“Each generation must, out of relative obscurity, discover its mission, fulfill it, or betray it.”
– Frantz Fanon

This letter is not intended, in any way, to be disparaging towards those older comrades who have given their lives to the struggle, and anyone who takes offence at the contents of this essay should be encouraged to rethink their perceived offence from the perspective of constructive critique – this is not personal malice, it is a political and strategic assessment. A healthy democratic political culture relies upon sincere and constructive criticism.

The left in Britain has a number of problems – a key one of these is the age problem. Within the British left, there exists a core generation which retains control over the apparatus of the broad left (Stop The War Coalition, Palestine Solidarity Campaign, union branches, etc.), primarily those within their 50s-60s. These are the generation who grew up politicised by the mass mobilisations of the 1980s, with the fight against the Poll Tax, the pickets and state violence of the Miners’ Strike, and the resistance against the National Front being events which exist in living memory to this section. These comrades have, in their lives, done fantastic work and have a wealth of knowledge and experience to share with the broader movement – they are living history and those who can tell stories which have been erased from the public consciousness; they still bear the scars of police violence at Orgreave, the scars of losing their friends to the AIDS crisis, and the bitter memory of defeat.

The problem is not with the participation of these comrades within the movement; it is with their insistence upon leading the movement and stifling the enthusiasm and energy of younger comrades with outdated political culture and processes, ultimately resulting in an insular left which exists simply to remember its past and rest upon its laurels (of which it has little in the past few decades). Younger comrades are consistently tokenised without actually encouraging meaningful participation, resulting in those younger comrades who fall in line with the older sections of the movement out of respect or deference for their history becoming absorbed into the same sectarian struggles which have plagued the left for decades. When we have a situation in which younger socialists are splitting into pre-existing sectarian groups based on their perceived disagreements over their interpretation of historical events for which they were never even alive, and then continue to reproduce the same toxic ideological divisions which have consistently paralysed the left, we are unable to move forward – only to act as a living museum for those who came before us. 

It is necessary to briefly outline a set of thoughts around what a healthy relationship between the “old guard” and younger members looks like. The older members of our movement, as previously outlined, possess a wealth of experience and knowledge, and fought political struggles which the contemporary left could only dream of conjuring up. The memory of groups such as Lesbians and Gays Support the Miners continues to inspire and inform us, and those who organised in these groups serve as living links to the history of our movement. This places our older comrades in a key position of advice and guidance – we cannot repeat the mistakes of the past, and without their perspectives and experience, we would be doomed to do so. However, when the old guard refuses to hand over the infrastructure and democratic bodies of the organisation, this paralyses the development of the movement’s perspectives and strategies, essentially freezing the left in time. The dominance of the old – this being the dominance of the older generation in key positions within movement infrastructure – prevents us from moving forward, and dooms us to repeat the same strategies and to maintain the same ideological positions which are considered, by younger generations, to be outdated and conservative. Discussions of Trotsky and Stalin still dominate a left which has seen over a century since the Russian Revolution, and in our insistence on dividing along historical-theoretical lines, we fail to produce a coherent analysis of our contemporary conditions without attempting to force it into an archaic framework.

In contrast, the younger members of our movement possess a wealth of energy, enthusiasm, and creativity – as seen in the talented young organisers who’ve led hospitality strikes up in Glasgow and Manchester, down to the young anti-fascists who’ve countered the far-right on our streets, the young left is nothing if not ready for a fight. However, the enthusiasm and energy of the young can often lead to two separate problems – adventurism and historical illiteracy. Regarding adventurism, the enthusiasm and energy felt by the young left can lead to a feeling that something has to be done in the immediate moment, that the crisis is so bad that we simply need to strike back immediately – this is understandable, however can lead to an insistence on hardline-appearing action over organising; younger comrades will put themselves in positions of danger without sufficient preparation or training, simply for the reason that they believe their cause is correct.

On the other hand, there is historical illiteracy; those on the younger left can sometimes have the tendency to act as if they’re the first people to ever take a particular kind of action or organise a particular kind of organisation, when this could not be further from the truth. A lack of understanding of the history of the movement can reproduce the same mistakes which the old guard has already made, and leads to a culture of arrogance, in which young organisers feel that they have the weight of the entire class struggle on their shoulders, ultimately burning out talented young activists as they believe they’re fighting a battle which no one has done before. As can be drawn from this explanation, the dominance of either young or old does not fare well in either respect. What is needed is a reciprocal relationship between the two groupings within an organisational context. Younger members must be empowered to organise their own campaigns, they must be provided with the resources to try new ideas, and they must be placed at the centre of the organisation’s cultural sphere; however, they cannot do these things without the older members providing sobering advice and experience, which must prevent the young from repeating the same mistakes of the past. A relationship in which the younger members lead the organisation with ideological and strategic development and the older members ensure that their generation’s mistakes are not repeated is the best way in which this relationship can work in a functional manner. The old must guard against the mistakes of the past, and ensure that the history of the movement is remembered and remains alive, while the young must provide fresh blood to the movement – they must provide the radical fervour for change that unseats the dominant ideological and strategic trends which become outdated; if we aren’t facilitating development, then we’re accepting political stagnation. 

While there is no claim in this essay to possess a definitive and complete idea of the measures necessary for our movement to grow into one capable of contesting capital and state power, a few suggestions for a strategy for renewal will be briefly put forward. A priority for our movement to renew is facilitating the involvement of young members in decision-making processes, not just for the sake of their increased willingness to challenge cemented ideological and cultural norms within organisational spaces, but in order to provide them with the experience needed to effectively run the organisation.

Good organisers don’t just emerge from a lifetime of only theory-reading, they emerge from the experience of doing organisational work; political development is not just a process of ideological and analytical development, it is an improvement in the technical abilities of a given member to facilitate meetings, organise party/movement events and to behave in a disciplined manner in organisational settings. This kind of political development is not something which can be achieved without direct experience of completing work either in an elected position or as an active organiser within a specific campaign/industrial, or tenancy dispute.

Therefore, it is necessary to not simply provide young members of the organisation with a platform to share their views or to consign them to a purely symbolic youth organisation which exists simply to propagate the parent organisation’s dominant ideas with a seemingly more radical facade, but to actively facilitate their involvement with the technical apparatus of the movement/party, and to do so with the horizon of their eventual inheritance of control over the political leadership of the movement/party. This cannot be accidental; the left must actively seek young people to develop.

Expanding on the point around the development of organisational skills, the responsibility for this cannot be entirely placed in older members of trade unions, tenants’ unions and organisations within the progressive movement; it is the responsibility of young people within the movement to actively make an effort to involve themselves with the functioning of the organisation and to ensure their participation with its remit of activity. Younger members of the movement should seek to occupy positions of relevant committees, ensure the success of the work within their remit, and develop as leaders through active organisational experience. While membership of a sect on the British left is not uncommon, young members who choose to solely focus their work on the development of this sect often fail to develop the practical skills necessary to organise and win in workplaces, housing disputes and ultimately in building effective struggle against capital on behalf of labour.

Participation within broad organisations that actively organise around material grievances, such as local trade union branches and tenants’ unions, can encourage young members to engage politics through a lens of strategy, tactics and as a question of logistics. Engaging in this kind of work, which can often cause burnout far quicker that attendance of sect organisations, also encourages the development of a social-emotional capacity in young members to evaluate their availability and the level of activity that they can engage in while maintaining a healthy relationship to political work; burnout is all too frequent among young organisers due to their inability to properly regulate their activity according to their capacity. If young leaders are to be able to launch sustained campaigns and engage in working-class organisations for prolonged periods, then the development of this capacity is a vital skill that is a necessary inclusion in any attempt to facilitate the development of youth leadership. 

In order to further facilitate the involvement of young members, the question of ideological control and plurality must also be addressed. After decades of decline, the British left is locked into several highly ideological sects which quietly compete for influence over institutions such as the trade unions, anti-war organisations, international solidarity groups & community/tenants’ unions. Part of the issue, as previously mentioned, is the absorption of young members into the ideological disputes of the older members’ sectarian organisations; this process creates a political culture of rigid groupings based on strict ideological unity around a set of disagreements with other groupings, which then translates in organisational contexts to a behaviour of snide remarks, sectarian in-jokes, and factional conflict.

In order to address this problem, the left must ask itself whether the ideological trends which have become so dominant serve as modes of analysis and thinking or if they serve as dogmatic lines of demarcation between the sects of a dwindling movement. In order to move past the sect form which has paralysed the movement and to properly facilitate the involvement of a new generation of the left, the movement/party requires ideological renewal. This means pluralism over dogmatism, it means a sincere and cooperative discussion on the points which unify and divide us, and it means a commitment to unity around that which we agree on. Those young people who do get involved in the movement are all too often scared away by the intense ideological conflict which exists, and the lengthy readings required in order to engage in this conflict make the movement inaccessible for large numbers of young people – the changing of this toxic ideological culture must be a priority.

The left in Britain is in dire need of renewal, and if we aren’t able to bring in a new generation of activists and members, then we’ll consign our movement to a future of embarrassment, repeated failure and sectarian dogmatism. We cannot go forward by trying to replicate the aesthetics and ideological character of the struggles which came before us; we must develop new strategies to tackle the problems of our rapidly shifting conditions. If the union movement is unable to bring in young workers, it will fade into irrelevance. If the anti-war movement is unable to translate youth attendance into leadership, it will stagnate.

We have seen, publicly, the failure of the old left to build a political vehicle which is ready for the challenges of the 21st century – the “Your Party” initiative, of which I was part, squandered a historic moment which could have birthed the basis of a genuine counter-hegemonic bloc all for the sake of clumsily cobbling together an, as of yet, entirely failed and incompetent populist electoral project which has alienated all those young left activists which initially flocked to it. The Your Party founding process and the resulting intense factional warfare between the two factions led by Jeremy Corbyn and Zarah Sultana around the election of the Central Executive Committee was a brutal embarrassment and ultimately alienated large amounts of young people, with the Green Party largely soaking up the young left-populist vote.

The electoral moment for the organised left has gone, with Polanski’s Green Party currently serving as the left-of-labour electoral formation, but there will be another; revolutionary situations, as described by Lenin, are a continuous feature of capitalist development – whether we have the capability to translate our current war of position into a decisive war of manoeuvre is a matter of developing the leadership to do it. The young left must be capable, disciplined, and actively seeking to take over the reins of power – we cannot complain about the failures of the old while consigning ourselves to despair and endless theoretical discussion, as they have done. We organise in new, experimental ways, and we change the culture of our movement, or we fade even further into insignificance. We must be bold in our challenge to the sect form which dominates the left, and we must be disciplined in our conduct while doing so; we must facilitate the development of a healthy culture of critique and self-criticism which recognises disagreement as political in nature, not personal. This will require sincerity, accountability, and a commitment to working together for a successful political vehicle; this will require a clear and accountable division of labour, in which organising is done in concrete, actionable terms. Overall, we must seek to replace the old sectarian forms which our movement has taken with a democratic and political renewal – a recognition of the pluralistic nature of the left, and an active commitment to unity around a programme of our shared values and policy which sets forth a strategy for seriously undertaking the task of constructing a counter-hegemonic bloc against capital and the political forces of the far-right. 

This monumental set of tasks falls to the new generation of the left, and must be met with the seriousness and honesty that such a set of tasks demands; the development of young cadres must be a priority if we are to replace the incompetence which has decimated Your Party. Younger members of organisations across the UK are increasingly discussing the idea of cadreisation – the ability to analyse our current conjuncture, strategise in response, and actively organise around this strategy. The struggle ahead to build a movement of active organisers who are competent, disciplined and cadreised will be difficult in the face of left fragmentation, incompetence and overall lack of success, but it is entirely necessary if we’re ready to build a viable left alternative to the horrors of capital and its rabid fascist offspring. 

Lewis is a communist and a member of rs21’s Manchester branch. He is involved in organising in the hospitality industry, alongside the wider left in Manchester, and has a strong interest in strategy, tactics, and how the British left can learn from European parties such as the PTB/PVDA.