“What, Who, and How?” Session One. Edited Transcript – 13 September 2026

More information about this series of discussions here.

Table of Contents

Introduction (BG)

It’s September 2026, and this is the first of four sessions in a series of discussions we’re calling “What, Who, and How?” — a series on some of the themes addressed in a text called Left Renewal in an Age of Waiting (henceforth LRAW). Before we start, a little about the story of that text.

It really goes back to the autumn of 2023 — the time of the start of the current intensification of conflict in Israel-Palestine: the war on Gaza — when a text was written that we called For a consistently democratic and internationalist left. A contribution to left renewal and transformation, by three of us: Daniel Randall, Daniel Mang, and myself, Ben Gidley. It aimed to make the case for a more thorough, consistent internationalism, a renewal of the left based on what we saw as core left values — values we thought had been breached in some of the responses to the 7 October 2023 Hamas attacks in Israel-Palestine and the subsequent war.

The three authors came from somewhat different backgrounds: Daniel Randall is a member of a heterodox Trotskyist group, the Alliance for Workers’ Liberty (AWL), in the UK, while Daniel Mang and I come from, let us say, anti-authoritarian left political backgrounds. There were some seams and joints in that original text, and perhaps slight contradictions, which came to light in online discussions afterwards. We also got the impression that quite a few people who had welcomed the critique of left antisemitism contained in the text were in fact not in agreement with its “radical left”, anticapitalist politics. There were other disagreements among signatories of the text as well.

So two of us — Daniel Mang and I — wrote LRAW, published in late 2025, “to clarify ambiguities in our original text (as we see them) but also to deepen and broaden the analysis proposed there.” Today we’re going to focus on the earlier parts of that text, which deal with class, interlocking systems of oppression, revolutionary subjects, and political organisation.

Input: class, interlocking systems of oppression, revolutionary subjects, and political organising (BG)

One of the starting points of the 2025 text was to qualify what looked, in the original 2023 text, like a simple call for a “return to class.” We argued then, and still think, that the left does need to recover class analysis, because neoliberalism, deindustrialisation, and the defeats of the labour movement have weakened our capacity both to resist and to diagnose what’s wrong with the world. At the same time, we insist that left politics shouldn’t be reduced to class — we strongly reject class reductionism: the idea that class is the fundamental or only real form of oppression, and that struggles around gender, race, sexuality, and other forms of domination are secondary to, or ultimately reducible to, class.

On class itself: the traditional image of the working class as the male industrial worker of the Global North’s industrialised heartlands was always too narrow. Women’s labour, racialised labour, domestic work, agricultural work, and today’s “pink-collar” work in care and other service sectors, along with other immaterial forms of labour, are all absolutely central to capitalism. The working class has to be understood differently than it has been by the traditional left — migration and mobility within the global restructuring of production are part of that class’s history, not external issues that can be separated off. A genuinely internationalist class politics should connect worker struggles in the deindustrialised parts of the Global North with worker struggles in newly industrialising parts of the world, rather than treating them as competing.

On interlocking systems of oppression (a theme to be developed further in later sessions): capitalism doesn’t simply sweep away older forms of domination — it incorporates, transforms, and makes use of existing relations such as patriarchy, racialised hierarchies, caste, and other forms of social differentiation. These systems retain their own autonomous dynamics; they’re interconnected with capitalism but can’t simply be explained as its effects. The call is to analyse the connections between different structures of domination and exploitation without collapsing them into a single grand system with one underlying cause. Unlike many Marxists and anarchists — even the best parts of the “trad left” — the aim isn’t an analysis that presents “class plus other oppressions,” but one that takes seriously the specificity and relative autonomy of different oppressions. Class reductionism, as a politics that overemphasises the primacy of class, opens the left to reactionary thinking, or at least to alliances with reactionary (e.g. nationalist, masculinist) forces.

On the revolutionary subject: this has implications for how we think about who carries emancipatory politics. There’s scepticism here toward the idea of a single, already-existing, “pure” revolutionary subject — whether imagined as the industrial working class, an abstract proletariat, a particular oppressed identity, or a national liberation movement. Real social movements always contain contradictory politics and motivations. The answer isn’t to search for the perfect revolutionary group, but to build alliances among actually existing struggles — supporting their emancipatory tendencies while challenging their reactionary ones, rather than waiting for people to be morally or politically perfect before organising with them. This entails scepticism toward vanguards and toward inward-looking, isolated affinity groups, in favour of thinking about what it means to reach out to allies one can actually work with.

On political organising, currents, and coalitions: it’s highly unlikely — perhaps even in principle unlikely — that any of this will become reality in the foreseeable future. The task then is one of planting seeds and laying groundwork for the renewal of dispersed struggles. The foundation of this approach to political organisation is rebuilding the labour movement, yes, but also connecting left struggles with feminist, anti-racist, queer, ecological, migrant, anti-colonial, indigenous, and other movements. Organisation should be coalitional, not sectarian — working with existing structures where useful (knowing they can sometimes be transformed from below), while also defending tactical engagement with electoral alliances, including with people who don’t share the whole radical programme. The governing principle is strategic action rather than ideological purity: identifying immediate dangers, building the widest possible emancipatory alliances, making tactical compromises when necessary, but retaining a longer-term revolutionary horizon.

Summing up: Class still matters hugely, but we reject approaches that reduce everything to it. The task is to understand how different systems of exploitation and oppression interact while building a broad internationalist movement capable of bringing those struggles together — without pretending they are all the same struggle. It’s a dialectical message: a return to materialist class analysis, but a definitive farewell to the idea that class is the centre of everything. These discussions aren’t an attempt to create a “big tent,” but they are a step in a process of coalition-building — an open-ended, necessary discussion of fundamental questions in radical politics today, aiming eventually toward an identifiable current that could reach out to others. Pulling together a fairly niche set of ideas into a common framework is a precondition for later, successfully participating in building broader coalitions with people one doesn’t fully agree with.

Discussion: revolutionary subjects, coalition-building, unity without a single story

A participant in the discussion raised what seemed like a fundamental question to everyone present:

If you move away from the idea of a single revolutionary subject, this introduces real strategic challenges for organising and for an actual, practical programme of social change. On what basis do you bring people together and motivate them for social change — especially in a coalition — when the different struggles involved aren’t all “one thing”? How do you mediate when, on the ground, one struggle appears to be in conflict with another that you want to treat as part of the same coalition, or as fundamentally tied together? How do you move from a monolithic story to a more dispersed set of structures while still bringing them together, both theoretically and strategically?

In response, this was split into two halves: first, a narrative problem — class used to provide a story people could unify around, and once that story is lost, the account of what’s happening becomes too complex to easily mobilise people around; second, an ethical/political-risk problem — coalition partners may share one commitment (e.g., opposing Russian imperialism, or patriarchy) while also holding views the coalition should reject (e.g., their own nationalism, or the view that trans women aren’t women).

Points made in discussion included:

Nostalgia is not a solution. There’s a common reactive move — nostalgia for a supposed common working-class culture of a century ago (shared workplaces, singing clubs, football clubs) that has since fragmented under outsourcing and precarious, dispersed contracting. That nostalgia doesn’t offer a way forward.

Trend-chasing is not a solution either. Another reactive move is opportunistically chasing whatever symbols or aesthetics seem to appeal to younger people (the example given: seeing that “Gen Z” likes a particular flag and deciding to package Marxist-Leninist or other messaging around it, or organising a concert to draw people in to then deliver “the message”). The impulse behind this — paying attention to what actually moves people — is not wrong in itself, but it isn’t sufficient; what’s needed is something more like proposing a new common culture, whatever that turns out to be.

The pull toward single, all-encompassing theoretical frameworks (e.g., social reproduction theory, racial capitalism theory) that try to fold every struggle into one structure was noted as another kind of reactive unity-seeking — as opposed to nostalgia for a simple story, this is a search for a single unifying-hierarchy story. The challenge is to hold multiple stories together without collapsing into relativism and murkiness.

On coalition and compromise: the text tries to articulate this through the idea of “red lines” — there have to be some, but different levels of emergency call for different levels of compromise. There’s always compromise, even with the people closest to you; nobody is ever fully on the same page. This is better handled as a sliding-scale judgment call than through fixed categories of “good people” and “bad people” decided in advance — treating some things as the real emergency requiring immediate action, and other things as more long-term matters on which one can afford to be more exacting.

People change, in both directions. People radicalise through struggle, solidarity, and coalition-building — but they can also de-radicalise or become reactionary. There’s a substantial body of literature on how class struggle builds class consciousness, and a much smaller body on the (not uncommon) reverse process.

Input: class reductionism and class fundamentalism (DM)

The distinction between “class reductionism” and “class fundamentalism” was credited to co-author Daniel Randall, from an earlier discussion with him about LRAW.

What do we mean by class reductionism? In Reversing the Decline of Union Power, Eddie Dempsey, a UK trade-union figure, writes: “Such developments fragmented class solidarity and replaced universalist demands for equality and dignity with an emphasis on individual identity categories. The Left increasingly appeared to many working-class voters to be dominated by moralising middle-class activists preoccupied with issues of race, gender, and climate. Meanwhile, material concerns like wages, housing, and social security were neglected. This new postmodern framework — one stripped of class politics — has been promoted by a political left that is often devoid of working-class activists and preoccupied with celebrating difference instead of solidarity and democracy.” This isn’t entirely nonsense — there has been a decline of focus on wages, housing, and social security in some quarters, and there genuinely aren’t enough working-class-origin activists on the left — but it is still, in the main, a fairly poor argument, and a good example of contemporary class reductionism.

What do we mean by class fundamentalism? An excerpt from an article published on the website of the Alliance for Workers’ Liberty, responding to Dempsey (No, “gender, race, and climate” are not “middle-class preoccupations”) was read out: “Dempsey’s article is couched as a defence of ‘universalism’ against ‘postmodernism’ and ‘identity politics’. Workers’ Liberty has critiqued, over many years, what we see as a ‘retreat from class’ across much of the radical left, into NGO-style politics, often substituting other social forces as the central agent of change. Dempsey offers a distorted caricature of that critique. In reality, his perspective is another form of identity politics, with ‘working-class’ reduced to a category of cultural identity rather than a diverse social collective. The ability of the working class to act as a universal agent of collective human emancipation is precisely based on our ability to integrate the struggles of those sections of our class which face specific forms of oppression into our programme for liberation and equality. Without such an approach, class unity is always under threat.”

The critique offered of this second, more sophisticated position: even here, the framework remains attached to the idea of the working class as the universal agent of collective human emancipation — a notion described as never having made much sense on its own terms (a fuller argument for why was deferred to a later section).

Input: what’s “left”? (DM)

What “left” means has always been a matter of internal struggle — arguably part of what characterises the left is precisely that its adherents fight over what it is.

A distinction was introduced between descriptive and prescriptive definitions: descriptive means looking at the history of movements and treating everyone who calls themselves “left” as part of the phenomenon; prescriptive starts instead from some central idea, first principles, or something seen as emerging from the dynamics of history.

Different national settings produce very different senses of what “left” means. Examples raised: India largely lacks a European-style modern social democracy (as does the US), and Stalinist/Marxist-Leninist parties partly fill that role instead — very differently, and with the cult of Stalin and Mao still alive today; post-Soviet Eastern Europe and Central Asia have seen a dramatic and ongoing collapse in the legitimacy of anything calling itself left, communist, or socialist, meaning people trying to renew, change, or preserve something there are reacting to a very different situation. Another example: organising with left-libertarian, feminist, queer people in some US circles where “class” is often simply absent from the list of things people are organising against, versus experiences in France where autonomous organising as women, queers, or racialised people is treated by parts of the left as illegitimate — seen as an import from “American sociology” that is “ruining” the left. The point: people who are dissatisfied with aspects of the left, even using the same words, often don’t mean the same things or share the same experiences.

Discussion: class fundamentalism, the global left, definitions of “class”

Bridging back to class fundamentalism. One participant asked for more on the Alliance for Workers’ Liberty’s (AWL) position, since AWL’s apparent answer to bridging the gaps between struggles is essentially “put everything under the same roof” (i.e., treat other oppressions as expressions of, or subordinate to, the working class’s universal emancipatory role). The suggestion was that if this is considered flawed, the flaws need to be spelt out explicitly, since — unlike the crude version (“we need to get back to what real workers care about,” collapsing into pure cultural nostalgia) — AWL’s stance is not incorrect in an obvious way: it does treat gender, race, and climate as real, relevant issues. So what, specifically, is the problem?

Is there a “global left”? A second question asked whether there are still commonalities across the global left — whether there’s a global left in anything but name, and what common features (if any) might be identified across different national and regional contexts.

A critique of Marxist-Leninist vanguardism. One participant offered a critique of Leninist frameworks: even the more sophisticated, less sectarian and less “vanguardist” Marxist-Leninist currents (including AWL, in this view) still centre class as the framework’s ultimate anchor — there’s room for “class plus” other concerns, but class always stays at the centre. Even the best versions of this remain one-dimensional: always trying to thicken that single dimension, rather than opening onto something genuinely multidimensional.

Analytical vs. strategic levels of the “class first” question. Another participant distinguished an analytical from a strategic argument for centring class. Analytically, one argument is that capitalist social relations are now genuinely global, having integrated nearly everyone into the circuits of global capital — but this argument never fully convinced this speaker, because patriarchy (and male domination more broadly) is also quasi-universal and has much deeper historical roots than capitalism. Struggles within that field (gender/patriarchy) are obviously important to connect to anti-capitalist and class struggles, and the contributions of social-reproduction approaches were acknowledged — but sexual violence, for example, doesn’t lend itself to smooth integration into a political-economic-focused analysis.

On the strategic side: people often already know what they want strategically (e.g., “unity of struggles”), and so gravitate toward theories that promise to unify everything under one key term or one key agent with the power to change everything. But the conviction expressed was that, both analytically and strategically, “class first” approaches — even in fundamentalist-but-not-reductionist forms — are fundamentally flawed: they give a poor account of history, and they don’t make for good politics.

National traditions and the “return to class”. It was suggested that the “return to class” idea can itself carry an unmarked Anglosphere/North Atlantic (and especially US) bias that gets globalised in the same way race discourse sometimes does — i.e., “the return to class” tends really to mean a return to a specifically Rust Belt Euro/American-style working class, rather than class in its full historic multiplicity.

Defining “class”. One piece of feedback on LRAW was that it never actually defines what “class” means. In response, one line of argument: class terminology is not exclusive to capitalism (there’s no consensus on when capitalism began or exactly what characterises it); at root, the concept concerns labour and resources — in Marx, surplus value and surplus labour. The idea of surplus labour being expropriated can be applied to many social forms: ones where a lord owns land, with peasants on it that can’t just up and leave, to ones where a lord owns people outright; there are many degrees of unfreedom in unfree labour, from chattel slavery via flexible forms of enslavement to serfdom, and so on — different ways of squeezing “more” from some people. In societies without a clear boundary between “the economy” and everything else (most of human history), applying these terms gets tricky. However, it still makes sense, provided one accepts a necessary diffuseness. Women’s labour is appropriated by men in many societies, and further diffuseness in definitions of “the material”, labour and class appears once one takes asymmetrical emotional, affective, or sexual exchanges seriously. Do we call this “exploitation” of “affective labour” and “sexual labour”? Where class/labour ends and gender, race, caste, or ethnicity begins is necessarily blurry — not just in pre-capitalist and non-capitalist societies, but under capitalism too, despite many leftist theorists preferring crisp definitions like “the working class = those who don’t own the means of production,” which sound neat but aren’t always helpful in explaining social reality.

Others then offered their own points of view on class:

Class as always in motion — a relation, not a thing — drawing on efforts to stretch Marxism (e.g., via Black Marxism and materialist feminism, and autonomist traditions around class composition). In classical Marxism, class has a distinctive kind of primacy because it’s the one category capable of dissolving all other categories (Marx’s idea of “radical chains”) — as opposed to a nostalgic, fixed idea of class identity that one simply defends. A further influence cited: Thompsonian ideas of class as something “made” (self-made) — taken up by social-reproduction feminists analysing recent waves of women’s strikes as a kind of self-making of class in action; this focus on self-making was offered as a useful antidote to reductionist, quasi-identitarian, fixed notions of class.

A brief tangent on the term “professional-managerial class” (PMC), noted as a term used casually in Anglophone left discourse despite carrying real definitional imprecision, with surprisingly little sustained critique of it — flagged for a later, separate discussion.

Input: descriptive and prescriptive definitions of leftism (DM)

Why insist on the label “left” at all, and what it should mean:

In the text, “left” is used descriptively — even though much of what actually presents itself as leftism is not really considered leftism by the authors, and there’s an awareness of the “no true Scotsman” risk (defining things so that only whoever you’ve already decided counts as a “real” leftist is one — which is a bit of a cheap move). There’s an acknowledged back-and-forth here: e.g., one participant said (half-jokingly) he sometimes simply ignores the claim by some anarchists that they’re not leftists, and instead insists that, in fact, they are a species of socialists and have many of the same underlying problems as everyone else on the left, whether or not they like hearing that.

But the descriptive use isn’t enough on its own — the term also needs to be used prescriptively. One way into this: start from the existence of hierarchies among beings (human and otherwise) — hierarchies of value that are widely accepted as natural. For us, one core of leftism in this prescriptive sense is to question the supposed naturalness of hierarchical difference: no, men are not smarter or more rational; no, white people are not superior; and so on. This is becoming especially clear with the resurgence of the far right, whose most hardcore currents say outright that they believe in racial and gender superiority. Where the left runs into trouble is with less popular or less comfortable issues — e.g., the oppression, exploitation, or domination of children, contempt for the old, disability, and health status, beauty and body politics; even some parts of progressive or leftist thought remain vulnerable to a “civilisational” logic in which some people must be brought “up and out” of a supposedly backward or uncivilised state — a logic bound up with judgments about who counts as closer to “nature” or “the animal.” This, in turn, was connected to the broader question of the treatment of non-human animals: animalisation and the denigration of other sentient beings (breeding, eating, and using them “however we like,” treated as unproblematic) was described as clearly linked to racism and patriarchy via speciesism (flagged as a topic for its own future discussion).

Input: core elements of leftism (DM)

Building on the rejection of “natural” hierarchy, a proposed positive core:

Equal worth. If hierarchy and difference in worth are denied as natural, the underlying claim is that we are all equal—equal, at minimum, in our capacity for suffering, unhappiness, isolation, and other negative experiences, which have equal weight and importance regardless of who experiences them. From this follow classical left values of equality — there is no justification for one person having more free time, more living space, or more of anything else.

Freedom — understood less as “freedom from” in an individualist, egotistical sense, and more as “freedom to.”

Community, cooperation, and social cohesion — once equality and freedom are on the table, these follow as bound-up further “co-” values.

An underlying empirical/aspirational claim: that people would actually be happier without hierarchical privilege over one another and with more cooperation.

This was flagged explicitly as a high-level, abstract formulation, but one considered important to state clearly from time to time.

Comment: equality and liberty (BG)

A follow-on point, in response to this formulation: one persistent dissatisfaction with the standard “left = equality, right = liberty” framing is that people tend to hear “equality” as levelling, sameness, or equal outcomes/opportunities. An alternative reading, drawing especially on Marxism, locates the core not in equality as such but in liberty understood as antagonism toward exploitation — toward having part of oneself extracted through the labour relation — a position closer to a deeply libertarian (in the classical, non-“right-libertarian” sense) than a narrowly egalitarian one. Framing the shared value as “equal worth” rather than bare equality captures this well, since liberty is easy for the right to claim for itself, whereas equal worth (extended, per one participant’s earlier question, to non-human beings too — a topic for a future session) sits naturally alongside the other “co-” values (community, cooperation, cohesion) rather than being framed in terms of levelling.

Input: the case for radical left politics (DM)

What is the rationale for insisting on a radical or revolutionary leftist perspective, rather than a more “moderate”, “social-democratic” one? Two main answers were offered:

Preserving the radical/utopian horizon. Given how unlikely success is in the foreseeable future, it’s necessary to preserve a radical or utopian horizon regardless — to keep imagining and asserting that fundamental change is possible and plausible, even against the grain of everyday experience telling you it’s impossible. Part of the struggle is not allowing the right to erase the very imagination of radical alternative or genuine change. This justification was described as reasonably compelling but “a bit weak” on its own.

The structural limits of social-democratic “tinkering.” A second, stronger justification: there’s good evidence that social-democratic reform — accepting private property and the broader capitalist system while trying to build a welfare state within it — has structural limits. Historically, it mostly worked (and even then, unevenly) for people in the Global North, and its successes there were often built on the back of imperialism. Where more fundamental democratic attempts at change have occurred (examples raised: Chile; arguably France in 1981 under Mitterrand), the response from the powers that be has not been passive acceptance — economic warfare, coups, or civil war have followed as ruling interests defend themselves. So “tinkering” has definite limits: as long as capitalism functions as it does, ruling classes will keep accumulating wealth and power, until liberal democracy becomes structurally incompatible with the system — capitalism and democracy are, in tendency, incompatible.

A related mechanism: centre-left parties and organisations are structurally forced to mobilise people suffering from exploitation around promises the system’s own limits will never let them deliver on fully — an automatic mechanism by which centre-left formations tend to repeatedly self-destruct, because they cannot functionally offer anything that actually addresses the underlying problems facing the majority.

Conclusion: “tinkering” cannot be a solution — without more fundamental change, the likely trajectory is the death of democracy and climate catastrophe.

Closing discussion

The final stretch of discussion returned to one participant’s earlier question about strategy and coalition, this time framed around history, hope, and what can usefully be said or theorised now:

A reflection that it wasn’t so long ago (in the arc of human history) that the left seemed to have a real shot in various places — raising the question of what can be learned from that past, and how to think about the future. One view: change, if it comes, won’t simply manifest progressively “out of thin air” — it has to be spoken into existence in some way, thought through and theorised (even imperfectly) in advance, so that when some decisive shift or “rupture” eventually occurs, there are already words and ideas in circulation that can shape how people think and act in that moment — because at some point, for better or worse (climate, AI, or otherwise), something decisive will happen, and there will still be people around to contest what comes next.

A caution against contempt for liberals and social democrats: even though incrementalist, social-democratic politics is seen (per the discussion above) as ultimately futile as a solution, it’s worth genuinely understanding why people would want to believe in small, achievable intermediate steps to avert disaster — this is less a theoretical disagreement than a question of how to debate productively with people one considers insufficiently radical.

A formulation from the Left Renewal in an Age of Waiting text was highlighted approvingly: thinking tactically about the contingency of the current conjuncture, strategically for “the day after,” and with an eye on the horizon of a fully emancipatory time. The risk of losing sight of any one of these three levels was discussed: focusing only on the incremental/tactical erodes the emancipatory horizon and one ends up structurally unable to make real change (incrementalism tends to keep shrinking its own ambitions); but a horizon with no workable theory of tactics or strategy for the “day after” also leaves one with no real capacity to affect the world.

A further exchange pushed back on any blanket dismissal of “incrementalism”: historically, viewed in retrospect, everything that happens can be described as having proceeded incrementally — even revolutionary ruptures are made of increments when looked at closely — and people are not simply wrong to want some visible, incremental victories as proof of viability before committing further. At the same time, there was a sense that we may be at a moment where people are actively “shopping around” for alternatives to incremental European-style social democracy and post-war US liberalism, without the radical left currently offering an obvious home — for a mix of self-inflicted and non-self-inflicted reasons (eg unfolding US electoral politics promising, at best, something not far beyond European-style social democracy). The closing thought offered: the real question may not be whether people are open to a more radical politics (many seem to be, simply through the dislocations of the present moment), but whether that openness can be organised into any coherent left-wing political formation — something that, at the time of the discussion, still looked highly speculative.