This is a contribution to the party building debate in the UK and beyond. We base it on our limited effort to build a political committee around the Vital Signs Magazine in two major local workplaces in Bristol, as a preliminary step towards the refoundation of a political working class organisation. For a more detailed description of the Vital Signs project you can read this article.

*** The debate

Since the failed attempt to make use of the Labour Party under Corbyn, the debate about re-building an independent working class organisation has continued and fortunately there are tendencies within that debate that have overcome the electoral focus – for a general critique of parliamentary socialist politics please read this text of ours. It is also fortunate that the debate is fairly international, involving, for example, comrades in the US or organisational efforts in Germany. In terms of reference points we want to mention the Prometheus Magazine, the debate on Cosmonaut, Communaut, Notes from Below and within local fringes of The World Transformed.

There are multiple contentious political issues when it comes to the party building debate, such as the question of national liberation, the history of the Soviet Union or social democracy. Our critique of the debate is not that you don’t need a clear political program or a centralised organisation. The opposite is true, the party building discussion runs the risk of fudging thorny issues, such as the position towards capitalist wars or elections, in order to create a big enough ‘critical mass’ for the party project. This is a recipe for disaster that will either cause future splits or paralysis. 

In this contribution, though, we want to focus on what we believe are the core questions: how do we see the working class, the relationship between working class struggles and communist revolution and the role of a political organisation.

***  The crux of the matter: a formal and ahistorical understanding of the working class

Our concern is that the debate mainly revolves around the left and its various historical programs without relating this to the actual working class, its constitution within 21st century capitalism and its struggles. 

We see a fairly traditional approach, referring either to former left mass organisations, such as the SPD in 1890, or former vanguard organisations, such as the Bolsheviks in the early 20th century – often without much materialist analysis about their subsequent historic failure. The vision to rebuild a party seems to consist in finding a broad enough common programmatic platform, to reach a critical mass within the left, and to build ‘economic front-organisations’ for workers, such as tenant unions, which then become the basis for educational programs about Marxism. 

For us this vision seems to express a certain detachment from class reality. Underlying this vision is a conception of the working class that reduces it to a mass of people with the same ‘economic interests’ (poverty, low wages). As the party building debate perceives no further inner cohesion or political dimension of the sphere of exploitation, it suggests that workers have to be united, first in economic organisations and then educated, e.g. by a minimum / maximum program dialectic, towards a fairly nebulous ‘revolutionary rupture’. It reproduces the old distinction between an economic struggle of workers on one side and the development of ‘socialist ideas’, in a more or less separated sphere, on the other. The working class is portrayed as a necessary mass, or economic lever, to put communism, as a distinct program, in place.

*** The material basis of revolutionary communism

We, on the other hand, believe that communism is a trajectory of working class experience within the capitalist mode of production, which can be unearthed and developed by advanced moments of class struggle itself. A communist organisation has to relate strategically and programmatically to these advanced moments, contributing with historical and international lessons of class struggle. For us there are two material pillars for revolutionary communism which have an objective and a subjective dimension.

The objective basis is the contradiction between what kind of social life the development of the ‘forces of production’ would allow, and the actual misery of capitalist reality. This contradiction is primarily experienced through the fact that social cooperation is hampered and resources wasted by capitalist constraints and narrow interests. Workers who are integrated in the social production process experience this contradiction the most clearly: on one hand, capital is interested in a smooth cooperation between workers in order to increase productivity and the rate of accumulation; on the other hand, the rule of capital as the ‘social coordinator of labour’ depends on the fact that workers remain divided in their cooperation, for example, along company lines or along lines of intellectual and manual labour or along divisions between local and migrant workers. Workers who cooperate too closely become a political risk to the system, as they question the power of bosses, e.g. it was relatively easy for skilled workers in integrated industrial towns, who had a good overview over the wider production process, to question why bosses were necessary at all. This segmentation of the social cooperation of workers is highly political, we can say it is the political core of class struggle in capitalism. Class struggle is a permanent process of decomposition and recomposition, the fragmentation of the social production process is capital’s desperate attempt to hide workers’ power and the objective potential of communism from the working class. While capital’s power relies on fragmentation, it also relies on accumulation and therefore on an ever increasing socialisation and expansion of labour. The ‘communist potential’ (global social cooperation, socialisation of knowledge etc.) has been inscribed in capitalist relations since its origins, but has to be unearthed and reconstituted again and again, due to the permanent transformation of the production process and the class itself.

The subjective basis of revolutionary communism is the experience of self-organisation. Self-organisation both within the production process and – being forced to defend working and living standards in cycles of crisis – within an increasingly fierce and global class struggle. When we refer to self-organisation we mean more than just workers leading their own struggles. It depends on their objective position within the social production process as to which extent self-organised struggles can tear apart the veil of capital, meaning, to question capital as being a necessary precondition for social labour. It depends on their objective position within the social production process as to which extent particular struggles can ‘express a wider desire and potential for communism’ and regroup the wider working class around a class program. It was no co-incidence that the ‘council’ as a primary political form of workers’ revolution emerged from regions of integrated mass industries. The fact that the class is composed unevenly in relation to the social production process and to the potential to regroup the class constitutes the possibility and necessity of political strategy. The confrontation with capital during strikes and the subsequent attacks by the media, community leaders, patriarchal figures, police and the law is the other highly political aspect of the ‘so-called ‘economic struggle’. 

These are the two main ‘materialist’ pillars of communism – the contradiction of social productivity and crisis, and the experience of workers’ self-activity. We could add a third pillar, which is the presence of a ‘political current’ or ‘historical consciousness’, the red thread of the communist movement, though its impact is more difficult to define. In a conversation, comrade Sergio Bologna expressed the following conundrum: “The upheaval of workers’ autonomous struggles of the 1960s and 1970s would not have been possible without the main militants having been socialised within the communist milieu and trade unions, at the same time organisations like the PCI and the trade unions became the greatest obstacles for working class revolutionary struggle once it started”. 

For us it is rather astonishing, if not frustrating, that instead of focusing on the two main pillars, the world of ever changing global production and combat, more or less all party building efforts focus on the rather marginal third pillar, meaning, on themselves, the traditions of the left, the historical programs.

How could you relate politically to the main two pillars?

*** The re-politicisation of work

As communists we argue that our primary task of day-to-day struggle is to re-politicise work, meaning, to encourage that our fellow workers question the organisation and power relations at work, rather than ‘just’ the conditions and distribution of its product. We have to insist on questions such as why is work organised the way it is? In whose interest? What is ‘irrational’ about it and why? How do we depend on the cooperation of millions and how is that cooperation disguised or hampered through capitalist forms? Why is that cooperation hierarchical? How are machines and how is knowledge developed and why is it often used to our detriment? Who or what decides about investments? This is intricate work, just looking at the health sector and its global character and applied science makes us dizzy. Bourgeois science and technological development is the backbone of capital’s social legitimisation and we have to break and demystify it from a communist point of view. The critique of capitalism has to get its hands dirty, climb down from the general level (wage labour is exploitation, the state is a repressive organ etc.) and critique the capitalist forms in concrete terms at each moment. This doesn’t mean to ignore a general critique of the commodity form, wage labour, money or the market, but to relate this critique closely to daily experiences. The commodity form and the capitalist property relations are not primarily enforced and reproduced by direct violence, but as products of a mode of production. How can a segmented global cooperation of millions, which carries within it the material basis of communism produce a social relation in which the products of labour – capital and the state apparatus – appear as an alien force?

It becomes clear that by reducing the world of work and production to the ‘economic dimension’ most communists will fail to question the power of capital and to support the material tendencies towards communism. Following from that perspective, they can claim that parliamentarism, a bourgeois form of politics which individualises the collective producer into individual working class citizens, can be used for revolutionary goals. Their communism will therefore remain one of the Evangelistic types, one that tries to preach ideas to the masses. This position is reflected in statements from participants in the party building debate, for example, that ‘electoral struggle’ is more radical, in terms of class struggle, than ‘economic struggle’, such as strikes. This position is also reflected in a common view that the basis of capitalist exploitation is private property and that the solution lies in nationalisation. Seen from a working class point of view, however, it is the actual form in which work is organised that leads to the expropriation of the producers and that therefore a fundamental change of the production process itself is required. This means that the form of work and the organisation of production itself is highly political. That the formal ownership of the means of production is a secondary question can be seen in the fact that there were high levels of workers discontent and struggle in regions and periods where large areas of the economy were formally ‘nationalised’, e.g. in the 1970s.

But this re-politicisation of work does not happen as an educational exercise – there is no collective subject to address without struggle, the class constitutes itself only in confrontation with capital. This re-politicisation of work has to happen as part of an antagonistic process, as part of the daily self-defense of our class. The analysis of one’s own industry first appears as a necessity to organise the struggle effectively: how can we interrupt production beyond our immediate workplace? What are the main dividing lines between workers? How can we use the means of production as a means of struggle? It then potentially becomes the knowledge to rupture production from its capitalist straightjacket.

Here we can see that the struggle for daily self-defense and the wider political horizon of working class social power are intrinsically linked. The challenge for communists is to propose forms of struggle that are not only effective in a quantitative sense, but that create a dynamic of self-organisation that points beyond professional and sectoral boundaries. A dynamic of self-organisation that is open towards the ‘making use of’ the means of production and work relations as means of struggle, e.g. when assembly line or transport workers used the work organisation to spread the dispute beyond their immediate surrounding or teachers used their strike to intervene in the proletarian neighbourhoods. Only these situations of antagonistic workers’ control have true educational value. This means that struggles of daily self-defense of wages and conditions cannot be relegated to the ‘economic struggle’ through trade unions. The trade union form of struggle – the struggle limited to professional groups, companies, competing union organisations, negotiable outcomes etc. – will not only be ineffective in the long-run, it also externalises and individualises the process of politicisation towards a detached sphere of bourgeois politics. The left of the party building debate doesn’t question the bourgeois sphere of politics, they just want to offer a ‘different political voice”:

“Political voice implies three elements. The first is a political programme which can be the basis of a party…the second is publishing an alternative to the capitalists’ advertising-funded media, and especially the national press, which drowns out oppositional speech by the amplification of the proprietor’s and his editor’s voices and thereby helps enforce the choice between the ‘party of order’ and the ‘party of liberty’…The third is as far as possible using the opportunity of electoral campaigning – and if possible actually winning seats in parliament, local government, and so on – to promote this politics.” –  Mike MacNair

Strikes and their political potential to reveal the social cooperation and productive knowledge of the class and their political antagonism vis-a-vis the state differ enormously. 

An immediate task of a working class organisation is therefore to instigate, together with worker militants, a ruthless analysis of each struggle in regards to their political potentials and limitations. This is the true meaning of Marx’s position that communists have no interests separate from the working class: unlike leftist organisations or trade unions, communists don’t have an interest in creating a fake aura of victorious struggle for their own organisations. The interest of the working class to learn from their defeats outweighs the interest of communists to show that they are successful. Lessons have not only to be drawn, but also disseminated in a strategic sense to points of struggles where they are most needed. 

The medium-term task of a party would be to develop out of this collective analytical work an understanding of the current state and contradictions of capitalist agriculture, energy production, transport, IT/electronics, manufacturing, health industries and public administration – and to instigate a debate about their sectoral ability to function as means of revolutionary struggle and communist transformation. So far the left’s critique of the main capitalist industries ignores the question of how they can be taken over and transformed into communist means of production. The critique has limited itself largely to pointing out the harmful impact of industries or the monopoly positions of corporations. There is little analysis about how the inner hierarchical division of labour can be dissolved, how labour can be socialised in a process of transition or how regional unevenness of development can be questioned.

*** Mass party or organised core in a mass movement?

“The idea is that, for a revolution to succeed, there must be one singular organisation, uniting all revolutionary forces, and coordinating the revolutionary struggle across all aspects of society.” – Archie Woodrow

Perceiving the working class primarily as a mass of wage workers, rather than a complex composition of more or less connected social producers, it is not surprising that the party building debate insists that the party has to have a ‘mass character’. If we ignore that workers are already organised through and against the social production process then it makes sense to assume that individual workers can only struggle once they join together in a mass organisation. We can see that historically this assumption is wrong, as revolutions were pushed by class movements whose scope and dynamic surpassed the official mass organisations. Most organisations of the traditional socialist and trade union movement were completely overrun by the dynamic of 1917 – 23 and so were most organisations that predated the global uprising of 1968.

Of course our aim should be to involve as many workers as possible in our organisations, but the perspective that the mass organisation itself is the prime vehicle of revolution is flawed and can result in politically fatal illusions and dead ends. The most likely outcome of this perspective is to water down the organisation’s revolutionary program in order to attract more people in non-revolutionary times. Once class movements actually heat up and put revolution back on the agenda, these organisations usually become stumbling blocks, such as the SPD in the period after World War I or the PCI after World War II. This is not a very astute point and it has been made by anarchists or left-communists over and over again. A similar critique is that once we believe that our organisation is the main vehicle we have less of an interest in strengthening the class movement as such, but we would mainly do so in order to recruit workers, in competition with other organisations. 

The perhaps even more serious consequence of this perspective is that it clouds our strategic view when it comes to actual class movements. If we believe that our own organisation contains the program, then there is no need to analyse the various segments, tendencies, productive capacities and compositions of class movements – which is actually the difficult bit, as it not only requires a sharp political view, but a closeness to class struggles in blood and flesh. If ‘the mass party’ is the presupposed answer then there is also no need to figure out how an organised revolutionary minority, which historically speaking is the most likely position we will find ourselves in, can function as bridges between certain class segments, as a catalyst that connects advanced moments of a movement with marginalised ones or historic lessons with current experiences and so on. In much of the discussion about party building, the acquiescence of the class to the program is presupposed through the correctness of the ideas expressed in the program. The question of the establishment and defence of workers control over the social production process is left for a future administration to impose – this is an idealist inversion, as the experience of worker control as part of a fierce struggle is a materialist precondition for ‘socialist ideas’ to develop and generalise. 

If you ask any Trotskist about what went wrong in May 1968 they would probably reply: “There were 10 Million workers on general strike, but the revolution did not happen. It must be due to the wrong leadership”. This response is obviously always true, but it doesn’t explain anything. Only an actual analysis of the ‘general strike’ and its inner composition – the fact that many workers just stayed at home, that only in a few industries workers actually took more radical steps etc. – can explain its limitations and tell us what our role as an organised minority could have been.

In that sense our position is not anti-organisational. We start from the historic premise that the class movement itself is the main revolutionary force, but that organised political minorities can have a strategic impact. Rather than a fairly simple and static model of organisation – the mass party – we propose a more complex intervention: on one hand the role of an organised minority is to encourage the creation of organs of mass participation and self-organisation of workers in a moment of prolonged social upheaval, on the other hand we propose to intervene in these mass organs of the movement as a clearly visible and outspoken communist core that proposes internationalist communist measures. 

This dynamic between class movement and organised cores is further layered by the composition of the working class within the social production process. The process and impact of self-organisation of groups of workers is determined by its material position – it makes huge differences if your struggles take place in an IT office, a cobalt mine, a mass hospital, a rust-belt region or a logistical hub.

*** Class composition and class strategy

Rather than as a mere mass of exploited we see the working class as composed by a complex and stratified social production process. The position within this production process determines not only the degree of collective power vis-a-vis capital and the state, but also the potential of particular struggles to attract wider class segments and to become an expression of the contradiction between social productivity and capitalist misery. In the 1960s it was the migrant mass worker in Detroit, Turin or Cologne who could express the most radical, collective anger at the most advanced point of development: “why suffer at the assembly line for an empty consumer society (and Cold War machine)?”. Marginalised sections of the class will experience this contradiction first and foremost as an exclusion from wealth, while workers who are integrated in modern industries will experience it as an absurd inversion of their social and productive collectivity, e.g. complex machinery that could make our lives easier are used to squeeze ever more labour out of a shrinking workforce. A communist organisation has to reflect the totality of class reality – it has to demonstrate that parts of the class, e.g. in developed regions, have already found answers to the questions that other struggles are still grappling with, e.g. in the fight over basic needs, which pushes marginalised workers into the hands of the middle-class. Each capitalist cycle is based on a particular class composition – a particular international industrial regime – and each cycle of class struggle constitutes itself around a particular ‘workers’ figure’ that is able to recompose the class through struggle. 

Historically we see a close link between a particular class composition and a particular expression of the communist project. Hidden behind the classic programs and distilled (and often distorted) in the declarations of the communist movement are the political expressions of a particular juncture of workers’ struggle. In 1848, the recently urbanised artisans, the liberal lawyers, the global dock workers and seafarers, the unruly proletarian towns women and the roving journeyman amalgamated into a class composition of egalitarian socialism of petty producers. In 1917, the skilled workers of industrial towns, the returning proletarian soldiers and a new generation of female factory workers who had still strong links to the peasant hinterland expressed their industrial integration politically in the form of international council communism, with the council dissolving the previous separation of political, economic and military organisation. In 1969, the mass migrant assembly line workers and proletarian students attacked the university and factory regime in a highly productive society, which had only mediocre consumption to offer for high levels of alienation. A general critique of professional straightjackets and political representation was expressed through new forms of self-organisation, such as assemblies and coordinations. 

Historically, the political left did not stand outside of the contemporary class composition but, consciously or not, expressed the experience and goals of a particular segment of the class as a general goal, e.g. the SPD cadres in 1890 largely expressed the goals of an upper-level of the industrial workers in conjunction with professionals, such as journalists or lawyers, who wanted a ‘betterment’ and social acceptance for the working class and had an ‘educational’ relation to common workers. Even today, left projects such as Podemos or the Corbyn movement express the class background of their activists, who propose their aspirations (“a ‘fair’ society led by educated metropolitans with democratic values”) as general politics.

Only those revolutionary organisations that were able to ‘read’ the emerging class composition of the movement were able to play a positive and radical role, e.g. in the 1960s, organisations belonging to the universe of workers’ autonomy that fused a critique of their own past within the communist movement with a sensitivity towards new forms of struggle, such as the worker-student assemblies. ‘Reading’ a class composition means to understand which are the advanced forms of struggle, to help generalise these forms and build bridges to marginalised segments, to help combining the spark of proletarian anger that stems from systemic poverty, oppression and exclusion, e.g. of the urban ghettos, with the powder keg of industrial mass experience and universitarian counter-science, e.g. when medical students started to inquiries into working class health in the 1970s. Groups like DRUM were able to play the role of catalysts for brief moments. A communist program has to be distilled out of these concrete moments. 

A vision of a ‘mass party’ runs the risk of functioning as a mere umbrella for different class segments, e.g. the unemployed, the students, the youth, the industrial workers, the intellectuals. Traditionally this would express itself in the ‘alliance of manual and intellectual workers’ of the Communist Parties. A revolutionary organisation, in contrast, would have to relate to the specific potentials and limitations that each class segment brings into the class movement and contribute to the actual material dissolution of the divisions. A revolutionary party has to leave its commanding heights and analyse the specific potentials and limitations of each major segment of the working class, the dividing lines and their specific role for a communist rupture.

We, ourselves, are confronted with complex class compositions today. In France, for example we saw three waves of enormous social turmoil, each of them expressing a certain class segment. The Yellow Vests were an expression of largely non-industrial workers and small entrepreneurs in marginal towns that created a new social sphere after decades of neoliberal atomisation, but that was not able to break the dangerous mould of populism. The movement against the pension reform was a largely union controlled strike of mainly public sector workers, supported by school and university students. They used blockades in order to compensate for a lack of inner cohesion and self-organisation, as the strikers themselves were often in a minority position within their workplaces or industries. Shortly after these strikes the riots against police violence erupted from the areas of urban poverty and exclusion, but it remained a spark without productive transforming power. In the USA, we saw a similar emergence of Black Lives Matter protests, a strike wave of a new generation of car, logistics and health workers and the expressions of discontent of so-called tech workers, who criticised the use of their labour for surveillance or military purposes. At least partially, the strikes themselves created bridges between class segments, such as the teachers strike in Chicago, which related to the wider proletarian community. As a revolutionary organisation we would have to analyse these segmented movements from within and read the potential that each component can bring to the table of a wider class movement. Further organisational intervention must be based on such an analysis, rather than trying to recruit workers individually into a ready-made receptacle. 

We don’t propose a reductive search for industries that could function as ‘future levers of class power’. It is easy to spot central industries as bases of class power, but it is difficult to find lines of organic connection that relate the detached spheres of technical expertise and science with proletarian hunger and violence or the experience of mass industrial cooperation with the sphere of social sensitivity towards the wider needs of the class. We have to locate ourselves at class junctions.

*** The limits of minimal or maximal programs as a set of demands

Lacking an insight into the political character of the production process and therefore of the inner constitution of class movements, the party building debate has to recycle external forms of programs, primarily in the form of minimal and maximal or transitional programs. By and large, these programs are composed of a collection of demands that could be raised at any point of modern capitalism, such as a reduction of working hours, increase of wages, nationalisation of industries and so forth. The ‘strategy’ seems to consist in ordering the demands in the right, meaning, escalating order.

We don’t criticise these programs for assuming that class struggle doesn’t develop purely in spontaneous leaps and bounds, but often in certain stages. And we don’t criticise the raising of general demands per se. We argue however that  these demands have to emerge out of advanced points of the movement or at least relate strategically to them. For example, a political intervention within a cross-class movement such as the Yellow Vests or even Black Lives Matter would support the organic proletarian demands – in the case of the Yellow Vests it was the focus on precarious labour contracts – in order to break the populist straightjacket. 

The problem of the left’s relationship with demands goes deeper. It often expresses an external relationship to class struggles. To outsiders of struggles, often only the official demands are visible and they become the measure to judge the radical or non-radical nature of the struggle. But the demands that workers raise are largely an expression of the underlying balance of power and of the degree of their inner cohesion. Proposing different kinds of demands doesn’t change that. Raising demands also expresses a certain degree of passivity, as it is one thing to demand improvements, a different thing to enforce changes. The left tends to want to represent or externally unite struggles and for this purpose demands are a welcome vehicle. Historically we can see that once a class movement emerges, workers tend to enforce things directly, e.g. the ‘proletarian rounds’ of factory collectives in Italy in the 1970s enforced the lowering of energy or transport prices or they prevent factories working overtime or weekend shifts.

Being critical of schematic formulas, such as minimum and maximum programs, doesn’t mean that we think that class struggle just leaps forward without mediations or stages – or that there is no need for ‘transitional class programs’, though we see the latter rather as measures for the class to impose, rather than demands to be made of political mediators. We see an escalation of class experience that proceeds from being able to conduct your own strikes to being able to take further control over your immediate workplace, e.g. to oppose certain management plans or to decide which work is performed and which not. Once these experiences reach a certain mass level a ‘class program’ can emerge. Here are three short examples that we see regarding recent potentials for such organic programs.

Firstly, the mass experience of the lock-down during the pandemic followed by the fire-and-rehire attack of the employers. Through numerous interviews we realised that workers in various sectors imposed levels of worker control during the first weeks of the pandemic. They would change regulations, refuse certain unnecessary work or alter shift patterns according to their understanding of the work process and health and safety. Shortly after this modest experience of worker control, serious attacks on wages and conditions started. At this moment we saw the potential for struggles to leave the defensive mould in those industries that were affected by fire-and-rehire: “we were able to change work practices during lock-down, we can take control of this dispute”; “during lock-down, we have seen on a social scale that not all work is socially essential, now we can express this in our struggle against job cuts: no to job cuts, we all work, we all work less hours and we all work for what we deem as socially necessary”. At least around west-London, where we had deeper roots at the time, there was a potential for such a limited ‘program’ in the air that could have galvanised other disputes.

Secondly, the experience of health workers during the pandemic. On an international level the pandemic broke the back of an already understaffed and overwhelmed workforce, resulting in a steep increase of industrial disputes. At the same time health workers experienced the inadequate state response to the pandemic, not being able to coordinate a health sector that is segmented by the self-interest of pharma-companies, by the detachment of science labs from hospital wards, by the separation of hospitals and social and elderly care and so on. At this point it would have been socially necessary for the wider health workforce to enforce an alternative pandemic plan, or program, based on their own collective understanding and taking into account the needs of the wider class. The problem was that the strikes themselves were not strong enough to overcome the various divisions and to collectivise the knowledge of local community GPs, hospital health care assistants and lab technicians. Here we can see the intrinsic link between self-organised struggle and the possibility of a genuine program to emerge.

Thirdly, the struggle of the ex-GKN workers in Italy. As a collective producer of fossil-fuelled passenger car parts the workforce took on a social responsibility for the factory that was supposed to be closed. Rather than proposing mere re-investment the workers said that with their factory occupation they want to defend certain conditions that previous generations had fought for and capture the factory not as their property, but as a productive infrastructure for the wider community. They tried to create a broad class front – from precarious workers, other workers who were threatened with job cuts, engineering students to initiatives for free public transport etc. – to defend the factory and to convert it for socially useful production under worker control. This worker control would entail a large-scale reduction in working time, as less automobile workers are needed for the production of public sector vehicles. On a regional and international level, these workers managed to create a movement around a genuine program. Despite the fact that this example will have to degenerate under market conditions, it was the most advanced point of current struggles. Unfortunately there have been only minor efforts to make this example known in the UK. GKN is a UK based company, with various local plants.

The ‘party building debate’ would have to be conducted and tested on the basis of such concrete examples of potential intervention. In future we should discuss the following question: how would a revolutionary organisation have intervened in the recent UK strike wave and the top-down attempt to focus it on general demands under the umbrella of ‘Enough is Enough’. What would the so-called ‘mass party’ have done?

The demands raised by ‘Enough is Enough’ were generally fitting the moment (energy price, rent) and if they had been raised from the strikers themselves or in close relationship with them, they could have developed into a genuine common focus. The lefty and trade union competition at the top of the campaign became an objective obstacle and the unions were too scared to break the strike laws. But it would be too superficial to blame ‘Enough is Enough’ for the failure of the campaign. The strikes themselves were too dependent on the union apparatus, meaning, the main task would not have been to raise better general demands or to make ‘Enough is Enough’ more democratic, but to propose practical steps that would have increased the independent strength and organisational cohesion of strikers. This would have required a revolutionary organisation to be in a close direct relationship with each particular strike. In general, the left milieu had no alternative reading of the strike wave and therefore no organisational proposals. What would the party have done? 

The pandemic has shredded the neoliberal illusion that material labour has disappeared and revealed a complex picture of international industrial cooperation. The future will see further strike waves and riots for sure, and moments where they fail to connect. The challenge will be to proceed from the experience of ‘we have the knowledge and collectivity to interrupt capital accumulation’ to a confidence that ‘we have the collectivity and social know-how to impose and defend a different use of capitalist resources’. This will require a social workforce that has analysed and understood its own industries through cycles of struggles. Only these advanced elements of the working class and their program to transform the social production process can win over large parts of the rest of society, in particular amongst the proletarian sections of the military and the productive administrative apparatus of the state. A communist core that is organised within the essential industries will play a decisive role. At this point, working class mass violence will primarily be a means to defend the productive bases of its creative collectivity and poles of social attraction, such as factories, hospitals and wider infrastructure. The productive force of the essential industries, in turn, is the main weapon in class warfare, as it can be used against a parasitic middle-class or the materially dependent armed forces. This is a different vision of revolution from those 20th century images of red civil war, a gradually expanding general strike or of taking over power in parliament.

*** The first steps towards the refoundation of a class party

We are not opposed to detailed discussions about political programs or platforms, e.g. about positions regarding imperialist wars or the nature of the Soviet Union. We are also not opposed to discussions about the inner structure of any future political organisation, e.g. about the rights of factions or the pitfalls of democratic centralism and horizontalism. (As a side note on the question of the inner structure of organisations: we find it unsatisfactory to have only formal solutions (‘the rights of factions’) for the problem of why many of the current organisations of ‘democratic centralism’ turn into ‘bureaucratic centralism’. We assume that ‘the bureaucracy’ of organisations like the Socialist Party express a certain political relation between a leadership composed of professionals, academics, retired comrades and ‘worker members’ who are primarily recruited individually. This relation won’t be changed by formal ‘democratic’ measures within the organisation.) Finally, we are not in the least opposed to creating a wide proletarian sphere of mutual aid, culture and debate. These things are happening and they have to happen. What we feel isn’t happening is an analysis of the current composition of our class and a debate about a political strategy within the class.

When it comes to a political platform we see ourselves already in a minority within the left. The refusal to support any capitalist state in any military confrontation or to insist that supporting ‘national liberation’ means to lead proletarians into fatal dead-ends puts us into a fringe position. The critique of electoral politics or of tactics that involve jockeying for positions within the trade unions marginalises us further. But in the end our aim is to engage in communist theory and practice within the class, not to create a false left unity. 

Agreeing on a political platform is not easy, but it is the easiest part of the process. As AngryWorkers we have seen how difficult it is to find groups of comrades who are willing and able to form communist nuclei within strategic workplaces, which we see as a precondition for re-constituting a revolutionary organisation. We think this is due to a certain tension within our political approach: on one hand we insist on the primacy of self-organisation within the class, on the other hand, under current conditions of relatively low levels of class struggle, it takes a cadre discipline of the old communist type to start and sustain collective activities in mass workplaces. So be it. We cannot by-pass the issue and create ‘short-cuts’ into the class, as most ‘party building projects’ are currently trying. Coming largely from a student background, many projects try to create links to the class by opening workers’ advice centres, food kitchens (or ‘Stadtteilgewerkschaften’ / neighbourhood unions in the case of Germany), or by becoming organisers in the official unions. While these are the most obvious or convenient steps to take if you want to leave the left bubble, they are also prone to end in politics of representation or social work.

Our simple suggestion is to form communist nuclei within essential industries, to start a process of collective analysis of the current constitution of these industries and to experiment with political interventions. The relationship between these communist nuclei is not one of a network or a federation, but of a future cohesive organisation. We have to continue a process of political clarification, when it comes to the global and historical questions, but more importantly, to commit to common strategic interventions, e.g. in moments such as the strike wave or in anti-war protests. The main current tasks of these communist nuclei are to engage in an empirical research about the respective sectors and an analysis of its capitalist contradictions: how has the work organisation and technology developed over time; how does the capitalist crisis impact on the sector; how has the cooperation of the workforce been constituted internationally and segmented at the same time? This research has to include detailed interviews with co-workers regarding the conditions and experiences of struggle and in an analysis of historical and international experiences of class conflict in the sector

Based on this pre-research of the objective and subjective conditions, we have to formulate a current political critique of how the global phenomena of capitalist crisis are reflected within the sector: restructuring, environmental destruction, militarisation, the general absurdity of capitalist technological and scientific ‘progress’, such as Artificial Intelligence. It is paramount to find new ways to discuss this critique with the wider workforce, e.g. through publications, meetings. As mentioned, these are not detached ‘educational efforts’, but they have to be embedded in forms of self-organisation for the daily self-defense of wages and working conditions.

Rooting your efforts of reconstituting a political organisation of the class in large workplaces doesn’t mean to become ‘workplace activists’. Rather, we have to intervene in local and regional disputes and mobilisations from the basis of being an organised workers’ core in an essential industry: from strikes, anti-migration raids, environmental action, rent action to interventions against fascists. From the strength as a collective workforce we have to build links to segments of the class that are not part of a similarly cohesive industrial base.

The same is true for engaging with the wider communist milieu. We have to create international links both with communist initiatives which share similar outlooks and with militant workers in the same industries, creating a dynamic between both. Only this will allow us to discuss the strategic importance of each workplace, industry and sector within a wider process of mass struggle, in situations of dual power and transition – which is our prime job as revolutionaries.

Of course there are various common pitfalls when you try to reconstitute a political organisation by getting rooted in very concrete sectoral conditions, such as a degeneration into localism or syndicalism. These risks need to be confronted rather than avoided.

*** The limitations of our efforts as AngryWorkers / Vital Signs Magazine

It is perhaps too early to draw meaningful lessons from our efforts of building a communist core in the two main hospitals in Bristol, but we can at least summarise some of the potentials and problems. As far as we know there isn’t any other similar project of comprehensive revolutionary magazines within essential industries in the UK, apart from perhaps the University Worker project by comrades from Notes From Below and the relatively formulaic ‘workplace newsletters’ of the Trotskyist-type. This means that we lack constructive controversies and exchange. 

The two hospitals we work in are not only big workplaces, with around 18,000 co-workers, but they are also complex in their composition, from cleaners to consultants and scientists. Even after years of working there we still struggle to understand the labour process, which reaches into universities, the pharma industry, the ‘community’.

There is hardly any trade union or rank-and-file activity, which means that in cases such as the current job cuts, we are the first group that speaks out and proposes collective action, drawing on examples of resistance in the past or in other regions. Thanks to Vital Signs Magazine, of which we distribute 1,000 copies, we are in touch with individual workers who are either affected by attacks, such as the job cuts, or who support our positions – but this does not galvanise into collective action yet. There are comrades of nearly all left organisations working in the two hospitals (SP, SPGB, Counterfire, Solfed, RS21, Momentum etc.), but this does not translate into a ‘political milieu’ and exchange within the workplace. These organisations have no workplace activity. Our open meetings only attract small numbers of political and militant co-workers. We try to support rank-and-file activity around day-to-day conflicts, e.g. through collective grievances when it comes to privatisation of surgical theatres, but our main focus is the publication of Vital Signs Mag as a political forum.

We started more ambitious research projects regarding the constitution of the sector, e.g. by discussing the global composition of the pharma-industry or the class history of medical surgery or the current militarisation of the health sector. We try to reflect this research in Vital Signs Mag, but this is a slow process. We try as well as we can to relate articles on general programmatic questions, e.g. the current trade war, the question of racism and fascism, the prospect of working class revolution, to the concrete experiences at work.

We established links with comrade health workers in the US, France and Germany and shared insights via the magazine. We continue participating in the organisation of an annual summer camp of internationalist revolutionaries from various countries. We intervene in the political debate in Bristol, e.g. the party building debate amongst comrades of Bristol Transformed, but this seems a slow process, both in terms of political clarification and practice.

We are planning a UK tour for 2026 in order to share our positions and experiences and hopefully help create similar nuclei elsewhere.

We are interested in your comments on this text and in collaborating towards the creation of a future organisation.

For communism

AngryWorkers