By Mike Nutt
We have family in England. A merciful vacation at an idyllic homestead in rural Devon awaits me there. There will be sheep. It will be overcast and cool while it is hot and unbearable in Raleigh.
I mutter synonyms for 'radical' and 'leftist' at the laptop as I search for bookstores near the small towns we're visiting. Predictably, the results on the map are long train rides away from our destinations.
Something unexpected, though. Better. The Socialist Workers Party is having its annual Marxism Festival in London the day before we fly back to the States from Heathrow. Such things are not luck; they are synchronicities, and all good socialists must learn to recognize them, ride them.
With my partner's blessing, on Saturday, July 6, I get up early to peel away from the family. They will visit Arundel Castle's Medieval Festival. I am dragging large suitcases closer to our hotel by LHR.
I get to the Emsworth train station early. I eat a delicious sausage roll from the local baker. I have my pick of seats when the train arrives. There is nothing to see, say, or sort, despite the constant security reminders. I relax and look out the window.
Three trains later, I leave my luggage in the basement of the Simpli Fresh convenience store in central London. Unburdened, I walk towards Marxism Festival 2024 at the University College of London.
On Thursday, July 4, the first day of Marxism Festival 2024 (MF24), England's Conservative party suffers a historic loss, ending 14 years of rule. I am attending the festival two days later on Saturday. One of the first people I see is an old man wearing an old t-shirt that says "FUCK THE TORIES." I resolve to also wear punk shirts as an old man.
Labour's win is hardly impressive, however, earning fewer total votes than in its last election. The festival's organizers, the Trotsykyist Socialist Workers Party [1], have already dismissed Keir Starmer as a typical agent of neoliberalism. A speaker on Saturday name-checks Jeremy Corbyn (a MF24 speaker himself, on the topic of poetry) as "one of five independent Members of Parliament (MPs) elected to the left of Labour." Speakers and audience members dissect the loss of the Tories throughout the day, and there is an obligatory cheer for their downfall at every talk.
This overcast and cool Saturday is also one day before the second round of National Assembly elections in France, where the far-right will underperform expectations. But today, we don't know that, and I see dozens of people race-walking to get a good seat at one of the first talks of the day, "France: Le Pen, Fascism and the Popular Front" by Denis Godard.
I find the location of my first session, which is in a building called Cruciform. I am the first to sit down for Julie Sherry's presentation, "Coal Mines to Call Centres: Has the Working Class Lost its Power?" Sherry is a former lead labor organizer for the SWP. She is sitting behind a small table at the front of a lecture hall, without shoes, waiting for her facilitator to arrive. The tube is running late.
Sherry's answer to the question posed in her talk title is that, no, the gig economy has not made the coal mining trade unionism of the past irrelevant, though of course circumstances are different so tactics should change. She pinpoints a dynamic in modern movements: people are highly motivated to demand an end to injustice but have low levels of class-consciousness and little experience with organizing for working-class power.
Therefore, Sherry explains, socialist labor organizers must be ready to join, support, and have mutually beneficial relationships with social justice movements like the Palestinian freedom movement or Black Lives Matter. The movement for a free Palestine (or any movement) can be an entry point for unions to address social problems by building working class solidarity and demonstrating the power of direct democracy. Yes, it is genocide. Yes, resistance is justified in an illegal occupation. Now, what are we going to do about it, together? Sherry is the first person in the day to say that socialists should "be stuck in to" every fight. This is the way to build trust and influence in our communities and to ultimately cultivate more revolutionaries.
The next meeting is with Lewis Nielson, one of the authors of the SWP's new book. He and Sophia Beach have just completed a crisp and powerful 80 page pamphlet entitled Why You Should Be a Socialist: the Case for Revolution (WYSBaS) [2]. All three of the talks I will see today purposefully revolve around themes from the book, an impressive display of party unity. The speakers reinforce and unpack themes from WYSBaS, but with a sharp focus on recent and looming elections, their importance, and the limitations of elections in general for Marxists.
Nielsen is a good speaker. His talk, "Party and Class: What Kind of Organization do We Need?" runs through some of the book's main points. He charges through his speech with only a couple glances at his notes. The SWP, says Nielson, should proudly declare themselves revolutionaries. Conditions change through rupture, not the incrementalism and reform of a limited representative democracy. Electoralism is not a strategy that can win.
From WYSBaS:
"...the reality is that socialism can't come from above through parliament" (p42). "...what really matters in society is not what happens in parliament, but what happens on the streets and communities and, above all, in our workplaces" (p48).
Still, says Nielson, elections are not unimportant. It matters who wins because they can create more or less favorable conditions for non-electoral organizing. The SWP even allows for strategic collaboration with the capitalist workers party, Labour. "Any serious revolutionary should look to work with Labour Party members in joint campaigns and struggles whenever possible" (p47). Nielson's assertion that election outcomes matter seems to imply approval of a united front with liberals against the fascist threat represented by Reform UK, the National Rally in France, and presumably the Republicans in the United States (Nielson predicted a Trump victory a week before he was an assassination target. He also stressed the ongoing threat from fascist elements in the UK, despite Reform UK's drubbing. A month later, the country erupted in race riots).
The most blood-pumping part of the speech is when Nielson takes a turn calling for socialists to be stuck in to every fight. The Socialist Workers Party must be a party of member-leaders, where the rank and file member is empowered to take the initiative necessary to organize the unorganized at the local level. Only a revolution from the bottom up will have legitimacy and democracy. Yes, comrade Lewis.
The movement for a free Palestine is on everyone's lips and the movement is in the London streets that weekend.
Palestine is all over the program, from the Palestine 101 session first thing Thursday July 4 to Sunday's closing rally on "Resistance in a world of imperialism and crisis." I force myself to buy only one Palestine-related book in the Bookmarks pop-up store, a biography of Leila Khaled [3].
Lewis Nielson notes early in his talk the incredible radicalizing power the movement for Palestine has had. He notes a poll: 54 percent of young people in England now say Israel doesn't have the right to exist. This would have been unimaginable on October 6, he says.
At noon there is a break in the conference and I march with one hundred thousand Londoners——including at least a thousand socialists, conservatively——to demand a Free Palestine. [4] I am wearing my Democratic Socialists of America Labor shirt. We ruck and chant and wait and dance and make demands in the streets for two hours.
I skip the culminating rally by the Thames to eat and get back to the conference. I try to find a pub for some food and a pint on the 45 minute walk back to the College, but all the tables are full or reserved. England is playing Switzerland in the Euro football championship.
My last talk of the day is in the enormous and impossible-to-find Chris Ingold chemistry building auditorium XLG2. Joseph Choonara delivers "Revolutionaries, Elections and the Way Forward." Choonara asks, "How do we use the election tactic?" He reminds us Lenin said that until you're ready to seize power, it's obligatory to participate in elections. However, "mass working class struggle from below is our tradition." In any case, the game is rigged. Reformists are better at winning elections than revolutionaries because they drop their principles to win elections.
In a best case scenario, Choonara says elections allow Marxists to raise working class consciousness, gauge where the working class is at, and "generalize and spread our ideas." Still, he cautions that people can be put off from a tactic by bad experiences. I think of DSA and its avoidance of long-shot socialists in the electoral sphere.
To close his portion of the talk, Choonara puts his palms on the large table in front of him and leans into his parting shot: "No honeymoon for Starmer."
After each main speaker of the day, there is an audience engagement portion of the hour. We are instructed to turn to our neighbors to discuss our thoughts on the topic at hand for three minutes. Then, we raise their hands to be recognized to address the whole room. It is during this last audience-interaction moment that my Festival experience reaches a climax.
The talks have been consistent throughout the day, along with the responses from the attendees and my conversations with strangers. I have read three WYSBaS chapters between sessions. I'm ready to raise a specific question to...someone, but I resolve not to be the one American DSA guy who makes a fool of himself challenging all of XLG2 to explain themselves. I turn to the three in the row above and behind me.
"I'm sorry, I'm American and not a Party member. May I ask a question? Throughout the day, people have only talked about national elections. Does the SWP have a strategy for local elections?"
The three SWP members stare silently at me for a socially awkward amount of time. The woman with short hair and a nose piercing to my right says, "Well, it's just a much different system than in the US." The brunette guy agrees. For a beat, no one elaborates further. I'm holding my tongue, practicing my organizer listening skills, trying not to be the stupid American, waiting to see if they will fill the silence. The third in my group, an old man in a tweed beret, eventually says "Palestine is the most important issue." He says Palestinian freedom is a national, not local, issue.
Just then, the meeting chair interrupts to tell us to wrap up. The four of us are silent for a few moments more. I'm trying to figure out why my question is being dismissed so easily.
I turn back to the man in the beret. "Can I ask you another question, since you mentioned Palestine?" He rolls his eyes dramatically but leans forward on his arms and looks at me and waits. "I understand we have different systems, but are there no local opportunities for BDS [6] of Israel, where local politicians could pursue divestment in municipal budgets, for example?" It's not a great question; it doesn't get to the theoretical rationale for a national-only electoral tactic. But it keeps the man in the beret talking.
He starts telling a story about an MP whom the SWP supported but couldn't keep in line and who ended up a corrupt disappointment. Strangely, the story seems to be proving that national MPs are too distant to be held accountable. As he’s getting into the story, the chair calls us back to hear Choonara's response to the audience comments.
When Choonara is done, I bound into the aisle. The man in the beret calls after me, "Aren't you going to let me finish what I was saying?" I wave and say, "No, thank you." I walk out of the lecture hall fairly certain that the Socialist Workers Party of England has a giant contradiction in its blind spot.
As I take the evening tube to my hotel, I think hard about the meetings I attended and the contradictions I saw at their center The Socialist Workers Party made a good case for revolution, but it was silent on how a revolutionary is supposed to approach local elections. The book, the speakers, my lecture hall neighbors...no one seemed to think local elections are "common struggles" worth our time. If elections matter and socialists need to be in every fight and we have to build from the bottom up, then socialists need to be running for municipal offices.
If we're building from the bottom up, we cannot ignore the local opportunities to build strong, radicalizing relationships through bottom-up elections. If radicals are going to use the electoral tactic at all, it must be deployed at the local level. You are not stuck in to every fight if you are ignoring local elections.
A few months before leaving for England, I discovered Murray Bookchin through Jackson Rising Redux, a book of essays about the radicals at Cooperation Jackson who are building cooperatives and dual power [6] in Mississippi. Bookchin once said, "The overriding problem is to change the structure of society so that people gain power. The best arena to do that is the municipality—-the city, town, and village—-where we have an opportunity to create a face-to-face democracy." [7] He did not mean that simply voting in the town council election will change society. Rather, he was identifying a social-geographic place of power where socialists can best exercise people-power across a range of democratic projects, including elections.
The Triangle DSA's recent electoral successes demonstrate how socialists can win seats in city councils, where we can not only "generalize and spread our ideas" but have positive material impacts on the lives of the working class which can be directly attributed to socialist praxis. In Durham, "we endorsed the electoral campaign of Nate Baker--a DSA member, whose campaign was managed by a DSA cadre and chapter HGO...Our elected officials have held the line on Palestine with total discipline: Nate Baker’s first action as a Durham City Council member was to call for a ceasefire and we secured the first ceasefire resolution passed in North Carolina with the help of DSA cadre and Carrboro town councilor Danny Nowell." [8]
This coming Raleigh town council election is the most exciting in my 11 years as a city resident, with two self-identified socialists on the ballot endorsed by our Triangle chapter. This is the first time I'll be able to vote for a candidate I first met as a comrade organizing in the community. Reeves Peeler's story and campaign represent a model for how socialists can raise up local organizers to claw back the trust of the working class, too battered to care about voting for yet another pro-gentrification Democrat.
Similarly, I am proud of our chapter's overwhelming endorsement of town council incumbent Mary Black. As one comrade noted after her endorsement meeting, she has "a clear fighter's spirit, being driven by a clear antipathy to the current political order and a desire to see a different, better world in its place. She's been a clear, public leader in Raleigh willing to take risks on Palestine even in a conservative district."
Socialism from below must do more to foster the delegation of individuals from our midst to positions of power in our local institutions. From public school Parent Teacher Associations to Citizen Advisory Councils and our own peoples movement assemblies. That means clear-headed engagement in local politics when conditions are right. The trick will be to recognize when the conditions are right.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socialist_Workers_Party_(UK)
[2] https://socialistworker.co.uk/product/wysbasbook/
[3] Leila Khaled: Icon of Palestinian Liberation by Sarah Irving. My English copy has the cover shown here, which is much better than the American one. https://www.middleeastmonitor.com/20140601-leila-khaled-icon-of-palestinian-liberation/
[4] Other socialist orgs were represented at the march, including the Socialist Equality Party who wrote this report: https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2024/07/07/qisb-j07.html
[5] Boycotts, divestment and sanctions. https://bdsmovement.net/get-involved
[6] See Dual Power Then and Now: From the Iroquois to Cooperation Jackson by the ROAR Collective
https://roarmag.org/magazine/dual-power-then-and-now-from-the-iroquois-to-cooperation-jackson/
[7] "Interview with Murray Bookchin" by David Vanek. https://social-ecology.org/wp/2001/10/harbinger-vol-2-no-1-%E2%80%94-murray-bookchin-interview/