Red Fightback’s Final Crisis
The way forward is complete representation for oppressed people groups within the leadership of the socialist cadre, safe channels of communication over sensitive topics of debate in order to encourage democratic centralism, and putting oppressed people-groups first in every instance.[1]
So read the statement of noble intent of Red Fightback, a Marxist-Leninist organisation formed five years ago by a handful of people who left the Revolutionary Communist Group (RCG) over its failure to handle a complaint of sexual assault. The split took place in a wider malaise of misogyny and abuse apologia within the British left, the Socialist Workers Party’s Comrade Delta scandal being the most notorious case. Red Fightback aimed to foster a revolutionary socialist and anti-imperialist movement that took oppression seriously, which included support for internal caucuses protecting the interests of members oppressed by patriarchy, racism, and ableism. The project has now seemingly come to a sudden end due to a failure to combat oppression within its ranks.
At the heart of the crisis was a traumatic interpersonal conflict involving several leading personalities, with ‘competing’ injuries of anti-Blackness and sexual abuse. This occurred against the background of longer-running concerns of institutional anti-Blackness within the organisation spanning over several years. In response to a statement signed by ten members of the Racially Oppressed Caucus, indicting the national leadership and announcing its secession from Red Fightback, one of the accused parties who managed the group’s tech infrastructure nuked the online communications server and website. The Central Committee, which was immersed in existing political tensions, was paralysed by inaction, and a CC member with access to the group’s social media sent out an unauthorised tweet declaring that the ‘attempt at building a cross-racial coalition in Red Fightback has failed’. Seventy-odd active members who had no idea of the issues boiling under the surface were left confused and grieving.
Post-mortems will inevitably ensue with declarations of failure that will be oversimplified, and prognoses that will draw the wrong lessons. What follows is an early attempt at analysing the hidden dynamic of a political sect sincerely committed to forging a revolutionary coalition against racial capitalism. It was an organisation frequently distinguished by that clash of orthodoxy and iconoclasm, so characteristic of the New Communist Movement of the 1970s, which generates a creative tension but also destructive tumult. Most striking, though, was Red Fightback’s advancement of an unapologetically queer communism – a majority of the group, including the leadership, identified as TLGBIQ and neurodivergent. Members found in the co-penetration of communist austerity and queer antinormativity a refuge from a hostile social and political outer world, although in practice the division of labour within the group often failed to transgress patriarchal conventions.
The group adopted what some members saw as an intersectional approach that sought to address the political significance of the Movement for Black Lives, in contrast to a left in Britain that has often deigned to take the struggle against racism seriously beyond tepid calls of “black and white, unite and fight”. Red Fightback was not insulated from a national culture carrying the deep imprint of Empire, however, and there were numerous manifestations of white chauvinism within the organisation. Consciousness raising was necessary, but the moralistic tendencies of a revolutionary sect, particularly of a Maoist inflection, at times encouraged hyper-subjectivism – a trend reinforced by essentialising and psychoanalytical theories of anti-Blackness. What remains certain, though, is that socialists cannot afford to defer questions of oppression to some point ‘After-the-Revolution’, and if overlapping injustices and traumas create particular difficulties in organising spaces ‘as identities become more and more fine grained and disagreements sharper’, it is all the more necessary for anti-capitalist coalitions to grapple with the porous boundaries between the personal and the political.[2]
An anti-sectarian sect
In 2018 a handful of activists from a mixture of social backgrounds split from the RCG (known for its newspaper Fight Racism! Fight Imperialism!) – itself a splinter from Tony Cliff’s International Socialist Group (later SWP) in the seventies – and founded a new communist organisation which aimed to be ‘feminist, anti-imperialist, anti-racist, anti-capitalist, anti-ableist and anti-abusive’. This was shortly joined by exiles from the disintegrating Communist Party of Great Britain (Marxist-Leninist), whose leaders had declared war on identity politics and ‘gender ideology’. Then there were those, like me, who came in fresh and for whom Red Fightback was the entry point into the subterranean world of Leninist sects.
In general, recruitment benefitted from an influx of students enthused by the socialist revival associated with Corbyn, but who didn’t want anything to do with the Labour Party which – after all – had a century-long record of governing capitalism at home and (neo-)colonialist domination abroad. My first in-person party experience was an early Congress at a church in Leeds, attended by seventeen misfits who announced the impending crisis of capitalist-imperialism and the coming British revolution. The memory that stands out was the jarring moment when a member of the Central Committee instructed us all to put our phones in a microwave to evade state surveillance. We reluctantly obliged.
Lenin’s 1920 pamphlet ‘Left-Wing’ Communism described ultraleftism as an ‘infantile disorder’ – infantile in the literal sense of political immaturity. Most of Red Fightback had little if any experience in organising, and were very young. ‘Sometimes iron certitude and self-righteousness reflect a poverty of inner knowledge.’[3] The group was informed by various shades of Maoism, or anti-revisionist Marxism-Leninism. Our politics in the early days were encapsulated by what New Socialist editor Tom Gann has referred to as ‘the “national nihilism” of “Rainy Fascism Island” ideas on the left’, entailing an aloof attitude to the British labour tradition, which was viewed as fundamentally bourgeois. Colonialism and imperialism have undoubtedly left their corrupting imprint on metropolitan class formation, but à la the RCG this was understood in a mechanical way which wrote off the entirety of the organised working class as a reactionary labour aristocracy.[4] We didn’t learn about the India League, the Movement for Colonial Freedom, or the Anti-Apartheid Movement; however weak and compromised, sedimented as it was across a longue durée of imperial rise and decline, there is a tradition of labour internationalism in Britain worth critically engaging with.
Not knowing what to do practically, Red Fightback focused on perfecting its political vision and internal structures. This entailed a wordy party constitution which someone pointed out exceeded the length of the Fundamental Law of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. Being guilty of what Trotsky dubbed the substitutionist error – substituting a political sect for a real class vanguard – the group’s concerns centred on having the correct ‘line’ to impart to the masses. Internal struggle over the party line often took the argumentative style of Twitter debates. As The Left Wind blog notes: ‘Internet communists learn Leninism as a set of “positions” on historical and modern events, or at worst, a set of dogmas and truisms. Then, new “converts” to MLism (or any other tendency) seek an “affinity group” (almost like a hobby club)’. To keep track of the growing number of official Red Fightback lines, a Core Positions document was created which included the various countries we deemed socialist. For a time the most pressing question on the lips of every new member was ‘What’s your line on China?’ The plurality of perspectives on Socialism with Chinese Characteristics was quite effectively resolved by referring to the Black Panther Party’s distinction between ‘revolutionary criticism’ and ‘reactionary criticism’ which strengthens the dominant camp of global imperialism.
The most idiosyncratic political line was ‘the final crisis of capitalism’. A leading member set forth a paper which showed that, by mapping the falling global rate of profit, it was possible to project a point in the near future when it will hit zero (legend tells that RCG founder Dr David Yaffe’s ‘velocitometer’ could ‘calculate the speed of the falling rate of profit to limits of 0.00002 feet per second’), shortly before which capitalism would enter an insoluble crisis. The analysis drew on Henryk Grossman’s reassertion of Marx’s laws of accumulation and critique of theories of underconsumption later associated with Keynes. The position was largely accepted by the membership, none of whom had any idea who Grossman was. Charitably, this analysis of a final crisis can be said to underscore the realities of imperialist competition – alert to the expanding contradictions within the NATO alliance which many on the left naively view as a homogenously unified bloc. Our analysis of Brexit highlighted the contradictions between sections of the British capitalist class relatively aligned with Euro-imperialism, and those whose priorities lay in strengthening the Special Relationship. The severity of the climate crisis was also emphasised, although the agitational utility of the catastrophist slogan ‘Socialism or Extinction’ was questionable. In time, the nasal gazing would lead to criticism of the party’s Theoretical Development Committee (TDC).
Inspired by the ‘base building’ trend associated with the now-defunct Marxist Center in North America, Red Fightback launched into a new focus on mutual aid which often functioned as red charity work. Regular stalls in local working-class communities in Liverpool, Birmingham, Glasgow and elsewhere enabled members to dip their feet into organising, boosted the group’s public profile, and encouraged a refreshing looking outwards. Branches were also involved in local movements including the anti-gentrification Save Latin Village campaign in north London. There was an attempt to kickstart our own campaign, ‘Bog Off’, against the exclusion of trans people from public toilets, which was linked to wider class and anti-racist struggles over ‘rights to health, safety, and dignity’. The campaign was mostly limited to stickering and a couple meetings with trade unionists. Members additionally took part in the Kill the Bill assemblies against the Policing, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill, and in networks resisting immigration raids.
The years following the national lockdowns were a time of political maturation for Red Fightback, which was accompanied by the development of a humorous and self-effacing culture towards ‘The Party’, including among the leadership. Much larger national congresses were of a qualitatively different character and the accumulation of lines was scrapped. However, the novelty of the group’s emphasis on democratic participation and autonomy of branches and caucuses also meant members often lacked initiative, and frequently complained that there wasn’t enough centralism or national direction. An exaggerated assumption among particularly newer members that the leadership comprised a bureaucratised clique with which they were principally in contradiction was compounded by a lingering reluctance to air political debates out in the open. Instead there remained a vicious cycle of intensive criticism – often in the form of bombing the party headquarters – and overcorrection that was unhealthy and unresolvable, since it expressed frustrations at the pace of socialist struggle which reflected objective circumstances beyond the control of a political sect.
The group’s ephemeral prime was further witness to a pedagogical zeal, with a series of educational programmes requiring a huge amount of time and energy from a score of dedicated members. This created a vibrantly eclectic and anti-didactic intellectual culture, though with a definite anti-Trotskyist slant to the curriculum. To the Marxist-Leninist classics and the Activist Study (Araling Aktibista – ARAK) of the Filipino revolutionary movement were added Ambalavaner Sivanandan, Cedric Robinson, Assata Shakur, Ruth Wilson Gilmore, and Silvia Federici. Topics covered included dialectics and the labour theory of value, anti-psychiatry, social reproduction theory, carceral abolitionism, Marx’s ecology, and the social model of disability. Particular importance was placed on theorising contemporary imperialism and the new processes of economic unequal exchange which accompanied capitalist ‘globalisation’, for which we drew heavily on Samir Amin, Walter Rodney, World-Systems Theory and the Monthly Review school. There was a notable neglect of the British New Left intellectuals, save for Stuart Hall’s writings on law and order.
Like the best of the ’68-era revolutionary groups, our Leninism did not preclude a healthy respect for libertarian impulses which soon led to a rethinking of sectarian vanguardism. More observant comrades connected the dots and realised that the Trotskyist sects were riddled with similar issues of overcentralism and abuses of power as the established Maoist and ‘Stalinist’ ones. It was recognised that the militarised formulation of democratic centralism, promoted by the Comintern under pressures of siege communism, was inappropriate to existing British conditions, and our reconfiguration drew on a range of influences from American post-Trotskyist Hal Draper’s socialism from below to the interpreter of foquismo Régis Debray.
Remarkably for a group which originated in a split from one of the most insular sects on the British left, we pushed towards an anti-sectarian position, a stance which is customarily ‘more honoured in the breach than the observance’.[5] In hindsight, my penning of a 10,000-word polemic against the reformist and nationalist errors of the Communist Party of Britain in late 2020 was probably not the most productive form of non-sectarian engagement. It fuelled online feuding with the Young Communist League, who had enjoyed a minor membership revival thanks to disillusioned Corbynistas drawn to the militancy evinced in its publicity stunts. But we were increasingly open to cooperation with other groups and individuals who, despite marked ideological differences, shared our emphasis on fighting oppression and an intolerance of abuse. This included various anarchists, and Trotskyists in rs21, who similarly to Red Fightback had undertaken a self-reflexive critique of sectarian vanguardism after the crisis in the SWP.
A common Red Fightback watchword was that, since Britain had never enjoyed the ‘actuality of revolution’, no revolutionary theory could be upheld by us as scientific doctrine. Dogmatic Marxist-Leninist types and fetishists of twentieth-century communist aesthetic continued to join in numbers and adopt leadership positions, but the general direction – encouraged by the now more experienced cadre – was towards an ‘open Leninism’ with a stress on combatting oppression and Eurocentrism. This political openness was, I think, encouraged by the group’s cultivation of a distinctively queer communism.
Queer communism
Communists have long noted how in times of social crisis the ‘traditional bonds of sexual relations’, like all other fetters, are thrown into question, and Red Fightback emerged during a period of ongoing cultural struggle within the left, revolving around the moral panic attending the breakdown of gender norms. The background to this conflict can be partially traced to New Labour, which combined pronouncements on gay equality with appeals to the traditionalist values of ‘faith, family and flag’, but over the last five years social reaction in Britain has been doggedly trained on the transgender community. Trans-antagonistic ‘gender critical’ viewpoints promoted within the Labour Party soon seeped into the trade union movement, reflected in the Communist Party-affiliated Morning Star’s decision to print a Der Stürmer-esque cartoon depicting trans women as a frothing crocodile in a pool of newts. Red Fightback, in stark contrast, provided a safe party for queer militants alienated and excluded from other left-wing spaces, and throughout its short existence most of the leadership were trans, nonbinary, and neurodivergent communists. There was also later a Caucus for Past and Present Sex Workers, which organised with the United Voices of the World union.
The British communist movement has historically sought to project a respectable, puritanical image, but as the late Glyn Salton-Cox pointed out in his Queer Communism and the Ministry of Love, this was always in tension with an anti-normative impulse: ‘“Tearing away the decent drapery” of capital to parade its freakish constitution of human interiority, and driven by a solemn madness to endlessly diagnose, correct, and abjectly celebrate their own deviations, Communists must surely rank among the foremost perverts of modernity.’[6] The struggle over socialist identity has persisted today in attempts to revive a ‘trad left’. Most risibly, the CPGB-ML has adopted the proletarian drag for which the Militant Tendency was once infamous, instructing its student members to wear Peaky Blinder flat caps and get Tommy Robinson haircuts. Brooklyn-based communist Kade Doyle Griffiths has observed how the traditionalist revival on the left reflects a kind of neoliberal approach to socialist identity, ‘an injunction to personally “just be normal”’.[7] The irony of ‘normie socialists’ in the CPGB-ML, the YCL, or the Trotskyist IMT is that they ‘are, to a person, themselves weirdos, intellectuals, hipsters, rigidly sectarian, “fail sons” in their own minds, deeply embroiled in left “subculture,” “weird Twitter” and the like, and really, all manner of not adequately normal.’
Red Fightback ditched the trad left aesthetic and championed an openness advocated by Griffiths: ‘As much as we aren’t going to trick the ruling class into giving us what we want and need, we won’t trick workers into socialism or into trusting socialists. In my experience, being “out” in any sense, breeds trust among comrades and militants.’ Red Fightback members constructed a queer and specifically trans identity that was defined in and through a communist political identity. As one member put it: ‘To Red Fightback, I am a comrade. To the gender-troubled-feminist, I am a curioso.’ This was also reflected during a roundtable discussion on Marxism and Transgender Liberation in June 2020[8]:
For me my gender was always linked to my politics; I started off organising around people who were largely trans and non-binary, and they were deeply influential in both facilitating me to come to terms with a lot of difficulties I had in my own experience of gender, as well as what it means to do so in a supportive and loving environment where that’s the norm. When I came to Red Fightback in those super early days, where everything was so stripped back, it was obvious where the party’s priorities lay; it was that same sense of communal support but paired with revolutionary liberation and better politics. And like, the fact that the Party started off with so many trans and non-binary people is such a reassurance – it’s still something we hear reassures people, that we really mean what we say on this issue.
I only realised I was trans, specifically non-binary, when I joined Red Fightback. Even two years ago I wasn’t a Marxist-Leninist, so I’ve done a big 180 on pretty much my entire worldview. Before I came to these realisations, I was aware of how patriarchal society is obsessed with policing the boundaries of womanhood, which I always found dehumanising. But I didn’t really know what that meant before I understood dialectical materialism … it’s a philosophy of revolutionising both our external world and ourselves…
Significantly, it was not just TLGBIQ members who were included in the party community. As Griffiths suggests, ‘queers have a lot to offer everyone about “coming out” and being authentically your weird self, loving not just who you love, but the ideas you love, the commitments you love that might not map on to that bourgeois ideal, and your dreams for yourself and society.’ For young cis male contrarians who suffered an early political detour through the New Atheist movement, an injection of queer radical culture could be manna from heaven.
Red Fightback pioneered a Transgender Marxism, before Pluto Press released its excellent collection of the same name edited by Jules Joanne Gleeson and Elle O’Rourke. The party advanced a revolutionary approach to transforming the self and society inspired by Leslie Feinberg and Mark Ashton. A short book we produced in early 2020, Marxism and Transgender Liberation: Confronting Transphobia in the British Left, achieved a circulation which transcended the obscurity of the group thanks in large part to the wicked cover art designed by two members.[9] Its content, which I contributed the bulk of, was mostly limited to demolition work, critiquing transphobic attitudes within existing left tendencies – Labourite, Communist, and Trotskyist – as well as the bio-essentialist hangovers in Engels’s (nonetheless ground-breaking) Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State.
Being influenced by the ‘proletarian feminism’ then in-vogue within the American neo-Maoist scene, the book took a dismissive approach to queer theory, and the party was initially reluctant to claim the term queer which some members deemed non-scientific. However, the release of the book attracted a significant number of TLGBIQ communists alienated from mainstream queer spaces who drove the group’s politics in less stale directions. This included a radical critique of Pride with its ‘neoliberal, individual-focused, medicalising, and reformist approach, the framing of “acceptance” and “inclusion” (code for political neutralisation and assimilation) into the existing power structure as liberation for LGBTIQ people’.[10]
There’s something specific about building a space where trans people can engage with themselves, but specifically trans people that have been alienated by the mainstream trans spaces that have carved a space out comfortably within capitalist hegemony. A lot of trans people, particularly working class trans people, find those spaces difficult; the fact it’s those people we’re bringing into Red Fightback is an even bigger endorsement.
Trans struggle was analysed through an anti-imperialist lens, tracing the ascendancy of the heteronormative gender binary to capitalist modernity’s universalisation through colonialism. While orthodox Leninists in Britain cling to sex essentialism wrapped in vulgar materialist rhetoric, Red Fightback looked towards attempts at the revolutionising of gender relations within extant socialist projects in Cuba, Venezuela, and the National Democratic Front of the Philippines. The party also emphasised how the particularly virulent TERF phenomenon in Britain is deeply rooted in imperial standards of sexual conformity and domestic respectability, and the legacy of assimilationist white feminism. In the period of decolonisation, gender deviants were ‘walking evidence of moral turpitude and the loss of manly virtue’. The transphobic moral panic is thus not unrelated to the populist politics of Empire nostalgia which boiled to the surface in 2016. We were sympathetic to the analysis of Sisters Uncut during the Kill the Bill movement, which linked gendered violence to the crisis-ridden British state’s convergent attacks on trade unions and racialised minorities.
In marked contrast to reactionary arguments linking gender nonconformity to liberal self-absorption, the reality is that in Britain and elsewhere ‘trans people have long been a backbone of popular organising’ in various movements, ‘from housing rights and trade unionism to resisting police harassment and sexual violence.’ Many trans communists in Red Fightback were involved in trade union organising, reflecting the changing character of the organised working class. While a large number of members were students, the precarity already wrought by neoliberalism was magnified by social marginalisation.
The division of labour within the party did not achieve the desired rupture with patriarchal norms, however. Cis men were encouraged to do their share of minuting meetings – with varying degrees of success – but the social-reproductive labour in Red Fightback, including tech maintenance, fell overwhelmingly on TLGBIQ members. It was noted that ‘women and trans comrades did the bulk of organisational/bureaucratic work’, all of which was uncompensated, ‘while others stood back and focused on their own personal interests.’[11] Queer care was also unable to negate the combined pressures of party work and external life, and the taxing rigours of criticism and self-criticism, which all resulted in perpetual burnout of active members (particularly welfare officers). At worst, the traumas produced by a violent society were re-inflicted on each other. And a further problem was that while the party was queer, it was also mostly white.
White chauvinism
Red Fightback was always anti-racist, but it was never unified on what that entailed. In the Leninist tradition, the prevailing tendency has been to treat ‘racial ideology, support for imperialism, and socialist allegiance to the nation-state as a necessarily singular phenomenon, often labelling this cluster of ideas as chauvinism.’[12] Consequently, there has often been a lack of attention paid specifically to Empire, colonialism, and whiteness. From the start, most party members rejected a view of racism within the labour movement as simply a question of false consciousness, which neglects the material components of the compensatory wages of whiteness theorised by W. E. B. Du Bois. Anti-racism nonetheless remained a theoretical weakness within the party, and there was a lack of engagement with Black radicalism, Pan-Africanism, or the neo-abolitionist politics which gained momentum with the transnational Movement for Black Lives.
These shortcomings came to a head in 2020 when some members were discussing the Black Hammer cult, a fringe American organisation that gained notoriety for burning copies of The Diary of Anne Frank. When it was pointed out by a Black comrade that there was a racist history of exceptionalising ‘Black antisemitism’ and downplaying antisemitism’s organic roots in white Christian European culture, the white members reacted defensively, with one of them shutting down the conversation. In response to criticism, several founding white members left the party. The psychological injury inflicted on the fragile white ego no doubt played a role, but the terminally online nature of interactions and needless intensity of line struggle at the time also contributed to the lack of a constructive resolution.
Over the following year, the Theoretical Development Committee was tasked with developing a line on anti-Blackness. Two comrades, one Black and one white, introduced the philosophy of Afro-pessimism developed by Frank B. Wilderson III, which posits the world as structured around non-Black solidarity: ‘Blacks do not function as political subjects; instead, our flesh and energies are instrumentalised for postcolonial, immigrant, LGBT, and workers’ agendas.’ (The white member advocating the Afro-pessimist position was the person who later responded to accusations of anti-Black misconduct with a slash-and-burn of the party’s tech infrastructure.) Critics of Afro-pessimism have highlighted its idealist psychoanalytical and ontological premises, which obscure the co-constitutive history of colonialism, slavery, and capitalism, and are thus at odds with the socialist coalition politics to which Red Fightback aspired. Its utility lay in forcing us to confront the specificity of anti-Black oppression and slavery’s afterlives, long neglected by Marxists, as well as the psychological impairments that structured interactions with the one Black person on the TDC.
The committee’s engagement with the line on anti-Blackness left much to be desired, resulting in a criticism of several white members, a couple of whom were supposed to have helped write the Afro-pessimism line but had not, and who self-criticised but later left the organisation or were kicked out. My own behaviour was uncomradely and chauvinist; I sought to ‘defeat’ an incorrect political line rather than engage in a dialogue motivated by curiosity and mutual respect, with the result that I destroyed a friendship and relationship of trust. While a lengthy self-criticism ensued, I shortly after again displayed white chauvinism in using triggering language when discussing the anti-Asian violence of the National Front – clumsily trying to make a point about the history of coalitional ‘political Blackness’ in Britain. Rather than being expelled, I agreed to a months-long rectification process and soon afterwards the TDC dissolved. These issues were concealed from the rest of the party, who were given the half-truth that the committee disbanded in tandem with the group’s reorientation towards concrete activities.
In a post-imperial national culture suffused with whiteness, consciousness raising was necessary, but challenges were involved in negotiating the balance between the individual and the structural. In his book Elite Capture: How the Powerful Took Over Identity Politics (And Everything Else), radical philosopher Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò attacks a ‘deference politics’ which focuses on the distribution of privilege ‘within the room’ (such as ‘classrooms, boardrooms, political parties’), ‘rather than at the root political issues that explain why everything is so fucked up.’[13] This debate around identity and social structure is one which predates even the new left. Similar arguments to Táíwò’s were made by the American communist Harry Haywood in his autobiography Black Bolshevik, during a discussion of the rightward drifting CPUSA in 1949-53. Haywood criticised how ‘mass work’ against racism was side-lined by the Communist Party leadership in favour of a ‘moral crusade’ which ‘assumed that chauvinist practices could be eliminated by wiping out wrong ideas and attitudes of the Party rank and file.’ He decried how ‘White chauvinism came to be considered as a sort of phenomenon; a thing in itself, separate from the fight for Black rights and proletarian revolution.’[14] This subjectivist approach was later revived in an intensified form within the anti-revisionist New Communist Movement, during a notorious Campaign Against White Chauvinism which ‘consisted of lengthy criticism sessions dissecting individuals’ attitudes and psychology.’[15]
The critique of deference politics has shades of the ‘Wait for the revolution’ line with which male socialists have often responded to the feminist challenge. Haywood voiced his frustrations with the view ‘which contended that the Party could not move forward [until] all vestiges of white chauvinism were driven from the ranks’, but he nonetheless saw a need for criticism and self-criticism whose purpose is ‘to strengthen the Party, to consolidate the cadres behind the correct line and practice through exposing errors and rectifying them in practice.’[16] Within Red Fightback there were attempts at a transformative approach to anti-racism, linked to constructive political action. A distressing incident on one of the party stalls, at which a comrade received anti-Black abuse from a member of the public and white comrades failed to intervene, was for instance used as an educative moment. Nonetheless, there was at times an inquisitional atmosphere and an element of performative confessionalism. A Black member of the Racially Oppressed Caucus who viewed the approach as overly individualist was accused of perpetuating whiteness.
Red Fightback’s final crisis revolved around an interpersonal conflict among several leading members, all of whom were queer and who had been on both the TDC and the Central Committee, involving ‘competing’ accusations of anti-Black behaviour and sexual assault. Often in the party there was a preference for attempting to privately resolve disputes, both personal and political, which resulted in a lack of transparency. This was despite the fact that there was an independent Welfare Forum to formally handle the large number of internal complaints, though due to capacity issues it became practically non-functional. When the anti-Blackness charges were presented to the leadership in the summer of 2022, an informal agreement was reached with the aggrieved party whereby all but one member of the CC stepped down prior to the 2022 Congress. None of the reasons behind this were known to the wider membership, including myself. Rather than resolving the issue, the conflict festered.
The collapse of the party in January 2023 was immediately triggered by the new CC’s expulsion of the Black member after the latter’s rejection of a reconciliation process when a complaint of sexual assault was issued against them. In part, the expulsion reflected the group’s emphasis on protecting survivors of sexual assault – a number of prominent members including several branch organising secretaries had been booted for sexual misconduct. However, the ROC secretary felt the caucus had been improperly excluded from the deliberations, and that the ‘utilisation of the privacy of a personal relationship’ (i.e., the request of the survivor of sexual assault for anonymity) was used to shut out a systematic investigation into racism. There were no formal procedures requiring any caucus’s approval for disciplinary action against its members, and there were no collective discussions about this at the 2022 Congress – even in the guise of processes about welfare, caucus organising, or broader questions of anti-Blackness. The party’s ability to respond to the ROC statement concluding that ‘Red Fightback is a white interest group’ was prevented by the rapid loss of communication and existing political tensions within and around the Central Committee.
Ultimately the critique of racism became entangled in a narrow factional-driven conflict, when some members sought to connect the anti-Blackness accusations to a dispute over the direction of the party. With the majority of the membership unaware of the events that had unfolded, claims began to circulate that the old guard were planning to conduct a purge of Marxist-Leninists, and even more outlandishly, to liquidate the group into an existing pro-trans Trotskyist outfit, rs21 (who would surely welcome an incursion of people they’d presumably regard as Stalinists...). The rumours were given credence by the fact that the former party general secretary criticised in the ROC statement had previously been lambasted for authoring the draft of the party strategy to be critiqued and debated in the lead up to the 2022 Congress, which had transgressed academic conventions and plagiarised aspects from some left-libertarian text.
As the party disintegrated, the conflict devolved into mudslinging as a group of white MLs began piling on their own accusations of ‘abuse’ against the member who managed the comms server which boiled down to the fact that she had been abrasive with them in online interactions. A member who pushed back against this narrative for trivialising the term abuse was accused of being a ‘fed’. In the process the struggle against racism was derailed, giving credence to Haywood’s reflections that an essentialising approach to racism had encouraged ‘an atmosphere which was conducive to the development of a particularly paternalistic and patronising form of white chauvinism’, and which left Black comrades as the ‘defenders’ of Black people against white chauvinists.[17]
Táíwò’s critique of deference emphasises the ‘corrosive effects’ of trauma within progressive political struggles, which he suggests can lead to ‘misrepresenting the stakes of conflict (often by overstating harm)’.[18] Here he draws on Sarah Schulman’s controversial book Conflict is Not Abuse: Overstating Harm, Community Responsibility and the Duty of Repair, which abolitionist feminists have criticised for its ‘total disinterest [in] interrogating the broader relationship between shame, abuse, and the structural inequalities that govern our society.’ It may be the case that neoliberalism has encouraged an individualised approach to trauma, and promoted punitive or self-managed solutions. As so often happens, however, this has become a toxically polarised debate within the left. While the violences of society cannot be wholly expunged from progressive spaces, we do need a prefigurative anti-racist politics which reflects the liberatory social relations we seek to achieve, as a precondition of Táíwò’s salutary call to ‘build the kinds of rooms in which we can sit together’. The left has too often been hamstrung by an ‘enervating desire for solidarity to be easy’. Unfortunately, there are no shortcuts to an effective socialist coalition, and it seems doubtful that the solutions to the fracturing of class struggle lie in the cottage industry of ortho-Marxist screeds against identity politics and standpoint epistemology.
Marxist proponents of a strategic universalism have a tendency to wind up ‘nostalgically replaying lost political opportunities, symbolised by the Haitian revolution and the 1960s US Black liberation movement’.[19] In the British context, mythologised accounts of solidarity centred on heroic episodes such as the Grunwick Strike or the Battle of Lewisham typically erase ‘the longue durée history’ of white workers ‘actively choosing to identify with whiteness, or not-blackness, underlining how historically one-way calls for “unity” or “black and white: unite and fight!” have been.’ While Leninist groups in Britain have historically helped kickstart mass anti-racist movements, they have often held a paternalistic attitude towards independent Black and Asian struggle, combined with an internal intolerance of autonomous self-organisation (such as caucuses) as ostensibly in contradiction with democratic centralism.[20]
Leninism sans guarantees
Despite the best efforts of the British New Left and Eurocommunist intellectuals to sublate the reform versus revolution dichotomy, the old debate has refused to die. Democratic socialism will prevail as the dominant anti-capitalist tendency in Britain for the foreseeable future, but Leninism remains an unspent political force. Its world-historic contributions to anti-imperialism, and its robust scepticism of the optimistic view that state power can simply be divided up and ‘pepper[ed] with working class personnel’, ensures its enduring vitality. Quixotic ultraleftism notwithstanding, we do need obstinate revolutionaries who resist the moderating pull exerted on socialists in the Labour Party’s orbit.
Revolutionaries can play an important role in non-revolutionary contexts. Although the organised far left has always been relatively tiny in Britain, the history shows that small but committed Leninist grouplets can punch above their weight and catalyse mass political movements: examples include the Vietnam Solidarity Campaign, the Anti-Nazi League, and the Non-Stop Picket of the South African embassy. However, these movements took place in a context of wider social ferment, and a conjuncture in which student radicalism linked up with industrial militancy that threatened the corporatist TUC-Labour partnership. What seeds of extra-parliamentary activism developed post-2008 in the movements against austerity, Corbynism transplanted into familiar electoral channels – and while recent years have witnessed significant strike actions the strength of organised labour has nowhere near recovered to pre-1980s levels. In the aftermath of Corbynism’s defeat, all the left can do is pick up the difficult task of developing anti-systemic forces organisationally.
The neoliberal counterrevolution of the 1980s-90s and the post-2008 left’s resultant lack of continuity with the new left-era means that inevitably, mistakes had to be made again. The revolutionary sects that have survived from the seventies are typically ones that insulated themselves from the anti-authoritarian rebellions of that period, and in which young militants continue to become trapped in fossilised political institutions. I suppose we should be thankful that in Red Fightback many lessons were learned quickly. The nature of the party’s anticlimactic implosion wasn’t inevitable, but the speed of the collapse represented the political tensions that could not be contained in the existing organisational form.
For those committed to revitalising a revolutionary trend, the question remains of how to constructively relate to the communist inheritance. The strength of the anti-revisionist framework lies in its recognition of the symbolic power of an unbroken revolutionary tradition with truly global contours, and the need to build upon that tradition. An older comrade from the British Maoist movement of the 1970s and 1980s reflects: ‘As individuals we had entered into this experiment thoroughly imbued with ideas from class and imperialist society, and it was only through struggle over line [that] we were able to take our political line into new territory which went beyond the old debates’. This was true of Red Fightback, which took its ideas in genuinely interesting directions, though the intellectual eclecticism translated into a lack of strategic clarity. The adverse side of anti-revisionism, however, is the idealism expressed in its desired restoration of an ‘untainted’ Marxism-Leninism (a proclivity that is similarly innate to Trotskyism), and a destructive obsession with ideological purity.
Old hostilities within the revolutionary left have deep history, but there are major issues that need to be dealt with collectively. Doctrinairism, abuses of centralism, and the traditionalist prejudices of a patriarchal and imperialist society – these problems within left-wing spaces do not neatly map onto sectarian demarcations. Some ideological issues will be irreconcilable, for instance questions of campism and the nature of emergent challenges to the US-led ‘unipolar’ global order. There should be an honest assessment of both the failures and ‘the kernels of the communist futures that manifested in the processes of the historical socialist project’, and of the latter’s fraught but intimate relationship with the epochal struggles against colonialism and racial apartheid. There are important debates to be had, however there can and should be points of practical unity as a jumping off point for dialogue. Easy to say in theory, of course, but entrenched issues of overt chauvinism and abuse coverup within the old sects mean that mistrust, insecurity, and paranoia will continue to mar intra-left interactions until a fundamental shakeup occurs.
Revolutionaries also need to find more productive ways of critically engaging with the left forces who wield the most institutional power. In this regard, we are still maligned by the historic split between communists and socialists that occurred a century ago. World communism emerged from an unavoidable antagonism, driven by the Second (Socialist) International’s opportunism on questions relating to the state and imperialism – issues fudged by recent attempts to rehabilitate the ‘centrist Marxism’ of Kautsky.[21] Nonetheless, the mythologised ‘split in socialism’ has become an unthinking dogma among most Leninists, nourishing the epidemic of micro-sects. Rather than seeking to purify the left movement prematurely, revolutionaries need to struggle for their principled positions within the broader socialist milieu. This means not just a reflexive labelling of reformists as bourgeois agents, but a concrete critique of the political culture of democratic socialism in Britain, from Hardie to Benn to Corbyn: its subordination to Labourism, a hegemonic ideology of social reform within the capitalist framework; and its brand of moral internationalism wrapped in liberal humanitarianism, and the paternalism of the ‘democratic’ Commonwealth ideal. To resume its status as an agent of change, the collective left needs its own organisation independent of Labour, but at present the revolutionary camp is far too weak and divided vis-à-vis the reformists to exercise a formative influence on such a project.
It is difficult to underestimate the challenges facing the still embryonic post-2008 left, operating in the long shadow of defeats suffered in a bygone era. After decades of neoliberal reaction, socialists’ energies are expended in rear-guard defences of reforms which represent the working-class struggle’s historical achievement of accumulated social compromises within the bounds of an imperialist nation-state. This bleak situation is unavoidable, but tough pragmatism needs to be wedded with the projection of an anti-systemic alternative; a promise of a better world worth fighting for. And this requires fleshing out the kind of politics towards which Red Fightback at its best aspired: ‘a socialism that is both universal and particular, economic and cultural, personal and political.’[22] A luta continua.
References
[1] Red Fightback, ‘A Polemic Against the Revolutionary Communist Group’, 1 June 2018 (archived at <http://web.archive.org/web/20201111233449/https://redfightback.org/a-polemic-against-the-revolutionary-communist-group/>).
[2] Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò, Elite Capture: How the Powerful Took Over Identity Politics (And Everything Else) (London: Pluto Press, 2022), p. 82.
[3] Tariq Ali, Redemption (London: Picador, 1991), p. 162.
[4] For middle class student communists like the author who grew up under New Labour, a stereotyped and pejorative attitude towards the ‘traditional’ working class could be organically traded in for a superficial version of Lenin’s theory of a reactionary labour aristocracy.
[5] Ali, Redemption, p. 8.
[6] Glyn Salton-Cox, Queer Communism and the Ministry of Love: Sexual Revolution in British Writing of the 1930s (Edinburgh University Press, 2018), p. 1.
[7] Thanks to Dan Frost for recommending this piece.
[8] Red Fightback, ‘Pride Special: Marxism and Transgender Liberation – A Roundtable Discussion’, 15 June 2020 (archived at <http://web.archive.org/web/20200929150711/https://redfightback.org/pride-special-marxism-and-transgender-liberation-a-roundtable-discussion/>).
[9] A Spanish communist publisher, Dos Cuadrados, even translated an extract from our book for its collection El Comunismo Ante La Cuestión LGTB+.
[10] ‘Whose Pride is it Anyway? Anti-Blackness and Rainbow Capitalism Vs the Struggle for Abolition and Liberation’, 15 July 2020 (unsigned article, archived at <http://web.archive.org/web/20200808032539/https://redfightback.org/whose-pride-is-it-anyway/>).
[11] Steven Reynolds, ‘On Red Fightback’, document sent to the author on 14 January 2023.
[12] Daniel Edmonds, Unpacking ‘Chauvinism’: The Interrelationship of Race, Internationalism, and Anti-Imperialism amongst Marxists in Britain, 1899–1933 (PhD thesis, University of Manchester, 2017), p. 17.
[13] Táíwò, Elite Capture, p. 72.
[14] Harry Haywood, Black Bolshevik: Autobiography of an Afro-American Communist (Chicago: Liberator Press, 1978), p. 587.
[15] Max Elbaum, Revolution in the Air: Sixties Radicals Turn to Lenin, Mao and Che (London: Verso, 2006), p. 257.
[16] Haywood, Black Bolshevik, pp. 587–8.
[17] Haywood, Black Bolshevik, p. 588.
[18] Táíwò, Elite Capture, p. 81.
[19] Alana Lentin, Why Race Still Matters (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2020).
[20] Examples of the latter include the case of the Socialist Workers Party’s short-lived Black caucus, Flame, which was shut down by the Central Committee in the context of wider centralising impulses within the party. More recently, the Executive Committee of the Communist Party of Britain attempted to block a London district congress resolution to review the party’s anti-racist work and facilitate self-organisation of Black members, ‘on the bureaucratic pretext that the phrase “self-organisation” was problematic’ and in contravention with ‘democratic centralism’.
[21] Jacobin Magazine’s attack on the ‘Leninist legacy’ continues in a recent article by Vivek Chibber, who makes the questionable claim that imperialism’s impact on class formation ‘has no significance whatsoever for a general analysis of either the [global] North or of global capitalism’.
[22] Arun Kundnani, ‘Introduction’ to Ambalavaner Sivanandan, Communities of Resistance: Writings on Black Struggles for Socialism (London: Verso, 2019 [1990]), p. xxii.