Marxist Bulletin

Monthly Archive: December 2025

Presentations / Strategy & Programme

Presentation for YP national founding conference fringe meeting:

“What kind of programme for Your Party“

Hi,

I’m Hans-Peter Breitman, member of the Marxist Bulletin within Your Party.

Your Party can and should establish itself as a mass fighting force for socialism. This requires inner-party democracy where every member can be heard and different positions be discussed. The party structure should reflect this set-up with democratically elected delegates via a one-member-one-vote system at all levels, including the leadership, with immediate recallability where required.

At the first meeting of our proto-branch in Lewisham, several attendees vocally rejected the idea of building a Labour Party Mk. II. In order to avoid that trap, we need to understand that the power structures and dynamics within capitalism force all business owners to continuously squeeze their workforce or face bankruptcy in a never-ending struggle for increased productivity and profits. The outcome for the mass of the population are longer and more intense working hours for those who still have a job whilst more and more have to survive without one with ever increasing levels of poverty.

The capitalist state is dependent on tax income and, in the short term, loans provided by private financial institutions which can dictate economic outcomes over the subjective will of any government. Should a government try to implement leftist reforms, these institutions might cut off funding, and welfare for the broader population can’t be achieved as the Syriza government demonstrated in Greece in 2015. The capitalist ruling class possesses powerful financial levers to undermine measures introduced by left-radical reformers aimed at reversing cuts, privatisations and other neo-liberal attacks. Sometimes the capitalist state’s repressive apparatus resorts to violence when it feels that its interests are under threat as the military coup against Allende’s Popular Front in Chile in 1973 showed. The threats made in September 2015 by an unnamed general to carry out a coup, should Jeremy Corbyn come to power in a future general election, shows that the working class needs to be prepared for this scenario. That is why a socialist government will need to replace the capitalists’ state machinery, including the police, prison officers, and border guards with new institutions composed of personnel loyal to the workers’ movement. There should be no room in either our party or the trade unions for these defenders of capitalist rule. In order to prevent economic sabotage, the working class will need to nationalise large corporations, banks and the transport system without compensation and place them under democratic workers’ control. Only by breaking the might of the ruling class and bringing the essential core of the economy under our control will we gain access to all the resources required to build the economy in line with a plan that meets the needs of both the mass of the population and the environment.

This precludes any electoral alliances with outright capitalist parties such as the Greens who have no meaningful relationship with the trade unions but are fundamentally dependent on the capitalist class. Despite their left-sounding rhetoric, they have called on the population to scab in Brighton during the refuse workers’ strike in 2021 and implemented cuts in councils under their control. When recently prompted, Zack Polanski confirmed that they will continue doing so.

YP must lead the fight against further attacks on working-class living standards, and whenever possible, go on the offensive in order to bring about material gains but link this struggle with the socialist end goal. If we limit ourselves to just patching up the current economic order, we will end up in a never-ending struggle for a few more crumbs here and there. That is how we arrived at this particular historical juncture today after decades of more bearable welfare capitalism. YP needs to use parliament as a stage for its ideas and, where possible, for implementing positive social reforms. More importantly, however, YP should be focusing on building working-class power through unionisation and working-class activity such as strikes. The strike wave of 2022 showed that there is tremendous potential which is currently restricted by anti-trade union legislation. YP should be campaigning for defying the anti-trade union laws and for their abolition while wholeheartedly supporting every strike. It should fight for decent, affordable housing and education for all and the complete, fully funded re-nationalisation of the NHS, water and railways, with the ultimate aim of bringing the entire economy under democratic workers’ control.

Our struggle mustn’t be restricted to the economic arena either. We need to defend those oppressed along national and ethnic, as well as sex and gender, lines whilst understanding that such oppression is bound up with the class oppression of capitalism and all preceding class societies. We need to fight for full citizenship rights for all immigrants, equal pay for equal work, and much more. YP should organise to defeat fascist attacks by working together with the largest possible coalitions without compromising on the understanding that successful self-defence can only be organised by ourselves rather than relying on the police. We should stress that anti-Zionism is not anti-Semitism and fight for ending the witch hunts and prosecutions against all opponents of Israel’s genocide. YP should stand against the undemocratic anti-terror and anti-protest laws.

These laws are a domestic extension of British imperialism’s foreign policy in support of, and engagement in, imperialist and genocidal wars. Where it is not cynically exploited for imperialist ends, YP must stand for the right to national self-determination and the secession of oppressed nations if the majority of their population desires it–most importantly at home. YP should be campaigning to leave NATO whilst ending Britain’s support for proxy wars in West Asia and Ukraine. We shouldn’t give one person or one penny for the military, whilst demanding the closure of all military bases in Ireland and elsewhere. We should recognise the right of exploited, neo-colonial countries to defend themselves against imperialist attacks. We believe that the Italian workers currently show the way of how YP could best support such countries – through preventing the onward transfer of military hardware to the Israeli regime by strike action. Such actions not only signal support to oppressed populations; they also help build working-class self-confidence and power, and this is what should be at the centre of what YP does.

Organisational Structure / Statements / Unity bloc

A proposal on democratic organisational structure

We believe what needs to happen now is for branches to meet and elect delegates to regional committee meetings in the New Year. As the currently existing structure agreed at the conference has no place for such regional committees in official policy decision making, we suggest that initially the remit of these committees would be to discuss and coordinate region-wide practical activities by Your Party – perhaps best called Regional Organising Committees.

However, we also see them as a part of a future, more democratic structure for Your Party nationally. Any mass working class socialist party worthy of the name should be one with delegates from the branch base organisational level to the next organisational level and the next – up to and including the CEC. This goes hand in hand with recallability which becomes effectively impossible for CEC members if they are selected by OMOV as they are not accountable to any lower body, such as a Regional Committee of which they are an elected delegate from a branch.

Such a major change would of course require its own Constitutional amendments. But that, like most of our immediate tasks, is a subordinate part of the wider battle to turn Your Party into a vehicle capable of fighting for the interests of the working class and oppressed up to and including the overthrow of capitalism. We understand there is agreement that the left and most non-aligned members want a new kind of party, as opposed to a Labour Party 2.0 that would be hamstrung by a primary focus on elections and subsequent legal reforms within existing structures of capitalist rule. Regional Organising Committees would be a sensible part of an activist party of action, which we believe should be the primary focus of Your Party.

We present this as a proposal for discussion in Your Party.

Marxist Bulletin group
marxistbulletin@gmail.com

Elections / Greens / Statements

Why an alliance with the Greens is a question of principle, not a tactic

There has been much talk in the various Your Party (YP) Lewisham WhatsApp groups concerning how we should relate to the Greens, when it comes to the local elections in May 2026, with some suggesting that YP should stand down in certain areas.

This document will attempt to set out not only why we should do no such thing but also as to why we should be opposing the Greens as fiercely as we would Tories and Reform etc. We want to stress that this is not meant as a personal attack against any YP comrades who’re also in the Green Party.

For various political, historical and social reasons the Green Party has little if any purchase in the working class. The Labour Party in contrast, for all its sins, (that not even Adam’s fig leaf could hide) does still have a link via the trade union bureaucracy, and at least in the past, sometimes pretended to represent the working class. Of course, while we recognise this distinction, we are totally opposed to Starmer’s reactionary pro-capitalist government.

At the moment, the Greens are riding high in the saddle thanks to having a new, young, charismatic leader, and Labour and the Tories imploding with the Liberal Democrats sidelined, while YP is gripped by arguments at the top. This has meant that, almost de facto, some part of the left-wing vote and potential YP members as well as support in the polls, have gone to the Greens.

All of this is understandable, but is being taken as read by some in YP that this is sufficient for us to give our support to this capitalist party, either directly or indirectly through electoral pacts.

  • The Greens as a party have issues with certain aspects of capitalism, which they want to rein in – radical reformism, if you will. But that does not make them anti-capitalist per se; their mantra of implementing a “wealth tax” and other limited reforms are measures that more far-sighted capitalists might well advocate to shore up popular support for the system.
  • When in power in other countries, such as Ireland and Germany, the Greens have been happy to be incorporated into regional and state level structures that support capitalism and imperialism: for example, the Greens’ support for the Bundeswehr intervention in Afghanistan in 2001, and the bombing of Yugoslavia in 1999.
  • Just as serious have been their actions at local council level where they’ve tried to break local government strikes in Brighton and implemented significant cuts there and in Bristol. Zack Polanski is on record as saying, in the case of Bristol, that they need to implement cuts, because otherwise “the government comes in and then does all the cuts anyway”, which “can be even worse than actually making the cuts in the first place”. And this is in advance, when he is still in opposition – what would be his line if he were actually in power?!
  • Also, many of the Labour Party councillors who have defected to the Green Party over the last 18 months have done so over being asked to make one cut too many. This implies that their stance on cuts and their party allegiances are opportunistic. They clearly do not adhere to ‘no cuts’ on a principled basis.
  • Jeremy Corbyn and those around him keep on telling us that YP is a “New kind of politics”, and yet even before a ballot is cast, we’re already talking horse trading and backroom deals. So, this is not just about the Green Party, but about our attitude to electoral politics overall. We need to remember that class struggle activity should be our main focus if YP is to be socialist in any meaningful sense. It’s not just about the state of the roads, or the bin collections. But we will work alongside the Greens and other forces in actions where our interests coincide, for example opposing a fascist rally, even though we cannot give them electoral or any other form of political support.
  • The most important thing we should do is to build the branches, solidify our programme and make it known.
  • However, if the consensus is to stand YP candidates in Lewisham in the May elections, then an “anti-cuts” stance should be the no. 1 priority and everything else flows from that. (More on concrete electoral policies later).
  • We know that both Southwark and Lewisham councils are gearing up for yet another savage set of cuts. This in turn means a principled anti-cuts campaign has to go beyond that of the electoral cycle. Doing so: (1) not only stops the decimation of jobs and services but rolls them back (2) It also stems the racist, anti-working class poison of Reform (btw Reform are not big in South East London, but they should not be used as a bogeyman to frighten people: Halloween has passed).
  • If the “new kind of politics” is to have any meaning when it comes to fighting cuts and austerity then it has to start not from being ‘pragmatic’, nor from a “people’s budget”, based on the idea that we manage the local capitalist budget until the money runs out and then appeal to central government for more crumbs.
  • We should be able to say to people at the door that we’re not just here for elections whether local or national, that we’re defenders of the community, tribunes of the oppressed. For example, we should call for the nationalisation without compensation of Landsec and the landlords. That’s the sort of thing we should be talking about – not which ward to concede to the Greens or the Liberal Democrats.