Revolutionary red lines

Members of rs21’s Revolution from Below Faction consider the tensions in engaging with electoral politics and argue for starting from the perspective of abolition

Introduction

Since its launch, hundreds of thousands of people have signed up to the Your Party mailing list and a significant number have already become full members. Initial meetings of proto-branches have sprung up across the country that have been generally well attended. It shows the appetite for real change and the rejection of a political trajectory towards more austerity, more cruelty towards minorities, and more of the same from the established parties. Socialists excited by the new party are right to view this as an indicator of a budding political consciousness, of a desire to act and become agents of change in a system that currently lacks expression for those of us who want to halt a further descent into the destructive politics of the ruling classes. 

However, electoral parties are not neutral vehicles that can be manipulated easily to achieve revolutionary goals – if only we centre the right people and use the right slogans – but can risk standing in the way of developing working-class power. Political parties are conditioned by bourgeois electoralism, by the various pressures that the system will force upon their actors (whether this is elected representatives, paid officials or volunteers having conversations on the doorstep) and eventually might lead to yet another cycle of demobilisation and reactionary reformist politics. 

We should approach the electoral party in the spirit of abolition. Like other aspects of the capitalist state, the party must seek to abolish itself, by empowering its members to create the social conditions that make it obsolete, because we have built new solidarities and found other ways to organise ourselves that go beyond the imagination of the present state of things. 

Through the text below, we hope to set out the risks that arise when socialists engage with electoral parties and to establish some minimum red lines for engagement within the new left party.

Working within the party

Electoralism

Socialists need to be alert to the pressures and forces of electoralism within an electoral party. We should ensure that our work within the party keeps our broader socialist goals in mind and we must oppose pressure to focus all of our efforts on individual candidates, the election cycle, and winning votes. 

Community organising and engagement with existing grassroots groups should not be done to merely promote the party and its candidates for electoral ends, but to genuinely build working-class power in our communities in the long-term. There may be times when the longer-term goals of building socialism conflict with short-term electoral goals, e.g. an election pledge that is popular locally but feeds reactionary views. In these cases, socialists should prioritise the longer-term goal.

Taking office

We must carefully weigh up the benefits, drawbacks, tensions and contradictions that arise when socialists back – or become – councillors, mayors and MPs. As well as the immediately obvious problems that will arise when socialists are elected to roles that exist to manage the state, capitalism and austerity, there are other fundamental issues with a political approach that places primacy on legislators as agents of change. We should not view political change as something that is primarily achieved and enacted through Parliament, councils, or mayoralities. 

Socialists must not imagine that taking on these offices enables us to circumvent long-term base building and can act as a shortcut to bringing about radical change. In reality, elected officials will only be able to implement our ideas if we have also developed a strong base of support for change and created new solidarities in society. We must, therefore, always critically assess what elected officials can realistically achieve within the current conjuncture before we advocate for socialists taking on such roles.

Base building

We believe in working-class solidarity, rather than charity from above, so self-organisation should be an ideological and practical foundation of our politics. Furthermore, a socialist party elected to office can only enact radical change if support for such change exists in broader society. As such, we should be actively involved in helping to build a base for revolutionary socialism in our communities. We should provide practical, hands-on support to groups, projects and campaigns that promote self-organising, develop solidarities, and diffuse the barriers capital has created between us, e.g. mutual aid projects, anti-raids groups, cop watch, rank-and-file trade unionism, etc. 

While some have argued that socialists should work to draw community activists into the new party, we should turn this premise on its head and see the new party as a place to politicise and draw out new members into the work of these radical groups. Crucially, this should not be done with a view to taking control of these groups but, instead, to providing additional resources to support and develop their work. In so doing, we can help to establish a base of support for a socialist electoral project and develop the politics of party members through engagement with radical projects, while also fostering a local political scene that is not entirely reliant on the success of that same party.

Avoiding liquidation

There are three forms of liquidation that socialists must seek to avoid when engaging with electoral parties. Firstly, a radical organisation may simply cease to exist by folding or withering away as its membership focuses on an electoral party. Secondly, an independent organisation may transform into a faction or network of activists within an electoral party, thereby shedding extra-party organising in favour of party work. Thirdly, an organisation, even if formally remaining an external, independent group, may become in practice merely an extension of the party by placing too much emphasis and priority on work within the party to the detriment of all other types of socialist organising. Some comrades are already reporting that engaging with the trials and tribulations of Your Party leaves them with no time or energy for any other political organising.

We need an ideological left-wing vanguard that is willing to uphold radical beliefs – such as abolishing capitalism, borders and the state – even if those things seem politically impossible now. If rs21 and all other small radical left groups liquidate themselves into an electoral party then that independent vanguard will be lost. As such, socialists should not exert all of their energy into the new party and leave no capacity for other organising work within socialist organisations, their communities, their workplaces and other sites of struggle. 

If nothing else, extra-party work needs to continue in case the new party folds or is found to be politically useless. We shouldn’t put all of our eggs into this basket.

Obfuscating politics

There is a temptation for socialists to suppress the strength of their politics to try to win support. This approach is both dishonest and ineffective. A politics of liberation is founded on trust and mutual respect.

Socialists should be open both about their politics and about their organisational affiliations both when speaking to other party members and to the general public. Tell no lies and claim no easy victories.

Political red lines that should not be obfuscated

Capitalism

The new left party should be confident in arguing that capitalism is a negative force in the world and proclaiming itself against it. The problems we face are not merely ‘the system’, ‘establishment’, or ‘elites’. The problem is capitalism.

Carcerality

Any party genuinely in opposition to British capitalism will need to be comfortable staking out an anti-carceral politics. This is especially vital off the back of an increasing weaponisation of the carceral state against political activism.

Imperialism and colonialism

Historically, British left parties have been weak on imperialism. Contemporaneously this is in part due to: the relative privileges afforded to the working class in the imperial core over the imperial periphery, a history of anti racist and decolonial organising being dismissed as a distraction or hindrance regarding the unionised British left, and a lack of historical understanding of colonisation in this country. It’s vital that the new left party stands completely opposed to British imperialism. The working class is international and its emancipation will be as well.

Borders

Borders are not merely a physical infrastructure or objective geographic reality but act as a mediator of social relations under capitalism through the violent domination of racialised and minoritised people – from the hostile environment that diffuses border control into everyday life citizen-to-citizen immigration checks, to the deadly systems of detention, deportation and surveillance that those at the sharpest end of the border complex are met with. Similar to imperialism, this is something the British left has a tendency to be weak on in the electoral sphere. One of the key mechanisms underpinning imperialism in the 21st century is global labour arbitrage, and the inequality in labour regimes is upheld and enforced at the border. This has effects both internationally and nationally, where undocumented workers suffer substantially worse conditions and operate effectively without labour rights. Open Borders, therefore, is a revolutionary position that looks at the machinations of global capitalism as a whole – it represents a rejection of its logic which centres new solidarities at home and abroad.

Queer Liberation and a new antiracist, transfeminist politics 

The contemporary far right is instrumentalising ‘feminist’ politics in its crusade against trans and queer people, as well as refugees and migrants, and is using women and children as an excuse to further their racist agenda in an effort to maintain plausible deniability. At the same time, these same groups are at the forefront of assaults on the rights of women’s bodily autonomy and general self-determination. Support for trans and queer liberation is vital not just because it is right, but equally because rising hatred and suppression of otherness benefits no one but the fascists.

Conclusion

We hope that this intervention proves useful to socialists, both within and outside of rs21, who intend to engage with the new left party by pre-empting some of the potential pitfalls, contradictions and problems that they will encounter. By listing these issues, and suggesting means of overcoming them, our intention is to help socialists avoid a counterproductive, short-termist focus on social democratic electoralism. Wherever we find ourselves in the struggle, we believe that the above political and organising principles must guide our work.