We cannot build a left that is capable of taking on capital, the state, and the far-right if we insist on continuing as usual. To develop past our general inability to present a serious political challenge, we must recognise the organisational forms and strategies of our movement that have failed to reach the class we claim to represent and have kept us a highly fringe hodgepodge of sects. A key tactic that has become so commonplace on the British left is public meetings, ad infinitum.
To clarify, this is not to say that public meetings with a focus on political education are bad as a general principle, but that they have become the dominant mode of organisation across the country. The left aims to convince the masses through slogans and the weight of its ideas, using posters and social media to bring people to meetings – this is all generally done with the underlying goal of contributing to the growth in membership of a socialist sect. This, as an organising principle, simply does not produce the effects that we need.
As communists, we don’t imagine that one day the masses will realise we were right all along, and will suddenly flock to our party (or whichever niche organisation we wish to picture as our hypothetical vanguard) – it is our responsibility to go to them. If we don’t give a reason for people to come to us, other than the strength of our argument and our remarkable printing ability, then they will not. This essentially puts us down the path of maintaining our structural position as sects in relation to the class and its political conditions.
An active outreach strategy for a socialist project can’t rely on the weight of its argument and a poster on a bus stop – the university campus special doesn’t work everywhere. Outreach requires giving people a reason to show up; it means food at meetings, it means active workshops and participation in meetings, it means phonebanking, it means door knocking, it means actually asking the people of our class, who have been denied a political voice for decades, what they want from us.
The socialist movement in Britain will not slide backwards; its core foundation of left sects is made up of incredibly dedicated activists who act with almost terrifying long-term commitment to maintaining their small organisations. But, with its current trajectory, it will not move forwards either. We cannot seek to just hunker down in our meetings; we must be actively involved in shaping the lives of the class through real, tangible work – work that moves us forward and builds something that people can feel. This does not mean sacrificing the political for the material, but instead insisting that there is no viable socialist politics without material organisation and roots.
Sitting in the meetings that seem to take us nowhere, surrounded by ever the same faces, we cannot continue as usual. Spinning in place is not a strategy.
