Editor’s Note: The Marxist Unity Caucus is an open ‘Partyist’ faction in the ecosocialist, feminist, anti-racist and anti-imperialist organisation Revolutionary Socialism in the 21st Century (rs21). We have published their New Left Party strategy below.

Our task is to merge socialism and the workers’ movement.

The world-historic role of Marxists is to unite the everyday struggles of each section of the working class around a universal struggle against all domination. To accomplish that, we need to organise into a working-class party, secure our political independence from bourgeois or petit-bourgeois forces and struggle for the conquest of political power, thereby beginning the transition to communism. It is not enough to organise only for the economic demands of the working class; we as Marxists should connect all these demands, through our agitation, with political demands. We must continually make the interconnection between the arbitrary power of our boss and the cis-heteronormative family form, with the arbitrary power of the undemocratic British state, the domination of the imperialist world system and market exchange.

Therefore, the revolutionary strategy within Britain, the Marxist strategy, must elevate itself to the level of high politics—to the constitution, parliament and state. For the Marxist Unity Caucus (MUC), this requires the struggle for a mass communist party—an association of the working class majority formed for collective political action to seize state power. The mission of this party is to be defined by a set of tasks articulated in a political programme rather than based on defending specific theoretical positions. The proletariat can only confront the capitalists’ state to the degree that it is organised independently in its own political party. We do not underestimate the difficulties involved in attempting to turn the new left formation (NLF) into a mass communist party; but to abstain from advocating our case would be a serious error. It is our duty as Marxists to argue for our politics in the workers’ movement against any attempts by its right wing to usurp it.

As the Marxist Unity Caucus, we therefore argue for the following:

1. The rapid growth of Reform has horrifyingly shown that there is a propagandistic and agitational function to any vehicle that even cynically attempts to articulate a political alternative in high politics. In response, we must present a real alternative with a competent socialist challenge at the level of the state. Neither the electoralist tactics of the right wing of the socialist movement, aiming to take positions of government and thereby responsibility for the bourgeois state, nor the rejection of participation in high politics and opting for an assortment of strikes and mass action tactics, has yielded any success. Between these two poles, there is a necessity to rediscover a Marxist centre in favour of a revolutionary use of the electoral tactic. While universal suffrage can easily become a tool for deceiving the working class, it must be turned into a weapon of emancipation. Through participation in high politics, the theatre of bourgeois parliament, the working class has a further necessary opportunity to develop its sectional consciousness into revolutionary class consciousness. 
   
2. The revolutionary electoral tactic leverages elections to present a communist programme to the entire class, not merely those orbiting within or around the existing movement. It enables us to put our political alternative, communism, on the ballot in every single election. Through this and the tireless agitation of elected communist representatives, the working class will come to understand the nature of politics as a struggle between political programmes, allowing clear lines of demarcation from those not in its interests. The programme of the working class requires building around it an independent political party to carry it forward. 
   
3. The upcoming new left formation will inevitably start as a broad-left project. Its creation is not a “qualitative leap” in the development of this independent political party in Britain. To prevent the new formation from collapsing into solely electoral opportunism lost in the mere management of the existing capitalist order, the existing communist forces must serve as a democratic left flank against their politics. Otherwise, it will just serve as an electoral front for people dissected by Corbynism but not politically evolved past it. The creation of the new left formation will open up a massive space for political struggle around socialist ideas at the level of the state. It would be sectarian posturing and defeatism to stay out of such a struggle. 
   
4. Now the communist movement in Britain has the opportunity to raise its red banner and present its programme. Neither abstaining from this upcoming formation to build our “revolutionary” party, another atrophied sect, nor entering another reformist project as communists who downplay or hide our politics and pretend we are left-reformists. Instead, we must work within this project to actively convince, develop, and regroup communist forces within and around it—a positive project of principled development. Without the active intervention of an organised communist faction under an explicitly communist programme, the new left formation will remain merely another “broad left” project that tails Left-Labourism, and the cycle of sectarian isolation will further weaken the fragmented communist movement. However, armed with such a faction, the new left formation can become the terrain for an open political struggle towards a genuinely democratic mass communist party with a solid base in the struggles of the exploited and oppressed in Britain.
   
5. This Communist Party will aim to be a mass organisation united under a democratically ratified “minimum-maximum” programme. The “minimum” being the set of demands we raise to democratise and de-bureaucratise the bourgeois state and establish a democratic socialist republic, the dictatorship of the proletariat. The “maximum” being the set of demands that will initiate the transition away from the existing economic order and establish a socialist one —a polity of popular delegacy free from the domination of social relations expressed in the value form, a republican communism.

New organisational tasks 

The tasks we elaborated in our platform remain as important, if not more so, than before in preparing rs21 for communist agitation within the NLF and the broader worker movement. In addition to these, we will argue for the following rs21-wide tasks within our branches, fractions, and future all-member assemblies (AMAs).  

Tasks for rs21 as an organisation 

1. Work within the NLF is to be prioritised for all members and branches of the organisation where it is operationally possible, with a clear collective position towards work in the NLF, as opposed to the Greens, abstentionism, or a diffuse range of activities. 
2. The establishment of an NLF fraction in rs21, subordinate and accountable to the AMAs and the Steering Group (SG). The fraction would allow regular meetings between rs21 members to coordinate activity in the NLF. 
3. Facilitate the establishment of a Communist Caucus (CC) as an independent communist faction within the NLF. 
4. Attend NLF and CC events and help their organisation. 
5. Leverage our role within The World Transformed (TWT) to reorient its activities as an educational and cultural institution around NLF. 
6. Develop a publication strategy for the rs21 website aimed at promoting our Marxist anti-oppression politics and analysis of the union bureaucracy within the NLF.

Tasks of rs21 members within the Communist Caucus 

The Communist Caucus should remain independent of rs21 and any other left-wing organisation that joins the NLF, and establish its own democratic and accountable administrative bodies within the NLF. Therefore, these are tasks that we, as rs21 members, collectively are responsible for getting the Communist Caucus to carry out. We may, at times, fail to persuade the Caucus to do so, as we will not seek to formally control it; however, we will aim to win over the caucus and the NLF to our politics of freedom in the long run. 

1. Establish a nationwide Steering Committee within the Communist Caucus. 
2. Encourage the establishment of NLF student and youth clubs, trade union groups, and social and political events and campaigns. The country must catch fire with socialist activity. The Communist Caucus should make it a priority to push the NLF towards taking up this work as a means to avoid the trap of mere electoralism. 
3. Push for the NLF and CC to have the necessary democratic measures in place to prevent their control by sect-bureaucrats of individual left groups or left-reformist cliques. For both the CC and NLF to be organised around extreme democracy, workers’ wages for any paid roles, an imperative mandate and recallability for any elected role. 
4. For the CC to organise events, develop its publications, put forward motions, and work to build the new left formation into a mass communist party.
5. ​​The Communist Caucus, with its founding, should prepare a list of candidates for the highest bodies of the NLF. 
6. Push the NLF to be organised based on a democratically ratified programme that would also serve as its basis for membership. 
7. For the NLF to become an individual, membership-based organisation rather than a coalition of local groups.