27.08.2026

Partyism in theory and practice

Communist University was a model of internationalism, and openings and discussion were of a high quality throughout. But we are not complacent - there should have been a much bigger attendance, says Carla Roberts

This year’s Communist University, taking place between August 8 and 15 in central London, attracted speakers and participants from across the globe: we spent the week with comrades from France, the Netherlands, Ireland, Germany, Turkey, Australia and the USA. Over 200 people came together (on Zoom and in person) to be educated, to talk, debate and argue - and all without restrictive speech controls, censorship or three-minute time limits. This was a small example of exactly the kind of partyist and democratic culture we are fighting for, almost uniquely on the British left.

Given the recent implosion of Jeremy Corbyn’s Your Party, it is no surprise then that partyism was a key theme and we consciously opened the school with a panel discussion: ‘How to get to the Communist Party we need’. Roxy Hall discussed the newly-merged Communist Unity in Australia, J Levi described the work of the Communist Platform in the Netherlands and Mike Macnair outlined the difficulties in achieving communist unity in Britain. We also heard via Zoom from Matthew Campbell-Strupp, a member of the Marxist Unity Group in America.

The MUG comrades have suddenly burst into the consciousness of the mainstream media, thanks to a string of DSA candidates having been selected as Democratic candidates for the mid-term elections - and thanks to MUG being the most programmatically coherent faction within the Democratic Socialists of America. We have long had friendly relations with the MUG comrades, who have participated in previous CUs going back many years.

Comrades can watch all of this year’s sessions on our YouTube channel and we will be publishing some of the openings in the following weeks and months - but it is worth quoting MUG’s comrade Campbell-Strupp at some length, because there are increasing numbers of socialists in Britain who almost worship MUG (and, in the case of the Marxist Unity Caucus in RS21, have even named themselves after the comrades) - but without really understanding the important partyist work that MUG is actually doing:

Something we learned from the CPGB, which was an attractive answer to us and which we’re still pursuing, is the idea of going through the existing left to get us to the mass Communist Party we need - regrouping self-identified Marxists in a programmatically unified party through open polemic. Achieving unity in this way, we can have the sort of collective social weight and legitimacy as an alternative political force in order to get a snowball effect of growth, resulting in a communist party becoming a hegemonic political expression of the working class. This is in opposition to small groups of competing communists attempting to go to the class directly, either through agitation or by attempting to lead the economic struggle directly without having first achieved unity on a political basis.

In the US there was something called the ‘base building tendency’ and an organisation called Marxist Center that promoted the latter position. What became the Marxist Unity Group around the magazine Cosmonaut instead embraced building a political alternative and promoted the idea of programmatic unity. So, in the US context, those of us who formed the Marxist Unity Group have attempted to follow this path primarily through engagement with the Democratic Socialists of America.

In other words, unlike many sects in Britain, the MUG comrades in the US have made the conscious decision not to try to go ‘to the class directly’, but to patiently sit down with other partyists and try to work on clarifying their political programme. Of course, comrade Campbell-Strupp was not uncritical of the DSA and he went on to discuss some of its political and bureaucratic shortcomings. There can be no doubt that the comrades have a distinct advantage of being able to engage with others in the context of the DSA - while in Britain, Your Party has now almost entirely run itself into the ground and thereby squandered the enthusiasm and hopes of the 800,000 people who originally signed up for a new party of the left.

We debated the bureaucratic shenanigans of the Corbyn clique in a separate session, which saw Marcus Strom and Tina Becker also discuss a range of other failed unity projects in Britain. “They all have in common that so-called socialists set up halfway houses that they know cannot lead to socialism. It shows that they do not trust their own programme and they certainly do not trust the working class, which they believe can be tricked into fighting for socialism”, as comrade Becker said. Comrade Strom, who had sat on the leadership of the Socialist Alliance and is now editor of Labor Tribune in Australia - outlined how the economistic transitional method developed by Leon Trotsky - in the run-up to World War II - has been thoroughly internalised by his followers and given an added opportunist twist: “Instead of building the united fronts these comrades envisage, they keep setting up popular fronts, in which they subordinate themselves to what they imagine the programme of the right to be,” comrade Strom explained.

In the discussion, most comrades agreed that the absence of a party like the DSA in Britain does not mean that communists in Britain should see it as their task to build such an organisation. If halfway-house parties like that arise - and Your Party was such an example, just like Left Unity, Respect and many other previous projects - then of course we get involved. But the task of communists is to build what is necessary, not what we think we can trick the working class into. The proof of the pudding is in the eating, of course - these halfway houses last, at best, a couple of years, before they fall apart under the weight of their own contradictions. We will remain members of Your Party for as long as we can, but there is no doubt that from the perspective of building a working class alternative, it is as dead as a dodo.

Problems

Considering the widespread adherence to identity politics and intersectionality within the left and even partyist circles, Roxy Hall’s session on ‘What is wrong with identity politics?’ was extremely useful. The comrade located the rise of ID politics firmly in the period of “political defeat for the left, where class politics has been replaced with a fixation on the politics of injury, which requires a reliance on the state to protect the various identities”. So, instead of building the forces of resistance, the logic of ID politics actually leads to a ‘popular front’ with the right and props up and strengthens the state.

This danger was also discussed by Mike Macnair in the session on ‘Why no platforming and speech controls strengthen the right’. He explained that, while much of the left believes they are building united fronts against ‘fascism’, groups like the Socialist Workers Party are in fact pursuing popular fronts with Labourites, liberals, Muslim businessmen and even some Tories that are strengthening the state in its campaign against the left. He outlined that

… we need a positive, alternative culture - if we just replicate the managerialism of capitalism, we are saying there is no alternative to it. Instead, our alternative must be a culture where everybody gets one vote and a simple majority always decides; where there is freedom of communication and association and nobody gets a veto, including caucuses of various oppressions.

In response to some critical questions from the floor, he explained that this does not mean we do not deal with those who want to disrupt our meetings, for example, because “free speech is not absolute, in the sense that we let trolls and saboteurs harm us”. But it is in the realm of political discourse that we should reject no-platforming and instead discuss, explain and expose wrong ideas.

The question of partyism was also discussed in a session on Ireland opened by comrade Anne McShane, who discussed the rise of nationalism and the collapse of the ‘left government strategy’ in People Before Profit, which is effectively run by the SWP’s co-thinkers in Ireland. Comrade McShane explained that she had been barred from becoming a member of PBP, because of her critical articles in Weekly Worker.

It was great to have input from comrade Eoin McGinley in this session, who stayed at CU for the whole week and is one of the founders of the new partyist faction in PBP that has been set up around the magazine Horizon. He echoed comrade McShane’s criticism that much of the left in Ireland is “preoccupied with defending what is supposedly Irish neutrality, while ignoring many other democratic questions about the state and how we are ruled”. Both stressed that the left does not only misidentify the rise of the right in Ireland as “fascist”, but that it is also wrong to counter this with left nationalism “and sloppy slogans like ‘Love Ireland, hate racism’ - as if the right don’t pretend to love Ireland too”, as comrade McGinley stated.

In the discussion, comrades insisted - and not just because of current circumstances of where capitalism is in decline and the forces of the left are entirely marginal - that communists and socialists should not be advocating participation in a bourgeois government. Whatever subjective good intentions, they would end up having to attack the working class, enforcing cuts and closures. Our recent history is full of such sad examples - Die Linke, Syriza and Rifondazione Communista. Socialists should only ever consider going into government when and if they can implement the full minimum programme.

Another very useful session on the broad theme of ‘partyism’ discussed the widespread social-imperialism and social-pacifism on much of the international left. Instead of embracing the need to fight for the abolition of the standing army, much of the left makes pointless pleas to the United Nations or ‘international law’ to bring about peace. Some even support imperialist sanctions against ‘rogue states’ or leaders, when clearly sanctions are very much part of today’s warfare and hit the working class and the poorest people the hardest. Marcus Strom explained that, “over 100 years ago, it was entirely uncontroversial in our movement to fight for the abolition of the standing army and replace it with a popular militia of the armed people. This has been forgotten, together with the Marxist minimum programme.”

In his excellent opening, comrade Floris B from the Communist Platform in the Netherlands explained quite rightly that there is a certain “under-theorisation of the concept of the people’s militia, which is often confused with the workers’ militia, a defensive form of organisation that arises spontaneously from below.” This thought-provoking session went a long way to clear up this confusion.

Working class

Last but not least, the red thread of partyism running through CU saw a debate on the question of ‘Who is working class and why does it matter strategically?’ Vincent David of the Spartacist League explained why their Australian comrades are trying to commit Communist Unity to sending at least 50% of their members into “working class jobs” - by which, as the discussion showed, the comrades specifically mean jobs in blue collar industry - like “factories and transport”. Apparently, that would “teach them discipline and to get up in the mornings”.

The now famous coffee shop ‘barista’ (discussed at length in the Weekly Worker) might be part of the wider proletariat, the comrade conceded, but because employees in the service industry are quite atomised they are not part of the real working class - which, according to comrade Vincent, is “a minority in Britain”. This is quite an astonishing claim, considering that a very clear majority of about 60% of people in Britain consider themselves to be working class. This has clear strategic implications, particularly with the rise of the precariat and fake self-employment. If you do not believe there is a working class majority in society, then your vision of socialism requires a minority government - or a cross-class coalition.

Mike Macnair, when answering comrade David, bent the stick perhaps a bit too far in the opposite direction, claiming “it is not the job of the party to give tactical direction to trade unions or to individual strikes, etc”. This all depends. We certainly do not advocate micromanaging our trade union members. But at certain points of the class struggle, the party must, of course, give firm political instructions.

The key, as Jack Conrad outlined in his contribution, is to win workers and trade unionists to a genuine Communist Party, “like the old CPGB did. It had many working class leaders and trade unionists as members, because it was able to pose a coherent political alternative. The CPGB certainly never sent students into factories - that is just a bizarre tactic”. Marcus Strom thought the Spartacists’ attitude “reflects a fundamental petty bourgeois approach to politics, projecting middle class political fantasies of the horny-handed sons of toil and that revolutionary consciousness spontaneously arises just because of where you happen to be in the labour process.”

Highlights

We cannot cover all sessions in this overview - all were of high quality, which makes it even more unfortunate that there were never more than 50 or so people in the room. Yes, almost 150 joined via Zoom throughout the week and some of the videos have already been watched thousands of times on Facebook and YouTube, but we were disappointed that fewer of our own members and supporters made it to London. CU is the highlight of our political year and comrades should really strive to be there in person - it is also important to help us build a collectivity and to socialise together.

A few more highlights from the week:

• The climate catastrophe was covered by a number of sessions, with two sobering introductions by climate scientist Bill McGuire and a session opened by Jack Conrad, who explained that, even if “capitalism just stopped, today, we would still have to deal with the dramatic consequences of rising temperatures for thousands of years”. Which makes our fight for a communist future even more important, he said. The alternative is beyond the kind of ‘barbarism’ that Rosa Luxemburg envisaged.
• Comrade Conrad also introduced his first book on the Soviet Union, which, following the methods of Hegel and Marx, starts with the “elemental part” - ie, the ‘product’, as a way to analyse the general laws of what he called a “freak society”: “Products had target‑value but no exchange value. There was no profit, no capital accumulation, no market and no money. It clearly was not a capitalist society.” It also was not socialist, in the sense that “workers were clearly not in control. It is important that we do not just stick a label on it, which is what much of the left has done, but understand the Soviet Union according to its own laws.” The book will soon be available for purchase.
• August 14 was ‘Radical Anthropology Day’ at CU, with Chris Knight introducing his new book, The revolutionary origins of language (Yale University Press). He explained that most linguists have now finally come to agree with Lewis Henry Morgan and Friedrich Engels, according to whom our ancestors lived in matrilineal societies - and that it was this female solidarity that allowed humans to develop language. In a second session, he outlined the unsettling relationship between linguist Noam Chomsky and Jeffrey Epstein: “Chomsky’s theory that language is not social, but is an organ in the brain that ‘just got there’ is as misguided as him turning to Jeffrey Epstein to help him sort out his finances and praising him as his ‘best friend’,” comrade Knight explained. In the afternoon, Camilla Power opened a session discussing the ‘Origins and the theft of fire’, outlining a number of myths that reference our matrilineal ancestry and the “dancing picket line of women” who are exercising their power through solidarity. This was followed by a group of comrades giving a spirited reading of Prometheus bound by Aeschylus.
• A number of sessions dealt with economics: Ted Reese took a critical look at the concept of ‘degrowth communism’, while left economist Michael Roberts discussed if “AI can save capitalism” - the short answer is ‘no’. As the comrade explained, “the AI bubble will burst, but it will not spell the end of plagiarism software. Resisting and sabotaging AI is akin to modern Luddism. The key is to bring it into common ownership to free humans from toil, so they can concentrate on creative and social work that only humans can do.”

Funnily enough, we got a lot of grief during CU for using AI to help us produce quick little graphics advertising the various sessions - but we very much agree with comrade Roberts about using technology where it can be useful and help our work in building the mass Communist Party we need.