Letters
‘Partyist’ leader?
Recently the Democratic Socialists announced the decision to cease all activity and to disband its organisation. This news is quite disappointing, as for some time it appeared to be one of the only organisations to emerge from the late Your Party that could present a clear programme and path forward for British socialists. The fight for radical democracy, for scientific socialism and for a workers’ republic is essential, and can only be achieved through comradely cooperation and working together towards refounding a communist party in Britain.
Organisations come and go, but building communist hegemony requires building lasting institutions - a task where the Democratic Socialists had a role to play. The involvement of DS in the foundation of the Socialist Federation was a great step forward, and could have potentially brought together groups and people into discussion that otherwise might have not given the Weekly Worker a second glance. There is very clearly still an appetite for socialist regroupment, but with every failed project more and more socialists are becoming pessimistic about the project of regroupment: many will retreat into their sect assigned at birth; others will become inactive altogether.
The discussions between comrades from the Marxist Unity Caucus and the Provisional Central Committee has left many of us with little faith in British partyism. Instead of open comradely discussion, the two groups have engaged in sectarian mud-slinging over Twitter and Discord - absent from this has been self-critique and responsibility. The PCC and MUC meaningfully differ only in theoretical maturity, and form the two pillars of British partyism. Unfortunately, a lot of good faith has been lost and collaboration appears no longer present on the agenda. I hope these two organisations can come to their senses.
As if the grapes weren’t already sour, a second front against the Provisional Central Committee has opened, with MUC comrades eager to join. The recent ‘N-word’ debate in the Weekly Worker has overshadowed intriguing articles that meaningfully push forward partyism, and completely absent has been discussion on the Democratic Socialists, and the road forward. The fight for political freedom is the fight for light and air, but the PCC has dug its trenches, fighting the battle, mistaking it for the war.
The collapse of the Democratic Socialists has wide implications for British socialists - no longer is there such a pro-party pole for radical democracy and scientific socialism; and the breakdown between the MUC and PCC has left British partyism less than the sum of its parts.
International partyism is advancing rapidly forward, becoming an institutional force in the Netherlands, Australia and beyond. Whereas British partyism was once the crown jewel of our tendency, it has since brought disrepute and embarrassment. Without a communist party the British communist-workers’ movement has nothing, and the path forward necessitates tact and open comradely discussion. I hope, when the time is right, the Marxist Unity Caucus will play a leading role in the process of forging communist unity, and that process begins with rebuilding comradely ties with the Provisional Central Committee.
Katy MacIntyre
Communist Unity (Australia)
DSYP marsh
The mothballing of the Democratic Socialists of Your Party is a conclusion of a decline of several months. It took the form of a series of personal conflicts, which resulted in resignation after resignation until barely anyone was still active within the organisation.
These personal conflicts took place primarily between people aligned with Max Shanly, one of the founders of the organisation and the main public figure, and people aligned with the Marxist Unity Caucus of RS21 and the Weekly Worker. I attempted to explain, to the extent of my knowledge, these various disputes in a previous letter to this newspaper (June 2). It all started when comrade Shanly called a few members of the DSYP executive committee incompetent during the frantic Grassroots Left slate negotiations of December 2025 and they responded by writing a google docs dossier about various issues they had with comrade Shanly.
There’s a whole variety of issues that each side can mention (much of which has been written about in various issues of this paper a few months ago, more has been written by comrade Shanly and others on his ‘side’ such as former GL CEC candidate Chloe B on twitter), although its often difficult to actually understand since there's not been a complete history of the DSYP written yet.
Generally the political differences between comrade Shanly and those aligned with the MUC and Weekly Worker seem to be very minor. The ‘Shanlyites’ seem to have a very negative view of the ‘sects’, often accusing the ‘MUCists’ of having been far too focussed on ensuring an alliance with various Trotskyist groups than with those more recently formed (Eco Socialist Horizon, Trans Liberation Group, etc). Meanwhile the ‘MUCists’ seemingly were very concerned about comrade Shanly’s connection to Zarah Sultana (they knew each other from the Labour Party), which they seemed to think was causing issues of democracy within the organisation. These political differences were not so major - both factions seemed to agree with the core premises of DSYP, its programme, etc. Whether or not people within the organisation called themselves ‘partyists’, it was still an organisation of people who should be working together to build a democratic socialist party.
Unfortunately the debates got very personal, and I think, when the GL slate was defeated during the CEC elections, it meant that there wasn’t much to really bind the organisation together, so the ‘Shanlyites’ gradually quit the organisation leaving the ‘MUCists’ in almost complete control of the executive. Eventually even they began to quit, as the active members of the organisation were essentially just themselves and a few people from the Weekly Worker. It would be a bit inaccurate to describe the MUCists as just giving up immediately after gaining control of the organisation, since they did bother to make a whole website and established a proper paid membership system.
All these personal arguments seem rather unnecessary: we are all trying to cooperate for an important cause that’s surely much more important than the issues between the ‘Shanlyites’ and the ‘MUCists’.
I do understand somewhat though how these arguments could get so personal. DSYP after all was an entirely voluntary organisation: it had no paid full-timers, its members were mostly quite young and, to put it simply, it was working class - meaning how that class exists today: not limited purely to manufacturing workers or union officials. The members of DSYP were mostly wage labourers who had to spend their days at work and then were spending their limited free time frantically working on building the organisation or negotiating with half a dozen different organisations or so. I think these conditions were possibly why the arguments got so personal.
It still is necessary for people to actually be able to work together for political purposes, despite personal issues. Ultimately the ‘Shanlyites’ and the ‘MUCists’ have similar enough political opinions, so that, if there ever was some sort of unified, democratic socialist party of considerable scale, then both groups would probably be part of it and almost certainly would be part of the same tendency within the party. At some point the two groups are going to have considerable reason to cooperate - ideally they would be cooperating now to try to build a democratic socialist party. We still need a party republic, and that requires people to build it together. Even in the absence of the mechanisms of bureaucratic centralism, it seems socialists are still unable to cooperate.
I do still hope that one day the people who were once DSYP can work together to build a democratic socialist party, and that they can start to discuss this with each other as soon as possible, I hope that personal issues between former DSYP members can be resolved. DSYP may not have succeeded in building the democratic socialist party. However, what it stood for is still fundamentally correct - the ideas of the organisation are still what the socialist movements requires. What is needed is an organisation that can unite those that believe in such ideas.
Dovah
Oxfordshire
N-word bore
No doubt readers of the Weekly Worker are thoroughly bored by the rehashing of the tired question of self-censorship. I, however, take the liberty of making a small observation about comrade Paul Demarty’s claim that “people do not want to hear the word [‘nigger’] because it is grossly offensive in ordinary usage. Some more elaborate arguments may be put on this point, but I have never found one that does not amount in the end to an argument from perceived personal safety.” May I suggest that there is one? The word is ‘taboo’.
That word seems the best explanation for why so many people are incapable of grasping the distinction between use and mention, when it comes to intense slur words. Nobody, I assume, would be at all confused by the distinction between saying ‘Donald Trump deserves the Nobel Peace Prize’ and saying ‘the president of FIFA said “Donald Trump deserves the Nobel Peace Prize”’. There are subtleties to the use/mention distinction. It would be odd to put your name in quote marks when asked for it on a form, but no such subtlety arises when it comes to reported speech. The confusion would seem to come about because, as comrade Demarty says, the word is grossly offensive. We can though drop the qualifier, “in ordinary usage”. Its power to offend comes from it being written or spoken. That is the hallmark of a taboo.
The real question is then, do we have use for taboos? Should we treat them as superstitions? It is important to acknowledge that one can break a taboo without being cursed - at least not in any straightforwardly causal way. The argument in favour of maintaining the taboo is not, therefore, as comrade Demarty claims, an argument for personal safety. Indeed, the point about taboos is that the very fact that they are a taboo is a reason for respecting them. No further justification can be proffered. The moment that you look for one is the moment that you are no longer are under the spell of the taboo.
That, of course, rubs against the grain of a certain materialist trend in Marxist thought, but Marxists should welcome that. There must be limits to materialism. Why make the bet on the working class? We want the liberation of all. Why care about liberation? Because it is the fundamental human good or, perhaps better, because it is the fundamental precondition of anything that is good. The Marxist must be as committed to the reality of irreducible normative qualities as the best of them. If it really is all just matter, then nothing matters.
Does that mean that all taboos must stand? I suspect that this one is one that should go. It seems to me that comrade Demarty is quite correct. We should quote people accurately. One cannot think about racism without thinking about racist language. It is perhaps not the most important aspect of the despicable phenomenon, but it is certainly one part. It makes sense to defy the taboo for that purpose. On the other hand, I remain in thrall to the word’s power. In the second sentence, I put the word in quote marks inside square brackets. I suspect comrade Demarty would have done the same. We are not normally so fussy about marking mention in that construction. Perhaps the pair of us really just want to say ‘Fuck’.
I apologise for the tedium.
Jacob Berkson
email
Union factions
The discussion in Britain over which part of the bureaucracy to back in the Unite elections has an echo in discussions among the socialist groups in Australia.
Support (critical, of course) for Sharon Graham is based on the illusion that such leaders will remove the shackles from rank-and-file activists pursuing strike action. Empty promises cloud the judgement of such socialists. But this is due to their own illusions that strike action alone will lead inexorably to socialist consciousness.
In Australia a recent election in the United Workers Union saw two elements of the union leadership pitched against each other. Most of the socialist groups supported the ‘Members First’ ticket and its promises it would support rank-and-file committees and industrial action (for more detail on this, read the series of articles in Labor Tribune).
How true this is can’t be tested now, as the faction more closely aligned with the ALP leadership (‘United for You’) won the election. But, even if the ‘Members First’ ticket had won and opened up avenues for more strikes, the idea that this leads automatically to political consciousness is risible. At its heart is the false idea of the ‘transitional method’: starting with politics ‘where the workers are at’, strikes on wages will, step by magical step, lead people to want to form workers’ councils and take power.
Of course, industrial action is at a low ebb. This is due to the fact that working class consciousness is at a low ebb. But strikes and trade unionism are the lowest form of class consciousness. The (largely Trotskyist) ‘activist’ left fetishises strikes - partly due to its poor method, but also partly due to a workerist substitutionism for their organisations’ largely student-based (or origin) membership.
The socialist left must do much better if it wants to break out of its siloed ghettoes.
Marcus Strom
Australia
Day of mourning
Even so close to Christmas, there ought to be a national day of mourning on December 15 - the 50th anniversary of the beginning of the neoliberal age in Britain, with the budget of December 15 1976
That was delivered by Denis Healey on behalf of Jim Callaghan - to the delight of Margaret Thatcher and Geoffrey Howe, who considered that the fox of their back-bench and indeed front-bench critics had been shot. The only notable thing about the 1979 general election was the sex of the new prime minister. Everything else had changed two and half years earlier, and has carried on under all three parties ever since. Andy Burnham is right about that, even if it is remarkable for a man with his record to say it.
As defence secretary, Healey had expelled the people from the Chagos Islands - a wrong that was later compounded by David Miliband, before apparently being completed by David Lammy and Richard Hermer. But Burnham has dismissed both Lammy and Hermer. He should cancel the Labour right’s three generations of betrayal and recognise that the Chagossians had the same right to self-determination as the Falkland Islanders, beginning with the right of return to exercise it. If Donald Trump did not like that, then too bad.
There is only one British member of Trump’s so-called Board of Peace. The expulsion of Tony Blair from the Labour Party, and his removal from the privy council as an agent of a foreign and increasingly hostile power, would be quite the ‘clause four moment’. As would the righting of the wrong against the Chagossians. And as would the removal of the 1995 commitment to neoliberalism that Blair wrote into the Labour Party constitution in place of clause four, leading Thatcher to describe New Labour as her own ‘greatest achievement’.
David Lindsay
Durham
Irish visionaries?
As part of this year’s Communist University, Anne McShane will lead a discussion titled ‘Ireland, the rise of rightwing nationalism, Sinn Féin, and the collapse of People Before Profit’s left-government strategy’. For some preparatory reading I’d like to suggest the short book, Neglect in the north of Ireland by Odrán de Bhaldraithe.
The book makes the case that continued British rule is at the heart of the economic, political and cultural neglect seen in the Six Counties - with ‘cultural’ primarily referring to Irish language matters. De Bhaldraithe argues that, rather than tailing mainstream republicanism, the left is better served by returning to and building on the radicalism of visionaries like Bobby Sands, Bernadette Devlin McAliskey and Ruarí Ó Brádaigh.
Sinn Féin supporters can point to their electoral success, the passing of an Irish Language Act - and, of course, its role in the peace process. But in prioritising results over method, the consequence of these apparent victories has actually been to legitimise partition - nowhere seen more clearly than in the Good Friday agreement. By participating in Stormont’s power-sharing agreement, Sinn Féin has fully cooperated with unionism.
In so doing, Ireland’s largest republican party, which has a long leftwing history, has aided the Democratic Unionist Party in reforming the tax system to welcome big business - bringing the north in line with the Irish Republic, which is considered by economists to be a tax haven. They have also signed off on the economic status quo, in which all funding for the north is agreed solely in Westminster. Workers, especially those of a Catholic background, feel the impact of all this in consistently missed hospital targets, shortages of social housing and parents forced to home-school children with special educational needs, since there aren’t enough places for them in the education system.
The trade union movement is hampered by the same error as much of mainstream republicanism: that of brushing aside the real history of unionism, treating it as merely a culture or identity that must be respected and accommodated. In reality, unionism is a system of domination, necessarily opposed to democracy and working class solidarity in Ireland. Common-sense politics dictates that trade union leaders are ‘sectarian’ or anti-peace when they stray from regular struggles over wages, and instead raise demands that question the northern statelet.
De Bhaldraithe sums the situation up: “Organised labour has admitted defeat in its challenging of the political arena.” The example is given of Steve Turner who, as assistant general secretary of Unite, consistently supported the manufacture of RAF fighter jets in Belfast. Later, as a candidate for general secretary, Turner received backing from the Communist Party of Ireland. If the labour movement can’t even fight against colonialism and for greater democracy, then it can forget about the all-important struggle for working class power.
With the limited scope of this work, it touches on financialisation, but doesn’t get into Ireland’s dependence on the United States, whose interests dominate the country even more than Britain’s. Marxists cannot overlook this challenge when thinking about a united Ireland, or indeed any national liberation movement.
There have been many developments to grapple with since the publication of this book, such as the pogroms against migrants and Roma in the north, and the work of People Before Profit and the Palestine solidarity movement both sides of the border. Much of the impotence of the revolutionary left in Britain and in Ireland is down to our unwillingness to describe things as they really are, and our refusal to debate.
So come to Communist University and get the discussion going.
Billy Clark
email
Family abolition
In an article titled ‘Romantic love and family are not the enemy’, which involved a discussion between Jacobin editor Meagan Day and Swedish gender studies academic Evalina Johansson Wilen, Jacobin completely mischaracterises the ‘family abolitionist’ position. I would like to set the record straight. Of course, I can only speak for myself in this letter, though I hope other “family abolitionists”, as we are described in the article, will agree with what I have to say.
In this interview, Wilen argues that “family abolitionism” - I shall call it ‘abolitionism’ from now on - is a position arising relatively recently due to increased demands on familial reproduction, alongside decreasing capacity to meet those demands. However, abolition of the family was advocated more than one hundred years ago by Marx in The communist manifesto. The socialisation of reproductive labour (which is, as Wilen acknowledges, the substance of abolishing the family) was an important part of the programmes of the social democratic parties of Europe, despite what the right wing of those parties thought about it.
Wilen also claims that abolitionists do not recognise that the family exists outside of market relations, and that this exterior existence is not only how capital makes use of it for its own interests, but also how it can serve as a basis of resistance. Wilen must not have done very much research into the abolitionist position to have come up with this perspective. It has been the exact perspective of socialist feminists for nearly one hundred years - from de Beauvoir to Wittig, to Mitchell, to Federici and Fortunati - that the family’s apparent separation from capitalist market relations is what allows these relations to subjugate it according to capitalist interests. Wilen’s claim that the family is completely external to the market is quite odd, as it is the gender pay gap which forces men and women proletarians together into families to function as stable economic actors. This separation is, in fact, illusory. It exists to ensure the stable supply of labour power, according to the economic and political interests of the ruling classes of the various nation-states of our global society.
The authors of this article make the point that familial relations can, and have, served as the basis for class struggle. This is true, without a doubt. Workers’ immediate experience of their exploitation, and their interest in fighting against it, often emerges from their loving relationships with their partners, children or other relatives who are suffering. But this alone tells us little that is interesting. It is certainly no reason to be soft on the family or romantic love. Workers also experience their exploitation in the workplace alongside their colleagues, or through their friends out in the ‘social factory’ of their towns and cities. Do we, then, go soft on wage labour?
It is only because the patriarchal and nuclear family structure favoured by capitalism is a part of capitalism that it can function as a site of resistance in the way that Day and Wilen argue. It is not truly external. It is not a novel argument that it is only with the tools provided to us by capitalism that we will be able to abolish it. This is exactly what Marx said when he wrote: “Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please”.
Wilen’s argument that capitalism is, at the most abstract level, ‘gender blind’ is patently false. While only that half of the species who are labelled ‘women’ are capable of reproducing the human species through birth, it is they who will be the absolute focus of capital’s need to reproduce the class which it exploits.
‘Hetero-pessimism’, an antagonistic view of the relationships between men and women, is not created by dating apps. First, there has always been a moral panic about ‘the war of the sexes’; it is nothing new. Secondly, if this ‘war’ has intensified, it is primarily a result of women’s entrance into the workforce and thus our increased capacity to decide our sexual partners for ourselves, and the anxious effect this has had on the consciousness of young men raised in an ideology that they deserve women’s sexual labour simply by existing.
And anyway, romantic love is not the true counterpart to the sort of dating culture created by dating apps, and we certainly shouldn’t be soft on it. Bourgeois romantic love, in all its tantalisations about finding ‘the one’, of men and women as different puzzle pieces fitting together, and of love everlasting, has a complementarist - and thus sexist - view of love by design.
The response to this which is truly in line with working class interests is not to fetishise romantic love, or to go soft on the family for fear of alienating the proletariat, which is so enmeshed in it as an institution, but to propose our own alternative. Comradely love is the negation of romantic love and of the family. It proposes that the proletarian-human of a future communist society will be free to love whomever and however many they wish in whatever manner they see fit and for however long they want - not in an exploitative manner, but in a way that is respectful to the wishes of all parties involved (for as long as they are compatible) and is responsible to the community.
The aim is a form of love which is truly free from economic considerations and not tied up automatically in oppressive amounts of reproductive labour. This kind of culture needs to be consciously built by a united, democratic, international communist party of the working class. I say, let a thousand blossoms bloom!
Mila Volkova
Communist Unity, Australia