-the-post creates structural barriers to left formation-building that proportional systems do not. PSOL, the Left Bloc and the Red-Green Alliance all developed in systems where a party winning 5–10% can build meaningful parliamentary presence and the institutional resources that come with it. In Britain, 5% nationally produces nothing.

2. Second, Labour’s gravitational pull has repeatedly hollowed out revolutionary formations by drawing cadre toward parliamentary reformism. The Corbyn surge was the most recent episode: a brief moment of socialist influence within the Labour Party followed by a decomposition that left the terrain more fragmented than before, with significant numbers drifting toward Your Party’s internal conflicts, Stop the War campism, or simple disengagement.

3. Third, the SWP’s organizational legacy has left a deposit of distrust that makes the mutual recognition required for a pluralist coalition harder to build. The 1,800 people who left the SWP after 2013 included the activist layer that might have built something comparable to rs21 at scale. Revolutionary Socialism in the 21st Century, which explicitly rejects top-down democratic centralism and has grown to over 400 members — more than half of whom were never in the SWP — is the partial recovery. But it is partial.

Anti-Capitalist Resistance, which joined the FI as part of its British section in 2024, represents the organizational vehicle for the FI tradition in England and Wales. Its connections to Your Party are real but complex, and Your Party’s ongoing internal crisis means those connections are more fraught than they appear from the outside.

The answer to John

John is right that not siding with the enemy is a prerequisite, not a destination. The FI tradition’s consistent record on Ukraine, feminist politics and democratic rights is necessary but insufficient. It does not yet constitute a counter-hegemonic project capable of contesting the terrain where the authoritarian right is winning.

But the evidence does not support the conclusion that the FI tradition offers only a correct negative. PSOL in Brazil, the Left Bloc in Portugal, the Red-Green Alliance in Denmark, the Victorian Socialists in Australia: these are formations that have built mass institutional presence, survived leadership transitions, maintained programmatic independence under governmental pressure, and sustained political coherence on the questions where the workerist tradition has failed most visibly. They did not do this by accident. They did it through organizational forms that distribute power rather than concentrating it, that institutionalize currents rather than suppressing them, and that treat feminist, ecological and democratic politics as constitutive rather than secondary.

The workerist tradition produced Galloway, BSW, and Stop the War’s accommodation of Russian aggression. The FI tradition produced PSOL voting 47-15 to maintain its independence from a government it supports. These are different political cultures, not just different positions, and the organizational form is not separable from the political outcome.

The question for Britain is not whether the FI model is correct. It is. The question is what structural and political conditions would allow it to produce here what it has produced in Lisbon, Copenhagen, and São Paulo. That is a harder question than correct positions can answer. But it is the question, and it is worth asking seriously.

Notes

John Game’s original comment was posted publicly on 19 March 2026 at substack.com/@johngame/note/c-230062268. He publishes at johngame.substack.com.

Primary sources: PSOL National Directorate vote (International Viewpoint, March 2026); Left Bloc interview (International Viewpoint); Enhedslisten party statutes and 2026 election data (enhedslisten.eu); FI World Congress Ukraine resolution (fourth.international); FI Executive Bureau statement on Socialist Action severance (fourth.international, 2024). SWP Delta case: The Guardian, March 2013; Socialist Studies academic analysis. BSW voter analysis: ResearchGate / Fondapol studies 2025–2026. Victorian Socialists: party statements, 2025 federal election results.