Letters

Dismal results

The Trade Unionist and Socialist Coalition (Tusc) has just published its regular report on the local election results. At 59 pages it is a comprehensive and valuable record of the results for leftwing candidates, including the numerous local independent anti-austerity groups and individuals, who won 101 council seats with a total left vote of over 440,000.

The report notes the two highest votes for Tusc candidates - 23.8% and 19.4% in Southampton and Knowsley respectively - but says nothing about the overall Tusc performance. This is a striking omission, because on the normal metrics the results were the worst they have ever achieved. Median vote share was just 1.0%, even worse than last year’s 1.1% and well below their peak performances: 4.6% in 2012 and 2.7% as recently as 2022 and 2024. The proportion of Tusc candidates securing more than 5% of the vote was just 1.05% - three out of 285, the lowest ever recorded. The contrast with their peak performances is again striking: almost 40% of candidates over the five percent mark in 2012 and 15%-16% over that threshold in 2022 and 2023.

It’s unclear what the Tusc leadership expected to achieve, but, notwithstanding support for the Greens, circumstances were pretty favourable: the collapse in Labour support, the presence of just 69 Workers Party of Britain candidates (not the 1,000 target they set last year) and the near total absence of Your Party. Moreover, Tusc largely succeeded in avoiding competition with independents and Workers Party candidates, so for all these reasons they must surely have thought 2026 would be a good year - maybe a great year.

It’s hard to believe they ever imagined their results would be quite so dismal.

John Kelly
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Kitchen communism

“Rather than descending from the heavens to the Earth, we must ascend from the Earth to the heavens,” wrote Marx in The German ideology.

Nothing exemplifies my communist orientation better than the method of dialectical materialism, succinctly expressed by Lenin’s argument for “concrete analysis of concrete conditions”. I appreciate David Passarine’s engagement with the Communist Party’s ‘street kitchen’ project (Letters, April 30) and I wish to provide a deeper analysis of it.

Do street kitchens cause burnout? It is generally considered common knowledge amongst the left that they do, but I have frequently and fervently argued in the negative. My brother, Lachlan, and I were two pillars of the Melbourne Street Kitchens and yet our decision to leave the kitchens were political, not a question of burnout. The simple fact is that the street kitchens are incredibly rewarding, not in the short-term as David argues, but in the long-term. It is enjoyable fun to cook large amounts of food but it was cumbersome and it was difficult to organise and coordinate, and the satisfaction came from dedication and consistency. Lachlan could turn around and whip up 70 meals like it was nothing.

Community Union Defence League published a short article titled ‘Come on Sundays: that’s when the communists come’. We took pride in our work, and we took pride in the community that we built. It wasn’t easy, but that was part of the satisfaction in it. Then why did we leave? I would argue that for myself it was my sheer dedication and commitment to the street kitchens that had me engaged in a serious struggle with the Melbourne section over the future orientation and direction of this project. Unsatisfied with my comrades, I took my concerns to the Communist Party central committee and, after being thoroughly demoralised by their response, I walked away from both organisations. I think that a similar trajectory is true for Lachlan also.

Before the street kitchens my brother and I had no organisational experience, but we were able to use this experience to radically transform ourselves. Honestly, we went from kids who could barely cook for ourselves to running an operation which would feed a small community. In this way, the street kitchens were the fire that hardens steel, and we developed into disciplined cadre, as David recognises. I think this developmental aspect is tangential to the Spartacist notion of proletarianisation, and the street kitchens were designed to be a demonstration that we were capable communists. The orientation was not for recruitment and in fact in our opposition to religious proselytisation we were far too opposed to recruitment, though I think this is likely only true for the Melbourne section. Nonetheless, it did somewhat operate as a tool for recruitment, and it is hard to find anyone who is not at least impressed by the effort and organisation that we achieved.

Related to the concept of burn-out is the notion that there are better things to do - most notably, conduct a reading group and study theory. The purpose of my letter is not to clamour for a return of the street kitchens, and I wish to acknowledge that this is a valid concern. However, I think that in the Communist Party to an extent we had our cake and ate it too. There was a strong emphasis on reading and education, and I think that the street kitchens actually enhanced this (though I maintain that our level of activity was higher than can reasonably be expected of members, since we adhered to an element of Marxism-Leninism!).

It is important to understand that, if our aim is to educate our members, that doesn’t necessarily mean just reading groups. Discussions on the streets or in our homes while we are cooking, or perhaps while driving, can contribute greatly to raising our consciousness. In fact, I would rather do a street kitchen than a ‘social event’. However, there are simply logistical difficulties in running a street kitchen which are not so easily overcome - principally financial considerations.

The simple fact, which David recognises, is that the street kitchens and the ACP were sticky - most people involved with these projects have tended to hang around the left in one way or another and thus I think it is crucial that we seriously investigate this phenomenon, which I call an aberration. I believe that the ACP attracted purposive workers, as Lars Lih explains it in Lenin rediscovered. Lachlan and I took up street kitchens out of an obligation to merge theory and practice, and this is a difficult balance to strike. In Communist Unity there are concerns such as David raised, that I am far too actionist in orientation; however, I posit that perhaps the opposite is true. While I am cautious to argue that there is a lack of activity in CU (since “we do not have the resources”), I would, however, be confident in arguing that there is a lack of discipline and centralisation, though I am reticent to go into details here.

My support for a street kitchen project is conditional upon the conjunctural analysis of the specific context; however, I maintain support for them in principle. I adhere to a principle of ‘If we can, we must’. If we are able to intervene in people’s lives and make a substantial difference, then I think we have a duty to do so. If we are communists who only speak of revolution and ignore what is beyond our doorstep, then we do not make very good communists. Nor do we make good communists if we do not seriously engage in theoretical study, education, agitation and propaganda.

There are certainly positive elements to street kitchens and other community/mutual-aid work, but there are downsides too. While I think it is necessary in a historical and contemporary context to understand the kitchens, the main point of my letter is to highlight methodological weaknesses in CU. David and many others in CU have basically written off such ideas without any real investigation. Even those who participated in the street kitchens have little positive to say about them, but this results from the fact that they are only able to comprehend their experience, which was decisively after Lachlan and I had departed the organisations - though I must give credit to the Spartacists, who have earnestly listened to me on this question and have sought to understand my perspective.

Furthermore, although I am writing in opposition to my CU comrades, I do recognise that they stand head and shoulders above the rest of the left, where the bar is so firmly placed on the ground that it would require mechanical assistance to lift it. If there is one thing that I take seriously, it is a certain sincerity and frankness towards politics, and I honestly see this as an expression of dialectics. If I am considered an actionist, it is by no means an essential feature of my political character. Sleek in the ACP would say that if you can’t organise a street kitchen, you may as well just pack up and go home. So perhaps it is not about the street kitchens themselves, but what they represent.

My final comment would be to extend David’s remarks to Red Wessex on the topic of Marxism-Leninism. I would strongly urge the comrades there to study Fundamentals of Marxism Leninism by Otto Wille Kuusinen.

George O’Shannassy
Melbourne

Hard-right Greens?

I have a question about something Jack Conrad said at last Sunday’s Online Communist Forum (May 10). He was quite insistent that the UK Green Party had a reactionary - at one point I believe he even said ‘near-fascist’ - origin.

I live in the US, in the Midwest rust belt - something, I think, like your ‘Red Wall’ in the UK. I am more or less familiar with the US Green Party (in typical left fashion there are actually two Green Parties here) and, while it characterises itself as socialist, I have met some very conservative - even somewhat reactionary - Greens, but usually these are outnumbered by cranks and outright oddballs.

However, for the most part the US party, if not exactly left, at least had an origin in the serious ecological movement, with all its internal contradictions. Many became Greens reading Ernest Callenbach’s Ecotopia. They have won elections here at the local level. A good friend from the UK, who lived here for 30 years, compared South Bend, my city, with Middlesbrough in Yorkshire (pretty much the ‘Red Wall’ equivalent, I would think).

I am not doubting Jack, and there are eco-fascist groups - even an out-and-out ‘ecoNazi’ group - here, but they are not Greens. Are there any articles or other material that explain the hard-right origin of the British Greens?

Thank you.

Lee Gloster
South Bend, Indiana

Imperialist China?

We thank the Weekly Worker for publishing our last letter (‘Just so stories’ April 23). We also thank Kieran Jeffs for his response (‘Spart China’ April 30). We would like to reply regarding a few points.

Comrade Jeffs takes issue with our discussion of the world situation, saying that we base our analysis on a “moralistic” understanding of imperialism. He says that, in our analysis, “imperialism is presented as a policy choice - one pursued by the bloodthirsty Americans and abstained from by the noble Chinese”. He concludes: “When imperialism is understood in moral rather than material terms, it simply becomes a matter of cheerleading for one’s preferred jackboot.”

This is an outrageous misrepresentation of what we wrote. At no point in our contribution did we praise the Chinese state or the policies of Communist Party of China (CPC). Instead, we described the party’s leaders as “treacherous”. As we explained, our view is that - instead of constituting a new imperialist power - the CPC leadership have accommodated US imperialism as part of their strategy for export-oriented economic development within the US-dominated system. But this does not mean we support or celebrate the CPC’s approach - we don’t.

More substantively, comrade Jeffs raises the question of what we actually mean by ‘imperialism’, and how we determine whether a given state is imperialist. We think our position is fully consistent with the theoretical arguments in such classic works as Socialism and war by Lenin and Zinoviev, In defence of Marxism by Trotsky and, of course, Lenin’s Imperialism: the highest stage of capitalism. Here, we limit ourselves to reviewing a few essential ideas.

The international development of capitalism creates a need to secure property rights across borders, and this gives rise to an international bureaucratic-state-military-financial machinery: imperialism. Just as it is untenable for two states to simultaneously control the same territory, it is also untenable for two competing imperialist powers to rule over the same area. Thus imperialism means a territorial division - a partition - of the world among distinct imperialist blocs.

And, just as replacing one state with another requires a revolution, it takes a war to repartition the world between competing imperialists. During the past century and a half, the world was repeatedly redivided through a series of wars, and the US ultimately emerged as the dominant imperialist power. The result is that, for generations, the American ruling class has overseen the international bureaucratic-state-military-financial machinery through which global trade and investment take place.

Is China an imperialist power? This would mean that, during the past four decades, the Chinese state somehow managed to redivide the world without fighting a single war - something that would contradict the ABCs of Marxism. Again, we contend that the Chinese state has actually worked within the US-dominated international system. Yes, China has a military base in Djibouti, but only because it is tolerated by the US (which has an even bigger military base in the country); yes, China exports capital, but it does so within the dollar system, and during the past 20 years the biggest recipient of Chinese foreign direct investment has been the US. In fact the CPC’s strategy of export-oriented growth means that - for now, at least - it has a vested interest in preserving key pillars of US global hegemony.

All of this flows from China’s position within the world economy. As comrade Jeffs acknowledges, China’s economy is at a very different level of economic development than the US - in fact, when measured in terms of purchasing power parity, per-capita GDP in China is barely above the average level for the world as a whole. While capitalists in China have an interest in investing all over the world, the Chinese state is not currently compelled by economic circumstances to create a distinct imperialist bloc. Of course, that could change in the future, but for now it isn’t possible to understand the world situation as an inter-imperialist conflict between the US and China.

Thus we do not agree with comrade Jeffs (or the ISA leadership) that China is an imperialist power, but this does not mean we have any fondness for the actual policies of the CPC bureaucracy. Again, the CPC leadership has followed an approach that we consider treacherous. Just consider the way that the CPC sits on its hands while US imperialism strangles Cuba. There is a difference between agreeing with the policies of the Chinese state and disputing the notion that China is an imperialist power.

We would also like to respond to the notion that we are “Sparts”. To be clear: we are not the Spartacist League. Although the Spartacists appear to agree with the three core programmatic points upon which we built our faction, our members hold a variety of opinions on other things. For example, in issue four of our Bulletin (page 19), we ran an article that praised sections four and five of the CPGB Draft programme. In fact we have important points of agreement with various groupings on the left; like us, the Spartacist League, the Revolutionary Communist International, Left Voice and Cosmonaut have all called for the defence of Iran. We think this speaks to the fact that the current organisational divisions on the left do not have a clear political basis.

Finally, we have to remark on the fact that the Weekly Worker published our contribution under the title ‘Just so stories’. A ‘just so story’ is an unsupportable narrative or explanation, but in our contribution we included a link with supporting documents. We think it’s unfortunate that the Weekly Worker removed this link from our contribution, while simultaneously placing a question mark over everything we had to say. It would be better to let readers look at our supporting documents and make up their own minds. Here is the link again.

International Socialist Alternative (Revolutionary)
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