The left is in crisis. While such a statement is clichéd at this point, it is undeniably true. For numerous reasons that we will talk about in a subsequent piece, the left is not only unwilling to confront the tasks that face it, but also is unable to learn the concrete lessons from historical experiences. Despite the fact that living standards have been falling for nearly 50 years, capitalism jumps from crisis to crisis, the planet is in an ecological death spiral, and fascism is on the rise globally, the left continues to ambulance chase, hopping from cause to cause in an epic avoidance of the question of building real power. Objective conditions have never been so good, and we are failing to rise to the task.

Before continuing further it is worthwhile to specify what we mean by “left.” We outright exclude the explicit reformist groups here: those that wish to simply apply band-aids to the current social order rather than outright upend it are not on “the left.” At best they represent the left-wing of capital, and are increasingly marginal. This piece is not directed at these forces, the leaders and dedicated activists of which are decidedly in the enemy camp. Instead we mean all of those groups and individuals that support, in word or action, the overthrow of capitalism and its replacement with some sort of anti-capitalist system (anarchists, socialist, communists, etc.). We can also include militant anti-oppression activists. These forces pursue broadly extra-legal approaches to social change. Within the broad “left” we can also speak of the “revolutionary left”: those that, regardless of their chosen tactics now, think that capitalism can only be overthrown through a revolution primarily aimed at overthrowing the capitalists’ state.

What then is the content of this crisis of the left? In broad terms the left is unwilling to content with political power, choosing instead to levy slogans and beg for scraps. Instead of forcing social forces to act in accordance with our wishes, we hold weak symbolic rallies where we yell and hope we are heard. Despite arguments that power is “diffuse”, real political power is actually located in two locations within capitalist society: in the hands of capital and in the hands of the state, roughly correlated to the capacity to create and destroy. The organizational form used by the left to contend in each realm has, respectively, been the union and the People’s Army/citizen’s militia). In both realms the left is wanting, lacking both actual power and a perspective focused on political power.

The left’s unwillingness to contend with power in a real way has several sources, not least of which is the onslaught of ideological confusion produced by capitalist society and its paid intellectuals. The reason that such confusion is so appealing to the current left will be addressed elsewhere. However, there are two key reasons that we will focus on: first, the near-complete neoliberalization of the left. Second, growing from the first, is the left’s inability to tactically orient itself, or rather, to see ideology as an outgrowth of action.

At risk of spending an inordinate amount of time defining terms, neoliberalism should be understood as a coherent political project of capitalist class offensive consisting of a constellation of ideologies, initiatives, policies, and apparatuses. On the ideological level, all have in common a return to the individualism of classical liberalism. There is a focus on the inalienable rights and freedoms of the individual to act in ways according to their own wishes. This is articulated primarily through economic activity: neoliberals focus on the role of private property rights in guaranteeing freedom. In turn, free markets guarantee a free society. Free markets necessitate the free movement of capital across borders, leading to a focus on globalization. To this end, traditional forms of social solidarity –unions, community organizations, etc.- are torn asunder. It is the complete atomization of the individual under late capitalism that is particularly important.

The result of neoliberalism is that for most people, default consciousness precludes collective solutions to collective problems. What we mean by this is that in the face of social problems, the default solutions are individual ones: if we’re poor, we as individuals should work harder rather than organize; if the planet is dying we as individuals should recycle rather than change how we as a society produce and distribute goods and services. However this default consciousness has also infected the left. In place of mass parties, unions, and revolutionary organizations we get splintered single-issue groups, small groupuscules, and a lack of engagement by the people in left political activity (indeed, all political activity, as the crisis of party membership in even the bourgeois parties attests to). For most of the left it is difficult to conceive of organizational forms in which one is part of a structure extending beyond one’s immediate social circle. The romantic actions of individuals are lauded over mass social change. The “affinity group” rather than mass organization is the spontaneous form of organization on the left, even when it does not recognize itself as such. Bourgeois media more-or-less controls the narrative, with leftists giving their “spin” rather than choosing which issues to address. The capitalist class laughs all the way to the bank.

The most noxious manifestation of the complete neoliberalization of the left is on the level of strategy. “Movementism,” as it has been coined by Joshua Moufawad-Paul, is the belief that somehow a conglomeration of the social-democratic unions, single-issue groups, and ostensibly revolutionary organizations will, if they are large enough or if enough of them have gathered together, spontaneously produce fundamental social change. And this is despite the lack of an overarching strategy, or coordinated leadership. While others have correctly noted that movementism is the elevation of the dead-end of spontaneism, the roots of movementism in neoliberalism have been overlooked: it should be unsurprising that the default strategy of the left in the era of hyper-individualism is a collection of small groups and individuals working on their own but together.

It was Gramsci that first noted that the factory was perhaps the first teacher of the working-class: that in a context where workers worked alongside thousands of their fellow workers, each performing small actions towards a greater whole, it was unsurprising that mass political action in the form of unions and parties became the default form of spontaneous working-class political expression. In the era of a significant portion of the working class working in retail (i.e. small shops divorced from production), at-will manufacturing, and the influence of classes other than the working class on the left, it is unsurprising that the default form of spontaneous oppositional political organization is itself smaller, and single-issue based. The neoliberalization of the left is not simply a result of bad ideas, but is a result of the material conditions that the left has found itself existing in: consciousness, after-all, follows existence.

One of the particularly interesting results of the neoliberalization of the left has been the rise of what is termed “identity politics.” Instead of focusing on the mutual solidarities of different oppressed groups (“Workers’ and oppressed of all countries, unite!”), neoliberal identity politics have instead subdivided people and made the focus of politics not the act of oppression but the self-identification with an identity. We want to be clear that we are not attaching a value judgement to this observation: we are not reductionists, and we do not think that identity-based struggles are unimportant. We do find it interesting though that the ascendancy of identity-based struggles aimed at ameliorating individual experience has occurred while traditional struggles aimed at fundamental social transformation have waned.

Now to bring this all back to the crisis of the left, the ascendancy of neoliberal identity has had an effect on how the left understands itself. Ideology is now largely defined abstractly, based on self-identification with an established trend irrespective of actual practice. So despite the fact that many anarchists, union activists, brands of Trotskyist, old-Communist Party activists, socialists, and others have virtually identical (movementist) practices, they all exist in different organizations because of self-identification with different political tendencies, a self-identification which often runs counter to the actual practice of the individual and organization in question. For the majority of the left, “ideology” exists abstractly apart from practice. And this is unsurprising: as the demographics of the left have shifted away from the working class, the terrain of struggle has shifted away from the realm of social production and reproduction. Struggle becomes abstracted from real life, and so ideology becomes abstracted from practical existence. And, furthermore, “ideology” is often based on adherence to particular historical moments or individuals, most of which have only tangential and allegorical significance to the present moment. Is it any surprise then that a left which defines itself apart from its practice using signifiers that are irrelevant to the current conjecture is itself irrelevant?

To summarize so far: the left faces a crisis. That crisis has as one of its causes ideological failings: an inability to contend with power, and the thorough neoliberalization of the left down to the level of how the left understands itself. Movementism and small-group approaches are one such outgrowth, but another is what can be called an abstract self-selection of “ideology” apart from practice. It is from these observations that we take our departure.

We want to approach the question of ideology from a totally different standpoint than much of the left. For us, ideology is defined by practice: we are what we do, not what we think we are. And so to be a communist is not to simply abstractly agree with a set of ideas, but rather to act like a communist. Or, to put it another way, a communist is not someone who says they are a communist, but rather a communist is someone who acts like a communist. It is defined on the level of tactics and strategy, not on the level of abstract adherence.

Now this is not to say that we reject any attempt at establishing some sort of ideological coherence or a points-of-unity as a means of declaring organizational cohesion. Action without theory is directionless flailing: we need to know our enemies in order to act against them. We believe that the history of working-class struggles have produced universal lessons that we can learn from and apply to our current context. And indeed, as you can see in our Draft Programme, we have some very pared-down but rigorous points of unity. However to be a communist it is not enough to simply abstractly agree that we must end capitalism, imperialism, colonialism; that revolution is necessary; that class struggle is the motor force of history, etc. . Once one has this understanding, one must put it into practice. For us, communism is defined on the level of practice.

What sort of practice? The fundamental task of communists is to organize the working class in order to overthrow the current order and the state that upholds it. To this end workers must be organized at the point of production: the location where they hold power. The job of a communist is therefore fundamentally to organize the working class. Additionally, communists must combat the limits of spontaneity by bringing together various struggles and pointing out their commonalities: to this end communists need an organization of communists (the Party) and a propaganda apparatus, which for us takes the form of an organizing publication. Practice in the vein of these three tasks –organizing workers at the point of production, the production and distribution of a paper, and building the Party- is for us what defines communism.

With this in mind, it is worth addressing the elephant in the room: the history of the revolutionary workers’ movement. As mentioned earlier, most of the organizations on the left (with some exceptions, largely reformist) define themselves not simply abstractly in relation to abstract ideas, but also define themselves abstractly in relation to history. It may be the case that varying types of Trotskyists engage in an almost identical practice, but because they “support” (i.e. think good thoughts about) different tendencies within the history of Trotskyism, they remain apart. In fact, we will go as far as to say that for the past 100 years, the majority of the left has defined itself precisely in terms of where on the “Leninist family tree” it fits: how it sided during various splits, etc. . To us, this is absurd. The insistence on rote agreement with a specific and contested historical narrative helps to damn the left into an eternal existence as small marginal organizations that function more as historical societies than living, breathing organizations.

Now this is not to say that history is unimportant. If we understand revolutionary communism as a science, where we take the good ideas and approaches and reject the bad ideas and approaches to the task of changing the world, history of course becomes invaluable: it provides some of the terrain on which we are able to evaluate our various social experiments. But it must be remembered that it is not history alone which is able to produce correct ideas: correct ideas can also be produced through social investigation and practice. And if we understand that history does not have a monopoly on the production of truth, the centrality of history in terms of how the left defines itself must be questioned. Or, to put it bluntly, we should not be afraid of the insights from other tendencies if they are correct: if Trotsky has an insight worth integrating, one hundred year old debates between long dead socialists over the future of a country which no longer exists should not stop us from doing so. Investigating history is able to produce universal truths, but it is not the only, or even best, way to do so. To us, this is the only scientific way of looking at history, and in turn understanding the connection between ideology, practice, unity, and the history of our movement.

Concretely then, the RWP does not define itself based on its relation to the history of the movement. You will notice that not once in our Draft Programme or other founding documents do we make reference to specific interpretations of the history of international communism. We are not concerned with what our members think of that history, as long as there is a tactical unity towards a common goal. There are certainly lessons we have learned from our shared history, elements of our shared experience that we would consider universal –the importance of focusing on imperialism and colonialism, the Party form of organization, the necessity of revolution, our approach to the state, etc. – but it is unity around the universal lesson we are concerned about, not the specific narrative which produced such a lesson.

In this sense we are very consciously “jumping out” of the Leninist family tree. While certainly finding use in the life and ideas of Lenin, we do not define ourselves abstractly based on a century of splits and mergers in relation to the genealogy of Leninism. We define ourselves by our practice, a communist practice. While critics may call this eclectic, we answer: so what? What matters to us is whether or not the practice is correct, not whether or not the pedigree of our ideas is worth saving.

To end on a somewhat ironic note, it is useful to turn to Lenin. In 1917, Lenin published what was arguably his most insightful work, The State and Revolution. In this pamphlet Lenin derives universal lessons on the state not only through an exegetic reading of the works of Marx and Engels, but also through careful historical analysis of the experiences of the 1848 revolutions, the Paris Commune, and the 1905 Russian Revolution. Lenin begins and ends the text with the universal lessons gleaned from this exercise. And yet not once does Lenin insist that his readers side with this or that specific faction or organization in these historical conflicts: from the dynamic perspective of 1917, even the specific contours of the battles of 1905 were no longer relevant. To be a Bolshevik in 1917 was not to be historical cheerleader for those who had engaged with the state in the past, but rather to adopt a certain set of action-generating ideas in relation to the state and then put those ideas into practice. And indeed, it was this practice which prevented the pamphlet from being finished to the point that Lenin would have wanted: Bolsheviks were too busy making history to be concerned about unanimous abstract agreement on historical matters. We think that there is something worth learning from this example, a universal lesson that has unfortunately been lost too much of the left.