26.03.2026

Through the Slough of Despond

Things have changed here and there, but not positively. Israel’s war on the Palestinians has become a US-Israeli war on Iran, YP proved stillborn and the climate crisis gets worse. Mike Macnair reports

We held our annual general meeting online on March 22. The day was primarily occupied with discussion and amendment of the ‘Assessments and perspectives’ document, which we will publish in the next issue of this paper.

Jack Conrad introduced it. He said that comparison with last year’s document¹ shows that relatively little has changed in our assessment of the situation: what has changed has been the continuation of a worsening situation. This year we decided to put the climate crisis upfront. This is not to diminish the evident war threat - these are the two ways in which humanity can be destroyed in the near future.

However, we should be looking to make climate a major theme of this year’s Communist University and we also need to work on the CPGB minimum programme on this issue. Nicolai Bukharin made the point that socialism does not take over from capitalism in a smooth way, the process of overthrow having unavoidable negative effects. The effects of human-induced climate change have already reached the point that working class rule will inherit a significantly degraded world, and we need to work on proposals to deal with the problems.

On the threat of war, he thought we were right to judge that, contrary to common liberal views, Donald Trump is not an ‘isolationist’. The USA itself remains the global power and there was always an iron fist within the velvet glove of the post-1945 arrangements. Equally, Trump is not a ‘fascist’: fascism was a response to a real threat of proletarian revolution. Today there is no such threat. On the contrary, though far-right politics is on the rise, the left clings to weaker and weaker forms of popular frontism, the latest version being the Together Alliance, with the slogan, ‘Love’. The far right is on the rise globally, with clear support from the Trump administration - even the ‘pink tide’ in Latin America has receded in the last year, and Trump has pulled a spectacular ‘decapitation’ deal in Venezuela and now threatens Cuba.

The only thing that can stop this trend is the working class beginning to organise itself as a potential ruling class. But the left continues to peddle illusions in liberalism and nationalism - George Galloway’s latest adoption of Scots nationalism is only a step further from his previous Brit nationalism. By promoting these popular front projects the left taints itself as part of the political establishment, and by doing so lends indirect support to the far-right populists.

Referring to the Corbynistas last year, we said, “We should expect nothing worthwhile coming from this quarter”. We have, in fact, seen something from them: Your Party. But this is almost certainly a stillbirth, due to Corbyn and his immediate associates’ determination to keep tight bureaucratic control, at the expense of mobilising the ranks. Some 800,000 initially expressed interest, but only 25,000 confirmed their membership in order to vote in the recent leadership elections. Meanwhile, the party that is growing radically is the Greens.

The present world is one in which people are blown very easily from one fashion to the next. The Corbyn campaign for leadership of the Labour Party and his victory produced a wave of euphoria, but the mass influx into Labour did not survive the first constituency meeting confronting many of the new members. Both the Labour membership surge and Momentum were killed by the Corbyn leadership’s fear of self-activity among the ranks and the possible influence of left groups. So it is in Your Party too.

But we should not break with engagement in YP. The Grassroots Left is clinging on by its nails, but is threatened by the visceral reaction against freedom of speech of Richard Brenner and other ‘code of conduct’ advocates: the standard far left leaders’ fear of openness (the labour bureaucracy writ small). We previously fought this conception in Left Unity, and in the Socialist Alliance, where the Socialist Workers Party’s first proposal after it joined was to try to expel us for public reporting.

Last year we had some hope in the ‘Forging Communist Unity’ process. Comrade Conrad confessed to having been “up one week and down the next” in this process; by July it was clearly dying, but we were right to drag it out to the jointly sponsored Communist University in August. Talking About Socialism has clearly ‘blown it’ as a party-building project.²

There exists a vague element on the left that appears to talk our language, but comrade Conrad does not hold out much hope in this tendency. As Marx put it, “The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living”. The basic ideas of today’s left go back to ‘official communism’ and bureaucratic socialism of one sort or another, stretching back to the non-Marxist left of the later 19th century: Bonapartist leaders, commitments to coalitions with liberalism or nationalism, and so on; these are absorbed with their mothers’ milk by left social democrats, ‘official communists’, Maoists and Trotskyists alike. All we can say for our alternative approach is that we think this is the best possible way forward.

The Green surge looks like the latest superficial left fashion, with Zack Polanski as the latest ‘man on a white horse’ to be followed. The party is capable of seeming very left: a few years back, its manifesto included the people’s militia. But precisely because it is not a party of proletarian socialism, it is potentially ‘buyable’. We should compare them with the Green surge in Germany in the 1980s: today the German Greens are the most warmongering Atlanticist party in the Bundestag, and the recipient of big donations from capital. A small symptom: pressed by the Tory press on the Greens’ policy of disestablishing the Church of England, Polanski responded that this policy “will not be a priority in the coming elections” - the usual sort of evasion that displays entry of ‘contender parties’ into the regime of capitalist control.

Comrade Conrad ended his introduction by responding to some of the proposed amendments, which will be discussed further on in this report. We went on to a general discussion of the document, followed by specific discussion of the amendments that had been proposed.

Debate

In the general discussion, comrade Andy Hannah said there was a problem, in the first part of the text, of ‘catastrophism’, which the left had repeatedly used to argue for short-cut politics; particularly in point 4, where it is suggested that capitalism has reached its absolute limits. Lenin somewhere says that there are no inescapable crises for capitalism; these are solved, every time, by destroying large numbers of human beings and productive resources.

Comrade Carla Roberts said the document was good, but had no easy answers. As for YP, it has turned out to be a disaster: there will be no branches and there is a lot of demoralisation among left comrades. An initiative from Zarah Sultana might offer some hope. Might it still be possible for the Democratic Socialists of Your Party to project something? We should try to invite some of the relevant people to Communist University to discuss the possibilities; otherwise all that will emerge is more demoralisation.

Comrade Martin Greenfield, a visitor from Australia, made three points. First, in relation to comrade Hannah, the first part may look ‘catastrophist’, but it is actually a realistic assessment of the future facing humanity. The Trotskyists committed themselves in 1938 to ‘catastrophe is coming: the solution is to fight for higher wages and that will lead to communism’; this is the root of ‘shortcut-ism’. Secondly, it is not quite true that everything is moving to the far right. The Democratic Socialists of America now has over 100,000 members; the election of Zohran Mamdani as New York mayor points in the same direction; Die Linke in Germany moved to the left and survived; the Mélenchon movement in France is a significant opposition. He said the perspectives document needed to flag the fact that YP is a site of struggle - the Weekly Worker is always most effective in intervening in such ‘sort of party’ projects. Third, it would be desirable to have something about how to organise sympathisers of the CPGB; and how to argue at a lower theoretical level without wasting resources.

I argued, in response to comrade Hannah’s point, that the ‘catastrophe’ problem consists in the fact that the USA has a military interest in the oil-driven model of warfare: military aircraft, tanks and trucks are not about to be replaced by electric ones. Through military dominance, the dollar is the reserve currency and the USA holds the rest of the world in economic subordination. Solving the climate crisis therefore requires the overthrow of the military power of the USA. That can only happen either through global nuclear exchange (leading to a quicker human extinction), or through a political project capable of reaching into the US armed forces, as the anti-Vietnam war movement did; meaning a universalistic one (communist, not nationalist). On comrade Roberts’ points, it seemed to me that, if Zarah Sultana broke with the Corbynistas to project an alternative, it would be most likely in order to join the Greens.

Comrade Jim Nelson agreed with moving climate to the front of the document. The Iran war had entailed a dramatic surge in carbon emissions; British politicians were arguing for the reopening of drilling in the North Sea. On ‘catastrophism’, millions can see catastrophe everywhere. But Corbyn and Polanski were merely recent examples of a succession of left illusions in ‘great leaders’. The Greens are able to talk left because they are far from power; if we look at their role in local government, they are more like the Lib Dems; so it is in Germany with their role in government.

Jack Conrad, replying to the general discussion, expressed disagreement with my view that the overthrow of the military power of the USA was needed to revolve the climate crisis. At the end of the day we all have to live on the same planet, so that capitalism would be driven to some form of authoritarian ‘climate socialism’ like German Kriegssozialismus in 1914-18. I was also mistaken on the link between oil and the military, he said: we see in Ukraine a revolution in warfare - a shift into missiles and electric drones. “Drill, baby drill” was a sign of capitalist irrationalism - so too with the arguments for opening up the North Sea that comrade Nelson had mentioned, which would take many years and have absolutely minimal effects on fuel prices, which are set globally.

On comrade Hannah’s point, if Lenin said capitalism had no limits, he was wrong. And Lenin was prepared to recognise catastrophes: thus his October 1917 pamphlet The impending catastrophe and how to combat it.³ Comrade Nelson is not quite right that we are actually at catastrophe, but, said comrade Conrad, ‘tipping points’ are coming quite soon.

He agreed with me on Zarah Sultana: but suppose she did call an initiative of left forces within YP - the London YP conference displayed the lousy economistic and intersectionalist politics on offer. He was sceptical, as compared with comrade Roberts, on the future possibilities of the DSYP; the underlying idea of a British equivalent of the Democratic Socialists of America was always delusional. On comrade Greenfield’s points: we never had great expectations for YP, so we were never plunged into demoralisation. We are not quite at the end of YP, but coming to the end of it as a vehicle for hope.

Comrade Anne McShane, a visitor from Ireland, thought that the document’s insistence on the politics of power, as opposed to the politics of protest, underestimated the importance of the continuing Palestine solidarity movement, and it should have more on our attitude to this movement. Secondly, it would be useful to relate the climate question to the disasters of the war in the Middle East. Third, both war and climate are connected with the issue of migration as ‘push factors’ driving migration from the global south. Finally, on the left in Britain, working with the equivalent of the SWP in Ireland in the Palestine movement, she said, had made it transparently clear that their ostensible Marxism is not, for them, a guide to action; hence they commonly ‘like’ the Weekly Worker, but find it ‘not relevant to day to day work’.

Amendments

We went on to discuss and vote on 11 separate amendments. Some of these were on points of detail or drafting, and were mostly either accepted, or accepted with some alterations, by the movers of the ‘Perspectives’ document. The differences of substance that were discussed concerned points 21 (the grounds of the characterisation of Russia as not an imperialist power), 23 (the relation between Russia and China), 26 and 29 (the Labour Party and the Labour left) and 38 (practical tasks in building relations with sympathisers).

On point 21, the original text read: “… Russia is, of course, in no way an imperialist power - ie, the export of capital and the extraction of surplus from abroad play only a marginal role in its economy.” Comrades Baris Graham, Lars Radov and Julian Harris proposed to delete all after “power” in this sentence, on the ground that the theory of imperialism as consisting in essence of the export of capital was not an agreed CPGB position (and might be false; there is also ‘debt imperialism’). The PCC proposed as an alternative to replace “ie” with “eg” - the point being that the export of capital for the extraction of surplus from abroad is one of the forms of capitalist imperialism. Comrade Radov proposed in the meeting the alternative formulation: “in no way an imperialist power, by any Marxist definition”.

Comrade Jack Conrad objected to this, because - for example - the SWP does regard Russia as an imperialist power, and so does Andrew Murray; the fact that Russian money is spent in the UK on buying football clubs or big houses is an example of the export of money, but not to be set in motion as capital. That Lenin characterised pre-1917 Russia as imperialist was a mistake, he argued; Boris Kagarlitsky’s Empire of the periphery is a better approach.

Comrade Hannah agreed that the objection to focussing on the export of capital was too narrow; there was also, for instance, surplus extraction through technical rents. He proposed the formulation “in no way an imperialist power: eg, the capitalist extraction of surplus value from abroad plays only a marginal role in its economy”. This formulation was accepted with no-one against; but it was generally agreed that we should carry on a discussion of the question of the nature of modern imperialism.

On point 23, comrade Baris Graham had proposed two amendments, which were designed to deal with the danger that he saw in the existing text of overstating the closeness between Russia and China, and understating the degree of ability of the Russian state to act autonomously and its ambition to become imperialist. Comrade Conrad opposed these. “No limits” was a quotation from Putin and Xi (in February 2022), he pointed out.⁴ Russia’s arms industry is dependent on Chinese chips. Point 23 is about what serious rivals the USA has - only China, not Russia, the EU or Japan. I argued that the relation between China and Russia was like that between Germany and Austria-Hungary in the run-up to 1914, while comrade Conrad proposed that we needed to continue the discussion at the level of analysis that is more concrete than in this summary document. On this basis comrade Graham withdrew the amendments.

On points 26 and 29, comrade Jim Moody proposed a group of amendments that were designed to combat what he saw as potential illusions in the Labour Party and the Labour left. He quoted a passage from Lenin in which Lenin described Labour as a reactionary bourgeois party, which aimed to fool the workers. Our attempt to do work with Labour Party Marxists (beginning before the Corbyn period) had been totally unsuccessful. There was now a negligible chance of a revival of the Labour left.

Comrade Stan Keable argued that this approach was misconceived. In relation to projects like the Socialist Alliance, Left Unity or Your Party, we argue that they could potentially be turned into a Communist Party. This is not at issue in relation to the Labour Party: we argue that it should be turned into a united front (by abolishing the regime of bans and proscriptions). I argued that the Labour Party retains a contradictory character, by self-advertising as a party of the working class and of socialism. Hence the repeated failure of efforts to create a left-of-Labour party on the basis of Labourite politics. This remains true. Jack Conrad pointed out that the Lenin speech comrade Moody had cited was urging the original CPGB to affiliate to the Labour Party. ‘Bourgeois workers’ party’ is still an accurate characterisation. Comrade Moody’s amendments were taken together, and were defeated by a large majority vote.

On paragraph 38, comrade Tam Dean Burn proposed an amendment to add: “We should explore recording audio versions of these and our other publications.” Both I and comrade Conrad were initially opposed to this on grounds of practical feasibility, given our limited resources, but after other comrades offered arguments for the usefulness and potential demand for audio publications, we dropped our opposition and the amendment was accepted with no-one against.

Finally, comrade Paul Cooper proposed a late amendment to add at the end a new point: “The PCC, working with appropriate cells, will explore the creation of a supporters network(s) and reading circles to extend the influence of our ideas and look for ways to recruit and give sympathetic Weekly Worker readers an opportunity to be actively involved in developing our work organisationally.” This was accepted, again, with no-one against. The document as amended was then put to the vote and carried unanimously.

By now we were running out of time. There was a brief discussion of elections to the Provisional Central Committee, which ended with a decision to temporarily extend the existing PCC till the next aggregate meeting. The financial report was also postponed until then.

1. ‘CPGB perspectives for 2025’ Weekly Worker February 27 2025: weeklyworker.co.uk/worker/1527/cpgb-perspectives-for-2025.↩︎

2. Since November 2025 TAS appears to have become merely a blog by Nick Wrack (talkingaboutsocialism.org); the ‘pro-talks wing’ of Prometheus has evaporated as a trend, and Prometheus itself has fused with Ebb magazine on the basis of very clearly ‘intersectionalist’ - that is, popular-frontist - politics: prometheus-mag.com/2026/02/21/ebb-and-prometheus.↩︎

3. www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1917/ichtci/index.htm.↩︎

4. Reaffirmed in February 2025: www.reuters.com/world/xi-putin-hold-phone-call-ukraine-war-anniversary-state-media-says-2025-02-24.↩︎