14.05.2026

Break with diplomatic self-silencing

Common-sense anti-factionalism is beginning to be called into question. So the likes of Claudia Webbe, RS21 and the Mandelites have been putting up what passes as an argument. As Mike Macnair shows, the results are neither impressive nor convincing

I began this series with three articles directed against ‘factionalism’: former MP Claudia Webbe’s defence of Corbynistas’ bans and proscriptions of far-left groups in the Morning Star,¹ Tristan Colum of RS21 on Die Linke,² and Duncan Chapel polemicising specifically against CPGB for ‘permanent factionalism’.³ I suggested that the partial coincidence of the appearance of these arguments reflected the fact that the UK left’s ‘common sense’ of anti-factionalism is beginning to be called into question.

The article then addressed some of the specifics of the three arguments: Claudia Webbe pursued cold war anti-communist use of Luxemburg and Eurocommunist use of Gramsci; Tristan Colum suggested that the Socialist Workers Party (of 2,500) offered a better organisational model than Die Linke (120,000); Duncan Chapel offered a fairy story about the CPGB’s role in Left Unity, claiming that we always intended to create a front.⁴ But the real story was about Nick Wrack and others in the Socialist Platform defending the ‘silent majority’ against CPGB factionalists, just like Claudia Webbe’s arguments.

In the second article, last week, I moved a lot further into the abstract and general. All our three anti-factionalist polemicists are trying to ‘dodge around’ the fact that communists/socialists are a minority, because of the failure of the Soviet state and economy, and trying to scam the working class into taking power. Nonetheless, firstly, the working class needs a socialist project, because the dynamics of capitalist competition tend to force down the wage share. To accept that capitalist competition will continue for the indefinite future is to accept a continuing tendency of the wage share to decline (as has, in fact, been seen since the 1980s). Conversely, even at the lowest level of working class demands beyond trade union sectional ones (10-hour day, public education), they involve demands for planning for the provision of goods in kind, interfering with market allocation.

Secondly, the society as a whole needs to move into planning in kind - if it is to overcome the plain failures of neoliberal financial marketisation, and to avoid the threat of human extinction either by global warming or by generalised nuclear war. And, thirdly, the experience of the Soviet regime proves (among other things) that functional planning in kind requires radical political democracy, and in particular freedom of association, in order to subordinate the managers and officials to the working class as a class. Hence, anti-factionalist leftists are promising the broad masses that there is no alternative to capitalist managerialism.

In this article I return to the arguments of Duncan Chapel against ‘permanent factionalism’ apart from his fictions about the CPGB in Left Unity, and to other Mandelites’ pseudo-self-critical arguments about their own policies in broader left formations, which comrade Chapel has put up on his Substack. I start, however, with one more general point about the centrality of political democracy - and in particular political democracy in the workers’ movement and the left - in regard to posing an alternative to the current capitalist regime.

Capitalist decline

Capitalism is in decline. That is not the same thing as saying that revolutionary crisis is imminent.⁵ It reflects the rise of the proletariat as a class, with the result that managing the proletariat as a class increasingly overrides market imperatives in capitalist decision-making (already by the 1850s, the British Limited Liability Act 1855 aimed to protect middle-class savers and thereby block the Chartist alliance between the working class and lower sections of the middle class), but, by doing so, it blunts market incentives. A more recent example of the same policy is the British Conservative and US Democrat aim for the “property-owning democracy” by promoting freehold-mortgage in housing - with deeply irrational results.⁶

It also reflects increasing inability of free markets to deliver state needs (for example, sufficiently healthy and educated recruits for the military). Public education and public or semi-public health provision, among other activities, reflect these needs.

Capitalist decline entails a tendency towards statisation, like the Roman Principate and Dominate, European absolutism or the Japanese Tokugawa regime. The significance of this tendency towards statisation is, on the one hand, that we have already seen in the 1950s-70s that nationalisations under standard corporate management neither emancipate the working class nor produce socially desirable planned outcomes in more than a very limited sense. On the other hand, we mostly live under corporate capitalism: the self-identified freebooters like Elon Musk or Donald Trump actually depend on layers of bureaucratic managers, lawyers and PR flacks, and the workers will encounter not the parasite freebooter ‘ultimate boss’, but the line manager and/or the ‘Human Resources’ department.

This corporate capitalism, moreover, mostly sucks on the teats of ‘mother state’; the sheer level of subsidies, including tax reliefs, in operation means that we have almost no knowledge of what free-market outcomes would actually look like. I have explored this very slightly for Britain in an article last August;⁷ but countries less absolutely dependent on finance than Britain also display complex subsidy regimes.⁸

We cannot return to peasant and artisan society (which never existed in a pure form).⁹ Equally, we cannot return to either national capitalism, or to pre-corporate capitalism (neither of these, either, ever existed in a pure form). Nor can we return to a capitalism without complex state management and subsidies: the supposed ‘free market’ neoliberal turn was actually merely a turn to the dominance of the financial services sector, which was supposed to do better than state management, but actually needed (from the moment of the 1987 crash,¹⁰ and still needs) endless money-printing, since the financial services merry-go-round can never be allowed to stop.

In last week’s article I posed the centrality of political democracy to socialism in terms of the need for the socialist horizon and the failure of Soviet planning. Here, the issue is posed because capitalist society in decline is already semi-planned. That is, corporate management is a form of planning; and this, in turn, is dependent on political decisions about subsidies, money-printing, and so on.

As things now stand, corporate management works for itself (in the form of ‘executive compensation’ - actually a form of distribution of profits), for shareholders (increasingly, ‘private equity’ asset-strippers) and for bond-holders. Political decisions are institutionally corrupt: that is, they are taken in the interests of contributors to party funds, of the payers of lobbyists and of the advertising subsidy to pro-capitalist media, and of the payers of counsel in judicial review proceedings. The result is a sort of simulacrum of capitalism proper. Yanis Varoufakis’s and others’ ‘techno-feudalism’¹¹ and similar ideas have a real basis in this respect. However, capitalist competitive dynamics actually persist, mainly in the form of geopolitical competition and the increase in the rent/property speculation share of output, and of the finance share, driving the downward pressure on the wage share.

The problem is for the working class as a class (remember, the whole social class is dependent on the wage share, not just workers employed in industry) to take control of these decisions away from corporate management and in states away from the bribe-paying class and the bribe-taking lawyers, lobbyists and professional politicians. In order to do so, the working class needs to develop (partly, to redevelop) forms of decision-making that de-managerialise the decision-making process.

The development of a properly ‘post-1991’ capitalist politics has been towards Bonapartism: meaning by that, not Marx’s sense of a last-ditch independence of the state faced by short-term revolution (adopted by Trotsky in relation to inter-war Europe),¹² but the methods of political management of Napoleon and Louis Bonaparte: the pretence of democracy through plebiscites (referenda), managed by control of the available choices and of information, and the cult of the personality of the individual - first consul or president turned emperor, and so on). Capital has been since the 1980s actively promoting the direct election of presidents, prime ministers and party leaders, forcing a choice controlled by the corrupt media: Votez escroc, pas facho (‘Vote for the crook, not for the fascist’) in France in 2002, and so on.

Collapse of 1991

What drives this shift is not the threat of revolution, since the collapse of 1991 has marginalised socialism (as I said last week). The question is of increasing routine capitalist control of political processes, since the actual decline of capitalism carries with it a decline in political support for the regime that can be turned out at elections. The result is a pretence of democracy in the form that ‘democracy’ consists in choosing the personally better manager (president, party leader, and so on) and the occasional right to vote in a controlled referendum.

The organisational forms of Podemos, La France Insoumise, Momentum, and so on - ‘leftist’ proprietary political brands - consist in promoting a Bonapartist regime, which is the increasingly dominant form of capitalist political order.

On Podemos, Manuel Gari in 2020 wrote that the Mandelite Izquierda Anticapitalista - Anticapitalistas group

focused its efforts almost exclusively on responding to the internal democratic question - a really important matter - but without raising the battle for a political project with enough energy to have brought together the existing currents of radicalisation within the Anticapitalistas¹³ environment.

Lesson from then and for the future: establishing the relationship between political project and aspiration to an ecosocialist and feminist society is the sine qua non condition for building the strategic political groupings that must have a horizon of post-capitalist society. Only in this way can an antagonistic historical bloc be created and unified.¹⁴

This is to propose a project with only a maximum and no minimum programme. The question of political democracy is seen as an internal problem of Podemos. It is, consequently, not grasped as a problem of how to confront the capitalist constitutional order - or, as the Podemos leadership round Pablo Iglesias and co did - to support the regime of institutional corruption in its Bonapartist form.

Mandelites

Gari is one of several Mandelites to have written on the problems with the Mandelites’ own project, since the 1980s, of building ‘broad front’ parties ‘not delimited between reform and revolution’. Duncan Chapel has published the English translation. He has also published a more recent Anticapitalistas text from Julia Camara and Raul Camargo; Phil Hearse on the 1970s Scottish Labour Party of Jim Sillars and others, on Arthur Scargill’s Socialist Labour Party, and Your Party, with side-references to the Brazilian Workers’ Party and to the Scottish Socialist Party; and he deploys Livio Maitan from 1978, on the (allegedly) belated break of the Gruppi Comunisti Rivoluzionari from entry in the Partito Comunista Italiano as an objection to leftists’ continued involvement in the Democratic Socialists of America.¹⁵

Both the Camara-Camargo text and that of Maitan have, for Chapel, the side benefit of anti-factionalist commitments. Separately (going along with his anti-CPGB polemic) he has published in a paid-for form Ernest Mandel’s 1977 polemic against Argentinian Trotskyist Nahuel Moreno,¹⁶ arising from Moreno and his co-thinkers’ refusal to join the ‘grand majority’ in the Unified Secretariat of the Fourth International, assembled after the dissolution of the International Majority Tendency and Leninist-Trotskyist Faction, on the basis of commitments to the Eurocommunist ‘Theses on socialist democracy and the dictatorship of the proletariat’¹⁷ and the ‘turn to industry’ (industrial colonisation projects).

(On this polemic I observe merely that the actual dissolution of the factions and ‘grand majority’ in the USFI were a complete disaster. The ‘Turn to Industry’ was immensely destructive for those among the USFI’s sections which took it seriously. The ‘Theses on Social Democracy’ foreshadowed the Mandelites’ inability in the 1990s to recognise that Boris Yeltsin was a rightwinger. The Moreno faction was driven to split in 1979 (though in my opinion a little prematurely) by the USFI giving the names of Trotskyists in Nicaragua to the Sandinista police - a clear scab act of ‘non-sectarian’ support to a left-nationalist regime.)

I have written repeatedly and at considerable length about the Mandelites’ repeated failures with ‘new party’ projects, and I do not propose to repeat the arguments at length.¹⁸ I will say here only that the core of the problem is the Mandelites’ commitment to diplomacy in the initial stages of these projects. This achieves a certain friendliness of the ‘official lefts’ to the Mandelites. They may even be employed, as the Fourth International Supporters Caucus were in Scargill’s Socialist Labour Party, as witch-hunting gatekeepers. But this inevitably breaks down. The Mandelites’ diplomatic self-silencing turns out to encourage the ‘official lefts’ to move right. The ‘official lefts’ are committed to loyalty to the capitalist nation-state and constitutional order, believe that publicly demonstrated loyalty to the state is essential to winning elections and winning reforms, and are therefore committed to the silencing or ostentatious exclusion of tendencies that are not loyal to this state.

The Mandelites’ diplomatic method is not a novelty in the period since the 1980s of the policy of building new parties ‘not programmatically delimited between reform and revolution’. It was the policy of the United States Socialist Workers Party and its co-thinkers towards the Cuban Communist Party, and towards Fatah in the Palestinian movement and the African National Congress in the struggle in South Africa, before the US SWP’s post-1979 break with Trotskyism. In Britain in the 1970s, it was the practical meaning of the “priority united front axis towards the left social-democratic organising cadre” of the Ross et al tendency in 1973-75. In the 1950s-60s, it was the ‘replacement leadership’ approach - that the small size of the Trotskyists meant that the Labour right would inevitably be replaced by Labour lefts (and so too with left socialists and communists in Europe), and the Trotskyists’ job was to work with the ‘replacement leadership’ at the first stage and only confront them later.¹⁹ Even earlier: this policy is not, in fact, descended from the pre-war policy of Trotsky and his co-thinkers, but from that of Raymond Molinier and Pierre Frank, who twice broke with Trotsky in order to create ‘broad-front’ or ‘agitational’ newspapers.²⁰

I refer to this long history, or rather to examples from it, for two reasons. The first is that it is perfectly straightforward that these are all tactics, which fail to be judged simply by their success. Have the Mandelites succeeded in creating broad mass parties by the tactics of ‘replacement leadership’ or of ‘parties not delimited between reform and revolution’? I accept, as I accept in relation to the British SWP, that the Mandelites are a lot bigger than the CPGB and that in that sense there is an argument from success. But the tactics in question were aimed at creating mass parties (or mass leftwing oppositions within the traditional socialist or communist parties). In this aim they quite plainly failed. Chapel offers as success stories the Left Bloc in Portugal, which is a unification of the far left for electoral purposes that has had considerable success, and the Red-Green Alliance in Denmark, which is based at its core on the old Danish Communist Party in alliance with a smaller left splinter off it and the Danish Mandelites. Both are success stories, but neither is an example of the Mandelites’ policy.

Second, as I have argued elsewhere, there is an intimate connection between the policy of diplomacy with a view to creating a ‘replacement leadership’ or a ‘party not delimited between reform and revolution’ and the imposition of bureaucratic controls on the speech of critics among your own membership - and hence, also, anti-factionalism.²¹

In Maitan’s arguments, and in Mandel’s polemic against Moreno, and in an indirect sense in Gari’s 2020 argument,²² what is actually proposed is, within the broad-front project, a Trotskyist party based on theory. But the effect of this is that there can be no unification of the Marxist or ‘revolutionary’ left.

This was dramatically demonstrated by the split in December 2022 of the Nouveau Parti Anticapitaliste by the walk-out at the conference of the largest minority (the tendency descended from the former majority of the LCR) in order to pursue a unity policy towards La France Insoumise. The Mandelites’ broad-frontism here prohibited them from acting as a disciplined minority in a unitary far-left party they had themselves created (though they were clearly disappointed to have picked up no more than other far-left trends).²³ The Mandelites hold themselves out as permitting ‘tendencies’ (which are actually factions); but only as long as they, in the form of the full-time apparatus, retain control.

Programme

This inability to unify as Marxists produces, inherently, the triumph of the ‘official lefts’ and incapacity of the ‘revolutionary lefts’ in broad-front parties. As long as the far left is so splintered, it cannot be taken seriously by the broad workers’ vanguard. It is not a problem just for Trotskyists. The ‘official’ communists could operate anti-factionalism because they had the USSR as a shining light (and also a material supporter). China provided less material support, and the Maoists were and are even more fissile than the Trotskyists. (So too are the anarchists, ‘left communists’, and so on.) Trying to create an ideologically homogenous party already produced bureaucratic-centralist sects before 1914 in Rosa Luxemburg, Leo Jogiches and others’ Social Democracy of the Kingdom of Poland and Lithuania, and Daniel De Leon’s Socialist Labour Party in the USA and its imitators elsewhere.

The alternative, which was already visible in Chartism, in the Second International and in Bolshevism (and the mass parties of Comintern that came out of the Second International), is unification on the basis of an accepted party platform, voted on and amendable; and the acceptance that there will be factions, including open factions, and including factions lasting as long as Bolsheviks and Mensheviks (1903-1917 before their final split).

The Mandelites cannot live with long-term factions and open factions, partly - as I have already said - because their diplomatic method requires self-censorship and thus censorship of oppositional groupings. But it is also partly because the ‘transitional method’ itself is antagonistic to the idea of unity round a party programme. After all, the 1938 Transitional programme includes the statement:

It is necessary to help the masses in the process of the daily struggle to find the bridge between present demands and the socialist programme of the revolution. This bridge should include a system of transitional demands, stemming from today’s conditions and from today’s consciousness of wide layers of the working class and unalterably leading to one final conclusion: the conquest of power by the proletariat.²⁴

But the ‘transitional programme’ is then on its own self-description not “the socialist programme of the revolution”, which is some ulterior programme. Perhaps the documents of the first four congresses of Comintern, plus those of the International Left Opposition, and so on … but already this mass of documentation is looking like a body of theory, not a political platform for a party. The party grounded on theory - or on ‘method’, as Duncan Chapel quotes Livio Maitan as arguing - cannot tolerate any serious differences persisting over any prolonged period of time. But, for precisely that reason, the effect is inevitably the multiplication of sects and their ineffectiveness in face of the ‘official lefts’ like Pablo Iglesias in Spain, like Mélenchon in France, like Corbyn and his clique in Britain.

The alternative is to break with the method altogether and unite on the basis of a summary political programme, put to the vote and amendable, and accepting that there will be open and long-lasting factions and sharp debates. If we can achieve this among the Marxist left, we may be able to pose this method as an alternative to the method of bureaucratic-managerial controls the ‘official lefts’ seek. And then perhaps we can de-managerialise and democratise the workers’ movement. And by de-managerialising the workers’ movement, we may be able to pose the possibility that a socialist and democratic transformation of the society is possible.

1. morningstaronline.co.uk/article/your-party-what-kind-socialist-party-does-british-working-class-actually-need-2026.↩︎

2. revsoc21.uk/2026/04/08/the-charms-and-pitfalls-of-extreme-pluralism-lessons-from-die-linke.↩︎

3. redmole.substack.com/p/flat-pack-leninism-why-mike-macnair.↩︎

4. In contrast, with Labour Party Marxists, we did always intend to support a group in political solidarity with the CPGB; the reason being that we identified the Labour Party as seriously hostile territory, in which a ‘broader front’ would pretty much inevitably be left-Labourite; in Left Unity we believed that it was possible to have a ‘partyist’ coalition broader than ourselves and our immediate periphery, but were defeated by the Socialist Platform leaders’ commitment to bureaucratic-diplomatic methods.↩︎

5. On ‘revolutionary crisis’, see ‘Against action programmes’ Weekly Worker December 18 2025 (weeklyworker.co.uk/worker/1566/against-action-programmes). On the decline of capitalism, see ‘World politics, long waves and the decline of capitalism’, January 7 2010 (weeklyworker.co.uk/worker/799/world-politics-long-waves-and-the-decline-of-capit) and ‘Capitalism as a star fort’, June 5 2025 (weeklyworker.co.uk/worker/1541/capitalism-as-a-star-fort).↩︎

6. Compare ‘Stunts, problems and solutions’ Weekly Worker May 5 2022 (weeklyworker.co.uk/worker/1394/stunts-problems-and-solutions).↩︎

7. ‘Class composition in a snapshot’ (part 2) Weekly Worker August 28 2025 (weeklyworker.co.uk/worker/1550/class-composition-in-a-snapshot).↩︎

8. Googling ‘business subsidies’ with a country name will produce masses of information.↩︎

9. Compare the 1880 Programme of the Parti Ouvrier (www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1880/05/parti-ouvrier.htm): “That the producers can be free only when they are in possession of the means of production; That there are only two forms under which the means of production can belong to them - (1) The individual form, which has never existed in a general state and which is increasingly eliminated by industrial progress; (2) The collective form, the material and intellectual elements of which are constituted by the very development of capitalist society”. The point is not that this is true because it is Marx, but that it is absolutely corroborated by the global tendency for family-scale production to be marginalised.↩︎

10. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Monday_(1987) is a convenient summary account.↩︎

11. Technofeudalism London 2023.↩︎

12. K Marx The eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (1852): www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1852/18th-brumaire; on Trotsky, see, for example, ‘German Bonapartism’ (1932): www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/germany/1932/321030.htm.↩︎

13. In the text as published. Should perhaps be “the Podemos environment”.↩︎

14. redmole.substack.com/p/before-your-party-there-was-podemos.↩︎

15. Camara and Camargo: redmole.substack.com/p/we-made-political-mistakes-anticapitalistas; Hearse: redmole.substack.com/p/phil-hearse-three-attempts-to-forge; Maitan: redmole.substack.com/p/dsa-repeats-italian-lefts-fatal-hesitation.↩︎

16. redmole.substack.com/p/available-in-english-at-last-ernest.↩︎

17. iire.org/node/939. The judgment that the text is Eurocommunist is one I made at the time.↩︎

18. Eg, ‘EuroTrotskyism’ Weekly Worker June 4 2003 (weeklyworker.co.uk/worker/483/eurotrotskyism); ‘The Fourth International and failed perspectives’ Weekly Worker June 7 2012 (weeklyworker.co.uk/worker/917/the-fourth-international-and-failed-perspectives); and ‘Strategy and freedom of criticism’ June 14 (weeklyworker.co.uk/worker/918/strategy-and-freedom-of-criticism); ‘Daniel Bensaïd: Repeated disappointments’ July 31 2014 (weeklyworker.co.uk/worker/1021/daniel-bensaid-repeated-disappointments). In fact, my small book Revolutionary strategy started with an attempt to grapple with a debate on strategy in the French Ligue Communiste Révolutionnaire in 2006 (the first article was ‘Floundering towards Eurocommunism’, February 16 2006 (weeklyworker.co.uk/worker/612/floundering-towards-eurocommunism).↩︎

19. P Peterson [P Jordan], ‘Aspects of the history of the IMG’ (1972): redmolerising.files.wordpress.com/2015/10/sl_img_fusion_conference.pdf, p18.↩︎

20. Trotsky, February 14 1939: www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1939/03/psop.htm: “adventurers of the type of Raymond Molinier who try to gain influence not by ideological struggle, but by corridor intrigues”; In defence of Marxism (New York 1970) p147 (“When [Molinier] decided to found a paper on the basis of ‘four slogans’ instead of our programme, and set out independently to execute this plan, I was among those who insisted upon his immediate expulsion”: January 1940).↩︎

21. Talk, ‘How broad-frontism requires top-down bureaucratic controls’, Communist University, January 2022: www.youtube.com/watch?v=gC-42E4Bsk4; ‘Principle not diplomacy’ Weekly Worker November 24 2022 (weeklyworker.co.uk/worker/1420/principle-not-diplomacy).↩︎

22. ‘In an indirect sense’ because “aspiration to an ecosocialist and feminist society” is in itself merely ‘motherhood and apple pie’, so that the actual political basis of Anticapitalistas has to be the Mandelite theoretical commitments.↩︎

23. Account with both sides’ statements: tomasoflatharta.com/2022/12/14/france-nouveau-parti-anticapitaliste-npa-new-anticapitalist-party-divides-down-the-middle.↩︎

24. http://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1938/tp/tp-text.htm.↩︎