With the relative success of Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s presidential bids there is growing interest in observing and emulating how his party, La France Insoumise (LFI) operates. Elsewhere in Europe, left-populist parties such as Podemos give us a more moderate example of the same tendency. In this piece, we argue that this tendency is a blind alley. Instead, we propose a reimagining of the concept of the Workers Party based on Marx’s republican conception of the workers’ state.
La France Insoumise
The French left experienced a series of defeats and rebirths in the first fifteen years of the century. The two traditional left parties, the Socialist Party (PS) and the Communist Party (PCF) had their old support base dwindle at a steady pace, with PS experiencing a temporary resurgence in 2012. There were many groups which attempted to fill this vacuum, one of which was Parti de Gauche, whose leader, Jean-Luc Mélenchon, a former leader of the left wing of PS split in 2008 in order to create a new left-wing alternative inspired by the German Die Linke. However, in 2016, after several disagreements within the broader electoral coalition of Front de gauche (FdG), Mélenchon decided to effectively split once again to run in the 2017 presidential election outside of any party’s framework1.
Established in the wake of the 2017 presidential election in France, LFI styles itself explicitly as “not a party, but a movement”, with the movement “being to the whole people what the party was to the class”. Even though it is officially registered as a party, the organisation does not maintain any of the ordinary party structures such as regular membership, a decision-making congress with elected representatives, a central committee or any intermediary representative bodies between the leadership and the rank and file. People are encouraged to sign up and start acting under the umbrella of LFI, without engaging in many inward-looking activities. Members don’t have rights or duties, membership does not oblige a person to pay dues or take part in any activities and in reality is nothing more than a mailing list.
At the ground level, LFI is composed of so-called “Action Groups” which, while enjoying a high degree of autonomy of action (which, however, is constrained by a lack of financial autonomy), have little impact on national-level decisions or the leadership2. This is justified in the languages of horizontality and efficacy.
The Movement is described as a more horizontal way of organisation in contrast to the old, rigid party. While this might seem contradictory given the role of the Movement’s paramount leader, it’s a key talking point of the LFI’s spokespeople who underline that, in contrast to the traditional party structured like a pyramid, their movement is “horizontal”, “polycentric” and “pluralistic”3. The word being conspicuously left out is “democratic”; this is by design. In the eyes of the leader, internal discussion, factionalism and voicing opposition hinder action,“No blabla – struggle!” says Mélenchon. With its outright rejection of class politics, this populist4 movement is described by its charismatic leader as “not democratic, but collective”5.
This contrast between a rhetoric of horizontality and the reality of decision-making power being concentrated in a highly centralised group of Mélenchon-loyalists results in a reign of informality and vagueness. The lack of procedures and intermediary structures privileges the leadership at the expense of the rank and file. Ordinary members are left without resources and means of self-organisation and are unable to exert any meaningful pressure on the brass. Even during the yearly national conference, which is more of an American DNC-style show than a body with any decision-making power, the possibility for an organised internal opposition is curtailed because the delegates are selected through sortition. How one gains access to any real leadership positions, be it elected office or the position of an unelected party coordinator, is unclear and happens through informal co-optation of individuals by the party powers that be.
All this is defended with the rhetoric of efficacy. The movement is presented as more effective than a party, without its internal debate, factional strife and tedious bureaucracy; it is focused purely on action and taking power. Inspired by the Spanish Podemos, which has been described by its campaign director as a “fast and efficient electoral war machine”, LFI aims to be “immediately useful” and is “preparing to govern”6. The one means of control the rank and file supposedly have is voting in online referenda on questions deemed important by the leadership, which are sent out by e-mail. This veneer of direct democracy hides the fact that these are mere rubber stamps for approving the leadership’s decisions, and there is no way to counterpropose a measure or to suggest an amendment. While this may have been defended in 2017 given the need for left unity and the urgency of the presidential election, it has since cemented itself as Mélenchon’s personal electoral machine which people leave outside of the election season because their voices aren’t heard and don’t feel represented by the leadership whose decisions are seen as arbitrary and illegitimate due to the striking democratic deficit. This means that only the permanent staffers and elected parliamentarians have any influence on the movement between election seasons.
Without financial autonomy, broader coordination, and a reliable activist base7, LFI can’t become an independent political force. Outside presidential elections dominated by Mélenchon, LFI relies on the infrastructure of more established parties such as PS, PCF and EELV (the Greens). This unravelled just a few months after the 2024 election after which the PS turned its back on the oppositional platform of the New Popular Front (NFP) and collaborated with the right-wing government. This alliance with state-centric parties drags the French radical left (in which LFI is hegemonic) into the position of being the party of responsible governance instead of a real alternative to capital.
Where has this attitude come from?
In the aftermath of the financial crisis, decentralised anti-austerity and alter-globalist movements sprang up all across Europe, their potential was picked up by an emerging intellectual interest in what came to be described as “Left-populism”. Figures such as Chantal Mouffe and Naomi Klein sought to reinvigorate the left by dropping the talk of class in favour of a people vs. oligarchy dichotomy.
The “left-populist moment” idea also imposed an immediacy to political action. Therefore, a lot of populist theory came to be focused less on proposing a holistic strategy, and more on a tactical question of what kind of electoral rhetoric should populist party leadership pursue in this “left-populist moment”8. Tactics and messaging are put before creating long-lasting structures and organising masses in a conscious, strategic way.
This theoretical analysis explains why populist parties inspired by these theorists, such as LFI, Podemos or DiEM25, are characterised by a bare-bones internal structure, a regime of informality and top-down messaging. Many of them can also be described as “online parties”, substituting in-person deliberative meetings with online polls or so-called Zoomocracy.
This sense of immediacy also forces populist parties to organise in ways that seem most viable in each state. This results in the state imposing a tempo of organising on those parties, and more importantly, the parties copying those same state structures. The specific context of French politics and the French presidential system heavily shapes LFI’s practice. Capitalising on the sense of crisis on the French left, Mélenchon exercises wide-ranging but vaguely defined powers within LFI and the broader left, comparable to those of the President of the Fifth Republic, when he declares a crisis without the need for democratic deliberation, only a flimsy mandate of public approval9.
Proponents of the populist model often claim that the time of mass workers parties has passed and it is now time to form something new. There are a few problems with this argument. To start, as Donald Parkinson has pointed out in his polemic with Sylvain Lazarus, this “appeal to novelty” is methodologically bankrupt:
“Arguments like this can be found everywhere, from ultra-left proponents of the immediate communization of society like the journal Endnotes to left-populists like Laclau and Mouffe. The old forms of worker identification and the corresponding forms of organization such as the party and union were expressions of a historically specific era that is long gone. Today we will see new forms of subjectivity and organizational forms, and those who raise the old forms of a bygone era are simply imposing a nostalgic past onto the present. Or so the argument typically goes. I like to call these types of arguments the ‘appeal to novelty’. (…) My first reaction to Lazarus’ argument here is that he’s making a claim that’s impossible to disprove because it’s impossible to prove. Looking at history and developing a periodization can be useful. That said, one has to ask whether they are imposing a periodization by coming up with a conclusion and then reading history backward to validate that conclusion. Historical narratives are supposed to be explanatory, and the only thing that Lazarus’ narrative explains is why he thinks we need to abandon all the past concepts of Marxist politics and come up with something completely novel.”
The other problem with this argument is that few of the defining traits of populist parties are anything new. Parliamentary parties with a dubious claim to connection with their activist bases were, in fact, the norm in the 19th century. These parties derived most of their legitimacy not from national, sovereign and independent party structures, but from local politicians and the votes they won in state elections. On the national level, they existed as parliamentary clubs loosely connected to local political clubs, or at most as a federation of local parties. This reinforced the power of individual politicians to do as they pleased, without scrutiny of the rank and file of their movement. They were only held accountable to the constituency at the ballot box, without distinction.
Whenever there is mention of parties at least before the 1860s, it has to be noted that we’re not talking about the popular modern conception of the term. For example, in the Second French Republic, neither the Montagnards, the Republicans, nor even any of the monarchist factions had a unified structure. There was certainly political identification, but they lacked regular national membership based on paying dues. This model is still maintained to some extent in modern entities that originated in that period or earlier: The American Republican and Democratic Parties are good examples. This party form was the hegemonic form that any leftist parliamentary project inevitably followed before the advent of the mass party form.
“Bonaparte has given us the example”
Where the LFI model differs from the general shape of the traditional 19th-century parties is in its centrality of the leading figure. The use of the media as a means of communication with its supporters is particularly vital to this. The local is substituted by the media, or in modern day, the internet, as a means for a leader to reach out to the movement without any intermediaries. The politics is thus much more centralised around the image of the prominent national leader in its messaging. Paraphrasing Lenin, sociologist Michel Offerlé describes populism as “the leader plus internet”. But this again is no innovation. It is a form that’s shaped by the presidential system of the Fifth Republic, but it also emerged in other times, such as to a certain extent within the semi-presidential and later presidential system of the Second French Republic.
During the tumultuous years of the Second French Republic, the distribution of forces was such that the monarchists, despite not being able to coalesce into a unified force due to their dynastic squabbles, nonetheless operated in tactical unity (at most times) to fight against Republican and Montagnard democratising forces. Aiming to limit the power of the legislature, more and more power was given to the president, Louis Bonaparte, creating a de facto presidential system. This was, of course, only a temporary arrangement, as neither the bourgeoisie nor the landowners were fond of the republic, and so the French Empire was restored.
We can see that in this struggle, the Bonapartist movement’s structure was very well suited to fighting for and taking power, as it heavily mimicked the presidential system itself. Louis Bonaparte leveraged extensive influence over the newspapers to support him. While the majority of the French press was against him (as it is against Mélenchon), he nonetheless viewed it as an important means of multiplying his personal voice on the national scale. Throughout his years as the emperor, he surrounded himself by an entourage of ageing writers from his presidential period, to the chagrin of some observers10.
Marx, in his The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, also highlights the importance of showmanship for the Bonapartist movement, and how Bonaparte himself was involved in nationwide political campaigns, travelling the country to gain votes:
“An old, crafty roué, he conceives the historical life of the nations and their performances of state as comedy in the most vulgar sense, as a masquerade in which the grand costumes, words, and postures merely serve to mask the pettiest knavery. Thus his expedition to Strasbourg, where the trained Swiss vulture played the part of the Napoleonic eagle. For his irruption into Boulogne he puts some London lackeys into French uniforms.”
Many of Louis Bonaparte’s actions were aimed at creating the impression of popular support for his personal decisions. The (literal) crowning symbol of that is his use of plebiscites – in 1851, to write a new constitution and in 1852 to restore the empire, among others, mostly territorial plebiscites. These plebiscites also served as a way for the executive to override the legislative branch. This critique of plebiscites, or “direct legislation by the people” goes back a long way in Marxism. An extensive analysis can be found in Karl Kautsky’s Parliamentarism and Democracy, where he argues that they conceal class divisions and turn decision-making into a series of unrelated events11. The aforementioned referenda in LFI are another way in which Bonapartist faux-democratic practices are reflected in the modern left-populist movement.
LFI are, of course, not identical to Bonapartists. Their demands are certainly different. Our argument, however, is that the similarities in the constitutional makeup of LFI and Bonapartist practices underline a core feature of the former: LFI puts unaccountable power in the hands of the leader and his entourage with no way for the rank and file to meaningfully influence their trajectory. This is already how most bourgeois states operate, with unaccountable power in the hands of the president; an emperor without a crown. This is certainly the case in France. Left populist movements are thus merely a reflection of their national bourgeois systems, and the only task they are suitable for in the best of cases is taking charge of such systems in the name of the “movement”, but only to fight the system’s most striking excesses. As Lucien Diehl points out, despite all the phrasemongering about a political “rupture”, the French left is de facto state-loyalist in its strategic outlook.
LFI has had considerable influence internationally and a lot of wannabe impersonators. Particularly relevant is a British example given to us by James Schneider, who admits that he would very much like to copy Melenchon’s way of doing things but acknowledges that Jeremy Corbyn is simply not that kind of leader, that “he doesn’t act in that way. It’s not his style”. This is a half-truth; it is true that Corbyn hasn’t acted in the same way as Mélenchon in the past but that is because Mélenchon’s praxis is a product of a presidential system. The British constitutional system materialised into its current form in the 18th century by the Hanoverian-Tory party. The British left-populists still feel the same sense of immediacy as their French comrades, and as such, the model that James Schneider helped set up before the announcement of Your Party borrowed its foundational logic from the parochial system of Tory governance rather than the presidential structure of the Gaulist republic. One can easily see this in the reliance on the Independent MPs as a source of legitimacy, combined with shady backroom deals, manoeuvring that’s very hard to keep track of, but is very reminiscent of all the other British (constitutionally Tory) parties.
For the left, the populist strategy is essentially a strategy of impatience. Many leftists, disappointed by the observed and imagined inability of the workers movement to coalesce into a party capable of overthrowing the system, and the real support for liberalism (what is commonly called “reformism” nowadays) from parties purporting to be workers’ parties (PCF and PS in France, Labour in Britain, PSOE and PCE/IU in Spain etc.) jump to find shortcuts to power. This is combined with a sense of shame and urgency (as exemplified in Pablo Iglesias, the former leader of Podemos) to cast out past failures of the left, and what usually follows are faulty “appeals to novelty”. But is going back to the old workers’ party model viable?
What is a workers’ party?
This term, “workers’ party”, is often taken as a given and not explained properly. In socialist circles, there are a few competing definitions, and a common one is taken indirectly from Lenin’s polemic with British Socialists regarding affiliation to the British Labour Party.
In 1916, Lenin called opportunist parties in support of the First World War “bourgeois labour parties”, which is supposed to highlight a contradiction within, where the membership of the party is working class, but its programme is limited to governance of the bourgeois state. As Mike Macnair put it, it is “a party which is in form a workers’ party (…) but is in reality in itself a coalition between advocates of the independent political representation of the working class on the one hand, and liberal or nationalist-statist reformers and political careerists on the other.”12
An extrapolated definition of a workers’ party is thus merely sociological. It highlights the party’s target demographic and its origins in workers’ organisations. The issue becomes muddled, however, when we start talking about who governs these supposed workers’ parties. Sociologically, we can say it has something to do with workers, as they are the target demographic of such a party, but it doesn’t belong to the workers.
By 1920, however, Lenin instead called Labour a “thoroughly Bourgeois party”, as opposed to a “real working-class political party”, by which he meant a party with a revolutionary programme. This classification is better, but it has its own problem – one of the terms becomes entirely superfluous. A “real working-class political party” is here synonymous with communist parties (or whatever you call a “good” party), which is really limiting because it becomes impossible to describe a workers’ party as anything but a revolutionary workers’ party. So rather than describing the class character of such a party, it describes its program.
Tracing back our steps, we notice that the term “workers’ party” bears semantic similarity with another Marxist term – “workers’ state”, otherwise known as the Dictatorship of the Proletariat. Hal Draper’s invaluable summary of the history of the term points out that in Marx’s writings, it originally was a counterposition to Blanqui’s conception of dictatorship, in which a militant minority would take over the state and educate the proletariat. i.e, a dictatorship over the proletariat13. Dictatorship of the Proletariat was a rarely used term, used to underline the constitutional class character of the state that was more often called other names, such as “the social republic”14. This term did not imply whatsoever the political programme on which this state would operate. When writing on the Paris Commune, his best example of a workers’ state, Marx argued that the Commune was a workers’ state not because it imposed some radical economic measures (it hardly laid its hands upon the institution of private property) but that it imposed a radical form of the state, “the actual “social” character of their Republic consists only in this, that workmen govern the Paris Commune!”
We thus propose that a more useful definition of the term workers’ party for modern-day activists would be to highlight the constitutional class character of such parties rather than their programme. By this definition, what Leninist groups call a “bourgeois workers’ party” would not be a workers’ party at all. Just like a dictatorship over the workers, it would be a party over the workers.
For a new conception of a workers’ party
So what defines the constitutional class character of a party? In short, a party can only be governed by the working class if it constitutes the vast majority of the membership and its structure is radically democratic. This underlines a key feature of Marxist politics, its prefiguration. In Marxist circles, it is commonly accepted that a workers’ state can only be achieved through workers’ self-organisation. We argue that states are necessarily established through (class-based) parties which impose their own structure on the newly founded states. Therefore, it should also be accepted that only a radically democratic party can establish a radical-democratic state.
What organisational principles should a radically democratic party follow? Firstly, we should conceptualise the party as a type of republic, wherein the membership is conceived of as the citizens. Comrades from Democratic Socialists of Your Party have already made that connection in their call for a “Party Republic”, but as far as we’re aware, they haven’t directly made the case that this form of organising is actually mandated by the conditions of class struggle.
There is, of course, a key difference between the party and the state: the former is a voluntary association, and the latter is not. This means that, unlike the state, a party should be able to compel its members (especially parliamentarians) to voluntary discipline. This distinction, however, does not impact our analysis of mechanisms of decision-making within a party.
There isn’t a straightforward way to fully democratise relations within a social organism (just as much in a state as in a party), but steps can be taken to maximise membership representation, strengthen the leadership’s mandate, and prevent splits.
- Just as in the idea of a democratic republic, the workers’ party ought to be an organisation where the membership, not the leadership, is sovereign. It is the membership which grants the leadership its democratic mandate through proportional representative democracy, expressed by a sovereign congress which elects standing leadership and votes on the most important issues.
- The right to form tendencies/factions. While many parties theoretically guarantee the right to self-organise within the party, this guarantee is often symbolic. The right to form tendencies cannot simply be a passive right granted to members only on paper, but a cultivated, living culture of debate, struggle, and theoretical development. It also requires active participation and education of the mass membership so they know which tendencies best represent their views. Theoretical debate should be conducted in public for all members and the broader working class to see and discuss. The goal is an environment where, to paraphrase Lenin, “every cook must learn to govern”.
- Local branches ought to be active, not just electorally, but use electoralism as only one of many ways of reaching the wider class.
A democratic-republican structure is not necessarily a quick solution for electoral victories under undemocratic bourgeois systems. Engaging in internal debates and struggles might at first seem like a waste of time given the pressures of external political life, but developing these structures is a historical necessity for the working class. The working class simply cannot take over the role of the ruling class without first learning how to rule. This takes time, and a truly democratic structure ensures that lessons learned along the way can be accumulated in a conscious, continuous way.
This does not necessarily imply the programmatic correctness of an internally democratic party. One can easily imagine a hypothetical party which follows all the aforementioned rules to be qualified as a workers’ party but is not revolutionary i.e. its programme is limited to a list of demands of the bourgeois state, and does not argue for a new, radically democratic state to be established in its image. This is a contradiction that, in practice, would result in severe pressure from the bourgeoisie, but it also points to the critical role that the Marxist activists should play in fostering internal party democracy. Such a workers’ party can always become revolutionary through political struggle, but a party that lacks such structures can never be sufficient for revolutionary working-class politics.
The modern workers’ party
As some observers have noted, the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) is an organisation that possesses all of those internal-democratic features, while also lacking a revolutionary programme. It is also a majority workers’ organisation, and all of its finances come from regular member dues. While it isn’t formally registered as a political party, its legal status isn’t of concern for our analysis and can be easily explained by the peculiarities of the American party system. DSA’s factional life, especially around their congresses, is an inspiring example of a living, breathing organisation, which is why some of the most interesting developments in party theory in recent years come from the DSA. The proof of its democratic character is in the fact that it started its life as what many would call an anti-communist NGO, but through rank-and-file activity over the last decade, it has been steadily developing into a principled revolutionary organisation. While the implementation of a revolutionary political programme is yet to happen, the revolutionary factions now constitute a majority of the democratically elected national leadership. From the outside, it seems that such an implementation is more of a question of “when?” rather than “if?”.
This is why we can describe DSA as a workers’ party but not a revolutionary party and why this contradiction has resulted in attacks on internal democracy from its right wing. The right-wing proposals bear striking resemblance to the populist model. One such example is an attempt to replace the sovereignty of the membership represented through a convention with plebiscites. Another successful attempt in the New York City DSA, a mostly right-wing chapter, to remove branch meetings and replace them with online structures. It bears noting that much of the American state structure operates using networks of NGOs coordinating various campaigns of professional elected officials, culminating in the two NGO-parties coordinating the presidential campaigns every four years. The citizen is thus at best a door-knocker for these campaigns, but most often simply delegated to the role of a passive observer. As such, it is only natural that state-loyalist factions of DSA would fall back on such a model. During the campaigns of Bernie Sanders, or the recent successful campaign of Zohran Mamdani, the state-loyalists experience the “populist moments”, but only as an illusion that mystifies the continuity of the history of class struggle.
We should not be surprised that these internal developments are taking place. As with all things in class society, a workers’ party is a battlefield in the wider class struggle, in this case materialised as a struggle between populist state-loyalists and revolutionary radical-democrats. No party structure guarantees a revolutionary political line, especially if such a structure is to be applied over a long timespan and with a mass membership, but we do know that duplicating bourgeois state structures cannot lead us out of bourgeois rul.e.
The direct task for everyone who takes the ideas of Marxism, democracy, and socialism seriously is to form and cultivate Workers’ Parties. In countries where they do not yet exist, it is of paramount importance to join initiatives that could give birth to one, uniting the class’s existing forces. In places where they do exist, there is no excuse for comrades to ignore them, even if they are politically flawed. There is no going around our duty of engaging with the most advanced sections of the working class, and meandering in search of shortcuts has always proven to be a folly. Through constant development of these parties, the membership learns how to debate and govern. The emergence of the Workers’ Party is thus the dawn of the Socialist Republic.
- Alexandre, Chloé, Antoine Bristielle, and Laura Chazel. From The Front de gauche to La France insoumise: Causes and Consequences of the Conversion of the French Radical Left to Populism” Partecipazione e conflitto-PArticipation and COnflict 14, no. 2 (2021), 937
↩︎ - Cervera-Marzal, Manuel. “La France insoumise, a “movement” in name only? Symbolic erasure and practical transformations of the party form.” Politix 138, no. 2 (2022), 54-57.
↩︎ - Cervera-Marzal, Manuel. ““This is not a party”: elements for a sociology of movementism based on the case of La France Insoumise.” French Politics 22, no. 1 (2024), 7-8.
↩︎ - We use the term descriptively, not as a value-judgement.
↩︎ - Cervera-Marzal, Manuel. “This is not a party”, 3-4 ↩︎
- Ibid. ↩︎
- Cervera-Marzal, Manuel. “La France insoumise, a “movement” in name only? Symbolic erasure and practical transformations of the party form.” Politix 138, no. 2 (2022), 59-62.
↩︎ - Mouffe, Chantal. For a left populism. Verso Books, 2018.
↩︎ - French Constitution, title 2, article 16
↩︎ - Isser, Natalie. The second empire and the press: a study of government-inspired brochures on French foreign policy in their propaganda milieu. Springer Science & Business Media, 2012, 18
↩︎ - Kautsky, Karl. Karl Kautsky on Democracy and Republicanism. Brill, 2020.
↩︎ - Macnair, Mike. “Revolutionary strategy.” (2008), 41.
↩︎ - Draper, Hal. Dictatorship of Proletariat. NYU Press, 1987.
↩︎ - Ibid. ↩︎
