The Fourth Internationalists in France long ago identified the critical weakness in LO (Lutte Ouvrière)’s politics with surgical precision: they wrote endlessly about what the Ligue Communiste Révolutionnaire was doing wrong, but propose an alternative line themselves? Explain to workers how to organise after a strike ends, on what slogans, with what forms of struggle? Silence. This wasn’t modesty; it was political bankruptcy. What matters is what you’re for, not what you’re against.
Workers’ Fight, the British current that is now the AWL, modelled itself on LO in some ways, and suffered the same disease. Ask them what the organisation should actually build—not politically, organisationally—and you’d get the habitual empty phrasemongering of British Trotskyists. Long on denunciation. Short on concrete plans. Critique without programme, opposition without alternative. Death by a thousand “against” statements with no “for” to guide the work.
Defensive slogans are often what a mass moves on. But a small group’s readers are the vanguard, and the vanguard already knows what it is against.
The French Trotskyists identified the weakness in Lutte Ouvrière with something close to surgery. LO could write, at length and often well, about what the Ligue Communiste Révolutionnaire was doing wrong. Ask it what workers should do when a strike stalls, on what slogans, in what forms, and the page went quiet. The answer, when it came, was to build LO. The LCR’s charge was not that LO criticised too much. It was that criticism was the whole of its politics: long on denunciation, silent on the alternative, a running commentary on everyone else’s mistakes. Workers’ Fight, the British current that became the AWL, took LO as a model and caught the same disease. Ask it what to build, and you got the habitual phrasemongering of British Trotskyism: critique without programme, opposition with no alternative behind it.
None of this means the negative slogan is the problem. It usually is not. A class in motion moves most readily in defence: against the cuts, against the closure, against the law, against the sack. It is defending something it already holds, and it knows the ground under its feet. “Hands off” has put more people in the street than any programme ever printed. And the best defensive demand already carries its opposite inside it. The sliding scale of wages lives inside the refusal of a pay cut; workers’ control lives inside the fight against a closure. It is the positive folded into the negative that turns a defensive strike into a school for something larger. What kills a movement is never that it said no. It is that the no opened onto nothing.
Which is why the rule bites hardest for us, and not for the reason it is usually given. We are a small group. We do not command a mass and our slogans do not move one. Our audience is the reader of the website, the person who takes the magazine, the dozen who come to the public meeting, the one we argue with after it has ended. That layer is the broad vanguard, and it does not come to us to be told what it is against. It arrived against. It reads us to find out what to be for: which line, which alternative, what to do on Monday, where the fight goes once the placard is down. For a crowd in the street a defensive slogan is oxygen. For the militant deciding where to spend a life, “against” is the thing they already have in surplus, and “for” is the thing they came to us lacking. A group whose entire reason to exist is to reach that layer, and which answers it with denunciation, is handing over the one thing its audience did not need more of.
Livio Maitan named this the method gap: the organisation that masters political criticism and cannot cross into organisational tasks, into programme, into the construction of a capacity to win. LO’s factory bulletins are the specimen. They denounced the bureaucrats and complained about the vending machines and the hot water, economism to the last drop, while the revolutionary alternative stayed permanently unspoken, because in the end LO would not propose what it could not itself guarantee to deliver. That is modesty turned into a principle, and the principle produces only helplessness. It is the same gap, in other clothes, that let the PCF drift from smashing the state to conquering positions inside it, and the CFDT treat every demand as an island rather than a strategy. The question Lenin put as what is to be done? is not answered by a longer catalogue of what is wrong with social democracy.
Set against all of it, the Sandinistas in 1979. The FSLN wrote a Plan of Struggle, a programme addressed to the people, and then wrote a second document that mattered as much: a guide for its own militants on how to explain the first, how to answer the counter-revolutionary argument, how to admit an error frankly, how to present the plan as the people’s own instrument. House visit by house visit, they were teaching a cadre to carry a “for.” Not against Somoza, since everyone was against Somoza, but for a named alternative with the steps to reach it. The distance from LO is not tactical finesse. It is whether the group has an answer to the only question its audience is actually asking.
That question is always some version of what do we do on Monday morning, and it is being asked right now. The mood against the AI data centres is real and worth having, and the reflex on much of the left is to meet it with the loudest available negative: close them, all of them. It fits on a placard and it commits us to nothing. We have argued the other way, because our job, with the readers we actually have, is not to shout the largest no but to supply what the mood cannot supply itself: what to build instead, under whose control, and toward what.
Everything a small revolutionary group is for, it should be able to say plainly, to a real person, in a room, on a Monday. The magazine that only says what it is against has not thereby kept itself pure. It has just walked its reader back out the door holding exactly what they came in with.
Sources. The critique of Lutte Ouvrière and the “method gap” draw on Livio Maitan’s writings on revolutionary organisation and strategy. The Sandinista “Plan of Struggle” and its accompanying propagandists’ guide are discussed in the Fourth International press of 1979. On the data centres, see our “Against the Tulip Economy.”
This article has been updated. For further reading, see the article below
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Further Reading
For those wishing to delve deeper into the historical experiences discussed and the source materials, the following French documents offer valuable insights:
"Le guide du propagandiste du Front" (The Front's Propagandist Guide): This excerpt details the practical methods used by FSLN militants in Nicaragua to explain their Plan of Struggle (see the English translation in October 1, 1984, Intercontinental Press) to the population. It provides arguments to counter "counter-revolutionary lies" and highlights the importance of an open but firm approach, capable of self-criticism and sensitive to the people's questions. The guide includes concrete suggestions for discussions during house visits and underscores the electoral campaign's significance as an opportunity to develop political consciousness and popular self-organisation. A related excerpt shows the FSLN specifically addressing women, detailing revolutionary gains for children and addressing women's own demands for equality, linking the programme to practical action like house visits. This document exemplifies an organisation consciously articulating and disseminating what it is for.
Texts on the CFDT Debate: "CFDT: des forces importantes pour redresser la barre" (CFDT: Important Forces to Right the Ship): These articles (and for a summary, see Critique Communiste) report on internal opposition within the CFDT trade union confederation, particularly critiquing the leadership's "recentering" towards integrating its action within a "durable capitalist system." Texts from the Basse-Normandie region and the Hacuitex federation reject the fundamental choices of the confederation, advocating for a class and mass unionism ("syndicalisme de classe et de masse") and explicitly calling for unity of action, primarily with the CGT, despite divergences, in the perspective of mobilising workers and pursuing an anti-capitalist struggle. This highlights a debate within a major workers' organisation over defining what it should be for in strategic terms.
"Lutte ouvrière" et la révolution mondiale ("Lutte Ouvrière" and the World Revolution): This document offers a critique of Lutte Ouvrière's (LO) analysis of revolutionary processes internationally. It examines LO's method of analysis and its implications, particularly concerning the nature of revolutions and state power in China, Cuba, and the popular democracies of Eastern Europe. The critique suggests theoretical and practical deviations in LO's approach, which, from the perspective of the analysis presented, hindered a clear understanding of the international revolutionary dynamic.
Critiques of Lutte Ouvrière's Practice and Theory in lutte ouvrière" ou la tendance prolétarienne": This comprehensive analysis delves into the structure and political practice of Lutte Ouvrière, contrasting it with the approach of the Ligue Communiste (LC/LCR). It critiques LO's system of press, particularly its factory bulletins, which are described as often focusing on immediate, even trivial, issues ("économiste") and lacking clear political slogans or alternative actions. The text highlights LO's perceived "passive critique" of other organisations and bureaucrats without proposing alternative lines or explaining how workers should organise or continue struggles. It points to a hesitation in defining specific organisational tasks and a tendency towards a "sentiment of helplessness" when struggles face difficulties. The critique suggests this approach focuses on what LO cannot immediately ensure rather than actively proposing and fighting for necessary steps. The document argues for the revolutionary organisation's necessity to assume and define organisational tasks and bring political knowledge to workers. It also touches upon LO's relationship with student movements.
"Construire le parti, construire l’Internationale" (Building the Party, Building the International): These documents stem from the preparatory debate for the founding congress of the Ligue Communiste. They are dedicated to the theory and system of organisation (Part 1) and the relationship between internationalism and the International (Part 2). These titles themselves indicate a focus on the active construction of the revolutionary instrument, defining the practical tasks required to achieve the revolutionary goal—explicitly outlining what the organisation is for in terms of its structure and international role.
"Pédagogie et crise de la bourgeoisie" (Pedagogy and Crisis of the Bourgeoisie): Authored by the teaching cell of the Ligue Communiste in Toulouse, this brochure analyses the education system within the context of the capitalist state. It critiques reformist approaches to education, including those from the PCF and certain union tendencies, highlighting their limitations in challenging the fundamental function of the school under bourgeois rule. The document aims to provide a basis for revolutionary militants in defining their line of struggle within the education sector, outlining orientations for transforming pedagogy and fighting the crisis of the bourgeoisie as it affects schooling.
"Fascisme et démocratie. Les formes de domination de l’état capitaliste. Suivi de Bonapartisme et fascisme" (Fascism and Democracy. Forms of Domination of the Capitalist State. Followed by Bonapartism and Fascism): This document provides a foundational Marxist theoretical analysis of different forms of the capitalist state, including bourgeois democracy, Bonapartism, and Fascism, including classic texts by Leon Trotsky on the subject. Understanding the nature of the state is crucial for revolutionaries to define what they are against (the capitalist state) and also implicitly shapes their understanding of what they are for (a workers' state, socialism), by defining the structures of domination that must be overthrown.
Critiques of the French Communist Party (PCF): See Critique communiste n°22, Février-Mars 1978 These excerpts include a discussion on the evolution of the PCF and the "Stalinist system," particularly focusing on the PCF's perceived "sectarian turn" after September 1977. One article is titled "PCF: the impossible strategy." Critiques of the PCF's positions, such as regarding a "capitalist private sector" within "advanced democracy" or their general political line, highlight the perceived lack of a viable revolutionary strategy. This serves as an example of a major political force whose strategy is analysed and found wanting from a revolutionary perspective, underscoring the need for revolutionaries to articulate a concrete alternative for achieving socialism.
There's a useful podcast on this topic at https://redmole.substack.com/p/deep-dive-podcast-what-matters-is