Fight for a new mass socialist politics

rs21 is taking part in The World Transformed festival this year as a partner organisation. There will be three assemblies at the festival on conjuncture, strategy and organisation. In this submission for the assembly, we argue a way forward for mass ecosocialist and anti-imperialist politics.

CONJUNCTURE AND ANALYSIS: REACTION AND REPRESSION

Capitalism has always been a brutal and violent system, but it is clear we are entering a phase of history where the pretence that it could be anything else is disappearing. The Labour Party under Keir Starmer is cutting welfare to invest in warfare. It has upheld the two-child benefit cap, launched attacks on migrants, trans and disabled people, and is complicit in Israel’s genocidal assault on the Palestinian people while repressing activists at home. 

Far-right forces are on the rise globally and taking state power. Reform is leading in the polls and will likely be kingmakers at the next election, while the far-right street movement grows in strength, turning out unprecedented numbers from London to small towns. Anti-migrant policies are becoming more extreme and violent, with the far right acting in lockstep with state violence and mobilising around a moral panic that casts asylum seekers as a threat to communities, women and children. The attacks on migrants are part of the same reactionary backlash that fuels anti-feminist politics including surging transphobia. The argument that we should treat transphobia or anti-migrant politics as secondary issues and ‘focus on what unites us not what divides us’ misses that these issues are about freedom for the whole class. The working class is already internally stratified along lines of nationality, race, disability, sexuality and more. Our job as socialists is to build unity and solidarity across the diversity of the class, not to wish away the difference that exists within it. Capitalist exploitation and oppression reinforce each other.

The long arc of (dis)organised abandonment of sections of the working class in Britain, in spatially and socially uneven ways, is a key factor underpinning contemporary shifts to the right. Deindustrialisation, privatisation, austerity and precarity in a stagnating economy is hollowing out our collective experience of society and putting immense pressure on our lives. Rents and bills are skyrocketing due to profiteering landlords and corporations, while the benefits system becomes more and more punitive.

The weakness of our labour movement is a huge challenge. Hundreds of thousands of workers took industrial action during the strike wave, but union membership is low, especially amongst private sector, precarious, low-waged and younger workers. Though the background level of strikes remains significantly higher than before the strike wave, and the Birmingham bin workers are putting up inspiring resistance, we are not seeing many big strikes that grab public attention. Many of the largest unions beg for crumbs from the Labour Government while remaining affiliated to the Party, with little to nothing to show for it. This is a consequence of both the low level of rank-and-file worker organisation and militancy, and the position of the union bureaucracy, who act as mediator between labour and capital, and maintain their political proximity to the Labour Party. Paid officials at the top of unions, the ‘bureaucracy’, have sometimes actively obstructed solidarity with Palestine and trans people. 

The separation of the workers’ movement from other social movements is a huge issue that has prevented us from using our most effective weapon as a class: withdrawing our labour. In Italy, we’ve seen strikes for Palestine liberation. We need to rebuild the labour movement and do better to forge connections between it and social movements. There are some positive signs, like the recent Trade Union Congress motion opposing increases in defence spending. 

The global capitalist system is pitching us into war, genocide and climate devastation. Global capitalism’s ever-accelerating extraction, production and accumulation is causing ecological ruin. Emissions keep ratcheting up, even as more countries experience climate disasters that wrench whole populations. Israel’s genocidal war against the Palestinian people – livestreamed for the world to see – is backed to the hilt by Britain, the US and other powers. Western states are cutting welfare and social spending to fund remilitarisation, attempting to revitalise NATO and/or prepare for its fragmentation. This comes in a context of heightened war and inter-imperialist conflict, where states seek to contain and repress the ever-growing numbers of people rendered ‘surplus’ by the ecocidal, racist, imperialist, capitalist system through militarised bordering and policing. The rise of tech capital and AI is intensifying all of these processes, becoming more and more central to capital accumulation, the war machine, policing and bordering as well as social provisions by the state (e.g in the NHS and more).

But there is a global political resistance to the genocide. In Britain, the scale and endurance of the movement in solidarity with Palestine has been the central political fact on the left over the last two years. The rise of authoritarianism and the far right should also be understood partly as a reaction against the Palestine movement. As protesting against an ongoing genocide is labelled as a terror threat, more and more people are reaching radical conclusions, taking political positions against Zionism, militarism and state repression. Liberal democracy appears as a sham, and the violence and racism of the state is laid bare.

STRATEGY: PARTY, MOVEMENT, CLASS

There is a historic opening for anti-imperialist and anti-capitalist politics in Britain. With the Labour Party actively complicit in the genocide of Palestinians – while enacting domestic repression, cuts and attacks on civil liberties at home – the desire for a political alternative to the left of the Labour Party is acute. The mass movements built over the past generation have laid the groundwork for a new phase of working-class struggle: Palestinian liberation, climate rebellion, migrant solidarity, Black lives, transfeminism, the fight against cops, cuts, landlords, bosses and war. These movements are part of how classes struggle, and connecting them to the workers’ movement and militant socialist politics is crucial.

There is a clear and urgent need for a principled mass socialist party. We have an opportunity to build that. The founding conference of a new left party is on the immediate horizon and local protobranches are launching up and down the country. We face a huge challenge to get this off the ground, but also an unprecedented opportunity. There is real potential to build a mass socialist party rooted in the realities of diverse working-class communities across the country and capable of presenting a political alternative.

We face a crisis of leadership. Recent weeks have been rocky and challenging. Unaccountable political leaders and movement bureaucrats have done serious damage. Our difficulty in moving beyond the limits of Corbynism reflects the weakness of the left today in Britain and the disorganisation of the working class. Those with the power to bring a new political project into existence come from places like the Labour left and union bureaucracies, both rife with petty factional maneuvering, bureaucratic stitch-ups and bullying, and with no clear political basis. But we cannot blame it all on them: we have to create a political organisation and culture that can launch a new layer of militants and collective leadership that represents the contemporary working class.

We need to seize this opportunity, not ‘wait and see’. People are looking at the chaos at the top of Your Party and feeling like giving up, or looking to the Greens instead. While the botched launch increases the challenges and risks, the chance to set up a mass socialist party with a serious commitment to building the self-activity of the working class is too big to give up on so soon. We want to work with leftists and activists in the Green party without abandoning our bigger goals.

The new left party will be operating in a period of political and social atomisation. The decomposition of the working class is central to the issues that we face on the left: from the inability to go further in the Palestine movement to unions’ weakness as the cost of living surges. More and more people face precarity, falling living standards and disconnection, with social existence increasingly playing out online. All these make it harder to organise. The far right is increasingly occupying the vacuum.

We need to reverse this process, build the working-class alternative, and actively struggle to transform society. To do that we need to investigate the present-day social, technical and political composition of the working class in all its diversity, develop habits of collective action in every workplace and community, and build organisational forms that meet the needs of the day. We need to develop ideas and analysis from that investigation and by learning from past socialist struggles, and to develop militant leaders from across the multiracial and multi-gendered working class. We can leave no section – no industry – no social form – no person – of the class behind. 

ORGANISATION: FIGHTING OUR SIDE

An anti-capitalist tendency within the new left party is needed to fight for a socialist political programme, for an orientation to organising and struggle, and for member-led democracy within the party. As socialists, revolutionaries, anti-capitalists and movement activists, we can’t assume that the new left party will automatically take up the liberatory politics and rooted organising strategy that we know is needed. We need to get organised – properly this time. We have to move past single-issue campaigns, reliance on leaders, and operating as informal networks or activist groups that can’t grow past a certain point. Global histories of struggle tell us that mass class self-organisation is possible, even if we cannot predict what forms it might take in the twenty-first century. A tendency in the new party could articulate a democratic, liberatory, anti-imperialist, ecosocialist politics:

Anticapitalism: The interlinked crises we face are a product of the capitalist system. At every opportunity, we should aim to show how struggles are linked, who profits, and how that system is reproduced. The party programme should have conflict with the ruling class and capital built in, linking that to everyday struggles including housing, work, time, education, care, energy, food and the cost of living. 

Against the state and imperialism: End the British state’s participation in the genocide. Shatter Britain’s attachment to US imperialism and NATO. Oppose increased military spending, and make the case for welfare not warfare. Ecosocialism here in 21st century means to struggle not only against state militarism, but the entanglement of labour and working-class social reproduction with imperialism, struggling for transitions for jobs in destructive industries towards socially useful ends, against the data centres that are destroying the planet, and for the decommodification of basic needs like energy, water, food and land. We need to rip these out of the hands of the capitalists, take on the financial institutions that increasingly subsume them and the rest of society underneath them, and place them in the hands of working people. The state uses its courts, police, surveillance and prisons to repress our movements, control working class people and reproduce structural racism – we need to fight to maximise liberty and democracy and against state repression and carceralism.

Solidarity against all oppression: Refuse any concession to oppression or nationalism, and fight for Palestinian liberation, trans liberation and migrant solidarity. Confront the far right with a politics of freedom and maximum solidarity, not triangulation.

Class struggle over electoralism: Not all of our organising can or should be achieved through a political party alone, but a mass socialist party can take up struggles, articulate political demands, and build class power. Prioritising class struggle doesn’t mean sidelining election campaigning – it means using it to raise consciousness, organise outwards, make new facts on the ground, and put forward political demands. Building this kind of power outlives any election result and shifts the whole political field. Basebuilding needs to be connected to a political fight. The party will falter without mass movements fighting for our policies. The party should avoid the trap of office without power, which can discredit it. Party representatives should not join governments or cabinets at local, devolved or national level unless there is enough power to implement the relevant parts of the party programme. 

Democracy at every level: Organise for democratic central structures, strong accountability mechanisms for leaders, and a level of autonomy for local branches. Formal democracy is one thing, but the party needs to be participatory and inclusive for that to be meaningful. That means delegates elected from local branches meeting at least once a year at a conference which is the supreme decision-making body of the party, and a collective leadership body elected by Single Transferable Vote.

An anti-capitalist tendency in the new party fighting for the politics outlined here could raise the political level of the wider party, and be a force to be reckoned with against the sway of unelected bureaucrats. Its supporters could work with others, particularly in local branches, to build working-class power and focus on struggle. It should organise openly through conference interventions, publications and communications strategies; and have its own internal democratic structures.

Whatever happens in the coming months and years, we will still need independent revolutionary organisation. Capitalism is destroying people and planet. It cannot be reformed, it must be overthrown. The ruling class won’t give up power if they lose an election. The repressive capitalist state must be destroyed in a revolution to replace capitalism with a socialist society with real democracy which stretches into the workplace, economy and across the whole of society. We want a mass socialist party in Britain to strengthen and politicise our side in the class struggle, but we will always continue to argue and organise for revolutionary socialist politics.

TWT will take place 9-12 October in Manchester. Find out more and get tickets here. rs21 will be running a stall – come and speak with us!