We live in an interesting time for the left on these islands. The failure of the Corbyn movement and the broader progressive electoral project of the late 2010s has drawn a swathe of new organisers into the revolutionary left. A wealth of new organisations and groupings, several identifying as parties have sprung up. This is an unquestionably positive development. These conditions have produced a great deal of vibrancy and volatility, investigation and introspection and if capitalised upon will lead to great strides forward for our movement. A hundred flowers are blooming. Yet, even as we greet this positive development we should be conscious of differences in terms and ideological approach that could present stumbling blocks to our progress. With that in mind we ask; what is the Party? 

The Party is the most advanced tool of proletarian emancipation. It is a democratic, centralist organisation of the most advanced section of the working class that has as its primary goal the construction of socialism. It is an organ within which the class-conscious workers can coalesce, investigate conditions, strategise and put into motion the process by which the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie may be dismantled and a dictatorship of the proletariat be proclaimed and maintained. 

Plaid Gomiwnyddol Cymru was constituted in 2023 as the party of the class-conscious working class in Wales. It formed out of the work of the Welsh Underground Network, a socialist-republican mass organisation active in community organising and solidarity work across Wales. The Welsh Underground Network, through its work with the masses in communities across the nation became a meeting point of the most advanced sections of the Welsh working class. From this coalescing it was identified that a lack of ideological direction and strategy would prevent the liberation of the working class, and while the work of the Welsh Underground Network was and continues to be vital in the realm of mass work, it was necessary to advance to a higher organisational stage; The Party.

During the period prior to the founding of the party, it was recognised that Marxist-Leninist organisational forms (the vanguard party and democratic centralism in particular) are especially powerful tools and are necessities should we hope our project to be successful. However, it was also recognised that simply proclaiming the Welsh Underground Network to be a party would not make it so. The level of political development amongst the membership was too varied and the projects of the organisation too disparate to take up the label of “party” in any meaningful sense. The fixed set of criteria and responsibilities of a party cannot be applicable to the Welsh Underground Network. By definition, the Welsh Underground Network is a broad church, with the intention of bringing together socialists of all stripes to target common community goals. The mass work carried out by the Welsh Underground Network is vital in the development of self-sustaining class-conscious communities.

However, The Party is an organisational unit first and foremost. It provides coordination and structure to the revolutionary movement. It undertakes investigation into the conditions we face. It examines the historical record and the work of previous revolutionaries for the solution to contemporary problems. For us to continue undertaking the mass work of the Welsh Underground Network and abandon these other tasks would be a foray into movementism; a belief that if we take part in enough dispersed mass work, resist enough evictions and provide enough solidarity aid that socialism will develop out of thin air. For us to declare the Welsh Underground Network a party without first developing the structures or level of political development requisite for a party would also be a fruitless exercise. To declare a structure a party does not make it so. It was necessary for the most politically developed members of the Welsh Underground Network to construct a party structure along Marxist-Leninist lines in order to advance our struggle, and that was the process undertaken between the summer of 2023 and the summer of 2024. 

Organisationally, the movement to which we belong is constituted of two parts: The Welsh Underground Network and Plaid Gomiwnyddol Cymru. What is the purpose for this separation? In part, this is a product of our circumstances as explained above. The level of political development of the Welsh Underground Network was far too eclectic to graduate the whole organisation to the role of “the party”. However, this arrangement also serves another purpose. As our party organisation develops, it has been possible to continue to undertake the mass work that our movement has become known for through the Welsh Underground Network. The party has been allowed to focus on the development of theory and strategy concerning our context, without giving up the work that has elevated the level of political consciousness in our communities and in turn elevated our standing in them. The Welsh Underground Network as a mass organisation has continued to serve the people while Plaid Gomiwnyddol Cymru has developed strategy to advance our struggle and the capacity to take on further work. We do not present this arrangement as a panacea and it certainly would not be applicable to all sites of struggle. However, we have found this to be an organisational form that has allowed us to develop our party formation and sharpen our understanding of our material conditions without giving up the work that brought us to this stage. 

As a party, we were formed on national grounds. Why was this? It was identified in the developmental stages of the Welsh Underground Network that the reason the conditions we were facing in our community work was so dire was related to Wales’ perennial underdevelopment as a peripheralised nation within the Union. As we deepened our analysis we came to the conclusion that the Union itself was a product of the development of capitalism, that it had underdeveloped and overdeveloped regions by design, and that it was a tool of the capital-exporting bourgeois class. In short, the Union itself was a barrier not only to the emancipation of the working classes on this island but also to the working class of the world. By dismantling the Union, we would be removing one weapon from the arsenal of the global imperialists. Our internationalism, our responsibility to assist our struggling comrades the world over, leads us to view nationalism and specifically socialist-republicanism as our tool for global workers’ emancipation.

This is more than a nationalist position, it is an anti-Unionist position. Therefore our party must be organised along national lines (as opposed to plurinational lines in the case of Unionist communist parties) because it would not be possible to begin the construction of socialism on this island without first doing away with the Union as a political entity. The dissolution of the union and the denial of territory to the capital-exporting bourgeoisie additionally assists our struggling siblings in the imperialised countries of the world. Welsh nationalism therefore becomes a tool for the class conscious working class to begin the local construction of socialism and to strike a blow at the imperialist class who currently subjugate our comrades in the global south. 

Analytically, we are committed to anti-revisionist ideological principles. As a party we have acknowledged the defeats of projects of socialist construction in the 20th century. We see these not as projects being crushed by the global imperialist powers, but as results of internal failures within those projects. What do we mean by this? Certainly, it’s plain to see the role of the capitalist-imperialist class in the derailing of socialist projects like those of the USSR and China. However, these defeats would not have been possible if the analysis of those communist movements had been more advanced, if the tools at their disposal had been more developed, if their approach to socialist construction had been more thorough. To blame outside forces for these defeats would be to wash our hands of the problem and set ourselves on the path of defeat once again. What we must do is recognise these failures and make it our duty to study, adopt successful organisational forms and strategies and abandon unsuccessful ones. In short, we need to eschew revisionist notions and commit ourselves to anti-revisionism. For example, we have to identify the role that bureaucratisation played in the deviation of the Soviet Union from the socialist road and towards the capitalist road. An apparatchik class developed that was resistant to the advancement of mass politics or cybernetic methods of economic organisation, posing barriers to the further advancement of socialism.

We must then investigate the contemporary critiques of this process, analyse strategies developed to combat this deviation, and adopt within our own party and movement the most successful organisational forms possible. In this instance, a culture of intense criticism of the leadership must be encouraged with roles within the party structure treated as duties and responsibilities rather than privileges. There must be a sense that nobody is immune from criticism and that those in elected roles are servants of the masses, not leaders to be obeyed uncritically. If the culture of the revolutionary party ossifies, then it ceases to be revolutionary. If there is no revolutionary culture within the party, the revolution has ceased. 

To summarise then, we see the following organisational forms and approaches as the most successful in our current context: 

1. A fraternally bonded Communist Party and Mass Movement, the former provided in-depth analysis and strategic direction, and the latter leading the way in mass work and drawing in a broader pool of comrades. The former provides political education to the latter.
2. A symbiotic relationship between analysis and mass work. Analysis must be done in order to develop programmes of mass work. Mass work must be done in order to provide material for analysis. Each form of work informs the other, and in turn advances the development of both the party and the mass movement.
3. A nationally organised party and mass movement. The Union is an organising tool for the international capitalist class. It perpetuates internal underdevelopment and overdevelopment, and facilitates imperialism abroad. The dissolution of the Union therefore must become an organisational goal of the left on this island. The tool to utilise in that struggle is Welsh nationalism and the organisational forms of socialist-republicanism.
4. A sincere commitment to anti-revisionism. We stand on the shoulders of giants, but simply mimicking the forms that have come before and have proven themselves lacking by their failure we condemn ourselves to a similar fate. Only through intense study and criticism of all previous attempts at the construction of socialism can we avoid stagnation, revisionism and the capitalist road.

We see the role of the party as being the most advanced organisational tool of the class-conscious working class. Its bond with organisations undertaking mass work is of key importance, as it provides an interface between the most advanced sections of the working class, the fellow travellers engaged in mass organisations and the broader working class as a whole. The relationship between these elements must be and remain symbiotic, with the role of the party to be analytical and organisational and the role of the mass organisation being to generate material for analysis and to reach the workers where they are. Socialist-republicanism is a key aspect of our organisational strategy for the reason that Unionism bars the way for the development of socialism domestically and internationally. Welsh nationalism therefore becomes an indispensable tool of the advanced working class in Wales seeking to begin the construction of socialism and to strike a blow at the capitalist-imperialist class. Finally, anti-revisionism must remain a fundamental principle of our movement. If we are unable to recognise the mistakes and weaknesses of previous attempts in the socialist project, then we ourselves are doomed to fail. Only by a rigorous and principled analysis of past conditions can we as a party and mass movement face the future with the most advanced organisational and strategic forms available. The product of our investigation is that the party equipped with the analytical method of anti-revisionist Marxism-Leninism, alongside the mass movement employing the organisational method of Socialist-Republicanism has the greatest likelihood of success in the construction of socialism.