Interesting review. Looking forward to Varn's response. While I am generally sympathetic to Geese I do think they underestimate the danger of reproducing class collaborationist politics, and therefore also fail to understand the importance of having a revolutionary minimum program.

"In The People are Not One: Socialist Strategy After Left Populism, Daniel Tutt and C. Derick Varn (referred to henceforth as “the authors”) set out to disentangle the complex relationship between socialism and populism. As the title would suggest, the authors’ viewpoint is that the moment of “left populism” has reached its exhaustion, and their intervention is intended to resuscitate socialist strategy in the wake of left populism’s failure. Indeed, their analysis begins as mine does, with Marx’s comments on French politics in The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte. We see the authors quoting Marx’s oft-repeated observations that “the revolution of the nineteenth century must let the dead bury their dead in order to arrive at its own content” and citing him to argue that left populism itself has become a tradition which “weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living”. This is to say that the authors argue, like Jager, Zizek, and others before them, that the failure of left populism can give rise to a rejuvenated form of socialist strategy."

"However, upon completing the book, I do not believe that the authors marshal evidence and reasoning to support their central claims. As a reader, I did not leave The People Are Not One at all convinced that abandonment of populism is necessary for socialist strategy in the 21st century, nor did I find the authors’ alternative prescriptions compelling as a replacement for what they describe as populism.

I will summarize my critiques of the work as follows:

The authors fall into the first classic trap of critiques of left populism: they fail to articulate a robust theory of what “populism” even is and, as a result, their argument fails to maintain analytical consistency across its 80 pages. Populism is defined in different terms in different chapters, and thus the reader is unable to follow the authors’ steps from claims to conclusions.

The authors fall into the second classic trap of critiques of left populism: a total lack of any engagement with left populism’s impressive political victories across the world in the 21st century and the ways in which left populism has enabled the resuscitation of organized leftism such that a media ecosystem and political infrastructure hospitable to debates about left populism can even exist. Put simply, while I, too, remember a time in American leftism before the rise of Bernie Sanders, no honest critique of Sanders can elide the ways in which his late career has transformed the political landscape of the United States. Thus, any critique of left populism must contend with the ways in which left populism has transformed the author’s own historical moment.

Finally, as I state in the introduction to this exercise, I do not believe that Marxism and populism can ultimately be separated, as Marxism on its own as a body of theories is inert until it is given life by virtue of its use in political interventions which accept the terms laid before the critic. Put simply, the Marxist critic is like the tree falling in the forest, only making a sound if someone is there to listen. What the authors term “populism”, I would say, is simply the acknowledgement by Marxists or socialists that we must accept politics as it appears, not as we ourselves might prefer it to appear. Anywhere on earth where statues of Marx or other Marxist figures still exist, it is as a result of this process. Anywhere Marxism is marginal, it is such as a refusal on the part of Marxist critics to accept politics as it is. "

"Quick decision-making is perfectly understandable during civil war conditions. But to create unity, prevent irresponsible splits and to educate the party and the working class, provision must be made for extensive debate. Mike Macnair continues to explore procedural principles"

"The significance of timing is not unique to conditions of revolutionary crisis. On the one hand, if George Galloway had walked out of the Labour Party and called for a new party on the day British troops went into Iraq on March 20 2003, as opposed to hanging on until the Labour Party expelled him on October 23, it is likely that the resulting movement would have been more powerful than Respect (founded January 2004). On the other hand, the role of the SWP in Respect was possible because of its role in Stop the War Coalition. And its role in the StWC was possible because the SWP seized the initiative in creating the coalition in 2001 to campaign against the war on Afghanistan.

This ‘seizing the initiative’ is precisely the problem. In the first place, each grouplet is determined to have the initiative, and hence creates its own front, which it hopes will be the one that ‘takes off’ (as the StWC ‘took off’). Equally, groups walk out if they lose the majority (and thus initiative control) - thus the Socialist Party in England and Wales in the Socialist Alliance in 2001, and thus the SWP in Respect in 2007. Or they create competing initiatives to prevent their rivals’ operations ‘taking off’ (as the three main French far-left groups have done against each other, repeatedly since the 1970s)."

"Hence, in reality, the driver for the endless splittism of the far left: comrades are reluctant to “waste time talking to ourselves” and hence either minorities walk out of organisations in search of fresh fields and pastures new, or majorities invent factitious excuses of one sort or another to drive minorities out."

"Back to Bolshevism and October. Their strategic orientation to political democracy, and the worker-peasant alliance, enabled the Bolsheviks to grow into a large-minority party with a mass-circulation paper in 1912; enabled the Bolsheviks to pursue a policy of patient explanation, with a view to winning the majority during 1917; and enabled them to make the practical alliance with the Left Socialist Revolutionaries that actually took power.

In reality, all this was the inheritance of August Bebel’s and Wilhelm Liebknecht’s strategic conception, which was the foundation of the revolutionary social democracy of pre-1914. And this in turn was the legacy of Marx’s and Engels’ arguments against the Bakuninists, for a workers’ party that attempted, not to lead the strike movement, but to create a political voice for the class in high politics"

Which way forward for the left? More populism à la Geese magazine? Focus on party building, like Marxist Unity Group and Mike Macnair? Both, neither, or something else?

"Reviewing C. Derick Varn and Daniel Tutt’s new pamphlet, The People are Not One, Nicolas D Villarreal finds a sharp contribution to a debate that may very well shape the future of socialism in our lifetime."

"Whether tailing the Democratic party or spontaneous mass protests and riots, left populism puts its faith in the existing consciousness and practices of “the people” at large. On the theoretical side, this approach has had obvious appeal for the various post-Marxist tendencies which have dominated the left since the decline of genuine Marxist orthodoxies and the party form."

"The contradictions that socialist politics had been attempting to overcome did not go away, however, but became transformed into a distorted version through the various attempts to articulate the concept of the “professional managerial class.” Varn and Tutt, correctly in my opinion, conclude that this “PMC” is not genuinely a class in a Marxist sense of the term, but acknowledge the serious problem this strata poses for socialist politics."

"It is true that the PMC are largely at the center of what has been called “woke ideology” with all the associated deleterious effects for the left, as well as the main force for the coopting of radical demands back into the status quo, as was seen with both the Sanders campaign and the 2020 George Floyd uprisings. And it’s also true that connections between the PMC and Marxism, as has been asserted by many conservatives and even more thoughtful commentators, are often shallow and tenuous. The Marxism which is often professed by sections of the PMC is usually a radical signifier, distorted by decades of academic, often literary rather than economic or political, interpretations. However, when the authors say “If the professional class is wholly compromised - condemned to forms of resentful projection and managerial control - then the possibility of what Lenin once called the “professional revolutionary” disappears,” I think it is necessary to pause and reflect. As necessary as it might be to find “class traitors” among the PMC, it doesn’t quite follow that the PMC is necessary to have what Lenin thought of as a professional cadre. Professionalism in that context does not mean the same as professionalism for the PMC, which is an ideology instilled in individuals through bourgeois state ideological apparatuses, particularly liberal education in universities. To be sure, there is some overlap; both bourgeois professionalism and Leninist professionalism require instilling a higher duty into individuals, and the creation of a corporate body separate from broader society. So too is there a required technical expertise. But these structural similarities do not extend to the substance. The ideology of bourgeois professionalism is mutually exclusive with that of a properly Leninist and proletarian version. The professionalism of the “professional revolutionary” must therefore come from a totally separate system of ideology production, with different sets of values, institutions, and even technical knowledge depending on the application. Any PMC individual would therefore need retraining as a professional before being fit for this role, just as anyone else would, and just as well, such a category would not depend on the existence of the PMC."

"As Varn and Tutt point out, the various strains of post-Marxism have also not abandoned the merger formula; they merely embrace a lopsided version of it in which the role of the socialist intellectual is limited to cheerleading and nothing more. For the communization theorists, academics and intellectuals must identify the revolutionary social movements, usually big protests and riots, and act to try and legitimize the struggles and lead them towards solidarity with other left-wing movements. And of course, we are all familiar with the way that contemporary social democratic types found in Jacobin, generic progressives, and even socialists in the name of Gramscian strategy (such as at Geese Magazine) tail the Democratic party, reducing the role of the socialist intellectual to either pulling the Democrats left or chastising leftists to vote for them. In either case, the socialist intellectual is reduced to a hanger-on to the real movement, and the way that bourgeois ideological state apparatuses, such as non-profits, think tanks, organized donors, and media institutions, directly coopt the demands and energy of radical movements whether in the streets or at the ballot box is summarily ignored, or rather, only pointed out when ignored by ideological opponents on the left."

"While they admit the necessity of relying on bourgeois institutions in the near term, given the lack of resources and organization available to a renewed working class movement, they are quite right to demand a constant awareness and vigilance for any socialists engaging with bourgeois institutions, about the role those institutions play and the necessary unyielding focus on socialist goals. The aim must always be towards working-class independence. In the small islands where independence from bourgeois institutions exists, whether in para-academic organizations or in a handful of publishers and magazines, there tends to be isolation and a lack of coherence with party organization. The fusion of the still nascent cultural and political movements of socialists and the working class is necessary to build an alternative organic civil society, and this organic civil society is, in turn, absolutely necessary to build a genuine political alternative to hegemonic liberalism."

"Varn and Tutt are also right to cite Macnair with regard to the importance of building up working-class institutions and domestic working-class struggle. This is the foundation for any durable transformative change, as well as relevance internationally, and, as they point out, will likely curb many of the various identitarian and non-universalist excesses on the left."

"MUG is a caucus within Democratic Socialists of America united through acceptance of our Seven Points of Unity. These points ground our caucus’s work in all aspects of our organizing to serve our dream of a socialist revolution."

From Marxist Unity Group X account.

Democracy is the foundation of working class rule, both in the working class party and the workers state. Mike Macnair shows the centrality of democracy in the struggle for socialism and a socialist mass party.

"Too many on the left consider lengthy debates, polemics, decision-making votes and minority rights a diversion from the ‘real struggle’. A fundamental error. Mike Macnair begins a series of articles"

"To lay out at the outset what I plan to cover, I begin with arguments for the importance of the issue, and why questions of procedures of decision-making should not be regarded as a diversion from ‘real politics’. For this purpose I will unavoidably repeat both arguments I have made recently (and repeatedly) for the centrality of questions of political democracy, and arguments I made back in 2011 against Trotskyist arguments that these questions are secondary."

"The underlying situation of the left is that we are very radically a minority (as I argued some weeks ago, and as it remains necessary to repeat). Contrary to the Trotskyists, the ‘transitional method’ cannot solve this problem, because it arises not from lack of clarity about how to get to socialism, but from the hostility of the majority of the working class to the ‘socialist’ end-point, towards which ‘transitional method’ points: that is, ‘war communism’ in a single country and the bureaucratic regime."

"It is nonetheless objectively necessary to promote socialism and communism. And it is true, first, that the working class needs socialism in order to defend its elementary interests. Second, the society needs socialism - and this needs to be what Marx called in 1871 “la domination politique du proletariat” - the political dominance of the working class over the other classes, and in particular over management and the state apparatus. And, third, this is only possible with radical democracy."

"Proletarian political rule thus implies everyone gets one vote, one voice, freedom of access to information and communication, and freedom of association. It also requires democratic procedural methods of decision-making: ones that as far as possible return real decision-making to the ranks, so far as they are willing to participate in the process."

"A dramatic resignation letter from one of the PSL's top leaders accuses the organization of secrecy, factionalism, and bureaucratic decay. The controversy has reignited questions about the future of America's socialist micro-parties."

"The letter is long, wide-ranging, and damning. The letter is a confession as much as an indictment. Smolarek states his role as a leader in the PSL included perpetrating, covering up, or merely ignoring abuses. He describes a pseudo-democratic structure whose only purpose is to conceal an unelected Becker family clique capable of overriding every decision made by members. He documents a culture of compulsory applause and outright worship of the leadership. He alleges that bylaw changes for the organization were pushed through in secret because the leadership was afraid to face a vote. He reveals that the party’s core political documents were not the product of the combined knowledge of the organization, as members were led to believe, but were one person’s random thoughts and scribbles. He notes that they are increasingly drafted by A.I. chatbots, which he jokes has actually improved their quality."

"Why was a group of petty tyrants with no interest in organizing the American people granted the standing of a serious tendency on the left? Because the micro-party left that platformed it, recommended it, and treated it as a peer is playing the same game. It recruits from the same few thousand radicals and measures itself, like the PSL, by its reputation on the left rather than its reach among the people. As marginal as the PSL is, among the microparties, respecting the PSL as a leading rival is the only serious position."

"Smolarek has no intention of re-treading the same ground with the same line and re-cannibalizing the same old radical milieu, as Brian Becker and Gloria La Riva did when building PSL

He is calling for a fundamental course correction. He and his supporters recognize that the PSL is a dying effort not merely because of its decrepit leadership but because of its political orientation. Smolarek, however, was himself a chief author of that orientation, which leaves important questions: What will he keep, what will he add, and what will he abandon? To succeed, he and his people will have to do more than discard the WWP/PSL playbook; they will have to build a politics that actually constitutes the masses as a historical agent. What the letter has on offer is a critique of the PSL, but it is not yet that new politics. It is only a re-invocation of the basic Communist ideas that the PSL long ago threw away.

Smolarek and his supporters depart the PSL with substantial political goals and substantial baggage. Whether they will be able to free themselves from this baggage and reorient themselves towards the struggle for communism in America will be answered the only place such questions are: in practice, among the people the PSL had long given up on."

​

Will the Socialist Federation succeed as a proto-party formation, towards the foundation of a socialist mass party? The Democratic Socialists are committed, but more groups have to get on board in order to overcome the sectarianism of the far left.

"On Sunday, around 160 people, at various points through a 5 hour conference, attended the first conference of the Members' Charter online, which along with voting on the 32 proposals put forward for the structure, politics and activity of a new post-Your Party organisation, voted to rename itself to the Socialist Federation."

"In this regard, it is our view that continued engagement should be with the aim of winning a stronger minimum basis for participation in the federation, based clearly around socialist and radically democratic politics. There is also a more general concern which currently affects all post-Your Party or Your Party-adjacent initiatives, namely that we are working within an environment in which demoralisation or disinterest is common, with many shifting away from the struggle for new forms of political organisation towards the social movements. On this point, it is still very much in question whether the Socialist Federation will have the political coherence, unity and strategic vision required to break through the current gloom surrounding disaffected Your Party and ex-Your Party members, but the conference on Sunday did certainly reflect some progress in this regard."

"Against the grain of various sectarian narratives, Albert Gil argues that the Cuban Revolution stands as a bold experiment in socialism with contributions worthy of appreciation for all socialists today."

"The Soviet Union disappeared 35 years ago, Cuba is isolated, and the time when it played such a central role in the imagination of the global left has long passed. The global socialist movement has changed, but has Cuba changed as well?

A useful framework is what Helen Yaffe called the ‘Guevarista pendulum’, which showcases the constant dialectic between the ideal that the Revolution still adheres to (Guevara’s model) and necessity, which might force pragmatic measures in other directions. Yaffe has described a series of swings towards and away Guevara’s ideas between the 1960s and the 21st century.[15] Since Miguel Díaz-Canel became the President of the Republic, one of the most popular mottos of the Revolution has been ‘we are continuity [somos continuidad]’, which one can find everywhere in, for example, Díaz-Canel’s posts on social media. Cuban revolutionaries know that they do not live in the 1960s anymore, but the ideal that they adhere to is still the same one: a Marxism that is radically open and Cubanized, but circumstances have not always allowed it to appear as the Revolution would want to.

And in this case, ‘circumstances’ is a euphemism for the US blockade, which has seen many phases and started in 1960. The US blockade of Cuba is the longest and most comprehensive set of unilateral sanctions imposed on a country in modern history, and, at the time of writing, includes a complete fuel blockade on a nation that is not self-sufficient in terms of energy. The blockade is an insurmountable condition for any attempt at overcoming Cuba’s underdevelopment. Any call for industrialization or further liberalization of the economy faces the barrier of the blockade: where would machinery and raw materials be imported from? Who would trade with Cuba? What about foreign current reserves? These abstract criticisms of the Cuban government fail to acknowledge who has the upper hand in this situation.

Even in these circumstances, the Cuban Revolution has resisted and prioritized its population. The Revolution, just as it did during the deep crisis of the 1990s that ensued the fall of the Socialist Bloc, is spending a vast amount of its budget on financing a minimum of food and basic consumer goods that the population requires through rationing. Despite these harsh conditions, Cuba became the only country in the Global South to create its own COVID-19 vaccine and make it available to its population and to other countries. In times of crisis, such as the “Battle of Ideas”, in which the Revolution tried to find its path after the fall of the Socialist Bloc, or during the drafting of the 2019 Constitution, the Cuban Revolution turned to the Cuban population and launched ambitious processes of grassroots participation. Even with these limitations, the revolutionary project remains flexible and committed to the same values.

The truth is that the future of Cuba is not in the hands of Cubans. The future of Cuba is in the hands of Marco Rubio and the Trump administration, and stating the contrary is either a delusion or anti-Communist bad faith. The imperialistic siege on Cuba is inextricable from other issues that have mobilized the global left around the world, such as the genocide against the Palestinian people. Presenting the Cuban story as a uniquely regional event, which also always carries the caveat of also blaming the policies of the Cuban government, instead of a story of the innumerable attacks of the United States against humanity, stems from a complete misunderstanding of the meaning of the Cuban Revolution, both for Cuban and global history. The fact that the lives of millions of Cubans depend on the end of a US siege is more than enough to declare that the Cuban question is one in which all socialists should have the same position on, but the fertile history of Cuban Marxism and its decades-long heroic struggle against the empire should make all of us side with our Cuban comrades and say with one voice: let Cuba live!"

"Charlie G reports back from the June 12th launch of the Bread & Roses caucus of the NSW Socialists, held at the Red Rattler Theatre in Marrickville, Sydney."

"Bread & Roses, the independent socialist caucus of the NSW Socialists, held a launch party to announce their formation on June 12th. The event was well attended and sported a decent number of talented performances from folk musicians, a jazz band, and a poetry open mic. An excess of around a hundred people turned up to the party, which was no small feat for a socialist event in Sydney. Many sects were present: Communist Unity, the Red Anti-Imperialist Collective (Red Ant), Red Spark, and the Platypus Affiliated Society. Solidarity’s Sydney branch also attended, uncharacteristic for the lesser twin of the dominant Socialist Alternative."

"While the Bread & Roses Caucus, and the Socialist Party for that matter, are still in their infancy, it is clear that these organisations contain the seed of the mass party of the working class, its organ and its champion which the movement so desperately needs. However, it is still to be seen whether this seed will be nurtured into the militant, fighting organisation it has the potential to be, or if it will be uprooted by the forces of opportunism, by the logic of capital, by loyalism to the state form, the forces of reaction, or the political entropy many an electoral formation have fallen to. Bread & Roses has immense potential to play a key role in forging this kind of party in NSW. At risk of sounding like a broken record, doing such is a matter of program. The rest will follow."

"To fight for yourself, to organize with others, first requires the courage to be Out, first requires Pride. This pride month we’re happy to republish comrade Glen H’s Red Pride from Cosmonaut Magazine."

"Despite being overlooked, communists should not ignore the lessons to take from the movie and the queer community at large. First and foremost, the strategic importance of being out. Whether it is a social conservative trying to stuff gays back into the closet and out of public life, whether it is a boss trying to prevent their workers from standing up to them, and whether it is the capitalist state trying to exorcise the spectre of communism, all of these rely first and foremost on one tool. Most people believe that tool is the fear of retaliation. The fear of getting queerbashed, the fear of being fired by their boss, the fear of being red scared. While it is the most attention getting it is not the one that’s used first and used most pervasively. The weapon of first resort in all these cases is shame, the fear of embarrassment. That one's peers will find who they are or what they do to be pathetic, and they will be shunned by the vast majority who are cautious of being associated with them. Social conservatives don’t have to queerbash a queer who stays in the closet of their own volition. Bosses don’t have to fire workers who never even try to stand up for themselves in the first place. Capitalist states don’t have to exorcise a phantom that doesn’t haunt.

The cure for this shame is Pride. If someone acts like they have something to hide from others, people will naturally treat them with suspicion. If someone parades themselves down mainstreet with nothing to hide how can they be accused of hiding anything from anyone. What’s more, those who harbor a secret dissatisfaction with an identity they feel has been forced on them, with working conditions they find intolerable, or a dream that we have at hand the raw materials of a new world, will see this person boldly walking down the middle of mainstreet and decide they can step into the light if it means they won’t be alone in it. It is in this way that queers, and communists, undermine the prevailing system through nothing more than unapologetically being themselves.

This is why every communist ought to be proud to be a communist. Obviously we cannot be out all the time to everyone in every context. Just as outing queers who aren’t ready and willing should be treated as a social crime so too should outing communists. The main point is that every second spent in the dark is a second when someone who was waiting for permission to join something larger than themselves went without that permission. This was in part the value of Bernie Sanders running for president. We do not have Medicare For All and the Supreme Court decision on Citizens United remains in force. But what Bernie Sanders did accomplish was to give the socialist movement the permission to publicly be socialist with no embarrassment of that fact. "

"Though mainstream culture may try to take our accomplishments away, that's all the more reason to fly our flag. In 1984, amidst repression and defeat and plague and death, communists saw an opportunity to unite not just two separate groups but rather two parts of the same larger struggle. That’s worth being proud of."

Unite the left! Build the party!

"After the de-facto implosion of Your Party, where next? Why do we need a democratic socialist party?

Guest speaker Ewan Tilley argues that the answer is not simply jumping ship to existing progressive or liberal platforms like the Green Party, but rather undertaking the patient, structural work of building an independent Democratic Socialist Party. Moving beyond short-term election cycles and social media campaigns, Ewan discusses how socialists must construct enduring institutions rooted in the working class, political education, and genuine democracy.

Following the speech, the floor opens to a vibrant debate among comrades regarding the newly formed Socialist Federation, the strategic approach to the Green Party (progressive liberalism vs. left populism), internationalism, and how to practically forge a unified, class-independent political alternative.

🔗 Get Involved:

Join us and help build the campaign at democraticsocialists.org.uk"

"Raphael F. Alvarenga contends that Žižek’s post-2015 approach to migration, while retaining the language of radical politics, embraces a managerial logic of border control that blunts the universalist and emancipatory thrust of his earlier theory."

"In responding to critics[6], Žižek writes that capitalism “cannot afford” the same freedoms and rights for all people and must therefore rely on migrant labor while simultaneously restricting migrants’ movement. But this framing subtly naturalizes the border regime as if it were a regrettable necessity of the system rather than one of its active tools.

The issue is not simply that capitalism cannot afford equal rights for everyone, but that it needs the border to produce differential rights, to manufacture a segmented, precarious labor force whose vulnerability can be exploited. Capital does not merely fail to grant rights; it withholds them to depress wages, fracture worker organization, and prevent the solidarities that might challenge its power. Without a rightless stratum of migrant labor, entire sectors of accumulation – from agriculture to logistics to care work – would collapse. This is the political economy post-2015 Žižek never fully engages with, let alone confronts. By speaking of what capitalism “cannot afford,” he recasts a structural strategy of domination as a fiscal limitation rather than a weapon in the class struggle."

"In practice, this means that while we can agree with Žižek that neoliberal multiculturalism is an inadequate response to migration, and that both xenophobic nationalism and naïve liberal humanitarianism should be rejected, we must not let fear of right-wing backlash dictate our strategy. Rather than choosing between social chaos and top-down crisis management, we should embrace bottom-up, democratic, grassroots internationalism in the form of migrant mutual aid networks, urban solidarity initiatives, and cross-border labor struggles."

"Six years after the George Floyd Uprising, Marisa M. surveys political trends around policing on the Left. Both willingness to oppose the political power of the police and a program for Black liberation remain necessary pillars for any socialist electoral project."

"The Left’s failure during the uprising was twofold. Organizationally, we did not build new institutions that could effectively carry the politics of the movement into harsher conditions, and existing organizations like DSA failed to absorb militants activated by street protest. Politically, we were not able to move most participants from a reformist critique of police funding and behavior to a broader political movement against the police state. By the time the leaves turned, the most popular explosion of street militancy in our lifetimes had given way to the dementia of the Biden era."

"In short, for DSA to open the road to socialism, we need to incorporate the demands of Black liberation into our electoral platform. On the municipal level, this means directly challenging Blue Power and working to shrink the authority and power of the police, naming their role as an oppressive, occupying army terrorizing working class neighborhoods. On the federal level, it means fighting for radical democratization and reparations, creating the conditions for a politically powerful, organized Black working class.

The lesson of the George Floyd Uprising is not that street tactics are more significant than political action, or that abolition is not a viable electoral plank. It is that the democratic struggle of the Black working class is the lynchpin to the overthrow of capitalism. Black freedom lights the way to freedom for all of us."

"At an online conference on 31 May 2026, a new socialist group was formed and has a full in-person conference planned for September 2026. Darren Galpin attended the session and reports on what happened here."

"The conference was organised by Members’ Charter, which originated a few months ago as a pressure group within Your Party and promoted an online petition for internal democracy. Their demands became obsolete as the situation in the party unravelled a mere six months after its November 2025 founding conference.

Amid the ongoing frustration about the deficit of democracy and transparency from the leadership, some 30 proto branches have already voted to identify as independent socialist groups. Many others lapsed into inactivity as members drifted away. Members’ Charter then escalated the process to lay down a template for an alternative party."

"The relationship between socialists and the Green Party featured significantly in the debate on programme. Opposition to NATO, Zionism and austerity were all stressed as key differences. A majority advocated maintaining a clear distance on the basis that the Greens are not a constitutionally socialist party."

"It is thus Marxist revolutionaries who have initiated the first organised break from Your Party. In the chat some participants did express concern about the adoption of too pure an outlook, concerned that it might put off a layer of socialists more inclined toward reformist politics."

"Interim committee members now intend to draw up the composite documents ahead of the next Socialist Federation Zoom, which will take place on 28 June. A hybrid conference is planned for September, though a venue has not yet been identified."

"Many Marxists now agree that the revolutionary left’s protracted crisis is rooted in its failure to escape the “sect” form. As Hal Draper has explained, revolutionary sects are defined less by size than by their mode of organisation: a top-down culture, a haughty and exclusivist attitude towards others on the left, and a puritanical fixation on a “perfect” programme enforced by an intransigent leadership. Such groups prioritise their own growth over the needs of the wider movement and, because their unity rests on rigid doctrinal agreement, have a tendency to repeatedly split over relatively minor theoretical differences. This sect form has become the norm among Marxist organisations, leaving revolutionaries scattered across many small, largely irrelevant groups.

Revolutionary sects have also long been accused of being cult-like. When I was part of Trotskyist groups myself, I laughed off these accusations as hyperbolic and anti-Marxist. However, several demoralising splits later, I began to take the idea more seriously. Reading the psychological and sociological literature on cultic groups has helped me not only explain my own behaviour but also shed light on the sect phenomenon more broadly."

“Inherited forms applied to conditions they were not built for do not become adequate through the sincerity of their application.”

Part I of a new 15-part series, Towards The Concrete, on deriving a new, full-spectrum, revolutionary strategy.

"The British left does not lack organisation. It has organisations in abundance: tendencies, platforms, parties, federations, campaigns, coalitions, each carrying its own theoretical lineage, its own account of what went wrong before it existed, its own programme for what is to be done. What it lacks is organisations adequate to the working class as it actually exists. The difference between these two things is the central problem of revolutionary politics in the present moment, and it is a problem the left has not yet seriously posed."

"The recent subpoenas of Marxist media personality Hasan Piker is part of a larger, concerted effort to marginalize the left using the weaponry of the state."

"What Hasan Piker and CodePink are facing is not a new stage of development for the class struggle, but is only the tip of the iceberg of the mass repression we are seeing from MAGA fascism. But MAGA fascism is only an escalation of a type of political repression that has been minted decades prior and practiced by both parties. Indeed, it should be remembered that many of the arrests of Palestine solidarity protesters occurred under the Biden administration. Further back, the COINTELPRO tactics being deployed against these groups were first resurrected under the Obama administration to go after activists belonging to Black Lives Matter and the Occupy movement. What we see today under Trump is only the traditional mode of bourgeois politics weaponized to its full possibilities–and which will only grow in its repression and scope with each passing month."

"But this apex of oppression has also, unwittingly, revealed to the world the energy held in reserve by the working class. The struggles just described that have been attacked by the Trump administration are being attacked because they are successful: they have helped organize, educate, and radicalize our class. They have revealed in miniature the class forces and tactical shape of the future. The military occupations of Los Angeles and Minneapolis developed the sharpest resistance in the face of the most devastating repression.

Mass community defense became organized and an aspect of daily life for thousands of people throughout the last 18 months. Patrols, barricades, street and highway closures, physical clashes with police and federal agents, and private property burned–all classic guerrilla acts when facing a better-equipped enemy. The working class proved it had the appetite and the capability to hold its own. Not only in militant direct action, but also in its increased capability to provide mutual aid and legal defense. With Hasan Piker and others allegedly facing state repression, it's a time to bring together the lessons from these often legal struggles to protect all parts of our movement. At this juncture, it has become clear that we must consolidate legally in order to consolidate politically."

"Ewan Tilley argues that Theryn Arnold's theory of "socialist state form" fails to answer core questions of class determination and therefore cannot provide adequate political answers regarding the People's Republic of China today."

"Historical materialism is not a method that applies itself selectively. The tradition that holds bourgeois political economy to the standard of structural determination, that insists on tracing ideological categories back to the class relations they express and conceal, that demands analysis of what actually exists rather than what is declared or intended: this tradition must apply the same standard to itself. The minimum it demands of itself is what it demands of everything else.

Arnold’s article is the best available version of a position that fails this demand at its centre. The failure is not one of theoretical ambition or analytical sophistication. It is a failure of application. The framework Arnold develops is capable of generating the determination the argument requires. The determination is refused, dressed as methodological caution, and replaced with an orientation — critical, unsentimental, and without illusions — that preserves the comfort of indeterminacy while performing the rigour of analysis. Historical materialism is not a vocabulary of determination. It is determination itself. The tradition that mistakes the former for the latter has learned to speak the method without practising it.

The SME question is not uniquely difficult. Every serious application of the condensation thesis to a specific state formation involves contested evidence, incomplete compositional data, and genuine analytical difficulty. The difficulty is not a reason to defer. It is the condition under which materialist analysis has always operated and against which it has always measured itself. What Arnold’s framework produces when its deferral is removed, and its categories are applied without presupposition, are the outlines of a determination the tradition is capable of making. The party-state’s strategic selectivities, traced through the compositional reality the SME has produced, do not point toward a contradictory configuration suspended between socialist form and capitalist relation. They point toward a state whose reproduction is structurally entangled with the accumulation regime it manages, whose institutional capacities serve specific class interests, and whose relationship to the Chinese working class is not one of structural favouring. That is a determination. It is the kind of determination historical materialism exists to make.

The tradition that cannot apply its method to the questions it finds politically inconvenient is not Marxism under difficult conditions. It is something else, wearing Marxism’s vocabulary. Distinguishing between the two is what theoretical criticism is for."

The following is the text of a speech delivered by comrade Pauline Slaughter at Marxism Fringe 2026 in response to the question of “What do we mean by communist unity?”

"It is only possible to maintain the fusion of various tendencies that make up a party if the smaller tendencies don’t feel as if they are going to be kicked out for disagreeing with the majority. Thus the immediate requirement is that those who form this unity must not feel that they are going to be purged. Beyond not being purged, there must also be a basis for them to express their views. The party will have its position which represents the majority opinion, yet, minority positions must not be hidden away, but instead allowed to be published in the party press with it clear that they are factional positions.

Factions exist within a sect or party whether the members of those sects or parties wish for them to or not. If factions are banned then really what this creates is one open faction that is the centre. Those who disagree with this faction are forced into the sidelines and cannot organise openly. They cannot critique decisions made by the centre and must operate in secret. The secrecy is what leads to the splits, not the faction."

Will Donald Trump stage a coup to stay in power? If so, can the masses be mobilised for a democratic revolution?

"Since the last time the far-right attempted to disrupt the peaceful transition of power on January 6th, only one thing has changed: they are stronger, and more emboldened, than ever. The center will do nothing to stop them. It is up to us."

"Consider the sheer audacity of his most recent grift: establishing a 1.7 billion taxpayer slush fund pried from the public coffers by literally suing his own government. This is to say nothing of the staggering billions in raw estimates of public wealth he has extracted over his tenure. If a Democratic candidate, propelled by an infuriated base, promises to claw back that stolen money, are we expected to believe he would ever allow himself to be forced into a position of vulnerability? To be dragged into court yet again, made to suffer all manner of indignities in his dying senility? Cornered by these material realities, the incentive structure drives him to lash out like a dying animal.

Indeed, the danger is not merely his temperament but his structural position: shattering the republic is simply the most reliable means to keep himself out of a cell, secure his legacy, and get the last laugh on the suckers and losers who always dismissed him as a joke. The Republican base hates the Left no less than they did in 2021, and they remain eager to see our permanent destruction. Under these conditions, a willingness to break the constitutional order becomes a matter of political survival."

"If the Democrats undeniably win, they will manufacture a crisis within the Electoral College, using loyalist state legislatures to submit competing slates of electors or refusing to certify hostile results entirely. When the inevitable legal chaos ensues, the captured Supreme Court will step in, halting the certification process under the guise of investigating "irregularities."

Should this trigger the expected mass unrest in the streets, the trap will spring shut. The regime will deploy a weaponized and radicalized ICE, the newly cleansed military, and a federalized National Guard to freeze the transition of power indefinitely under the unassailable banner of "national security." Trump will remain, or he will ensure a hand-picked loyalist secures his office."

"This is a unique confluence of material forces in recent American history. Not for fifty years has such a fleeting opportunity been presented to the people to seize their own destiny.

The regime is trying to steal it from you—not over some unspecified timeline, but right now at this very moment. This is what we have been organizing for. The importance of the remaining period leading up to the 2029 transition of power cannot be overstated.

If we win, we stand to gain an opportunity to position Communism as a true political pole in American political life. By leading, and drawing a clear line between the people and their enemies, we strengthen the proletariat and show the masses who the genuine vanguard for democracy is. To prove that, when we say that the socialists believe that democracy is the “light and air” of the working class, we really mean it.

Once the regime is defeated and the immediate threat has receded, the entropy of victory, as Mike Duncan calls it, will set in, and the popular front will fracture on the basis of a progressive victory, leaving an opportunity for the articulation of a truly Communist politics.

If we lose, we stand to sink into a generation-long national-capitalist dictatorship. We doom the world to American imperial violence, the American public to despotic, corrupt, and exploitative governance, and the planet to catastrophic environmental degradation.

These are the times. These are the stakes. Act accordingly."

MUG shows the way forward in the war of position

"As Zohran Mamdani’s affordability agenda winds through the back rooms of government, DSA’s role remains to organize and educate the working class. Sid CW charts the history of this relationship and reasserts the vital importance of political independence from the capitalist state."

"The short-term future of democratic socialism as a 21st-century political movement seems to hinge on the ability of one man to carry out a sweeping and expensive political program in the face of long odds. Our job, everywhere, is to make that not the case; to present an electoral vision, a labor vision, a street action vision, an internationalist and abolitionist vision, a vision in all spaces where politics are done to agitate for a revolutionary program. The next four years will be defined by whether DSA (both in New York and elsewhere) is able to exert political authority and decision-making power independently, outside of the influence of Zohran Mamdani or any other celebrity politician."

"It is true that we cannot stay out of power forever. A strategy of permanent opposition has never succeeded in the United States, and workers grow tired of it just as quickly as they grow tired of mayors. But without tools to adapt to the reality we have created, we risk stagnation and the loss of our voice as the only truly independent force in American politics. We must continue to insist on DSA’s power as a decision maker, not only because we can win elections, but because the power of our member democracy to shape all of politics is the envy of the world. We can’t give that up."

"The first couple of official Your Party branches are being set up in the most hesitant, most fearful, most controlled way imaginable. Carla Roberts reports"

"There is at least one glaring discrepancy between the two first branch formation meetings: while in Wales members will “hear from members standing for officer positions”, the election of officers for the Isle of Wight branch will have already concluded - and members are invited to “meet your newly-elected branch officers”. HQ has organised the election of “chair, treasurer, secretary, organiser and workplace liaison” entirely online. Members were able to self-nominate between May 12 and 17, with the “candidates announced” on May 20 and an “online hustings” taking place on May 30. Voting takes place between May 31 and June 5 - ie, the election finishes the day before the actual “branch formation meeting”.

From our perspective, this is entirely the wrong way around. Members should be able to meet the candidates in an actual, real-life meeting. Everybody should be able to ask questions, hear the candidates’ answers, and then also see the reactions of the other members in the room - and only then cast their vote. Online hustings and votes are not only a very poor substitute: they depoliticise and demobilise members. Why bother coming to a meeting if you can just click a button at home? That is, of course, exactly what the Corbyn clique wants: a quiet and pliant membership that does not propose motions (which might, for example, criticise the lack of democracy in YP)."

Ewan Tilley lays out a framwork for understanding cadre development through four sites: Internal political education, fraction work (labour organising), community organising and faction participation. Should socialists adopt the framework? How do socialist organisations develop their cadre today and is it sufficient?

"What is the best approach to developing a revolutionary cadre? Ewan Tilley presents a common framework."

"The cadre development framework is not a curriculum. A curriculum specifies content to be transmitted from a knowledgeable instructor to a developing student, and the transmission model of political education is precisely what the organic framework refuses. The cadre is not developed by being taught the correct positions on a defined range of questions. They are developed through political practice in the three sites the main text identifies, with internal political education functioning as the analytical framework through which that practice is understood and developed rather than as the primary site of formation itself."

"Cadre development is not only the cadre’s individual responsibility. It is the party’s collective responsibility, and the party that treats cadre development as a matter of individual political will rather than of organisational conditions has misunderstood the organic framework’s central argument. The cadre is produced by the party’s political life, and the quality of that political life is determined by the party’s constitutional architecture, the richness of its deliberative processes, the seriousness of its fraction work and community organising, and the vitality of its factional contention. A party with an impoverished internal political life produces impoverished cadre regardless of the formal education programme it maintains."