Socialist Register 2025
Openings and closures: Socialist strategy at a crossroads
by Gregory Albo and Stephen Maher
978-1-68590-115-8 /24$ / 344 pages
Dragan Plavšić for Counterfire
Socialist Register 2025: Openings and closures: Socialist strategy at a crossroads appears at an opportune moment, especially in the UK where Jeremy Corbyn and Zarah Sultana have just announced the forming of a new socialist party to Labour’s left.i Enthusiasm greeted this news but we need also to reflect on past failures to learn lessons and do better this time.
Reviving fortunes
It is in this spirit that Socialist Register 2025 seeks to address the question of how the left can revive its fortunes after the failure of what in their Preface the editors, Greg Albo and Stephen Maher, call the ‘democratic socialist moment’ (p.ix) of left parties such as Syriza (Greece), Podemos (Spain) and the Left Bloc (Portugal). If we add in Corbyn’s Labour Party leadership and even Bernie Sanders’ Democratic Party candidacy in the US, we have parties whose brush with power led to accommodation and capitulation and leaders who were defeated by powerful establishment forces.
Albo and Maher also begin by reminding us of the animating political vision of Socialist Register since its launch over sixty years ago by socialist thinkers, Ralph Miliband and John Saville; namely, ‘to carve out a political space that was neither attached to Leninist parties nor beholden to social democratic illusions.’
This vision has always had its good and productive side, as we see when Albo and Maher call for a left politics ‘explicitly directed toward the goal of socialist transition’ and warn of ‘broader transformative goals’ being ‘perpetually deferred and ultimately abandoned’ because ‘the relentless pressures of electoral timetables and parliamentary logics’ reduce ‘reform to an end in itself’ (p.xiii).
At the same time, this vision has gone hand in hand with what Albo and Maher call working ‘inside and outside of the state’. They mean something more than the essential tactic of getting socialists elected to parliament to act as tribunes of the people. They mean a strategy combining parliamentary and extra-parliamentary forces in order to ‘transform the state’ (p.xiv).
Three immediate issues arise here: the precise nature of the relationship between parliamentary and extra-parliamentary forces and in particular which has primacy; the ‘transformability’ of the state or the extent to which the state can indeed be ‘transformed’ into something other than itself; and finally the danger Albo and Maher readily acknowledge with this pithy question: ‘Is it possible to wage a struggle “within and against the state” without succumbing to social democratization?’ (p.xv).
Albo and Maher pose several such questions in this open-minded and ruminative way to provoke discussion and pave the way for a series of articles on a diverse mix of issues for the left. As they say: ‘None of us, essayists and editors alike, will be in line with all the positions taken. But disagreements, and different emphases in understanding the current setting and the routes to take, is crucial to debating the responsibilities laying ahead of us’ (p. xviii).
Strategy
Panagiotis Sotiris begins his essay, the first in this collection, by asking whether a left government, by which he means to the left of standard social democracy, is possible today. Discussion of this possibility returned to the fore with the rise of the anti-globalisation and anti-war movements and then the rise of organisations like Syriza and Podemos. Noting their more than disappointing results – ‘defeat and capitulation to neoliberal exigencies’ (p.1) – Sotiris argues that what ‘was missing was a more strategic political and theoretical discussion’.
The survey he then provides of debates ‘around governance in the history of Marxism’ (p.2) gives two basic lines of strategic thinking. On the one hand, we have the insistence of Marx and Engels and then Lenin that the working class cannot simply lay hold of the capitalist state and wield it for its own purposes given it was forged by a ruling class minority for very different, oppressive purposes. Consequently, as Lenin put it, the bourgeois state has to be ‘smashed’.
On the other hand, we have Kautsky who advocated ‘a long period of mainly peaceful struggles that take advantage of bourgeois democratic institutions’ (p.3). And Nicos Poulantzas for whom the state was a terrain where class struggle plays out and the masses have ‘centres of resistance … within state networks’ that can in a ‘long process’ be extended into ‘the real centres of power’ (p.8). This recalls the editorial vision of working ‘within and against’ the state and also therefore the admitted danger of social democratisation.
Sotiris does not definitively choose sides in this debate, not least because he is sympathetic to Poulantzas, albeit critically. Instead, his overriding point appears to be the ecumenical one that here are to be found the essential terms of the strategic debate left parties like Syriza and others should have had but did not. As a result, when faced with power, they were quite unprepared because they lacked ‘any actual strategic elaboration on how to deal with state power’ (p.13).
This criticism of a lack of strategic thinking rings true but the key question is why the lack. Here we need to consider the political unwillingness of the leaderships of these parties and their supporters to think in strategic terms about ‘state power’ for what were essentially reformist reasons. We need also to factor in the relative political weakness of other more radical and revolutionary forces to make such strategic thinking the order of the day. At root, the failing was political and only secondarily the intellectual one of not thinking things through.
The failures of Syriza and others plus the observation that ‘implementing reforms today can only be an institutionally violent process’ (p.14) prompt Sotiris to ask whether any attempt at a left government of the kind he means is ‘doomed to end up in failure and capitulation’ (p.18). His basic answer takes us in a useful direction.
Excluding the conventional possibility of ‘a smooth increase of electoral forces that would bring change’, he notes how such an ‘electoralist’ strategy ‘usually ends with the opposite result, namely reabsorption into the political system and a gradual transformation into “a party of the state”.’ Of course, this does not then mean dismissing and ignoring elections, but it does mean seeing elections and any electoral victory of left forces in terms of ‘a broader sequence of struggle … rather than an end in itself’ (p.19). From which it follows that the relationship of a left party in elections to this broader struggle is key.
In his conclusion, Sotiris urges a consideration of strategic questions in order to ‘put tactical choices into perspective.’ He comments that the ‘crucial element’ will be ‘the extent to which a tactical choice leads to a better relation of forces in favour of the subaltern [oppressed – DP] classes’ by enhancing ‘their potential for autonomous initiative’ and enabling ‘them to expand the terrain of their intervention and strengthens their ideological independence’ (p.24). As an abstract yardstick, this is of course indispensable even as we recognise that concretely applying it will not always be straightforward.
Alternatives
The aim of Michael Calderbank and Hilary Wainwright’s essay ‘Losing Momentum: Strategic Dilemmas for Socialists in Britain’ is to understand the politics of Starmerism, what its goals are in government, and whether a significant pole of opposition can be developed against it.
Their survey of Starmer’s rise to government contains familiar points for the left: his duplicitous leadership campaign when he described Corbyn’s 2017 manifesto as ‘foundational’; the authoritarian expulsion and curtailing of the left; an election campaign and now a government reflecting the anti-immigrant ‘tropes of the far right’ (p.55); the scrapping of winter fuel payments (though now largely reversed) but not the two-child benefit cap; the dilution of reform of anti-union legislation; the support for Nato and Ukraine’s membership; plus the support for Israel but not recognition of Palestinian statehood. Given all this, it’s a surprise to read Calderbank and Wainwright then comment: ‘It is not entirely clear what kind of Labour government we will get over the next five years’ (p.59).
In any event, the key question is what is to be done. Is there, as some claim, no realistic alternative but to work in the Labour Party, even if the gains to be had are negligible? In response, Calderbank and Wainwright take a critical look at some alternatives.
First they consider Corbyn’s grassroots call – made shortly after winning his Islington seat at last year’s general election – ‘to build community power in every corner of the country’ which when replicated can be the basis of ‘a new movement capable of challenging the stale two-party system’ (p.60). And they point to the difficulties of replicating his success as an independent candidate given its particular dependence on his national profile as a former Labour Party leader and his standing as a sitting MP of many years.
Certainly, in our present circumstances, questions about the likely success of a grassroots model that lacks a distinctive national presence are very much to the point, for the local and national need to run together to maximise their mutual chances of success. The recent announcement by Corbyn and Sultana that they will begin forming a new party is therefore a step in the right direction and should be welcomed.
Calderbank and Wainwright also consider the role of the independent MPs elected last year in constituencies with large Muslim communities ‘justifiably inflamed over Labour’s position in relation to Gaza’ (p.61). Here they are right to note that the rhetoric of independently representing community interests need not imply class politics. Earlier this year, the independent MP for Birmingham Perry Barr, Ayoub Khan, called on Starmer to deploy the army to collect refuse during the Unite bin strike in the city.
From this, it follows that if a new left party is indeed to be effective and not go the way of others, its elected representatives must be rooted, as a matter of fundamental principle, in local and national movements and struggles. They must see themselves first and foremost as the amplifying voices of these struggles and not as representatives with personal mandates.
Calderbank and Wainwright end their essay tentatively with the hope that ‘creative radical initiatives such as those in solidarity with Gaza’ will provide ‘significant, potentially material bases for new alliances on the left, especially’, they add, ‘with the Green and independent left in Parliament’ (p.64). They also think it ‘instructive’ for ‘the possibilities of any political realignment’ to consider whether the Green Party is capable of ‘deepening and developing its own trade union links’ (p.61).
The desire to marshal support is understandable but a sober assessment of the Greens points to their direction of travel becoming only too familiar. In 2023, for example, over Ukraine, they jettisoned their policy of withdrawing from Nato. Now their policy highlights Nato’s ‘important role in ensuring the ability of its member states to respond to threats to their security.’
Palestine
Given the essential significance of movements and struggles for the success of a new left party, two essays on Palestine deserve particular attention for different but related reasons.
Arun Gupta’s ‘The Contemporary History of the US Palestine Solidarity Movement’ is interesting for its overview of recent protest movements in the US such as the Occupy Wall Street and George Floyd movements as background for the magnificent Gaza solidarity encampments last year at some 120 US university and college campuses before they came under attack by Trump and the university authorities.
Gupta’s approach to these movements is supportive, of course, but critical. He notes how a specific tactic adopted by a movement such as encampments ‘captures media attention, briefly puts state power on the defensive and then spreads rapidly.’ But at the same time, the movement ‘rarely’ has ‘a developed strategy or defined leadership’ while ‘organization is minimal if any and protests tend to ossify quickly and veer toward maximalism’ leaving movements ‘open to cooptation and opportunism’ (p.343). The tendency to make expectant appeals to the Democrats is also a problem.ii Here a comparison with the UK Palestine movement and how it currently sustains itself by multiple mass demonstrations despite authoritarian attempts to undermine and defuse it might well have been useful.
Especially instructive though for this review’s theme of reviving the left is Gupta’s brief analysis of the relationship with the Gaza protests of the country’s largest left organisation, the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA). Here he comments that, in many ways, the Palestine solidarity movement was made for the DSA; it’s just that the DSA wasn’t made for it. As one organiser put it, ‘the DSA flubbed the George Floyd movement, and then flubbed the Gaza movement.’ It could have played a key mobilising role. Instead, its bureaucratic party structure and its focus ‘mainly on electoral politics’ made it ‘very hard to move the entire organization into non-electoral work.’ As a result, most of the people interested in ‘building movements and building struggle’ left the DSA (p.365). This is a cautionary tale for any new left party in the UK.
The second essay on Palestine is Umut Özsu’s ‘International Law, Palestine and Socialism’. Few cases ‘juxtapose international law’s proud principles with the reality of state-making projects’ (p.31) as consistently as the Palestine question since 1948. For as Özsu shows, Israel has always relied on international law ‘selectively’ to achieve its goals or sought to remould it to serve its interests or ‘simply dismissed it in practice’. For these reasons, he concludes, ‘liberation will not be achieved through law’ (p.43).
Though it is not a neutral or reliable tool of justice and should not be mistaken for such, Özsu does not simply reject international law either. He indicates that in certain limited contexts, it can be useful. South Africa’s December 2023 application to the International Court of Justice alleging Israel was violating the Genocide Convention and the ICJ’s orders directing Israel to comply with it could be and were put to effective political use by the left to win arguments and help mobilise demonstrations. The ‘trick’, so to speak, is to make use of international law for concrete political purposes without falling victim to the illusion that justice will come this way. Justice lies with movements and struggles not the ICJ.
Direct action
The final essay that caught my eye is Feyzi Ismail’s ‘The Climate Movement, the Suffragettes and the Meaning of Militancy’, a comparative critique of today’s climate activists and the suffragettes. Groups like Extinction Rebellion (XR) and Just Stop Oil have adopted militant tactics such as window-smashing and disrupting public events, often invoking the suffragettes as inspiration.
As Ismail outlines, the women’s suffrage movement had ‘two traditions of militancy’ (p.318). One led by the Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU) focused on property damage and public disruption ‘primarily undertaken by women who could afford arrest and prison, or bail’ (p.321). Inevitably this stress on individual and conspiratorial heroics ‘came at the expense of the mass movement and of working-class struggle’ (p.318). Moreover, these tactics were not in the end the primary reason the vote was won. The broader context – the role of women in industrial production in the First World War plus fear of revolution from Russia and Germany – was decisive.
By contrast, the other militant tradition, represented by groups like the East London Federation of Suffragettes, stressed working-class solidarity and linked suffrage to economic and social issues. They organised strikes, rent protests, and community support networks, demonstrating that militancy could go hand in hand with mass mobilisation and participation.
It is to this tradition that Ismail looks for guidance for a climate movement she warns is at risk of replicating the WSPU’s errors. While nonviolent direct action has raised awareness, tactics like commuter-train disruptions show an ‘ignorance of the realities of working people’ (p.332). The frequent rejection of political engagement also limits the movement’s reach and ultimate effectiveness. Instead, she argues, the climate movement needs to engage with existing social and workplace struggles and integrate climate activism into a wider anti-capitalist framework. Here an appreciation of the power of the working class given its central role in production is indispensable.
Ismail values the courage of direct-action activists and stands against authoritarian attempts by the state to harass and arrest them (just as in the related case of Palestine Action we need to oppose its proscription for terrorism). However, she also calls for ‘a sober evaluation’ (p.335) of strategy and tactics. Without a coherent strategy that centres working-class agency and builds mass support, courage will not be enough and even the boldest of actions risk becoming isolated spectacles rather than effective steps to real change.
There is a clear link here to the different but related dangers of electoralism. Unless a new left party is democratically rooted in movements and working-class struggles and unless it serves them as their principled mouthpiece, it will risk becoming captivated by isolated election spectacles and by parliamentary representatives who are laws unto themselves. We need to do much better this time and Socialist Register 2025 is welcome for encouraging us to discuss and debate these issues.
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