Led By Donkeys
“Hide nothing from the masses of our people. Tell no lies. Expose lies whenever they are told. Mask no difficulties, mistakes, failures. Claim no easy victories.”
-Amilcar Cabral, Revolution in Guinea1
The past few months have been marked by a series of tumultuous events on the Left in Britain, with the emergence of Your Party and the surrounding charades. What could have been an era-defining opportunity in working-class politics is currently being squandered not by external forces of reaction but by the anti-political way in which the founding process is organised. An endless series of backroom dealings representing the worst of Labourism and the way the trade union bureaucracy engages in “politics”. Throughout this charade, the self-appointed clique was unwilling to put members in control, opting for a loose party aiming to secure another re-election of largely unaccountable MPs. We had to deal with a series of party launches, (non/re)launches and unclear communication; the few hopeful moments in the regional assemblies were when comrades of the Sheffield proto-branch and elsewhere put politics in command and, alongside inspiration by the Democratic Socialists faction, put their own politics forward against the shambolic setup by Collective et al.2. This is symptomatic that the leadership of Your Party and the wider left have been utterly incompetent in developing any politics of self-emancipation3.
The obstacles to developing this politics are, on the one hand, that the leadership of the various socialist groups (well, most of them) has no interest in the politics of working-class power. Stuck in the nostalgia of 20th-century Trotskyist and Marxist-Leninist tendencies, they are too preoccupied with sucking the lifeblood of their cadre in between an endless series of power abuses and splits over random deviations from the immortal science their geriatric gurus conjured 60 years ago. How a mass communist movement of the present will materialise by rehashing the mistaken ideological tendencies of the past, while each group recruits one by one for their own sect, is left for future generations to answer. We have no communist programme for the 21st century, embraced by the masses or a movement of millions to push it forward. We are not gonna get one with our existing modus operandi stuck between bureaucratic centralist sects and movementist liquidationism.
Alongside the fragmented socialist groups, we have to deal with another section of the Left in Britain operating as a “Network Left”, tapping each other on the shoulder as the self-appointed organising gurus of the Left:
“By Network Left, I mean figures who are active on the British left whose organising method is based on using their relationships with a narrow selection of other individuals ‘in key positions’ to initiate campaigns and groups. These networks may have come about by virtue of people’s institutional position in NGOs, left-publications, or campaigning organisations, their social media following, or their previous role in projects around Corbynism. Their outward facing orientation, whether they are intentional about it or not, is to other ‘key figures’ on the left in private to begin projects.”
Between opportunist triangulation, sect (re)production and backroom patronage, we need to get a grip. We need a mode of politics that can pose an alternative political strategy to the existing order. The tasks for Communists in Britain are colossal, and we cannot pretend otherwise. But it is the burden we inherited by being part of a Communist movement and the legacy it left for the 21st century. This task means inheriting a mission of transforming and revitalising Marxism (and Marxist politics) as a new “conception of the world” capable of breaking away from our current politico-organisational impasse, or as Peter D. Thomas has recently put it:
“If the subaltern classes do not elaborate their own hegemonic apparatus capable of challenging the relations of force condensed in the established ‘political society’ of the bourgeois integral state, they will remain subaltern to its overdeterminations. Similarly, without the elaboration of its own philosophy, or concrete conception of the world elaborated in institutions adequate to the specificity of its own project, the movement of the oppressed and exploited classes of capitalist society will remain subaltern to the existing dominant ‘conception of the world’.”4
Otherwise, the Left in Britain will remain caught in an Arnoldian twilight, ‘wandering between two worlds, one dead, the other powerless to be born’5 stuck in an endless cycle of blind leading the blind, jumping between left sects and broad left electoralism. This piece will not even remotely provide this conception beyond mere provocations, but I hope that comrades will take this dialogical invitation to develop this “conception of the world” further.
Towards a Politics
Looking at the Arab political subject before and after Al-Aqsa Flood, Nihal El Aasar explored how to shift a paralysed political subject “from being a bystander and witness to becoming an agent of history”6. Similar to the Arab political subject before Al-Aqsa Flood, the communist subject in Britain has seen better days. The destruction of the trade unions by Thatcher, the contradictory impotence of both Labourism and British Communism7 and now the devastation caused by Starmerism put us in a questionable position vis-a-vis revolutionary subjectivity. With the current state of British Communism, none of the existing organisations on their own are equipped to break us away from a common sense of sect-form loyalism, electoral opportunism, and movementist liquidationism. This political decomposition results from the ideological defeat of the existing Left and its inability to construct a (counter)hegemonic political project. Now the communist subject becomes tangled in a mire of melancholia and nostalgia, stuck in an infinite set of micro-projects.
El Aasar, by leveraging Hannah Proctor’s insightful book Burnout, argued that “seen through the lens of melancholia, defeat is not merely about affect. This change in political subjectivity is material—not merely intellectual, but experiential. In order to change this condition, prevent lingering feelings of melancholia, and reengage in political struggle, we have to grapple with defeat as a material reality, rather than as an epochal event”. On the one hand it is the responsibility of publications such as Prometheus to investigate this material reality following Cabral’s “hide nothing from the masses” as its motto. On the other hand, we can see a spark of hope outside of this melancholia. Like the new kind of Arab political subjectivity created by Al-Aqsa Flood, the Palestinian cause has created the terrain to shift in emancipatory politics, and a new political subjectivity here in Britain is “struggling to be born”. From the millions marching, the thousands engaging in direct action, and the countless being introduced to revolutionary politics because of Gaza, we see the potential spark from the British Left to break from its melancholia and recompose itself into a new communist subject, tying together national liberation, anti-imperialism, anti-oppression, and anti-capitalism into a new integral mode of politics.
This new mode of politics has the opportunity to qualitatively transform into a revolutionary methodology, embodying a politics that has full fidelity to the masses and their ability to become the authors of their own epic of self-emancipation. While the Left has frequently focused on its crisis of leadership or prioritising questions of structure and constitution, this is merely a mystification of the underlying issue: an inability to articulate a politics, a lack of a political programme, and a lack of an “alternative conception of the world.” We are lacking a politics that places the masses as protagonists and, by developing a universal programme of self-emancipation, aims to awaken workers and the oppressed to a world-historic mission: winning freedom from all forms of domination. Whilst we are seeing the early steps towards such an emancipatory programme emerging from this year’s The World Transformed, the road to power is going to be a long one.
What follows is, in my assessment, the necessary components needed to turn this growing left-wing oppositional movement, galvanised by the opposition to the genocide of Palestinians by the Zionist Entity, alongside struggles against carcerality and for trans liberation, into an organised mass movement capable of achieving its aims.
For Unity around a Programme
“Without a political program, we have no way of seriously posing an alternative to the established parties of capital, and articulating a vision of society for the democratic class rule of workers.”
– Parker McQueeney, Why Have a Political Program?
The early excitement for Your Party and the Greens’ growth clearly indicates a rising interest in party-building among the Left in Britain. In contrast to the broad political basis of both initiatives8 I argue for the necessity of a mass party that unites the majority of the proletariat under its wings—a unity not based on particular theoretical positions, but based on a common political programme. Through factional contestation of this programme, linked to and conducted within the many forms of class struggle, the left can break the endless cycle of splits and moribund sects and form the kinds of hegemonic apparatuses needed for revolution and the conquest of political power. The minimum-maximum programme format of Marx and Guesde’s Programme of the Parti Ouvrier and the German SPD’s Erfurt Programme are designed for that task.
The programme facilitates the political changes necessary for the working class to break free from economism and tailism by articulating demands from various movements and struggles to the level of the State, i.e., as political demands. This enables us to make clear the historical task of the working class: the establishment of a communist society. Instead of offering shortcuts to power through Labourism or harbouring delusions that workers and the oppressed can be coddled into action by raising vapid “transitional” slogans, hoping they will eventually create a revolutionary situation, it is essential to break away from existing common sense. It offers the “good news” of a political alternative to the working class. This type of programme ties together demands for democracy, power, and hegemony in the workers’ movement. It politicises the workers and raises their consciousness, allowing them to demand the democratisation and de-bureaucratisation of the bourgeois State and its transformation into a Social Republic.
With these demands, we provide the working class with a clear path to becoming a class for itself and become the active protagonists of a mission to establish a Social Republic, thereby reconstructing the existing order into a socialist one. The minimum-maximum program, rather than a shopping list of sub-reformist demands for the state or empty revolutionary phrasemongering, is a roadmap to build a workers’ movement that is aware of what it is fighting for and confident in its aims. The “minimum” outlines the demands we raise to democratise and de-bureaucratise the bourgeois state and establish a Social Republic, the dictatorship of the proletariat. The “maximum” keeps the final goal of communism ever present in our organising and raises the set of demands needed to 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. To ensure the existence of such a programme, we fight for the unity of the Marxist left and bring the good news of socialism to the masses in and around it.
For a mass Communist Party
“Marx fought for the unity of all principled revolutionaries around a strategy for the proletariat to constitute itself as a class and fight for political power, not for the purity of a micro-sect. Many are wary of the project of party-building today because of the toxic attitudes of sectarians who promote disunity, and one should not mistake my argument in favor of a workers’ party as an argument for a new sect. What is needed is the unity of Marxists within the existing left around a program of class independence and a strategy of building a party that will organize working-class communities and contest elections. Such unity will require a breakup of sectarian identities in favor of collaboration and mergers, and will not be easily won.”
-Donald Parkinson, Without a Party, We Have Nothing
The party represents the single-most important institution of the socialist movement. The party exists to organise the working class in a political struggle to win the battle of democracy. It therefore exists to unify the individual struggles of sections of the working class and articulate them into a strategy and programme for the working class as a whole. The party represents both a tribune of the working class against the State and a means of collective decision-making for the entire class. It becomes both a laboratory for the entire working class to experiment during its struggles and a vehicle to unify its interests and elevate them to the level of the State, thereby enabling it to exercise leadership as part of its mission to become hegemonic. It must thereby be an integral part of the everyday life of the workers through building alternative institutions and media that offer a new conception of the world, and not, as some communists think, fall from the sky the day of the Revolution.
The merger formula describes this party model, representing the unification of the workers’ movement and socialism. This does not mean that a working-class party has intellectuals swooping in to impose a socialist programme upon them. The workers’ movement, by engaging the working class in struggle, raises their economic, intellectual, and political power and provides them with the means to make socialism their goal.
In the absence of this party, our primary purpose as communists is to build one. We can only achieve this through the patient struggle for democracy, a party, and a programme within the socialist and workers’ movements. Within Your Party, we should strive to be a mass membership party, not an electoral front led by MPs or their staff, whose political basis is determined by a common programme drafted and amended at every conference. Its politics should go beyond canvassing for careerists and seek to elevate the left’s politics to a mass level, building the base for a new communist movement that can lead the masses towards liberation. Only by uniting under a mass communist party and a minimum-maximum programme will we bring the twilight of capitalism and herald the coming of a new civilisation.
For a Republican Communist Civilisation
A crucial yet often missing element from contemporary Marxism is Marx’s conception of freedom. We need to reclaim the lost republican freedom, understood in the negative sense as freedom from domination or the absence of any arbitrary power9. This means not just the freedom from interference, which can exist under a liberal constitutional regime, but also the very possibility of interference. Against the “anti-politics” of the existing left, which either underestimates the contradictory class nature of our society, denies the necessity for political struggle at the level of the State, or argues for a technocratic conception of communist society free from political conflict and without political institutions, we must reclaim an explicitly political critique of how capitalism creates these relations of domination at the international state through imperialism and market exchange as well as denials of sovereignty for the Global South. For example, Adom Getachew has recently argued that rather than seeing “decolonization as a moment of nation-building in which the anticolonial demand for self-determination culminated in the rejection of alien rule and the formation of nation-states”, we should be seeing it as “worldmaking” moment, one aiming to create a global counterpoint of non-domination against the hierarchies of domination built by imperialism and empire10. Similarly, Tara Alami argued that Palestinian Liberation is not a state-building project but a multifaceted and layered struggle, going beyond the limits of the Western nation-state11. Freedom from domination is the slogan of our age, one that makes 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. It is our sacred obligation to the workers and oppressed to abandon our “anti-politics” and fight for a republican communist civilisation.
In Britain, this implies that the conquest of political power by the working class would establish a Social Republic: not merely a bourgeois state without a monarch, but a polity with the maximum possible self-government. Every city, town and village is built as a Commune with its own deliberative assemblies of self-governance, all linked together to regional and central assemblies by delegates which exercise the remaining governing functions not carried out by the local communes. All elected officials and representatives are subject to an imperative mandate, are recallable, and are subject to strict term limits. The judiciary is elected and subject to recall, and the masses’ self-arming replaces the police and the army with a people’s militia. No separation of executive and legislative bodies, no monarch or president with the powers of a monarch, only the citizens themselves ruling their lives through the communes. It is only by the maximum political participation offered by this Republic that the working class can obtain the power needed to transform society.
Far from a mere slogan, the Social Republic is the only form of government in which the working class may exercise true power, as opposed to the illusion of power which comes from entering government in a bourgeois regime or by the rejection of politics in favour of rapid communisation. The Republic is therefore indispensable for any politics of self-emancipation. We aim to equip our class with the arguments, knowledge, and confidence necessary to build a hegemonic bloc strong enough to establish a Social Republic and, with that, usher in a new republican civilisation based on the principle: “From each according to their ability, to each according to their needs”. Now onwards to a Social Republic of Britain and hundreds of Social Republics across the world, to a World Social Republic.
References
- Amilcar Cabral, “Tell no lies, Claim no easy victories…”, Marxist Internet Archive, https://www.marxists.org/subject/africa/cabral/1965/tnlcnev.htm
↩︎ - See Tina Becker’s report: https://weeklyworker.co.uk/worker/1560/doing-things-differently/ & the Democratic Socialist’s report here: https://dsyp.org/2025/11/07/your-party-south-london-assembly-dotocracy-in-action/
↩︎ - See Archie Woodrow, “Whose party is it anyway?”, Prometheus, September 9th,2025, https://prometheusjournal.org/2025/09/09/whose-party-is-it-anyway/
↩︎ - Peter D. Thomas. The Gramscian Moment: Philosophy, Hegemony and Marxism (Haymarket Books, 2011)
↩︎ - Matthew Arnold, “Stanzas from the Grande Chartreuse”, https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/43605/stanzas-from-the-grande-chartreuse
↩︎ - Nihal El Aasar, “Left-wing Melancholia”, Parapraxis Magazine, 2024, https://www.parapraxismagazine.com/articles/leftwing-melancholia
↩︎ - See Mike Macnair, Revolutionary Strategy: Marxism and the challenge of left unity (November Publications, 2008) a book that tried to move us away from 20th century dogmas.
↩︎ - This is not an argument to abstain from engaging in Your Party work; just the necessity to be clear that its current political basis is very weak. We should be participating in mass class struggle that is I hope self-evident, my emphasis is that regardless of the broad basis we should and must try to argue for and win people over our liberatory politics.
↩︎ - For the discovery of Marx’s lost republicanism see Bruno Leipold, Citizen Marx: Republicanism and the Formation of Karl Marx’s Social and Political Thought (Princeton University Press, 2024) alongside Søren Mau, “Marx’s Republican Communism“, Spectre Journal, May 29, 2025, https://spectrejournal.com/marxs-republican-communism/ and our recent inteview with Bruno Leipold:https://prometheusjournal.org/2024/12/20/citizen-marx-an-interview/
↩︎ - Adom Getachew, Worldmaking after Empire: The Rise and Fall of Self-Determination (Princeton University Press, 2019), Introduction
↩︎ - Tara Alami, “Palestinian Liberation Is Not a State-Building Project”, September 25, 2025, https://taraalami.substack.com/p/palestinian-liberation-is-not-a-state
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