There have been a series of ongoing conversations about the possibility of ‘a new party of the left’ in Britain. While much of this has been positive, I think these conversations have tended to be very confused. In particular, I don’t think these conversations can be productive unless they start with some clarity about what we actually mean by a ‘party’, and about what the political basis and long-term objectives of such a party should be.
In the first section of this essay, I argue for the importance of distinguishing between a ‘party’ in the sense of an electoral coalition, and a ‘party’ in the sense of a more coherent organisation pursuing a particular political project. In the second section, I argue for the necessity of anticapitalists to be organised as anticapitalists, in anticapitalist organisations (which may or may not share an electoral coalition with those more interested in merely reforming capitalism). In the third section, I discuss the landscape of existing anticapitalist organisations in Britain and their limitations (especially their fragmentation), and make an argument for the necessity of regroupment into a singular united organisation for anticapitalists. In the fourth section, I outline some practical steps that organised and unorganised anticapitalists should be taking to facilitate regroupment. In the final sections, I discuss some of the barriers towards regroupment, as well as the possible relationship between regroupment of the anticapitalist left and the development of wider left-of-Labour electoral coalitions.
When is a party not a party?
There are at least three distinct senses of the term ‘party’ in politics. We need to be clear about which sense we are using the word in, otherwise these discussions become confused.
In the most abstract sense, a political party can be any collective political agent – a group of people working together, as if they constituted a single political actor, to pursue a shared political project. This usually requires some kind of formal political organisation, but in certain circumstances it is possible for more informal groups to act as parties, or for more formally non-political organisations (e.g. a trade union) to act as a kind of party.
This is a critical concept because the question of agency – how we act, purposefully, together as a collective – underpins virtually every other political problem. When we ask questions like “what should the left do?”, who is the “we”? Who is the collective actor? In its most abstract sense, the answer, by definition, is a party of some kind. The absence of any clear answers to this question of how we act collectively is, in my view, at the root of a great many of the most urgent problems with the left in Britain.
The second important sense of the word ‘party’, is that in mainstream politics it is usually used to refer to a specific type of legally regulated organisation which runs candidates in state elections.
Under a proportional electoral system, a single organisation will often function as a party in both senses of the word. Under a first-past-the-post (FPTP) electoral system (as in the UK or the USA), they will tend to diverge. Under FPTP, the smaller a party is, the more it is punished by the voting system. The largest two parties end up with massive structural advantages, and it is very difficult for third parties to compete – and it is extremely difficult for smaller parties or new parties to break through or to sustain themselves. This means that successful electoral parties will usually need to become extremely broad coalitions containing multiple different political projects, sometimes projects whose aims and methods violently contradict with one another.
Under the FPTP electoral system in Britain, anticapitalists who think it’s useful to engage with electoral politics will likely need to be involved in electoral coalitions that involve a wide range of people with differing political outlooks. Any specifically anticapitalist political organisation that engages effectively with electoral politics is likely to be some kind of ‘party-within-a-party’, rather than being a freestanding electoral party by itself. Typical examples of such ‘parties-within-parties’ include the Militant tendency within the Labour Party in the 1980s, or the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) within the US Democratic Party today – but similar groups have also commonly existed on the right, such as Blair’s Progress faction within Labour.
The third important sense of the term ‘party’, is the way it’s used within the Leninist tradition of Marxism (the tradition within the left most responsible for theorising the question of parties). For Leninists, the answer to the question of how the left exercises agency collectively is not merely through a party, or through some parties, but through ‘the party’. The idea is that, for a revolution to succeed, there must be one singular organisation, uniting all revolutionary forces, and coordinating the revolutionary struggle across all aspects of society.
Participation in state elections might be one front of that struggle, but the Comintern’s line was that,
“[Communism] denies the possibility of taking over parliament in the long run; it sets itself the aim of destroying parliamentarism. Therefore there can only be a question of utilising the bourgeois state institutions for the purpose of their destruction.”
So, although such a party might sometimes contest elections as a tactic, this kind of party was supposed to be very different from an electoralist one. It would only engage in state elections in as far as that engagement could be used to support the wider revolutionary mass struggle. In this conception, struggles in parliament, in workplaces, in communities are all just different fronts of the same class war – and the party is the institution which coordinates the strategy that can tie these fronts together.
Any discussion about left regroupment and the possibility of a new left ‘party’ in Britain needs to be absolutely clear about these different senses of the word ‘party’, otherwise we will become confused and talk past one another.
Why do anticapitalists need our own political organisations?
Overthrowing capitalism is very difficult. The tasks we face are extremely onerous and our enemies are extremely strong and well-entrenched. The capitalist class have all the money. We are aiming for the overthrow of an entire global economic and social system, buttressed by states with gargantuan bureaucracies, state-of-the-art militaries, high-tech surveillance networks and brutal police forces.
If we want to have any chance of winning, we will need to be serious, we will need to be organised, we will need our entire movement working together, and we will need to use every resource at our disposal to its maximum effect. This means that we need serious, joined-up, long-term strategy. Developing and implementing a collective strategy to fulfil particular long term goals requires a single collective organisation where we are united around our long term goals. For me, this is the most essential part of the argument for the necessity of a singular united political organisation for anticapitalists.
Disciplining the bureaucrats
Whether it’s within a larger electoral party, in local or national government, or in trade unions or other movement organisations, we inevitably will end up having to deal with entrenched bureaucracies. Now, some of my best friends are bureaucrats, but by virtue of their position, you cannot trust them to hold true to their anticapitalist politics. The pressures and incentives of those jobs inevitably have a powerful influence which it is difficult for any individual to completely resist.
A loose network of anticapitalists is incapable of disciplining bureaucrats into pursuing a revolutionary political project. In fact, when such a network comes into contact with bureaucratic structures, often the opposite occurs. The relative power, privilege, and access that comes with such positions will often end up giving comrades who enter those positions significant influence over their political networks, and the tendency is for those networks of radicals to become disciplined by the logics of the bureaucracy. This is certainly a dynamic which we saw play out in Corbyn’s Labour Party, where thousands of radical activists became engaged in the party, and many of them took up paid roles within the bureaucracy.
Why can’t we just share with the social-democrats?
Our long term goals differ significantly from those who are not interested in overthrowing capitalism. While we might agree on many short or medium term questions of policy (e.g. better public services, stronger trade union rights, more progressive taxation, etc), our priorities will often be very different.
To overthrow capitalism, we need a long term strategy to build class power and develop revolutionary consciousness. These are not things which social-democrats and social-democratic organisations are usually interested in. A social-democratic organisation will prefer canvassing swing voters over organising the working class; it will not be interested in prioritising radical anticapitalist propaganda and education; it will run scared of making important political arguments (e.g. over solidarity with Palestine or with migrants and refugees) if it thinks those would generate negative headlines and lose votes.
Reform or revolution? Against state-loyalism
Dating back to the split between the Second International, and the Third (Communist) International, the Leninist tradition within Marxism usually emphasises the need for revolutionaries (i.e. those wishing to overthrow the existing state) to have separate organisations from reformists (i.e. those who think it’s possible to abolish capitalism through peaceful reforms to the existing state).
Personally, I tend to think that this distinction comes with too much baggage and is not always particularly black-and-white. There have been plenty of proposed or attempted anticapitalist strategies which don’t necessarily fit very neatly into a strict binary. Indeed, as the late Ed Rooksby argued, even the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 doesn’t strictly match the Bolsheviks’ own conception of revolutionary strategy, and, correspondingly, anticapitalist ‘reformism’ is surprisingly difficult to recognise as a coherently articulated strategic current within the Second International.
I think the more precisely relevant divide is over what Mike Macnair discusses in terms of state-loyalism. Our movement is constantly facing pressure from the state. Sometimes this is overt censorship and police repression. Often it is less direct, in terms of financial support, press smear campaigns, operations by the intelligence services, etc. And it can also be much more passive in terms of e.g. the legal frameworks which trade unions or protest organisers are forced to operate under, and which they often end up working implicitly to enforce.
The parts of the movement which do not recognise these problems, and do not view the state as a principal enemy, will always be an obstacle to an anticapitalist project. When put under serious pressure by the state, they routinely end up collaborating (directly or indirectly) with the state to suppress the more radical wing of the movement. Those anticapitalists who understand the state as a principal enemy therefore need independent organisation which makes that hostility to the state a core part of its politics.
What’s wrong with our existing organisations?
Just off the top of my head, I can think of more than ten different revolutionary organisations active within the British left today. There is my own organisation, the confusingly named Revolutionary Socialism in the 21st Century, there is the Communist Party of Britain, the Communist Party of Great Britain (Marxist-Leninist), the Communist Party of Great Britain (Provisional Central Committee), the Revolutionary Communist Party, the Revolutionary Communist Group, Counterfire, Workers Power, the Workers Revolutionary Party, the Socialist Workers Party, the Socialist Party of England and Wales, the Scottish Socialist Party, Socialist Alternative, the Alliance for Workers Liberty, and there are probably many more.
This is obviously too many groups. Clearly this doesn’t work. I think this is obvious to all but the most committed true-believers within these organisations. The largest of these groups have perhaps a few thousand members each, while the smallest have just a handful of people. When groups like this are small and divided and fragmented, they are much weaker than the sum of their parts.
Weaker than the sum of our parts
Contrary to many of their critics, most of these groups are engaged in a lot of important and productive work. In fact, their discipline is usually so tight, their membership dues so high, their organising experience so extensive that they often punch well above their weight and have a much bigger impact than you would expect on the basis of their size or their other flaws. Many important parts of the movement, especially trade union branches and international solidarity campaigns, would struggle to function without the efforts of the activists from these groups. And yet their fragmentation into separate groups means that there is enormous duplication of efforts and waste of resources, and that coordination becomes difficult or impossible.
Stupider than the sum of our parts
One of the purposes of a political organisation is to harness our collective intelligence. Our movement has an enormous wealth of knowledge, experience, and insight from tens of thousands of comrades embedded across communities, trade unions, and social movements, as well as intellectuals and academics with specialist expertise. We need to collectivise that knowledge and to bring it all together to inform our collective strategies. When we’re fragmented, often in different organisations which hardly even communicate with one another, it becomes impossible to make effective use of that collective wisdom and it becomes much more difficult to coordinate across different parts of our movement.
Why should anyone take us seriously?
There is a deeper political problem here than just the inefficiencies of fragmentation (and, again, Macnair is worth reading on this). The more different competing organisations there are which all claim to be the true inheritors of the flame of revolutionary anticapitalism, the harder it is for anyone to take their claims seriously, and the harder it is for anyone to take the very idea of anticapitalist political organisation seriously. Anticapitalists need to be politically organised as anticapitalists, but if you propose the idea to your average activist, the response is often “What? Like all those tiny Trotskyist sects? Why do we need another one?” Proving that it’s important to join any one particular anticapitalist organisation is much harder when there are umpteen different competing ones in existence – and it is rational for people to be sceptical about these kinds of organisations in such circumstances.
Stuck in old models
What’s going on here? Why are there so many competing groups? Why can’t we all just get along? And why do so many of these groups seem to have so many problems? I’m not going to recite the litany of complaints that have been levelled against these groups – I assume most people who have been active on the British left for some time will have either encountered these problems first hand or certainly will have heard others making these complaints. Entire books have been written on this subject, and there are more to be written yet, but, again, Macnair is one of the most cogent writers about this phenomenon in Britain.
There is more detail to Macnair’s argument (and that detail is worth engaging with), but one of the key points to his argument relates to how most of these organisations follow a fairly strict interpretation of how a communist party should be organised, a model which was formalised in the 1920s by the Comintern. While this model did reflect some important advances, it also built in significant problems. There may be an argument that this model was necessary or unavoidable given the circumstances (the split in the Second International, the revolutionary civil war ongoing in Russia, the newly founded Soviet Union’s encirclement by imperialist powers, etc), but it certainly seems to have become dysfunctional in present conditions.
In particular, the problems relate to the excessive centralisation, overly powerful leaderships (relative to the membership or to local branches), and the ban on internal factions. The result seems to be an inability to contain any kind of pluralism internally, and therefore it seems almost inevitably to lead to an endless cycle of splits and ever-increasing fragmentation.
Newer experiments
There are only a handful of explicitly anticapitalist organisations in Britain which do not share this model, and which consequently allow a greater degree of pluralism and open factionalism. To my knowledge, there are three which came from within the Leninist tradition but came to reject the strict model of the Leninist party: the Communist Party of Great Britain (Provisional Central Committee) (CPGB-PCC), Anti-Capitalist Resistance (ACR), and the organisation which I joined in 2023, Revolutionary Socialism in the 21st Century (rs21).
All of these organisations are extremely small. At the time of writing (November 2024), rs21 had around 450 members (on paper), and, as far as I’m aware, the other two groups are much smaller (I have heard 60-100 for ACR, and 10-15 for CPGB-PCC, but I’m not sure how reliable these estimates are). Probably these groups should be working towards merging. I know that CPGB-PCC makes the argument for regroupment as a central part of its propaganda, and that ACR have approached rs21 about merging in the past, but rs21’s leadership has usually been sceptical about this.
There are also a handful of small anticapitalist organisations drawing more from the anarchist tradition than from Marxism (e.g. Plan C and Solidarity Federation), as well as the curious pre-Leninist Marxist organisation, the Socialist Party of Great Britain. These organisations are also very small (and, to the best of my knowledge, have been declining in membership).
My group is NOT a Trotskyist group.
I can’t say too much about the models used by these other groups because I’m not familiar enough with them myself and because this essay would become unwieldy – but more detailed studies of these different groups would be valuable. As a member of rs21, I can say more.
rs21 is not perfect, does not claim to be perfect, does not claim to have a blueprint for what leftist political organisations should look like, and certainly does not claim to be the party (it doesn’t even claim to be a party). rs21’s political basis document, adopted in 2024, states that “We are committed to working with others to create a mass revolutionary party rooted in the working class”, but there is no worked out consensus within rs21 about what such a party should look like, or about what rs21 (or anyone else) should be doing to help bring about the creation of such a party.
I think this lack of clarity or strategic direction is typical of rs21’s main limitations (besides its small size). I think rs21 is a brilliant organisation and I’m glad to be a member, but it isn’t an organisation with a particularly clear sense of direction or active purpose. We agree about our long term aims, and there’s some agreement on the kinds of activity members should be engaged in at a local level, or some of the interventions we need to make into other movements or campaigns, but it’s not really clear that we have a cohesive strategy collectively as an organisation.
As far as I can tell, this is in large part to do with rs21’s history, and the way it emerged as a separate organisation in response to the Socialist Workers Party (SWP)’s cover-up of a sexual assault case in 2013. rs21’s founding members (correctly) concluded that the cover-up was not just some one-off mistake, but reflected broader problems with the SWP’s internal culture and with its structure. Consequently, rs21 abandoned the SWP’s model and adopted a very minimalistic form of organisation, with little in the way of centralisation, internal discipline, formal processes or structures, or explicit collective political positions.
This has also resulted in rs21 becoming far more pluralistic than traditional Marxist organisations, which I think is one of rs21’s greatest strengths. Nevertheless, I think it’s fairly clear that overall rs21 overcorrected for some of the SWP’s problems, and could do with a bit more in the way of internal coherence, formal structures, and explicit political and strategic direction. I think there is a growing consensus within rs21 about this, and it seems like rs21 has recently been moving in that direction towards a healthier balance.
What is to be done?
What follows are some of my own thoughts about what we should be doing to work towards regroupment for the anticapitalist left. On one level, this is an outline of the kind of thing which I would like to see rs21 develop as a cohesive national strategy, but this is also activity that I think can and should and must be shared by other organisations of the anticapitalist left, as well as by individual anticapitalists who aren’t currently affiliated with any particular organisation.
Party Time
Over the last few months, there have been a series of events hosted in Pelican House in London (organised by a network of activists with roots in the 2010 student movement, Plan C, Corbynism and The World Transformed) under the title ‘Party Time’ to discuss these questions of left regroupment, of the possibility of a new party, and of what we even mean by a party. The actual content of these discussions has often been frustrating and confused, with people neglecting to define their terms and talking at cross-purposes. Nevertheless they have been an enormously positive development, they have been a useful learning experience for everyone involved, and they have started generating some very important and productive conversations.
We need more events like this, and we need them around the country – not just in London. We need to learn from the limitations of these initial events. The terms of the discussion need to be set much more clearly – half the room will be talking about social-democratic electoral formations, while the other half are trying to discuss anticapitalist regroupment, so people talk past one another and go round in circles. And we need fewer journalists, writers, and academics on the panels (apologies to all my friends in those professions!), and more people with experience of or active involvement in attempts to build political organisations.
Write us a letter
We also need more written exchanges. The low level of the discussion in those ‘Party Time’ debates reflects the low level of discussion in written left media – or often almost the complete absence of any serious discussion on these questions. Left media and other left organisations need to up their game and start producing and commissioning serious long-form work to address these questions.
This very publication, Prometheus has recently issued a callout for submissions (from organised groups and from individuals) on the questions of: “What do you mean by the party? What are the purposes of such an organisation? What are the functions it needs to cover? And how might it come about?”. This is a very positive step, but other left media need to follow suit.
Influential figures like Jeremy Corbyn, Andrew Feinstein, Jamie Driscoll, Karie Murphy and others who have been involved in private meetings about the possibility of a new left party or other forms of organisation need to stop conducting those arguments merely in private or at the local level. They need to start laying out their positions in detail, publicly, in extended written arguments.
Regroupment from above…
The organised anticapitalist groups need to get their act together too. They need to accept the obvious: the current situation is a mess, none of them by themselves are currently or are about to become the mass political vehicle that we so desperately need. We need regroupment. And that means all of these groups need to be taking the question of regroupment seriously.
The lowest bar here is that these groups need to be talking to each other. Often they are not even doing that. I know that everyone has their grudges, their disagreements, their frustrations, all accumulated over long hard decades, but we need to get over it and we need to reorganise.
Part of this will involve discussions, debates, meetings, written exchanges between the leaderships of these organisations. This does not just mean trying to talk ourselves into unprincipled unity. It will mean serious discussions about our strategic and political differences – which are real. Perhaps it won’t ultimately be possible for everyone to regroup into the same organisation, but without serious engagement across different groups, we can’t even have a clear understanding of our differences. We need to be talking to each other to work out what our dividing lines are at the moment, and whether or not those are the right lines, and what should be our real red lines.
… and from below…
Unfortunately, it probably won’t be enough simply to get the leaderships of these groups talking to each other. As things stand, it might not even be possible to immediately get these groups talking. There will also need to be discussion, cross-pollination, and collaboration at the grassroots between members of these different organisations, and between those who aren’t members of any political organisation. Partly this is a question of building the organic links that can help to make regroupment possible, but it’s also about putting more pressure on the leaderships of these groups to take the issue of regroupment seriously.
Some of this already happens all the time across the country in trade union branches, in local Palestine groups, and in all kinds of other local campaigns. But we should be proactive about it. Get to know your local Trotskyite! Invite your friendly neighbourhood Stalinist out for a drink! They’re probably not so bad once you get to know them!
And we need forums for deeper political discussion at the local level. Too often, there is nowhere to go at the local level to have a serious conversation about anticapitalist politics. In some areas, there are very positive initiatives – groups like STRIKE! Manchester, Bristol Transformed, Sheffield Transformed, and others. These provide useful models for the kind of ongoing spaces where activists can come together from different campaigns to discuss the wider politics that unite them.
If a group like that doesn’t exist in your local area, start one! If you don’t know anybody to start it with, go and join your local Palestine group. Get to know people there. Find out who else is interested in talking about capitalism and overthrowing the British state (it might be a lot of them!), and start a reading group with them. Or start a discussion group. Start something and get talking. And put the questions of political organisation and regroupment on the agenda.
… and from above again
The World Transformed (TWT), an organisation I was deeply involved in from 2016-2020, once had an ambition to create a national network to support the creation of groups like this across the country. Originally, this was part of a strategy to build up the radical fringe of the Labour left under Corbyn, but outside of the Labour Party it would still be a useful project.
While some successful local groups emerged from this, the ambition to create a national network to support it seems largely to have been abandoned by TWT. This is a terrible shame because it is still urgently important work. TWT’s original main activity, hosting a festival alongside the Labour Party conference, seems pointless now that the Labour Party has almost completely shut out the left. If TWT is looking for a new focus, perhaps it should return to these ideas about supporting local groups. If TWT is unable or unwilling to do this, other groups will need to move into this space.
Events may remain decisive.
I think all of the above ideas would be positive and useful and would help us get to a better place where we are more likely to be able to achieve meaningful regroupment, but they may not be enough. In particular, it might not be enough to force the existing organised groups to unite.
Some of these groups are very set in their ways. They have been doing the same thing for a very long time, and they are very confident that they already have the right answers and that it’s only a matter of time before their methods bear fruit. There are also pettier problems. If you’re part of the leadership of such an organisation, you’re a big fish in a small pond. After regroupment, you become a small fish in a big pond. You have something to lose.
But there are less cynical risks involved as well. As I’ve said, most of these groups still are engaged in some amount of meaningful and useful work. Their members find them to be useful – otherwise they would leave. And forming and sustaining a new organisation is difficult. I’ve tried to do it before myself and failed horribly. Any new attempt at regroupment involves a lot of uncertainty, and dissolving your own organisation to join a new one involves taking enormous risks. Nobody wants to take a big risk unless they can see the possibility of a big pay-off.
So talking about regroupment might not be enough. It may be that we will need people to be swept up in events. Some upsurge in activity, some new mass popular campaign, some crisis for the government that calls the left into action together. Such a moment not only forces the left to work together, to talk to each other, to coordinate with one another, but it puts the prospects of tangible victories within sight. It makes clear to everyone that there could be real benefits in the foreseeable future from working together more closely, and therefore perhaps for uniting our forces and regrouping.
Back to the party
This takes us back to where we started. I started writing this piece because two different conversations seemed to be becoming confused together. There is a conversation ongoing about regroupment of the anticapitalist left – something that used to be represented by the idea of a communist party. There is also a conversation ongoing about regroupment of the broader left in an electoral party. Especially in an electoral system like Britain’s, these are different concepts, and therefore they need to be distinct conversations. But they are related conversations.
There are two obvious ways in which electoral regroupment and anticapitalist regroupment might be related processes:
After anticapitalists have regrouped together in a unified political organisation, they might conclude that they need to intervene in electoral politics – either by running candidates of their own as a communist electoral party; or by engaging in entryism into existing electoral parties like Labour or the Greens; or by forming an electoral alliance with other groups. Anticapitalist regroupment would, in that case, precede electoral regroupment.
On the other hand, the process of electoral regroupment for the wider left might be a precondition to anticapitalist regroupment.
The Spectre of Corbynism
Something like this did begin to happen when Corbyn was the leader of the Labour Party. All kinds of anticapitalists, some as part of organised groups, some as individuals, rushed into the Labour Party, or oriented around it to support Corbyn. Meanwhile, hundreds of thousands of people new to politics, or who had previously been liberals or social-democrats, were radicalised by the experience of Corbynism, by the struggles within the Labour Party, by the behaviour of the Labour right and of the mainstream media. The experience created many new anticapitalists, and it created a giant melting pot for anticapitalists new and old.
Momentum initially seemed like it had the potential to be a vehicle for a regroupment of the anticapitalist left, and many people fought for it to become that. Unfortunately Momentum ended up as a complete disappointment. There is much more to be said about exactly how and why Momentum failed, but one of the key issues is that its leadership shut down its internal democracy and watered down its politics, in large part because they were afraid of being expelled from the Labour Party en masse for being ‘a party-within-a-party’ as happened to the Militant tendency in the 1980s.
Ask the right questions
Clearly the fragility of Labour’s majority (they may have an enormous majority of seats – but many of those seats are far less safe than before), and the success of the Greens and the independent parliamentary candidates, means that some kind of electoral regroupment seems possible, urgent, and likely. Indeed, the failures of the left in seats where multiple candidates split the vote seems to demonstrate the necessity of electoral regroupment. I don’t pretend to have any of the answers about what should happen next or what is likely to happen next, and if I did, they would warrant an essay of their own. Instead, I’m going to close with some remarks about what the anticapitalist left should be thinking about in the context of electoral regroupment.
For the time being, let the social-democrats worry about the urgency of an electoral challenge to Labour and the finer details of policy. Everyone can see that urgency, so people will be and are already working on that. The anticapitalist left needs to have a bit more patience and to focus on getting its own house in order and getting reorganised so that we’re in position to have an impact as a relevant political actor.
Our main concerns on the issue of electoral regroupment should be about how it relates to the question of anticapitalist regroupment. This means that questions of internal democracy, freedom of organisation and of propaganda, freedom to form internal factions are the key questions we need to be concerned with. Whether we’re thinking about joining the Greens, or affiliating to TUSC, or creating some new electoral organisation, or whatever the proposed alternatives may be, the question that really matters is will we have the freedom within that coalition to be organised as anticapitalists and to be organised in anticapitalist organisations.
Forget about whether or not we happen to like the exact composition of the current leadership, whether or not they’ve made public statements we dislike, whether or not their policy platform is exactly what we would want. Will it be a useful forum for regrouping the anticapitalist left? Do the organisation’s internal structures allow them to repress us or to expel us? Will the internal culture and the balance of internal factions mean that they are likely to try to repress us or to expel us?
