



The British Left in its current multitudinous and splintered iterations have no theoretical movement for power. Even the more successful of these iterations, isolated from the mass of people, are limited in their ability to provide more than just a contingency to the economic conditions of the poor working classes. Basebuilding, at least, provides a space to examine praxis, correct its mistakes, develop a correct theory and seek to import it elsewhere. This way serving the people connects with widespread political power through a democratic central hub of delegates from each group. In the United States, this model sees these basebuilding groups meet at the ‘Marxist Center’. And with a focus on creating a totalising socialism, basebuilding need not be limited to service that keeps the hungry fed for a day, nor to a small group of individuals compelled to right the wrongs of a broken system, but can extend outwards to every walk of life, far outside of the Labour Party.











This is of course not an argument against solidarity efforts that keep people alive, it’s about channeling these efforts into a formidable political movement inclusive of the joys of living.











It was refreshing then, amidst the chaos of the current pandemic to firstly not only see a huge uptake in solidarity driven ‘mutual aid groups’ rapidly spread across the UK and then internationally from a single small household of anarchists in a largely affected borough of South East London but secondly to see those organisers look towards self-criticism of the limitations and the possibilities of how a new movement might grow in a post-Coronavirus world.











In a piece by ‘Anna Kleist’ in Freedom this week the author, who set up the first Covid-19 mutual aid group, discusses how they themselves did not feel that what they were doing was in itself ‘a revolutionary act’ but that there was an already and soon to be oversubscribed need for vulnerable members of the community to be supported while in isolation. This single act has resulted in thousands of local volunteers from an array of different backgrounds ensuring that people in self isolation are fed, medicated, supported to feel less lonely, and ultimately surprised that other people in their community think that this is important.







The author lays out five points that can be summarised:







1: Mutual aid groups don’t disrupt the logic of capital due to the amount that involves shopping for locals and actually have found capital to, well, have capitalised on this through ‘volunteer cards’ making the job easier for volunteers.

2. Some groups have organised towards decommodification - preventing evictions, redistributing resources for free etc. This should be built upon.

3.Survival pending revolution is important and shouldn’t be dismissed by political puritanism.

4. The rapidity of organising of new mutual aid groups and the positive impact it has had on locals is not a direct challenge to capitalist structures but is even in such a short period of expansion one, out of very few, of the more effective products of the Left at present.

5. Mutual Aid groups require democratic structures, continuous self-criticism, and a commitment to patient organising that digs in deep with the very people we purport to want to see liberated, even if they’re not a part of a perfect (or any) political tendency.







These five points, even if not directly influenced by basebuilding as a method, seems to understand the necessity of such a set of organisations. More so, these groups are already doing it. Some mutual aid groups are more established, more effective than others. From my own brief smaller experiences in them I’ve seen a wealth of important information and guidance shared from group to group to build efficiency (and unfortunately some groups that make the easiest jobs harder for themselves).







“Anna Kleist” asks an important question about the future. What next?







Coronavirus has in such a small time frame washed away all of the illusions and abstractions of capitalism that have plagued class consciousness for so long. The free market does not provide and the state has had to intervene to keep idolatry of capital afloat. Shortages of ventilators and chemical agents for mass testing are resulting in larger numbers of deaths because ‘nobody asked us to produce more’. Workers forced to stay home are having to be bailed out by money that was always available despite the myths pedalled that there was 'no magic money tree' for the poor. People who were valued at zero by Priti Patel at the start of the year are now “essential workers”. The “economically inactive” (the elderly, the disabled) are strongarmed into Do Not Resuscitate orders and die. Everything we were told was a lie and it was all ideological. Now the dominant ideology is collapsing but while socialism is the correct and inevitable outcome of capitalist defeat, it is underutilised by those such as Barnett who would apparently rather commit to living a principled socialist life under capitalism.







A ‘socialist presence in all walks of life’ is not nearly enough. Class struggle requires the domination of one class over the other and creating socialist signifiers as a trajectory for volunteer labour upholds the status quo. The revolutionary gesamtkunstwerk however relies on the complete abrogation of the way in which we organise, who and what we deem to be important, how we engage in debate and discourse and the level to which we integrate that into everything we do. We have to completely reinvent ourselves, to expand like we have never done before, to move culture away from the underground and invest ourselves in a political marathon, whilst also trying to survive. The Labour party, limited by its relationship with capital, neither has the scope, the vision or the political consciousness in its ranks to achieve this. This has been proved to us time and time again.







I cannot predict that this current crisis, probably the most significant since the Second World War (even with a massive and co-ordinated effort from the ranks of the working classes) will be the one to destroy the current order. But it has, more effectively than the British Left has ever been able to, exposed it for its failures.







The revolutionary gesamtkunstwerk is a model for building a totalising revolution. Class consciousness is not a product of disingenuously recreating socialist traditions or struggling to reform capitalism to mitigate its contradictions. It requires a new political imaginary, driven by a unity in struggle to create a present which once and for all will dominate the past.