19.03.2026

Syndicalist quackery

Their understanding of who constitutes the working class is radically false. So is their strategy of industrial colonisation. Mike Macnair thinks that the Spartacists are trapped in a dumb orthodoxy

Two weeks ago we published comrade Vincent David’s reply, ‘Not a serious response’, to my polemic, ‘Beware of Sparts bearing gifts’ (February 26). Last week we published Charlotte Bourchier of the Spartacist League of Australia (now the Spartacist Tendency of Communist Unity). Her article dealt with the conference of the Revolutionary Communist Organisation, which has recently renamed itself Communist Unity and accepted the SLA comrades into membership.¹

This shares the false strategic conception of ‘proletarianisation’ through sending young members into industry with comrade David (but develops the argument less). It also opens a question which would be worth a separate discussion, whether ‘Chinese-defencism’ (analogous to the old ‘Soviet-defencism’) is a good guide to action for the working class. On this latter point I will only pose the question.

The original title for my February 26 piece was ‘Spart traps’; the editorial team changed it to ‘Beware of Sparts bearing gifts’, which images the Sparts as a clever Ulysses offering the ‘Trojan Horse’, secretly full of Greek soldiers, to take Troy.² I make this point because my original title intended to carry the overtone, not merely that the Spartacists’ proposal is a trap for Communist Unity, but also that the Spartacists themselves are trapped in a dumb Cannonite orthodoxy. And this is the same phenomenon as the Socialist Workers Party and its international co-thinkers, trapped in a dumb Cliffite orthodoxy, the Socialist Party in England and Wales and the Revolutionary Communist Party and their international co-thinkers, trapped in dumb Grantite orthodoxies, and Anti-Capitalist Resistance, etc, trapped in a dumb Mandelite orthodoxy (ultimately derived from the politics of the 1930s Molinier-Frank tendency’s advocacy of diplomatic unity).

I begin with comrade David’s general remarks about my polemic, which are, to be blunt, evasive. It is good to have agreement that polemic should be open and as sharp as necessary. I am equally happy to see comrade David repudiating his 1960s-70s ‘rank and filist’ formula that “What we mean is to really rebuild the unions, which are today completely hollowed out, by pushing and organising struggles for what workers need. Crucially, this must be done in constant struggle against the union bureaucracy.”

Beyond that, I said quite specifically that the Spartacists’ overstatement of the importance of the RCO-SLA fusion was analogous to the overstatement of the importance of the fusions of the SL in Britain in 1978 and 1981 with small tendencies won to Spartacism from the Workers Socialist League and International Marxist Group - and that this sort of overstatement was characteristic of Trotskyist caudillos more generally. It was mere speculation on my part that this sort of overstatement started with James P Cannon in 1946 (and I said so explicitly: “It is not quite clear to me where this tendency to ‘official optimism’ among Trotskyist caudillos like Moreno, Lambert, Varga, Robertson - and James P Cannon; and Ted Grant and Alan Woods - came from …”). Comrade David focusses instead on the present-day Spartacists’ correct judgment that global politics is moving rapidly to the right, in contrast with Cannon’s illusions in 1946 - and by doing so dodges giving any answer to my objection that the overstatement of the importance of the RCO-SLA fusion was itself Trot caudillo-talk.

Secondly, at the beginning of this recent argument is my letter of August 28 2025, which responded to two positive assessments of the Spartacists:

Comrade [David] Passerine writes: “Since the death of Jim Robertson, and the broad failure of their long-time strategy of going straight to the masses, the Spartacists globally have moved away from the sectarian positions they are most commonly known for.” For his part, comrade [Ian] Spencer states: “There were interesting contributions from the Spartacist League, which nowadays is far more open to actual discussion with other groups.”

I objected that the policy of the Spartacists in the 1970s-80s was not to go “straight to the masses”, but (following Cannon in the 1930s) “to practise short-term raiding entry to destroy ‘centrist obstacles’, even if the result was not significant growth for the Trotskyists, rapidly pulling forces out.”³

Demagogic

Comrade Gabriel Perrault in his letter of September 5 2025, objected to these observations as “demagogic” and as irrelevant history - the latter point was also made by comrade David in his letter of February 19.⁴ In response, in my February 26 article I documented both the inappropriate triumphalism of the SL(B) in relation to its small fusions in 1978 and 1981, its characterisation of the groups it had engaged with as ‘centrist obstacles’, and the ‘raiding’ character of the entry operations. I also gave a citation to blog comments, where various ex-Spartacists had discussed what came of these operations (nothing good).

I went on to explain why this paper carries extensive criticism (and self-criticism) of the past of the various left trends, including those from which our own members came. Self-criticism is not, in our view, a precondition for unity - but in George Santayana’s tag, “those who do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it”.

In relation to industrial colonisation, today’s Spartacists are proposing to repeat a policy which failed for the Spartacists in the 1970s-80 (and offer no self-critical balance-sheet of why it failed). It failed for the US ‘New Communist Movement’ in the 1970s and failed for both the Mandelite and Barnesite factions of the Unified Secretariat of the Fourth International in the late 1970s to mid-1980s. Their ‘offer’ for ‘this time is different’ is merely that ‘this time we really mean to fight the labour bureaucracy’ - an ‘offer’ which has been made by all the Trotskyist groups which have endeavoured this policy, with the exception of the Barnesites, who were already in rapid transition to ‘official communism’ and its friendly approach to the labour bureaucracy.

In relation to the policy of ‘raiding entry’ to destroy ‘centrist obstacles’, the comrades are simply unwilling to answer. This is not a question like ‘Have you stopped beating your wife? Answer yes or no!’ - because I am not demanding a ‘yes’ or ‘no’: only an actual answer. It would be a perfectly defensible answer for the comrades to say, ‘No, we weren’t pursuing the policy of “raiding entry” to destroy “centrist obstacles” back then’ (though they would need to provide documentary evidence to counter what I have cited). It would be an equally defensible answer to say, ‘Yes, we were pursuing the policy of “raiding entry” to destroy “centrist obstacles” back then, but we have now broken with it, for the following reasons …’ This would be (from my point of view) a real step forward, since the Cannonite version of ‘the revolutionary party’ is in my opinion a major obstacle to an effective left and as such serves as an outwork of the fortifications of the capitalist class.

Or it would be a defensible answer to say: ‘Actually, we think the policy of “raiding entry” to destroy “centrist obstacles” is correct.’ This third option is not a bar to unity in practice, but it would imply that long-term unity is unlikely, since the Cannonites will be driven to cash their gains by making a premature split. Saying nothing, and evading the question (but claiming that the history is unimportant) actually carries with it impliedly an assertion of the third position.

‘Behold, I make all things new’ (Revelations xxi:5). It is a common feature of Trotskyist argumentation to insist that their prolonged legacy of failure is to be disregarded, because the new, changed objective situation demands what turns out to be the old policy. The Spartacists’ arguments, both in comrade David’s and comrade Bourchier’s versions, have this character. In both, the ‘new situation’ is the severe isolation of the far left from the ‘industrial working class’ - which is to be symptomatised by the rise of the far right.

Comrade David accuses me thus: “… rather than seriously dealing with what the Spartacist League says or does today, in 2026, he simply picks sentences and goes on autopilot by forcing them into his decades-old ‘boxes’.” This would be more plausible if comrade David himself were not arguing from “decades-old boxes”. We will come back to the plausibility of his arguments about how the communist parties became mass parties (in my opinion untrue). But my article was directed, precisely, at his February 19 argument that “Every single communist party that went from a sect to a national force did so by organising workers and leading decisive sections of the proletariat in struggle.” So comrade David relies on a view of the history of the movement to teach us lessons. He just wants to exclude from the history of the movement the practical failures of the far left - including the Spartacists - in the 1960s-90s.

The comrades’ argument for the ‘new situation’ pastes together two elements, one of which is new and the other old. The new element is big capital’s abandonment of liberalism, the end of the post-1945 political settlement and the rise of the far right. Not new in a grand-historical sense, since an increasing dominance of the far right characterised the whole inter-war period (1920-40); but new relative to what was widely believed to be ‘secular’ changes in post-war capitalism.

It is nonetheless mistaken to suppose that ‘working class’ support for the far right really characterises the historical big bastions of Labour, except insofar as these have been de-proletarianised by long-term unemployment producing a sort of lumpenisation: rather, in the UK, Reform has mopped up historical Tory votes. And, when serious work was done on the Nazi electoral base, it turned out that the urban and organised working class was not tempted by voting Nazi: rather, the far right gained support among small-town and unorganised workers.⁵

The old element is the marginality of the far left (Trotskyists, Maoists, etc) in the ‘core’ manual working class. This has been, in reality, a continuous truth since the 1930s. There have been episodic and local presences, like the US Socialist Workers Party in the 1934 Minneapolis Teamsters’ strike, the Revolutionary Communist Party (mark I) of 1944-48 in Britain, the Trotskyists at Renault in the late 1940s, or the Socialist Labour League and then Workers’ Socialist League in Oxford Cowley. In reality, however, all these local episodes failed to produce deep-rooted proletarianisation of the far-left groups involved or a stable ability to compete for leadership with the ‘official communists’ (let alone with the rightwing trade union bureaucrats).

The dependence of Labour and similar parties on white-collar workers, teachers, and so on, is no novelty either. It was the object of commentary by leftists who expected social democracy to disappear in the 1960s. What it reflects, in reality, is the inherent division of labour between the trade union bureaucracy, on the one hand (focused on wage and conditions bargaining), and social democracy as an electoral formation, on the other (focused on claims to achieve ‘reforms’ through government).

This division of labour represents a retreat of proletarian class consciousness relative to pre-1914 social democracy and the communist parties - in the direction of ‘mere trade unionism’ as the ‘bourgeois politics of the working class’, in Lenin’s phrase. In this context, for far-leftists to pose themselves as effective leaders of the trade union struggle - as opposed to electoral campaigners, and so on - was to accept this retreat of class consciousness: to appeal to militant trade union sectionalism. Far-leftist local-struggle leadership on this basis would inevitably be marginalised and overthrown, when the national political relationship of forces was brought into play against them.

Meanwhile, from the standpoint of the working class as a class, the organisations of the far left appeared as ‘not to be taken seriously’, because their splintered character counterposed themselves to the objective class interest in unity, which is the basis of trade union organisation, of cooperatives and mutuals, and of collectivist political parties. The ‘official communists’ could at least point to the regimes which they followed. And it turns out that even after the fall of the ‘Soviet bloc’ they can still do so.

The ‘new situation’ is thus not new at all in relation to the marginality of the far left. And there is no reason to suppose that the quack remedy of industrial colonisation will work any better under today’s conditions than it did for previous generations of young far leftists.

Badly wrong

Back to his letter, comrade David argued: “Every single communist party that went from a sect to a national force did so by organising workers and leading decisive sections of the proletariat in struggle. Work in the working class is thus absolutely key to rebuilding communist parties.” I responded:

No evidence is offered in support of this argument and it is very doubtful that any can be. Just for a few examples of mass communist parties: Rosa Luxemburg’s and Leo Jogiches’ Polish Social Democracy of the Kingdom of Poland and Lithuania before World War I, which attempted to give party direction to the mass struggle, was a plain bureaucratic-centralist sect. The creation of the Polish Communist Party as a national force was made possible by unity with the Polish Socialist Party - Left. The German Communist Party became mass by unity with the majority of the Independent Socialist Party. The Communist Party of France was the majority of the old Section Française de l’Internationale Ouvrière. The Bulgarian Communist Party originated as the ‘Narrow’ Socialist Party, which grew radically through its anti-war position in 1914-18. The Communist Party of Italy remained largely marginal until it was able to play a central role in the anti-fascist resistance in 1941-45. And so on.

Comrade David replies:

This is astonishing, coming from someone we assume knows quite well the history of the workers’ movement.

The SPD, so dear to the Weekly Worker, became influential by essentially building the German workers movement. Then, what made the KPD a mass force was not merely the product of the Halle Congress and the subsequent unity with the USPD left, but the fact that the KPD had won decisive influence among the Revolutionary Shop Stewards in the heat of the 1919-20 strike waves. The French Communist Party consolidated itself as a real force not merely with the Tours Congress, but by leading the CGT, which organised the most militant sectors of the French proletariat, notably in the metal and rail industries. The Bulgarian ‘Narrow’ CP became a force by focusing almost exclusively on the industrial proletariat, and leading many strikes. The Italian CP was able to lead the resistance because it spent years building illegal cells in factories like Fiat, enabling it to lead the 1943 strikes. Even the small CPGB became a force in the 1920s because of its decisive influence within the shop stewards’ network and among the miners. Macnair focuses on the formal foundations and congresses of those parties, at the expense of the decisive element which made them a real force: influence in the proletariat.

I can say equally that comrade David’s interpretation “is astonishing, coming from someone we assume knows quite well the history of the workers’ movement.” The SPD became a mass force through, first, rejection of the Lassallean line of single-person leadership and direct party control of trade unions, which allowed the Eisenach party to be founded by unifying dissident Lassalleans with the Bebel-Liebknecht group; second, August Bebel and Wilhelm Liebknecht’s parliamentary stand against the war with France (even though limited to abstaining); third, the Gotha unification of Eisenachers and Lassalleans; and fourth, the exploitation of electoral action. The Bulgarian ‘Narrows’ attained mass influence in the 1914-18 war, as a result of being the anti-war party.⁶

False history

Secondly, the KPD had not “won decisive influence among the Revolutionary Shop Stewards in the heat of the 1919-20 strike waves”. See Ralf Hofrogge’s 2015 book on the Revolutionäre Obleute: the KPD(S) did not win leadership of this movement, but won (some of) the forces involved as part of the USPD.⁷

Third, the French CGT was split in the same year as Tours, with the right wing having the ability to expel the pro-communist wing. The PCF became a significant minority party, but only became the dominant party of the French working class (with the SFIO more white-collar, and so on) as a result of its role in the resistance in 1941-45. The same is true, albeit in different forms, of the Italian PCI. These organisations obtained support from the Allies, as part of the global popular front created after 1941.

Comrade David says that “these parties became a force not because they led vague ‘political actions’ or had mergers in congresses, but because they led workers in key industries”. On the “vague political actions” I cited Karl Marx for the meaning of “political action”; it is worth directly quoting, since comrade David plainly has not followed up the citations. Thus, on September 21 1871:

Complete abstention from political action is impossible. The abstentionist press participates in politics every day. It is only a question of how one does it, and of what politics one engages in. For the rest, to us abstention is impossible. The working class party functions as a political party in most countries by now, and it is not for us to ruin it by preaching abstention. Living experience, the political oppression of the existing governments compels the workers to occupy themselves with politics, whether they like it or not, be it for political or for social goals. To preach abstention to them is to throw them into the embrace of bourgeois politics. The morning after the Paris Commune, which has made proletarian political action an order of the day, abstention is entirely out of the question.

We want the abolition of classes. What is the means of achieving it? The only means is political domination of the proletariat. For all this, now that it is acknowledged by one and all, we are told not to meddle with politics. The abstentionists say they are revolutionaries, even revolutionaries par excellence. Yet revolution is a supreme political act and those who want revolution must also want the means of achieving it: that is, political action, which prepares the ground for revolution and provides the workers with the revolutionary training, without which they are sure to become the dupes of the Favres and Pyats the morning after the battle. However, our politics must be working class politics. The workers’ party must never be the tagtail of any bourgeois party; it must be independent and have its goal and its own policy.

The political freedoms, the right of assembly and association, and the freedom of the press - those are our weapons. Are we to sit back and abstain, while somebody tries to rob us of them? It is said that a political act on our part implies that we accept the existing state of affairs. On the contrary, so long as this state of affairs offers us the means of protesting against it, our use of these means does not signify that we recognise the prevailing order.⁸

And in a letter of November 23 of the same year:

NB as to political movement: The political movement of the working class has as its object, of course, the conquest of political power for the working class, and for this it is naturally necessary that a previous organisation of the working class, itself arising from their economic struggles, should have been developed up to a certain point.

On the other hand, however, every movement in which the working class comes out as a class against the ruling classes and attempts to force them by pressure from without is a political movement. For instance, the attempt in a particular factory or even a particular industry to force a shorter working day out of the capitalists by strikes, etc is a purely economic movement. On the other hand, the movement to force an eight-hour day, etc law is a political movement. And, in this way, out of the separate economic movements of the workers there grows up everywhere a political movement - that is to say a movement of the class - with the object of achieving its interests in a general form, in a form possessing a general social force of compulsion. If these movements presuppose a certain degree of previous organisation, they are themselves equally a means of the development of this organisation.

Where the working class is not yet far enough advanced in its organisation to undertake a decisive campaign against the collective power - ie, the political power of the ruling classes - it must at any rate be trained for this by continual agitation against and a hostile attitude towards the policy of the ruling classes. Otherwise it will remain a plaything in their hands, as the September revolution in France showed, and as is also proved up to a certain point by the game Messrs Gladstone and co are bringing off in England even up to the present time.⁹

This is a radically different conception of what a workers’ party is for than the idea that it is for giving direct leadership to strike struggles. This is not to say that a communist party will not have trade union and industrial fractions and things to say about strike struggles. But wagering on strike struggles to the exclusion of political action - characterised as ‘electoralism’ or (for that matter) “mergers in congresses” is precisely to leave the working class as “a plaything in [the] hands” of the liberal or conservative wings of capitalist politics - with the result that, as happened, far-leftists’ purely trade unionist militant leadership of strike struggles, and so on, can achieve only local and ephemeral results.

Class

Comrade David is committed to a syndicalist conception of what the workers’ party is - and, in effect, of revolution. This leads him to adopt a bizarrely narrow conception of what the working class is: that is, only the industrial workers. The agricultural workers, transport workers, the building trades, and so on, and so on, are not part of comrade David’s conception of the revolutionary actor.

Comrade David rejects my insistence that the proletariat is all those who, lacking property in the means of production, are dependent on the wage share either directly (as wage-earners) or indirectly (as homemakers, other dependents, etc). He claims:

This is a classic revision of Marxism, which dissolves the centrality of the industrial proletariat into a sea of wage-earners. According to this definition, there is no difference between a dockworker, an assembly operator at Land Rover, an Oxford University professor and a lawyer in the City of London. All earn a wage, right?

Wage-earners have existed since way before the birth of capitalism. Yet the possibility of socialist revolution appears only with the creation of the industrial working class, who not only have to sell their labour to survive, but who also work in socialised production: ie, industry. It is because the industrial proletariat is at the heart of capitalist production, which has become socialised on a large scale, that the industrial proletariat is a revolutionary class: that is, a class which carries within it a new, progressive mode of production - socialism. It is because the industrial proletariat is concentrated in key areas of the productive process that it is objectively pushed towards collective forms of struggle. When Marx and Engels talked about the proletariat in the Communist manifesto, they were not merely referring to people earning a wage. Those existed even in Roman times. They were talking about the modern industrial working class.

I would suggest that comrade David go away and read volume 2 of Hal Draper’s Karl Marx’s theory of revolution: the politics of social classes,¹⁰ which very elaborately collects all of Marx’s writing on the issue of class. He will find that it is he, not I, who revises Marxism on this question.

I might add that I have recently written three articles on the question of class in the UK today - a review of Dan Evans’s A Nation of shopkeepers and a two-parter on ‘class composition in a snapshot’.¹¹ It should be clear from these that I do not imagine that “there is no difference between a dockworker, an assembly operator at Land Rover, an Oxford University professor and a lawyer in the City of London”. My understanding of class is perfectly capable of recognising that Oxbridge dons and City solicitors are middle class (indeed, the dons at St John’s and some of the other colleges are very large corporate landlords; the partners in the City law firms are major (unproductive) capitalist operators …). I explore, where comrade David does not, the nature of the employed middle class.

I will not, however, take seriously comrade David’s suggestion that “employees in small shops (like the famous barista, who often comes up in discussions with RCOers) are not proletarians. These layers form various strata of the petty bourgeoisie.” Really? This would identify as middle class a large part of the base of Chartism - called by Marx and Engels the first political party of the working class.

What lies behind comrade David’s revision of Marxism on this point is the comrades’ commitment to syndicalism, already mentioned. Marx’s conception of the central role of labour flows from the separation of labour from the means of production forcing workers to organise collectively, unlike medieval peasants and artisans - and in a different sense, unlike slaves. Yes, there were wage-workers in classical antiquity and in feudalism. What changes is the expropriation of the peasants and artisans, meaning that the workers become the numerically dominant exploited class.

For the syndicalists, the working class is to take power through trade unionism, leading to ‘one big strike’. For this perspective, the size of workplaces matters enormously. In contrast, Marx’s and Engels’ conception of working class political action is posed just as strongly in a world of small workplaces (as was, in fact, true of Britain before World War I) as in one of large ones.

Comrade David’s radical misunderstanding of class thus illustrates that the issues at stake in the “proletarianisation” proposal are by no means secondary. We would all like to create organisations which have deep roots in the working class - which none of the far left organisations to the left of the ‘official communists’ have or have had in the last 90 years. But the idea of creating these roots by industrial colonisation and leadership roles in what Marx called the “purely economic movement” is not only a quack remedy which has repeatedly failed: it also entails a very fundamental strategic error.

‘Beware of Sparts bearing gifts’ Weekly Worker February 26 2026: weeklyworker.co.uk/worker/1574/beware-of-sparts-bearing-gifts; ‘Not a serious response’, March 5 2026: weeklyworker.co.uk/worker/1575/not-a-serious-response; ‘Key questions for uniting the left’ March 12 2026: weeklyworker.co.uk/worker/1576/key-questions-for-uniting-the-left.↩︎
As seen by Laocoon in Virgil’s Aeneid (ii: 49): ‘Timeo Danaos et dona ferentes’, ‘I fear the Greeks, even bringing gifts’ (Latin: www.thelatinlibrary.com/vergil/aen2.shtml; English: vergilregit.blogspot.com/p/book-2-full-literal.html).↩︎
Letters, August 28 2025.↩︎
Letters, September 4 2025.↩︎
Eg, www.johndclare.net/Weimar6_Geary.htm (1998); T Mason Social policy in the Third Reich Oxford 1993; T Kirk Nazism and the working class in Austria: industrial unrest and political dissent in the ‘national community’ Cambridge 2002.↩︎
JD Bell The Bulgarian Communist Party from Blagoev to Zhivkov Stanford CA 2020.↩︎
R Hofrogge Working class politics in the German revolution: Richard Müller, the revolutionary shop stewards and the origins of the council movement Chicago 2015 (especially chapters 7 and 8).↩︎
www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1871/09/21.htm. An alternative report, with some additional material from September 20, is at www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1871/09/politics-speech.htm.↩︎
www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1871/letters/71_11_23.htm.↩︎
New York 1978.↩︎
‘Rising middle classes?’ July 3 2025: weeklyworker.co.uk/worker/1545/rising-middle-classes; ‘Class composition in a snapshot’, part 1, August 21 2025: weeklyworker.co.uk/worker/1549/class-composition-in-a-snapshot; part 2, August 28 2025: weeklyworker.co.uk/worker/1550/class-composition-in-a-snapshot.↩︎