Letters

Petty points

Further to Talal Hangari’s letter (February 12) regarding the petty bourgeois character of the Green Party, most of us likely agree deep down that it is “doubtful that many of us have a clear idea of what the petty bourgeoisie is in the 21st century”.

Obviously myriad factions of the petty bourgeoisie exist in this and other countries. Much of the traditional petty bourgeoisie is right-populist and much of the new, younger petty bourgeoisie is left-populist or left-liberal. That is partly because the latter’s access to capital tends to be lower than in the past - small businesses tend to be much smaller these days - and partly because, due to technological, economic and political advances, they have grown up in a more culturally integrated era.

Class composition is, of course, very complicated. A household might easily contain a bourgeois owner with three or four doting and loyal proletarian dependents, who would be lumpenised if he ran off with a new partner, for example.

I think the confusion Talal would like to see taken more seriously comes from a lack of appreciation for what we might call the ‘semi-proletariat’. For one thing, the tax system increasingly encourages workers to go self-employed and form limited companies - as a byproduct of corporation tax cuts, implemented to counter capitalism’s tendency to generate falling profit rates.

A lot of workers have one or more ‘side hustles’ these days. Almost anyone can advertise a part-time service to a wide audience - DJ-ing, Yoga classes, etc - or make their own custom merchandise online and start selling from their own Shopify account, for example.

Then there is the fact that more households than ever (at least in the UK and US) have direct investments in the stock market (plus indirectly through rehypothecation). Not because they are wealthier, thanks to imperialist superprofits - but because they are getting poorer and need to top up their wages and income to survive. They are effectively turning to gambling on a Ponzi scheme out of desperation. The capitalist state encourages this further by tinkering with the tax system to discourage saving, since capitalists are increasingly dependent on plundering public wealth.

The privatisation of housing, of course, turned many workers into equity holders. These sorts of developments have generated a kind of small capitalist mindset among large numbers of wage workers.

We workers do have a couple of things in common with the capitalist class. We’re all in the business of making money. And we suffer from the worst example of cognitive dissonance - what we call the commodity fetish - and increasingly so, it seems, since humans adapt to their (increasingly privatised) environment; and do not generally wish to see the economy deteriorate. Everyone seems to agree: we just need to grow the economy (make more commodities)!

How we achieve that is what is disputed. The Greens and Your Party believe that a more balanced public-private mixed economy will bring utility bills down, making commodities cheaper to produce and putting more money into the pockets of therefore higher-spending consumers. Win, win. This position may or may not be wholly determined by class character. Most pure wage workers would probably agree, because Marxism isn’t widely taught and social democracy is the sigh of the oppressed.

The problem with the theory, of course, is that the remainder of the privately owned economy will continue to suffer from falling profit rates, as innovation advances and we make more commodities in less time. This pushes prices ever-closer to zero, which results in profit-making becoming increasingly difficult - compelling capitalists to reprivatise the rest of the economy.

All of which is to say, this isn’t just a class struggle: it is a social struggle. We are trying to go from one historical social system to the next. We are faced with mass economic illiteracy, even among the brightest minds of the most advanced, scientifically brilliant workers. We are trying to rewire billions of brains from ones that take it as read that economies will always be money-based.

We really need to incorporate some kind of ‘Marxist neuroscience’ or behaviour-change science into our approach. As much as we need better class and political analysis, we also need better social and economic analysis. The present social-economic system is unsustainable, and nobody’s class character or opportunism can change that fact.

Ted Reese
Democratic Socialists of Your Party

Unpack the crap

Once again, comrade Mike Macnair has written a quite demagogic letter about the Spartacist tendency (‘Spart Cannonism’, February 12). Like the previous one (‘Spart leopard’, August 28 2025), rather than a serious attempt at dealing with our arguments and perspectives, its goal is to use false analogies and distortions to cast a “dark shadow” over us.

This time, it concerns the merger of the Revolutionary Communist Organisation with the Spartacists in Australia - in particular, our comrades’ proposals at the unity conference for a proletarian RCO. Their motion was for the RCO to aim to have 50% of its members in working class jobs. While the RCO did not adopt our proposal, Macnair still feels the need to pillory this as “crap” and a “political health warning”. Let’s unpack.

Comrade Macnair’s argument is basically that since many before us degenerated while pushing for “turns to industry”, any push to industrialise communists necessarily means political degeneration. This is what is called sophistry. Because “turns to industry” have been used in the past for opportunist goals does not mean that turning to industry is wrong. Furthermore, this evades the argument that acquiring weight in the proletariat is precisely how communist parties were forged. Every single communist party that went from a sect to a national force did so by organising workers and leading decisive sections of the proletariat in struggle. Work in the working class is thus absolutely key to rebuilding communist parties.

Often, we hear that we must first focus on the left, or students, and later on go to the workers. But this is a false dichotomy. One of the biggest problems of the socialist movement today is that it is totally divorced from the working class. Most socialist groups today (at least in the west) are made up of students, petty bourgeois and retirees, and focus the bulk of their work on campuses. This is hugely deforming and impacts the politics of the movement - which becomes dominated by petty bourgeois layers. Meanwhile, many workers are turning to the far right as the only perceived fighting alternative to the status quo. So, while communists must work on campuses and among other left groups, one of the most important points to make in those areas is to turn to the working class, and fight the tendency to focus only among students and intellectuals.

Of course, Macnair is right when he notes that “proletarianising” is not a talisman against degeneration. We have never argued this. In fact, having more workers brings new problems and pressures on the party - which highlights the key role of having good leadership of the party. But having next to no workers is even worse. It means the isolation of the party from the class it seeks to represent, and encourages sectarianism and dilettantism.

Regarding the RCO, this is a group which - like most - is in its vast majority made up of young students and declassed intellectuals. In this case, it is quite important to consciously push some of them into working class jobs. Together with political education, patient and serious work in the working class is the best school to form disciplined, communist cadres. Furthermore, there is a real material question here: there is little prospect any more for youth to go to university and get comfortable petty bourgeois jobs. Most end up in debt with no job prospects. It is much better for young revolutionaries to become plumbers, electricians, welders, nurses or even teachers and get a decent job, in which they can be on the front line of rebuilding the trade union movement. I fear Macnair’s view is tainted by a form of political post-traumatic stress disorder.

Another point linked to this is that, when we say “serious work in the working class”, we do not mean cozying up to the union bureaucracy, or voting paper motions in deserted branch meetings. This is too often what passes for ‘trade union work’ among the left. What we mean is to really rebuild the unions, which are today completely hollowed out, by pushing and organising struggles for what workers need. Crucially, this must be done in constant struggle against the union bureaucracy.

The merger of the RCO and the Spartacist League of Australia is a massive win for the communist movement there and beyond. After years of talking about communist unity in the pages of the Weekly Worker, this merger is actually the first real achievement of this perspective. So we are puzzled as to why comrade Macnair wrote a letter (again) essentially bashing the Sparts by digging up examples from 50 years ago. We would prefer that Macnair and the PCC respond seriously to our arguments. They might also want to reflect as to why the Spartacists have been virtually the only tendency that has seriously taken up the struggle for communist unity.

For those who want to know more, we recommend listening to the latest episode of our English-language podcast, SpartTalk, titled ‘Australian communists merge’ (February 13, wherever you get your podcasts), where SLA and RCO leaders lay out their views of this quite historic fusion.

Vincent David
Spartacist League

Vote GL?

While most groups on the left, including the Socialist Workers Party, have no problem calling on all of its members and supporters to vote for the Grassroots Left slate, some organisations seem to find it somewhat more difficult. Dave Nellist has written online that, after having been barred as a candidate, he supports the GL candidates for the West Midlands - Megan Clarke and Graham Jones. But an official editorial in The Socialist is a lot less clear on the matter and does not mention the word ‘Grassroots Left’ (or ‘The Many’, for that matter):

“We call on Your Party members to vote for candidates in their regions who support the call for the party to ‘turn to the working class’, to put the trade unions central, to make the most of the opportunities presented for an anti-cuts socialist stand in May’s elections, and stand against exclusions of socialists. This approach is not wholly applicable for all the candidates for the national office holders. Neither Jeremy Corbyn nor Zarah Sultana, for example, see the need to orientate to the organised working class with a campaign aimed at the base of the trade unions.”

In other words, neither slate agrees with SPEW’s increasingly bizarre insistence that Your Party should become a federal party with special privileges for trade unions - ie, union bureaucrats. The implication of the editorial is to vote for GL, but it is very odd that the comrades cannot get themselves to say it out loud. Perhaps comrade Nellist was even breaking ranks by putting out his personal support for Jones and Clarke.

Then there is the truly perplexing statement from Revolutionary Socialism in the 21st Century, which pretty much sums up what is wrong with the organisation - it cannot give any clear leadership, on anything: “The polarisation in Your Party is now existential: a CEC controlled by Corbyn’s camp will likely lead to the ostracisation of the radical left, while one controlled by Sultana’s may lead to Corbyn’s departure. The best outcome for these elections would be a balanced CEC, including the best of both slates and independents.” (revsoc21.uk/2026/02/10/your-party-cec-elections.)

Come again? A “balanced CEC” would clearly be one of the worst possible outcomes of the elections - the fighting over the direction of Your Party would continue, without being resolved either way. The vast majority of the members would soon get sick of it and leave. Yes, RS21 then goes on to call for a vote for GL, but the idea that “both wings” are “required to make it a success” has more than a hint of centrism about it. No, you don’t need a right wing in a socialist party. In fact, you should try and get rid of it.

The statement also recommends that, “Your Party should not make the mistake of distancing itself from the Green surge.” Again, this does not come with clarity on what it means in practice. The comrades do not even spell out if people in Gorton and Denton should vote for the Green candidate Hannah Spencer (this is implied by the half-sentence “a win for the Greens would be the best outcome under the circumstances”). Are the comrades arguing for dual membership? Maybe they are saying we shouldn’t criticise the Greens? Do they think Your Party should aim for local or national coalition governments with the Green Party? We don’t know. We suspect most RS21 members don’t know either. What is often presented as a strength of RS21 is actually a profound programmatic weakness.

Yes, thousands (if not tens of thousands) among the 800,000 who signed up to ‘express an interest’ in forming a new socialist party have now joined the Green Party instead. This is mainly down to the Corbyn clique messing things up so much, as well as ex-Liberal Democrat Zack Polanski having spotted a gap in the market, which means he is currently posing left. But the Greens are not a semi-socialist party. This is a misconception we must fight, including arguing against dual membership with the Greens, as some GL supporters have done. We need exactly the opposite approach, explaining that the Green Party is not a working class party, that it does not want to overcome capitalism and that dual membership should be a logical impossibility - you cannot argue for and against capitalism at the same time.

Matt Rubens
email

Imperiali STV

Your comments on the use of the Imperiali quota in Single Transferable Vote elections are not entirely correct. The lower quota value of Imperiali (votes/seats+2) means that the surplus vote transfers from ballots for the leading candidates will be even greater than with the more common Droop or Hare quotas.

So it really is worth voting for more than two candidates. It will indeed favour slates including candidates who get a huge personal vote which then transfers to other candidates because fewer votes will get used up by the quota that elects the first candidate.

Phil Pope
Bristol

Change tactics

Firstly, I have just voted in the Your Party election. I found it strikingly easy to vote for candidates that most Weekly Worker readers could broadly support, even if the result will still be a diluted, compromised version of the socialist party we actually need. That, however, is hardly unusual. Even the Bolsheviks had to fight their way through compromise, diplomacy and factional struggle at the outset.

For the first time in my 74 years, a vote made me feel politically included - as though I was voting for people who might genuinely represent my views. I never once felt that as a Labour Party member. That alone suggests something may finally be shifting on the left, even if I fully expect an eventual meltdown, once egos and internal contradictions collide.

Like most of your readers, I am appalled by the worldwide banning and suppression of pro-Palestinian organisations. This raises a broader tactical question: is one of the left’s recurring weaknesses its tendency to organise around single-issue, easily isolated causes?

Until recently, international law - rooted in the Geneva Conventions - placed limits on acceptable behaviour in war. The deliberate targeting of civilians could not be openly defended. Since Trump helped tear up the post-war settlement, those limits have been quietly abandoned. Governments now either support or remain silent about atrocities that would previously have been indefensible. The left has not yet adjusted its tactics to this new reality.

The argument should be brutally simple: any government that deliberately kills or injures civilians - including women and children - should be sanctioned. No qualifications. No contextual evasions.

By focusing on the universal right not to be targeted as a civilian, the debate is shifted away from the emotive terrain that Zionists currently exploit. Strip the argument of religious claims, ethnic narratives, Hamas justifications and historical exceptionalism, and force a single question: do you support the killing of women and children?

I am not convinced that this question can be answered in the affirmative without openly implicating oneself in genocide - or in the negative without collapsing the current Zionist defence. At present, that defence relies heavily on the holocaust and on branding pro-Palestinian organisations as terrorist sympathisers. This strategy muddies the water and enables repression. It works precisely because the argument is framed as ‘Palestine’ rather than as the killing of civilians.

This is not an argument against pro-Palestinian organisations or their politics. It is a recognition that they are being successfully neutralised - which means tactics must change. Could any government plausibly ban a march carrying banners that simply ask, “Is it right to kill women and children?” The police already look absurd arresting people with pro-Palestinian placards. How would they look arresting pensioners carrying that question? No reference to Palestine would even be necessary. Everyone already knows where this is happening. The point is to force an answer that cannot be deflected.

Socialism is unambiguous on these questions. If the left is serious about confronting the right, it must relearn how to ask difficult questions rather than rely solely on adversarial declarations. This used to be a political skill. Many older politicians dismantled their opponents with a single, well-aimed question. Prime Minister’s Questions once meant exactly that - before politics degenerated into character assassination and media theatre.

PE Williams
email

Lights out

On February 12 I attended a Your Party/The Many hustings in a village near Cambridge with Jeremy Corbyn, Jo Rust, Michael Mulquin and guest Ismail Uddin (The Many candidate for Yorkshire).

I asked the question on the Labour Party in regards to its bans and proscriptions and what Corbyn and anyone else on the panel thought about the banning of the Communist Party and the fact that MP Phil Piratin - who had helped organise rent strikes in 1938-39 and was elected in 1945 - was a CPGB member. I also pointed out that, in YP, Dave Nellist was kicked out.

I wanted to try and expose the hypocrisy in YP’s exclusion of the rest of the left, but Shizuka Jane Pye (Kika), who was chairing, gave me only one minute to speak! I already knew it would be bad, but when someone warned me that Kika was the organiser and chair, I knew it would be terrible, so my expectations were low. Anyway, nobody answered my question or even addressed it.

Jo Rust, despite posing with comrades I know who are in Cambridge SWP (seen on an overhead projector of pictures of The Many and their slogans, such as ‘For members, not sects’, blah, blah, blah), said we can’t work with people who don’t support the “aims and aspirations of Your Party” and that YP needs to be a “broad church”, working “with all parties”. Uddin talked about abiding by the “decisions of conference” and getting “back on track” (so vacuous). Corbyn said opinions and views are fine, but “we’re not a debating society” (he doesn’t want to be scrutinised, in other words).

Comrade Inacio asked Corbyn again on ‘dual membership’, and Corbyn briefly responded about the vote at conference. There was a bit of back and forth between the two. Inacio kept pressing him on the fact that there had been no real choice to accept dual membership: it was either reject it or ‘a maybe’. Corbyn said he believed in the need to be clear who would be allowed and it would be for the CEC to decide. Inacio said, “For everybody”? This sparked off the chair to say, “Would you allow Reform in?” There was lots of heckling about allowing socialists in - and counter-heckling to stop the “disruption”. One Corbyn supporter even threatened to throw out any “disruptive” hecklers.

Anyway, the hustings only started after Corbyn arrived about 15 minutes late and then, as he took his seat, there was a power cut in the whole street. Thus, the lights went out for the whole of the hustings and only came back on when the meeting had finished - a neat metaphor for Corbynism/The Many.

Julian Harris
Cambridge

YP duals

This is the Republic Your Party resolution adopted unanimously on February 12 on the expulsion of Rob Rooney, the South West region candidate for the YP central executive committee:

1. RYP notes the failure of the Grassroots Left (GL) to support our open letter to Jeremy Corbyn and Zara Sultana. This letter opposed, on principled democratic grounds, the exclusion of dual members from the CEC elections. GL did not support our petition demanding political accountability.

2. Had GL members and the organisations with dual members supported our petition, then a dialogue could have begun with either or both of the joint leaders. With strong support across the party, this might have had a democratic deterrent effect against further expulsions.

3. Despite the failure of GL to support our open letter and the petition, Republic YP opposes the expulsion of Rob Rooney in line with the principles of our open letter and petition.

4. We urge all democratically minded members of YP to sign the petition in support of Rob Rooney and the defence of YP democratic practice.

Republic Your Party
email

More confusion

Eddie Ford’s criticism of Alex Callinicos is typical Trotskyist ultra-left sectarianism (‘Spreading panic and confusion’, February 12).

Trotskyists have never understood that the class struggle of the proletariat consists of two distinct stages: the defensive and the offensive. Not understanding these two distinct stages of the class struggle, Trotskyism has traditionally condemned the popular front. For instance, during World War II, Trotskyism adopted the policy of revolutionary defeatism. This meant calling for the defeat of Britain by the Nazis. It would be interesting to know if Callinicos and the SWP retrospectively defend this Trotskyist policy.

What the left needs to understand is that, with the exception of the direct struggle for power, every struggle of the working class is a defensive struggle. Ultra-leftists don’t understand this. They only have one view of the class struggle - as an offensive campaign.

The thing is that, when the working class and its political leadership are not engaged in a direct struggle for power, we need to unite the greatest number of people as possible against fascism. This is the meaning of the popular front, which the ultra-left sectarians of Trotskyism do not understand. It represents the defensive stage of the class struggle, not a direct struggle for power by the working class. It is the defence of bourgeois democracy against fascism.

The two main political forces in society are revolution and counterrevolution. At the present time, the far-right supporters of the counterrevolution are on the offensive.

When Ford says that something is changing in the US, but it’s not mutating into fascism, he misses the point. What is changing in the US is that there is a process of political polarisation taking place, between left and right, revolution and counterrevolution. The same process is taking place in Britain, for instance. Fascism, the essence of which is the suppression of bourgeois democracy, can take different forms. It doesn’t have to take the form of old-style fascism.

This polarisation process is important because it allows us to see who is on the side of revolution and who is on the side of counterrevolution, so that we can unite the maximum number of people against the latter in the defensive stage of the class struggle.

Please, Eddie, stop confusing a defensive stage of the class struggle with the struggle for power.

Tony Clark
For Democratic Socialism

Frog apologist

Foreign secretary Yvette Cooper’s startling claim over the weekend that the Russian state assassinated opposition leader Alexei Navalny with poison from an Ecuadorian dart frog clearly makes absolute sense.

Of course, it was a pure coincidence that the claim was made at the same time as the Munich Security Conference was taking place, on February 15, the anniversary of when Navalny last appeared in court, and when Russia needs to be further pressured at a very delicate point in the negotiations over Ukraine. Also a pure coincidence: the UK is about to announce a fast-tracking of massive increases in defence spending - actually spending on preparing for war with the Russian Federation, which Nato appears to be actively planning in the next couple of years or so.

Apparently, the said Ecuadorian dart frog can only produce the poison when feasting on small invertebrates natural to its habitat of subtropical or tropical lowland forests. So presumably the Russian state agencies travelled halfway across the world to an Ecuadorian forest to catch a poor frog and extracted its poison. Or perhaps they transplanted a section of the tropical forest to support a frog colony in Moscow. Another line fed to the media over the weekend claimed (inconsistently) that the Russians manufactured the poison in one of their own laboratories. So not from an Ecuadorian dart frog after all!

Cooper states she now “knows” the Russians have quantities of the poison in stock, presumably in some top-secret location. Well, we all know Cooper’s sterling reputation for straight talking, and for honesty and integrity in all circumstances, but how can she possibly “know” this to be the case? If she “knows” the Russians have this poison in some top-secret laboratory, one must assume that the British have some sort of spy in there, who let them know (plus, of course, another agent who had access to Navalny’s autopsy results).

Who Cooper has presumably thrown under the proverbial bus (as if there is a top-secret laboratory with this specific poison) it will probably take the Russian security services less than 20 minutes to work out exactly (if there is a scintilla of truth in any of this, of course!).

The 47-year-old Navalny was sentenced to 19 years in an Arctic penal colony effective from December 2023 for embezzlement and other charges. Russian penitentiaries and penal colonies are not exactly holiday camps. If the plan was to neutralise Navalny as a credible opponent, it would seem a far more effective strategy to have allowed him to simply serve out part or all his sentence. Indeed, that was the very accusation made in the west when Navalny was convicted and sentenced.

If it was decided to bump him off, would you really choose to traipse halfway round the world to obtain some particularly exotic and unique frog poison to do it? Why? There would surely be a whole host of simpler and more local methods available - and a lot more convincing!

Andrew Northall
Kettering

Hugo voter

As an ex-member of the Green Party, I was pleased to read Jack Conrad’s article about the Gorton and Denton by-election, which will take place on Thursday, February 26 (‘Not red on the inside’, February 12).

Jack is correct to expose how the 800 Green Party councillors across Britain are complicit in voting for cuts in local authority budgets. He is also right when he describes the passive and not-so-passive support of SPEW, SWP, Counterfire, CPB, ACR and WPGB for the Green Party candidate in the coming parliamentary by-election.

However, I disagree with his conclusion that communists should call on the people of Gorton and Denton to vote for the Labour candidate to stop the election of a Reform MP. Jack seems to live in the Westminster bubble, divorced from the hatred that working class people in the rest of the country have for Starmer’s Labour government.

Given that, according to Eddie Ford, Reform is not a fascist party in spite of its 270,000 working class members, and that we are not facing the prospect of a fascist government (‘Spreading panic and confusion’, February 12), I think it would be far better if Jack called for a vote for Hugo Wils, the candidate of the Communist League in the by-election. Such a call would be better than his call for a vote for a candidate of a failing government.

John Smithee
Cambridgeshire

Poison pen

‘Lefties’ is a useful shorthand to discuss various ponces. Actually, they are not leftists, but revisionists: ‘red libs’, Trotskyists, anarchists and liberals - whose stupid games are fully endorsed by capitalism.

They are no longer Marxists. Why? Because they chose ‘neo-Marxism’ and the Frankfurt School agenda. These are revisionist philosophies which dumped class struggle, class war and economic socialism (all the core tenets of Marxist ideology). Marcuse, Fromm, Gramsci - all their intellectuals decided that the working class had to be dispensed with, because (the idea goes) we are not revolutionary, and never will be (shows how much they know).

We should therefore be replaced with a ‘rainbow coalition’ of black people, homosexuals, the disabled, bourgeois university graduates, highly positioned and well paid technical workers and professionals. All the people who constitute the current Labour Party!

These wokists still believe that they are leftists, still call themselves ‘socialists’. But they are assuredly not: they are poison, pure and simple. Revisionist poison - our class and national enemies.

Warwick Alderman
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