In this pamphlet, we, two of the authors of For a consistently democratic and internationalist left, return to some of the fault lines within this text – which reflect some of the differences among the authors as well as fault lines in the coalitions we call for. We wish to clarify ambiguities in our original text (as we see them) but also to deepen and broaden the analysis proposed there.

Introduction

The text For a consistently democratic and internationalist left (which we wrote together with Daniel Randall, with input from numerous other contributors, and published in December 2023) has attracted support from people holding a wide range of political views: from anarchists to social democrats, from anti-Zionists to left Zionists. 

It has also been met with much defensiveness and hostility on the radical left. In this context, the authors have occasionally been labelled “liberal Zionists”. In reality, of course, neither we nor our co-author Daniel Randall are Zionists, or liberals, but leftists opposed to all forms of nationalism, including Zionism. 

We are open to discussions and political alliances with a wide spectrum of emancipatory currents and social movements: socialist/communist/anarchist, feminist, trans liberationist, queer, anti-ableist, anti-speciesist, ecological, peasants’ rights, anti-colonial, anti-imperialist, anti-caste, indigenous rights, anti-racist…

We are critical of liberalism, particularly of the racism inherent in liberalism, and of the mainstreaming of far right ideas by liberals – but we also recognise important differences among liberals, and, for that matter, among conservative political currents.

Not all enemies of radical social change are the same or equally dangerous. However bad the Democrats in the US are, they are not as dangerous as the Republicans; however conservative Congress in India is, it is not as authoritarian and racist as the BJP; however neoliberal the Civic Platform in Poland is, it is not as reactionary as Law and Justice. 

And however oppressive, exploitative, death-dealing and hypocritical the “liberal world order” has been (and, in its crisis, still is), the new world order dreamt of by the global far right – from big players like Russian neo-Eurasianists, CCP ultranationalists and US paleocons, to smaller players like the Gulf elites or the military rulers of Myanmar (to name only a few examples) – is going to be much worse.

We are in favour of strategic alliances with liberals, when necessary even with conservatives, in defense of political democracy and civil liberties, and against the far right. We want to win liberals over to more radical positions, for example by pointing out the impossibility of achieving full democracy under capitalism and, more generally, the fundamental contradictions of liberalism. 

We advocate working in unions and, where it makes sense, parties, and emphasise that even bureaucratised and conservative organisations can, if conditions are right, be transformed from below. We are in favour of engaging, where it is possible, in electoral politics and trying to win concrete improvements within the framework of the state. 

We nonetheless consider ourselves radical leftists. Our political horizon is “revolutionary” rather than “reformist”. 

What exactly do we mean by this? 

Here we get into some of the disagreements not only between different supporters and signatories of our text, but also among the authors, one of whom is an unorthodox Trotskyist, while the two others are anti-authoritarian leftists of different formation.

In this pamphlet, we (the “two others”) return to some of the fault lines within our December 2023 text – which reflect some of the differences among the authors as well as fault lines in the coalitions we call for. We wish to clarify ambiguities in our original text (as we see them) but also to deepen and broaden the analysis proposed there. 

In our 2023 text, we identified some of the ways in which the left was in urgent need of renewal, as starkly revealed by responses to October 7 and its aftermath – from simplistic forms of anti-imperialism to truncated forms of anti-racism, from susceptibility to conspiracy theories to the temptations of reaction. Here, the two of us try to point to what we think are some of the deeper conceptual issues underlying these problems. 

At the same time, although liberals and centrists today often point to some of the same problems on the left that we do (such as a tendency towards antisemitic discourse or the embrace of reactionary movements that pose as counter-hegemonic or anti-imperialist), laying out our stance on these deeper conceptual issues demonstrates the gulf separating us from liberalism – an important project in the face of liberalism’s attempt to co-opt the critique of the critique in defence of the status quo. 

For example, we believe that overcoming the vulgar, manichean versions of “anti-imperialism” that so much of today’s left regurgitates requires a far more complex, planetary understanding of internationalism and solidarity from below. We believe that susceptibility to conspiracy theory will only be overcome through a return to class analysis, as we argued in our previous text, but that in the 21st century this requires stretching Marxism’s orthodoxies more radically than we intimated in that text. Conversely, a reckoning with class reductionism and the conservative politics it licences requires a deeper engagement with the insights of social movements and marginalised identities. Similarly, loosening the hold reactionary nationalism has on the left, as well as its fetishisation of certain national liberation movements, requires a more radical engagement with anti-nationalist perspectives. 

One of the most obvious fault lines in “For a consistently democratic and internationalist left” is how we talk about class. We are all generally sceptical of the “retreat from class” discourses of many left intellectuals (such as Ernesto Laclau & Chantal Mouffe, or André Gorz) in various core capitalist countries emerging in the 1980s and 1990s. But we differ in our evaluation of the ideas and developments these various theoretical currents were reacting to. 

This is due to our different relationships to the socialist tradition, and our different understandings of the history of the left in general, and our differing views on various developments of left theory (more on this later).   

This opens a set of questions about organisation and the mobilisation of a “revolutionary subject” (if any) and a set of questions about how radicals should position themselves in relation to the language of “bourgeois” rights. 

“New” social movements, including around gender and sexuality, have transformed the terrain of struggle in the last several decades in ways with which the “trad left” has not fully reckoned. We argue that these movements offer important lessons the left has still not fully taken on board, including about what we might call “micropolitics”. 

While some streams of the left have leaned into the reactionary backlash against “identity politics” and “wokeism”, other streams have abandoned some core left values in favour of a retreat into identity absolutisms. 

Finally, a key fault line relates to the place of religion and “fundamentalism”, an issue raised in our original statement and clarified here.

Two threads run through this text. 

First, we argue for a politics of alliance and coalition-building. We recognise that we are living in a time of defeat of radical politics – an age of waiting, as Victor Serge put it – which makes alliances and coalition-building both more essential and more risky. This means radical activists and organisers need a clear-eyed identification of the most present dangers and must risk the venture of compromise with those with whom we disagree (and, in many cases, will never convince and should never trust), to defeat these dangers – rather than rage away in the splendid isolation of ideological purity. This does not mean abandoning our principles in a rush to the lowest common denominator, or an appeal to a populist politics of grievances, or some kind of “beyond left and right” configuration. It means always thinking tactically about the contingency of the current conjuncture, strategically for the day after, and also with an eye on the horizon of a fuller emancipatory time. A politics of the possible, with a realistic theory of change; but also acting in such a way as to send a message in a bottle to a future time, after the “age of waiting”, when mass radical movements may emerge again from the wreckage of the current crisis.

Second, we argue, in the spirit of consistent internationalism, for a planetary view of the current conjuncture: a critique of the parochialism of so much of the left. What happens in attempts to organise transnationally in a grossly unequal world, where the landscape looks completely different from different vantage points, where the red lines involved in coalition-building are different in every location? For example, as we argue below, a retreat from class or defence of old-style class politics in the de-industrialising global North looks different when we note that de-industrialisation there always means industrialisation and the creation of an industrial proletariat somewhere else. Similarly, “bourgeois” rights that might seem trivial to some in “liberal democracies” are a matter of life and death in nakedly authoritarian states.

Resources for Left Renewal

We are not here to defend or extend any particular left sub-tradition, whether Trotskyist, council communist, anarchist, or democratic socialist. Rather, we see many possible resources for renewal within the heterogeneous history of the existing left. Specifically, we place ourselves in the broad tradition of the anti-Stalinist left, which has long had to contend with the dominance of dogmatic, authoritarian and statist (not to mention masculinist, heterosexist and nationalist) leftisms, whether “revolutionary” or “reformist”, in left movements and spaces. 

At various times, often of emergency, the anti-Stalinist left has worked in broad alliance, without any of its elements sacrificing their independence. Without succumbing to nostalgia for lost opportunities, we similarly seek a broad alliance of anti-capitalist, eco-socialist, anti-racist, feminist, trans and queer liberationist… activists against the dangers of the present day. 

In particular, while some traditional leftists see the “new” social movements of the 1960s and 70s and “identity politics” as aberrations or degenerations, we think the left has a lot to learn from social movements that do not necessarily label themselves as “left”, even if, at times, the rise of such social movements “outside the left” and the left’s defeat and disorientation have been part of one and the same process. Similarly, we take inspiration from the wealth of continuing innovation within the critical Marxist tradition, without wanting to maintain Marxism as the one true faith.

Which “Return To Class”?

In our original statement, we argued for a “return” to class analysis: “The only possible agency for an authentically democratic, anti-capitalist politics is conscious struggle by the exploited and oppressed for self-emancipation.” Class politics, we argued, have been set back by decades of neoliberal victories and labour movement defeats. The weaknesses of the left we identified – “the rise of syncretic politics, campism and conspiracy theory, as well as the deepening purchase of pseudo-emancipatory antisemitism” – can, we argued, “partly be explained as symptoms of this left abandonment of class” and its abandonment of “an analysis of the dynamics of global capitalism.” 

In this, some readers might have seen a parallel with the wave of “back to class” calls emerging since the global financial crisis of 2007/2008, which come from the traditional left (e.g. Adolph Reed, Chetan Bhatt) as well as from pseudo-leftists (e.g. Angela Nagle, Musa al-Gharbi, Catherine Liu, Amber A’Lee Frost).

However, in the same text we also argued that the left has at times suffered from viewing liberation struggles over gender and sexuality as of secondary political importance to the left’s traditional struggles against the “main enemy” –  which has sometimes led to it allying with socially conservative forces that also appear to oppose the “main enemy”.

In other words, while advocating class analysis, we oppose the class reductionism championed by many of those calling for a “return to class”. 

Class reductionists imagine the working class in the same way the traditional western left imagined it a century ago: the normative worker was male and employed in heavy industry. As materialist feminists, Black Marxists and others have long shown, that image was already problematic then: it excluded whole sectors, such as domestic service and hyper-exploited agricultural labour, for example – sectors where women and negatively racialised people (including of course negatively racialised women) predominated. 

But it is even more problematic now, as the nature of capitalism continues to mutate, with ever more of us working in immaterial (“white” and “pink collar”) industries, from the care sector to “creative” industries, often producing information, feelings or states of being rather than tangible objects. 

For us, the renewal of the left requires both a critique of forms of domination other than class and an understanding of how these intersect with and reshape class itself. 

Class reductionists see the left’s case for open borders as a variation on the dream of parts of the global capitalist class of a more frictionless global market (who they, like the populist right, call the “globalists”, a term that invokes old Stalinist antisemitic narratives about “rootless cosmopolitans”). Class reductionists imagine the working class to be rooted in a place, and to be defined by the nation states in which they live, missing the extent to which uprooting, mobility and migration were central to the very emergence of a proletariat. For us, in contrast, the struggle for the right to move (including across nation-state borders) is a central working class demand. Building walls, attacking migrant workers for crossing borders, blaming them for wage reductions made by the employers who exploit them, or even the demand to bring jobs home, are all ultimately anti-working class positions.

Class reductionism, then, is always a parochial vision, not an internationalist one. In a planetary perspective, we know that de-industrialisation in one country is always industrialisation somewhere else; the de- and re-composition of the working class in the rust belts of the capitalist core (such as in the USA) cannot be separated from the re-composition of the working class in peripheralised regions where new factories are built due to lower wages, more authoritarian labour discipline and cheaper natural resources, in what Beverly Silver and David Harvey have called capital’s “spatial fix”. 

Internationalists should seek to link up “rust belt struggles” in capitalist core regions with emergent workers’ movements in industrialising regions – and not play them off against each other in a zero-sum contest. 

Class reductionists in the old core of the capitalist world-system tend to uncritically defend what Silver has called “backlash resistances”, the defensive struggles of working classes “that are being unmade by global economic transformations”. These struggles, which mobilise especially ”workers who had benefited from established social compacts that are being abandoned from above”, necessarily have both reactionary and radical aspects. 

A consistently internationalist class politics would seek to radicalise these struggles by linking them up with what Silver has called “the struggles of newly emerging working classes”.

But global capitalism is not only producing new industrial working classes, but also an ever growing class of people it has no use for at all – people that capitalist society, at least as it is organised today, cannot integrate. The fate right wing thinkers have in store for this “surplus population” is mass death. 

We think leftists could engage more seriously and consistently with the struggles emerging from this “world” – land rights, informal workers’ rights and food security, debt struggles and poor women’s struggles, the right to the city and migrants’ rights…

What is Capitalism?

“What is capitalism?” is not an academic question. How we answer it will determine our political priorities. If capitalism is in the process of dissolving, replacing, sweeping away… all previous forms of social domination (or has already done so), we don’t really have to bother with social struggles that are not recognisably anti-capitalist, not “class struggle” – or at least we’re justified in treating them as secondary.

In our view, that’s not at all how capitalism works. Capitalism takes over older forms of social differentiation, like male domination, ethnic stratification, slavery, caste (or, for that matter, pre-capitalist class distinctions), alters them and puts them to new uses. It also creates new forms of difference. Capitalism is not only homogenising but also productive of difference. 

Nor is capitalism some total, seamless system. Even in a fully developed capitalist society, not everything is determined by a “capitalist logic”. Neither patriarchy nor ethno”racial” social structures are derivative of capitalism. Male domination and racism are today obviously entangled with capitalism, and persist in capitalist forms. That does not mean they don’t have their own logics that may at times be in contradiction with the logic of capitalism. 

What’s more, capitalism is dependent on non-capitalist spheres, such as that of social reproduction, for its continued existence. This dependence is denied in some currents of left thinking, while other oppositional currents tend to idealise non-capitalist spheres (from “love” to “nature”) as unproblematic bases for opposition to capitalism, rather than as bound up with it.

Interlocking Systems of Oppression

To come back to the specific issue of the relationship of class to other forms of domination. There can be no left renewal without the revival, radicalisation and broadening of the labour movement: new organising drives, new waves of strikes at points of production, blockades and occupations of workplaces and transport hubs, and so on. 

That said, the class struggle cannot be reduced to the struggle of the industrial proletariat, important as it is. More than that: beyond this necessary “stretching” of classical left conceptions of class struggle, we advocate a break with the idea of the primacy of class struggle in left politics. We see the relationship of humans to other living beings and the world at large, male domination and “race” as just as important to left politics as class.

Feminisms

While we acknowledge that the left has made progress in including ecologist, feminist, transfeminist, queer liberationist, anti-racist… issues and campaigns, this progress has been very uneven and the situation is still far from satisfactory. 

In our view, the feminist transformation of leftism that has been underway worldwide over the past few decades (though often stalling or reversing) must go much farther. We see a future in which “non-feminist leftism” has ceased to be a meaningful concept. 

We think the weakness of much left politics, the world over, on questions of gender and sexuality is particularly serious today, given the obvious centrality of gender, sexuality and family to the current global and transcultural right-wing project of preserving, enforcing and expanding unjust and unequal social orders.

One important way issues of gender and sexuality have been sidelined (or integrated into leftist agendas as ancillary concerns) is through a certain orthodox understanding of “materiality”. In the worst, “vulgar Marxist” version of this, “the material” is equated with “the economic”. A related set of ideas sees class as having a “material base”, while “race”, gender and sexuality (collectively called “oppressions”) are cast as “cultural” or “ideological”.

Against these ways of thinking, we want to insist that gender and sexuality are material (and in many ways also economic) and involve both “exploitation” and “oppression”. Gender is of course not only “material” (neither is class, for that matter). But it is very much about the exploitation of women’s labour, as well as emotional and sexual exploitation (which some have analysed as the exploitation of particular – emotional and sexual – forms of labour).

Violence against women is surely a complex phenomenon, but there is no doubt it fulfils an important social function in disciplining women, keeping gender hierarchies intact and patriarchal exploitation going.

Heterosexual men who vote for conservative or far right parties are acting in their material self-interest as people who, under the present patriarchal system of gender relations, receive “wages of maleness” (varying amounts – depending on local balances of gendered power – of free domestic labour, free care work, free emotional support, free sexual services) from women, in addition to just generally getting to feel superior, and as people who would like to keep their privileges – rather than risk their comfort and sense of self by embarking on the fraught adventure of becoming something new and learning to live new kinds of personal relations.

But it is easy to talk about the necessity of a feminist transformation of leftism in general terms. As we all know there is no more a singular feminism than there is a singular anarchism, socialism or anti-racism. So, what feminist currents are we drawing on, and what feminist positions do we advocate?

On a very general level, of a theory of society, we are of course sceptical of approaches that try to shoehorn “women’s issues” into a lightly modified orthodox Marxist framework. But we are also wary of approaches that (in a sort of mirror image of class reductionism) posit the primacy of gender over “race” and class. 

We are indebted to the decades-long efforts of many “global majority” feminists the world over to “think together” gender, “race”, imperialism and much more. 

We favour thinking that highlights the interconnections between different social relations of domination/exploitation, but remain nonetheless sceptical of “unitary” theories that tend to collapse different structures into one another or end up ascribing a singular cause or origin to all systems of oppression.

Still very generally speaking, we think it’s important not to divorce a “classical feminist” critique of gendered violence, domination, hierarchy and inequality (key words: “patriarchy” or “male dominance”), on the one hand, from a “queer feminist” critique of the violence done to all people through the social imposition of gendered norms and identities (key word: “gender binary”), on the other. Our long term goal is not “merely” a society in which “men and women are equal” (and certainly not a “gynocentric” society), but one that allows and cherishes a plurality of ways of being quite beyond what most of us today understand by “men and women”…

Regarding the debates on issues of sexuality that have vexed feminism since at least the sex wars of the 1970s and remain essentially unresolved, we are firmly in (what Carole Vance as well as Lorna Bracewell call) the “sex-radical” camp. To name two important examples of what this means in political terms: we draw a very clear red line between us and trans-exclusionary feminists, as well as between us and proponents of anti-sexworker policies (such as the so-called “Nordic model” of sex work criminalisation). 

Micropolitics

A problem related to the left’s continuing weakness on issues of gender and sexuality – that we think is partly linked to the long history of left antifeminism and male domination in left organisations – is the relative scarcity of specifically left wing approaches to affect, emotions, subjectivity and micropolitics. We share many classical left critiques of depoliticising, individualist and neoliberalism-compatible ways of dealing with “subjectivity” and the therapy-isation of social questions. But critiques are not enough, and hostility to the psychologisation of everything is no replacement for the development of our own radical left approaches to subjectivity.

The left needs a better understanding of how different forms of domination and exploitation work at psychic, affective, and somatic levels. We think it is important to address these aspects in emancipatory politics, including within left structures themselves. For example, we think we could all benefit from a thorough and critical debate on the issue of projection in leftist internationalism, a “working-through” of the left’s history of romanticisation and fetishisation of social movements in distant places, and of left nostalgia for earlier struggles.

Collective Identities

The question of human nature is a political battleground. Some form of “naturalisation” (declaring something to be natural and therefore unchangeable) of socially created relations, attitudes and identities has been an important part of the defence of the status quo – in many societies and in many historical periods.

More just social arrangements are, according to conservatives and far right ideologues the world over, precluded by the natural order of things. In these reactionary discourses, justification of class, “racial” and gender hierarchies is inextricably bound up with ideas of what it means to be human, not animal, and ideas about age, beauty and ability. Pushing back against such conservative naturalisation of inequality and oppression is, or should be, a central aspect of left politics. Biology is not destiny. 

At the same time, claiming that “everything is cultural” is not only simply wrong on factual grounds, but politically self-defeating. Left politics needs a concept of “human nature”. We are not infinitely flexible and no person is born an actual “blank slate”: we cannot be socialised to be happy slaves and we cannot be made to enjoy hunger. Demands for freedom, solidarity and equality rely, implicitly or explicitly, on the idea that humans are capable of creating, and would be happier in, a freer, more cooperative and more egalitarian society.

There are different versions of naturalisation of inequality and oppression. Besides the most open and hardline fascist versions, there are more moderate conservative ones. And there is of course the social-liberal version, with its implicit assumption that class differences are mostly based on inborn differences of aptitude and inclination. From this assumption flow social-liberal illusions about meritocracy, and demands for level playing fields – as opposed to the actual social equality leftists call for, or should call for. 

As Quinn Slobodian has shown in Hayek’s Bastards, there are clear paths from liberalism to the far right, and ideas about “hard-wired human nature” have played a key role in the development of the kinds of neoliberal fascism we are dealing with, and increasingly living under, today.

Belief in the naturalness of inequality, and the inevitability of the struggle of all against all, is reinforced and shored up every day through our lived experience of the absence of solidarity in unequal societies, heightened under neoliberalism. 

Religious and other ideologies that shape the value systems of people the world over, from Catholicism to Confucianism, play an important role in naturalising social relations of domination on the micropolitical level. 

Conservative politics have, in many societies and many epochs, been rooted in an attachment to oppressive and unequal household arrangements, fear and hatred of sexual freedom, especially women’s sexual freedom, and anything that would threaten rigid and hierarchical gender arrangements.

There are good reasons for the political and cultural right to be obsessed with family and nation. Attachment to rigid identities and authoritarian social relations at the “personal” and household level goes very well with a passionate identification with a people and its territory, a fantasised “body of the nation”. 

These attachments and identifications are not only mutually reinforcing but also inimical to radical politics: ethnonational-familial attachments and idealisations often make it difficult for people to create other collective identities that could be the basis for emancipatory political organising (like “feminist” or “class-conscious worker” or  “citizen of the world”…)

Which Universalism?

To be clear, we do not dream of a world where people have cast off their local identities and senses of belonging, their dialects and cultural idiosyncrasies. Our version of anti-national politics emphasises the homogenising, flattening and culture-destroying aspect of nation-building and nationalism. We do not see the falling out of use of minority languages and the abandonment of old ways of living (and all the forms of knowledge associated with them) as “progress”, or “inevitable aspects of modernisation”. 

Neither, of course, do we advocate the preservation of tradition for tradition’s sake. Like everything else, culture is political. Questioning all forms of social domination means radically transforming all cultures. That is what we stand for. But transformation is not erasure – on the contrary. While our political vision is planetary and cosmopolitan, which implies a certain degree of global commonality, we also envision a transformation towards more cultural complexity and local particularity – not an erasure of the local and the idiosyncratic by global norms and standards.

We see the need to belong – to a group, a project, a society – as a fundamental human need. But we also see the tendency to idealise one’s own (ethnic, national or other) collective as (largely) a result and symptom of the psychic damage done to people growing up in violent and oppressive societies. 

Such forms of collective narcissism are often linked to the need to identify with a strong leader – a result of the crushing of people’s autonomy in childhood and a life lived under the irrational authority of heads of households and bosses at work.

In other words, parochial forms of thinking and feeling (ethnocentrism, patriotism, nationalism…) have a collective psychic dimension, linked to authoritarian ways of thinking and feeling. 

But they are also produced through national education systems, popular discourses and media environments. 

And they are grounded in economic conditions and state structures: despite globalisation’s hollow promises of mobility, most people around the world are in fact quite fixed to their locations and locked into limiting cultural and linguistic frames by economic and legal constraints, to do with class society and the state system. 

The small global minority of people with powerful passports, money and free time to travel and learn languages, are, for obvious reasons, mostly not interested in major changes to the world order – much less in some form of revolutionary cosmopolitanism.

Nationalism and Emancipation

When people are oppressed for their ethnicity or nationality (are told that they are not a real people, that they do not have the right to their own country, that they are not allowed to speak their language, that they are “less developed” people…), their resistance is bound to be a mixture of progressive and regressive motivations, goals and methods. We do not see this as an insuperable problem. We have no time for fantasies of pure revolutionary subjects. Oppressed people do not have to be morally or politically perfect for leftists to recognise their oppression and organise with them.

Obviously the nationalisms of citizens of small, less powerful nation states (or members of peoples or nations without a nation state, and especially those living under occupation or invasion) are different from the nationalisms of citizens of middle or great powers, and should evoke different responses from political radicals. That said, there is no such thing as a truly emancipatory nationalism. Nationalism’s logic is inherently exclusionary and oppressive. What exists are mixtures of emancipatory and nationalist tendencies in social movements. 

Our job as radicals is to support emancipatory tendencies and push back against reactionary ones within really existing social movements. Our job is also to build alliances, including with people we disagree with quite sharply, for example about the nation.

In our December 2023 text we wrote:

The left should support the right to self-determination as part of a programme for democratic equality. This means supporting the right of all peoples to self-determination on an equal basis, and opposing any programme that aims for the domination of one people over another.

But we think national sovereignty and self-determination are in tension with each other: within the nation state framework, one only has the right to self-determination to the degree one belongs to the nation. Full popular self-determination is only possible in a world without nations, just as full democracy is only possible in a classless and non-patriarchal society that no longer knows “races”.

To be clear, our position is not that national or ethnic oppression does not matter or should necessarily be regarded as secondary to, for example, class or patriarchal domination. On the contrary. We acknowledge that, in situations of national oppression, all members of a dominant nationality are involved in the domination of all members of oppressed nationalities (even if to different degrees and in different ways). Movements dominated by nationalist thinking will tend to foreground this fact and downplay differences of class, gender and political persuasion among the dominant nationality. 

Taken to the extreme, this can lead militants of movements dominated by nationalism to deny all distinctions among “enemy” oppressor nationals, thus making civilians of all genders, ages and stations in life legitimate targets of “liberatory” violence. As we’re not the first to point out, this question of violence against civilians is the red line dividing armed struggles that can still be regarded as progressive from movements that are in fact fundamentally right wing and reactionary (or well on their way to becoming so) despite the “leftist”-sounding rhetoric with which they try to justify their terror. 

In other words, one element that distinguishes emancipatory politics from other kinds, in our view, is the insistence on the “to different degrees and in different ways” bit. Not only regarding the involvement of members of a dominant national group in national oppression, but regarding all forms of social domination. 

As we should all have understood by now, most people are, most of the time, simultaneously part of one or more oppressor groups while also belonging to one or more oppressed groups. 

Racism and Atlantic Bias

We want to start this section by acknowledging the essential role played by the struggles of Africans and Afro-descendants in the Americas – against European colonialism, slavery, racism and “colonisation of the mind”, from the Haitian revolution and Maroon struggles of the 18th century all the way through to Black Lives Matter – in the “world history of emancipation”, and in providing models for other social movements, the world over. 

Our call, in what follows, for anti-racism to move beyond an “Atlantic perspective” is not about denying or minimising what is great and valuable about the anti-racist struggles of the Atlantic world, but about placing them in a larger global context.

We think the emergence of planetary solidarity has been hampered by the limitations of a left that emerged in Europe and flourished in the capitalist core, and which has absorbed the dominant ideas and blindnesses of these regions. For instance, US ideas of “race” have been globally exported as a framework for anti-racism, even when the framework manifestly doesn’t fit local reality.

Beyond this sort of eurocentricity and US-centricity, we see an “Atlantic bias” at work in the left’s analysis, as a key barrier to a planetary perspective. By this we mean a set of assumptions about “race”, racism, colonialism and imperialism prevalent on the left globally but rooted in the history and politics of the “Atlantic world” – by which we mean not only North America and Europe, but also Latin America and Africa. 

This set of assumptions depends on a narrow understanding of “race” and racism (as of “modern” and “Western” origin), and an ignorance (or denial) of the histories of Eurasian empires and imperialisms.

The concept “Atlantic bias” relies on two related lines of reasoning. One is about “race” and racism, the other about imperialism and colonialism.

The first line of reasoning starts from the observation that North American and Latin American societies have roughly similar – even if always locally contingent – structures of racialisation. Although racial regimes in the Americas range from the extremely segregationist to the more fluid and have evolved over time, the basic structure of racial hierarchy is the same all over the Americas. It is a result of the history of European invasion and settlement, the dispossession and partial extermination of indigenous populations and the importation of enslaved people from Africa. In those parts of the Americas where indigenous people today make up only a small percentage of the population, but a significant part is descended from enslaved Africans, as in the US, black and white tend to be the most prominent racial categories.

Anti-blackness was a fundamental component of the racisms Europeans developed from the 16th century onwards (drawing on older Christian ways of thinking): racial ideas and practices which were closely linked to and reflected the growing importance of the enslavement of people from Africa for Euro-American societies, and the growing power of European states in the world.

People residing on the African continent south of the Sahara obviously had no concept of “blackness” before they came into contact with the expanding world of Islam. Through its contact with people south of the Sahara, Islamicate culture developed ideas of blackness, different from, but not entirely dissimilar to, Christian European ideas of blackness. 

Later, with increasing European influence and penetration from the 15th century onwards, ideas of blackness and whiteness developed through the encounter between Africans and Europeans – an encounter that became increasingly unequal over time, culminating in the colonial domination of virtually the whole of the African continent by European powers in the late 19th century.

The situation in Asia was different. “Race”, understood in a very broad sense – as forms of social hierarchy based on a belief in fundamental and immutable differences between groups of human beings of different social value, linked to cosmology, ideas of “nature”, the body and descent – existed in different forms in different Asian societies long before Portuguese and Spanish ships first appeared in “the Indies”. These precolonial Asian racisms (in the broad sense of the term we are using here) mostly had nothing to do with the transatlantic slave trade or blackness.

As, in the course of the 18th and 19th centuries, European states began to dominate Asian powers they would have had no chance of defeating in early modern times, European racism became a globally dominant ideology and began to interface and interact much more than earlier with pre-existing forms of racialisation in Asian societies.

But this global spread of ideas of European origin about blackness, whiteness, colour, “race”, etc., does not, in our eyes, justify the assumption that there is today one unified system of racial ideas and images all over the world. 

To be clear, any meaningful antiracist politics today has to challenge stereotypes about people of African descent, push back against disinterest in African (and African diaspora) history and politics, and foreground the link between anti-blackness and the global distribution of wealth and power.

That said, we should also recognise that there is in fact not one “colour line”, there are many racial “lines”, some of them not “about” colour at all. White supremacy is an important, in many ways determinative, element of global racisms, but it is not the essence of all racism.

Rather, it seems to us that racisms of European and Euroamerican origin today coexist, merge and clash with locally specific and regional forms of racialisation in Asia – which have themselves evolved from the combination of earlier racisms of European origin with preexisting forms of social hierarchy, some of which one could call “racial”, in a broad sense.

There are, of course, other problems with many of the conceptualisations of racism prevalent in global left discussions. Even European constructions of “race”, although they always involved ideas about descent and the body, were never only “about” skin colour. Nor did European racial ideas always function to justify slavery, or, more generally, legitimate the domination of the poorest and most powerless. Many forms of racism target groups inhabiting contradictory social locations or “middleman minorities” (for example the Armenian diaspora in the Ottoman and Russian Empires and elsewhere, the Chinese diaspora in South East Asia or the South Asian diaspora in Africa…) Fantasies of (hidden) Jewish power, wealth and cunning are important elements of modern antisemitism. Some forms of racism construct “others” that are evil in both “subhuman” and “superhuman” ways. Much more could be said regarding this.

The second line of reasoning, that about imperialism and colonialism, starts from the observation that the region we call Latin America today was colonised by Spain and Portugal, later was the theatre of colonial projects of various other European powers (of which the Netherlands, France and Britain were the most important, but let us not forget the efforts of Sweden, Denmark, Scotland and the Duchy of Courland), and then subject to European (mainly British) and later US imperialism. Similarly, the African continent was colonised by West and Central European powers. After formal decolonisation, the US, France and other Western powers did their best to keep African states locked into subordinate positions in the global economy, supported right wing authoritarian forces in general and the white supremacist regime in South Africa in particular. 

In other words, the recent historical experience of both Latin America and Africa south of the Sahara is mainly with West/Central European and US political and economic domination. This, we suggest, together with the continued influence of authoritarian leftism, including “Marxist-Leninist” nostalgia for state “socialism”, is one of the main reasons for the failure of many African and Latin American leftists to recognise the capitalist and imperialist character of China and Russia, and to open their eyes to the negative aspects of “multipolarity”, the dangers posed by the increasing influence in world affairs of “non-Western” authoritarian states and the rise of “non-Western” and “anti-Western” far right politics (such as Duginism, Islamism, Hindutva, Buddhist supremacism and Chinese ultranationalism…)

Regarding the Atlantic bias of many North American and European leftists, it is, as many critics before us have pointed out, of a piece with the eurocentrism or “West-centrism” we find in the “mainstream” of these societies – just with the arrogance and sense of cultural superiority of the mainstream replaced, on the left, by unease, outrage and loathing. 

What many supposed leftists and “anti-imperialists” share with right wing champions and ideologues of “Western” supremacy is a belief in the centrality, unitariness, immutability and total agency of “the West”.

Identity Politics

Truncated understandings of emancipation have hindered radical politics from moving forward. In particular, moving forward requires a more dialectical analysis that defends the gains made by emancipatory social movements against conservative backlash, building wider popular coalitions in defence of these gains, while also understanding the extent to which the language, and sometimes ideas and practices, of these emancipatory social movements have been taken up by elites committed to the maintenance of the capitalist order. Power’s ability to recuperate resistance is ever renewed, from the embrace of “diversity” and “inclusion” or “flat hierarchies” and “co-production” in workplaces, to spurious claims about “green” or “sustainable” capitalism, to the deployment of gender equality or gay rights to legitimise military intervention; corporate interests have co-opted the language of identity politics into a corporate discourse of diversity and inclusion as part of the management of difference to maintain capitalist domination.

At the same time, left currents have emerged that promote a fractured world of segregated identities, or which reify the imagined moral excellence of particular subaltern identities. This has taken some in a sectarian direction, a politics of identity-based moral purity inimical to building new coalitions of liberation, in which standpoint trumps reasoned content. 

In response to these managerial and sectarian drifts, a left critique of “identity politics” has emerged, from which we have learned a lot. But some parts of what we might call the trad or orthodox, class reductionist left – in the US, Western Europe and elsewhere – have gone further, to embrace “anti-woke” positions, articulating a version of “back to class” which rolls back some of the advances brought about by “new” social movements since the 1960s (encompassing issues such as ecology, climate change, and redefining concepts of progress and abundance, as well as themes relating to collective identities, discussed above). Ironically, many of the calls for a return to class end up as a form of identity politics, celebrating the imagined – “white” – identity of a reified working class defined by culture rather than by power relations.

The evolution of movements like ecologism and gay rights, at least in the United States, partly reflected the weakness of the classical left, a retreat from class politics and class analysis in the wake of the defeat of the cycle of struggle which peaked in the late 1960s. In the emotional landscape of the trad left, nostalgia for an imagined golden age before that defeat and retreat, is intertwined with bitterness at the gains of “new” social movements. Constrained by its theoretical and affective limitations, all it can offer is the same false “universalism”, premised on the figure of the heterosexual white male industrial worker in the nation-states of the capitalist core. 

Another way of naming this tendency is “conservative populism” – identified by Daphne Lawless in 2016 as one of the three pillars of “conservative leftism”: “opposition to the social changes which have happened in the neoliberal/globalised era (opposition to cosmopolitan urbanisation, anti-immigration, idealisation of ‘traditional’ rural/small-town/working class life, scepticism of newer identities around gender/race which are smeared as ‘identity politics’)”. Recently, Lawless has noted the convergence between the Trump project and this milieu around an “anti-woke” agenda. Because putative “wokeness” (the corporate identity politics mentioned earlier) can be mobilised from above, “anti-wokeness” can generate support from those who identity with “the underdog”, even when it is deployed by the global right to pursue, in Lawless’ words, “class war from above”. 

We believe that “new” social movement themes – often demonised by self-styled “radical leftists” as “radlib” (radical liberal), “woke” or “identity politics” – need to be brought into a broader leftist framework, recognizing their importance as a corrective to previous universalist aspirations that failed to be truly inclusive. In this sense, identity politics, as formulated for example by the Combahee River Collective, is a challenge to articulate a more genuine universalism, that has room for the flourishing of myriad particularities. Some aspects of what has been labelled “wokeness” or identity politics are remnants of previous emancipatory struggles, representing victories worth defending. We need to hold on to gains made by earlier (overlapping) liberation movements such as for women, indigenous and negatively racialised people, and queer people (including struggles within and against the left). The left’s embrace of “anti-woke” rhetoric potentially undoes past successes.

Confusionism, Anti-Trans Politics, Reactionary Decoloniality

Specifically, anti-woke leftism opens up a vulnerability for leftist politics to be co-opted by anti-emancipatory projects, with leftist and former leftist personalities used as an alibi for right-wing politics or as sales assistants in bids to enter, confuse or reroute leftist movements – in what commentators have called syncretic, confusionist or diagonalist politics. Instead, we argue, we need to push through, not roll back social movement advances in the renewal of left politics.

Transphobia within feminism and on the left is one manifestation of this kind of confusionism and why the left needs to be uncompromising in its defence of emancipatory movements. Transphobia has been central to the current globally ascendant authoritarian wave, which has deployed culture war conspiracy theories and the anti-woke backlash to promote its message. Former radicals and progressives have embraced “purple-brown politics” in what has been called the “TERF to far right pipeline”, ending up in alliance with religious nationalists and authoritarian political parties while claiming to act in the name of emancipatory values. This kind of confusionism has given legitimacy and intellectual energy to the authoritarian wave, enabling it to claim to act against “elites”. In the name of “gender criticism”, anti-trans feminists have found themselves promoting conservative movements that see the (authoritarian, patriarchal, heteronormative…) family as the foundation of society. 

In such contexts, a renewed, emancipatory, anti-fascist left must stand up for the rights of people of all genders, even, or especially, when transphobic attacks come in left-wing or feminist garb.

In similarly confusionist ways, authoritarian movements, often deeply patriarchal and hostile to women’s and queer lives, have employed the language of anti-imperialism and decolonisation. Borrowing decolonial critiques, conservative and sovereigntist forces outside the capitalist core have portrayed emancipatory movements as western imperialist projects. 

Civilisational racism and the denial, or trivialisation, of the harms of Western colonialism/imperialism are an important part of the “common sense” of majority white countries of the capitalist core. Feminist and LGBTQ+ movements in the US, Western Europe, etc, were never free of such tendencies. And it is true that feminist and liberationist language has been abused by western elites (as when Laura Bush declared during the 2001 US invasion of Afghanistan that “the fight against terrorism is also a fight for the rights and dignity of women”), earning feminism a bad name in many contexts. 

However, the hasty dismissal in some quarters of feminist and gay liberation’s universalist aspirations as always automatically “white feminism”, “femonationalism” or “pinkwashing” can objectively serve the power interests of authoritarian states and para-states – from Putin’s Russia and Modi’s India to Ortega’s Nicaragua and Maduro’s Venezuela. In such contexts, a renewed, emancipatory, democratic left must be clear in standing in solidarity with global queer and feminist movements, even when they resist states that pose as “anti-imperialist” – without retreating into a defence of white feminism or liberal false universalisms!

Fundamentalisms

The complexities here are especially acute when we look at the entangled politics of the “Middle East”, which have been so symbolically important in the current cycle of struggle. Our original statement gave significant space to a critique of the left’s accommodation with Islamism in particular and fundamentalisms in general. We noted that Islamist movements and regimes have, in common with other forms of politicised fundamentalist religion, brutalised religious, ethnic and sexual minorities, women, political dissidents and progressive movements; and we noted the particular role that antisemitism has played in the history of Islamism globally. The critique of religious authority, particularly when that authority is backed by state power, has deep roots on the left, in anarchist and feminist traditions, which have long raised the alarm about the use of religion to buttress patriarchal power, enforce the heteronormative family, and exclude minoritised ethnicities. 

However, we recognise that the term “fundamentalism”, as well as the critique of Islamism, comes with problematic political baggage. The last two decades have seen the increasing use of what has been named “liberal Islamophobia”, including the deployment by the right of “liberal” critiques of Islam to mainstream and whitewash anti-Muslim racism. “Muscular liberal” secularism has been another gateway to confusionism, as secularists and the far right form alliances. The term “fundamentalism” is part of the lexicon of this alliance. The same language has been echoed on the “anti-imperialist” left against the Syrian revolution, with Sunni Muslim Arabs who resisted the putatively “secular” Assad regime demonised as bloodthirsty jihadi “headchoppers”.

The Syrian example also reminds us that religious sources can sustain resistance to state power, and history provides multiple examples of emancipatory movements animated by religious faith. 

Nonetheless, we feel the advantages of using the term “fundamentalism” outweigh the disadvantages, especially when used in the plural, as by the feminist group Women Against Fundamentalisms (WAF), which “insisted on the importance of challenging fundamentalism across all religions, not just Muslim fundamentalism. For instance,… critiquing the Hindu Right and its attacks on Muslims and other minorities in India”. WAF defined fundamentalisms as modern day religious political movements that make use of state machinery to consolidate their power and to impose their version of religion. This definition highlights fundamentalism as distinctly contemporary (rather than some atavistic throwback to “barbarism”, as liberal Islamophobia conceives of Islamism) and as an authoritarian drift cutting across denominational and ethnic categories. In the current political conjuncture, as religious conservatism deepens its grip on state apparatuses and on women’s bodies, resisting this drift is more important than ever. This is why we made the decision to go with the term “fundamentalism” as a globally applicable category, seeing Islamism as sharing features with Hindutva, Buddhist supremacisms, Kahanism and Religious Zionist messianism, Russian Orthodox Nationalism or MAGA-affiliated Christian Nationalism.

People, Nature, Extractivism

The age of waiting is also an age of emergency. Our planet is burning. In this context too, the existing left’s blindness to the insights of “new” social movements is disastrous. Just as left renewal means changing our ideas about gender, ethnicity and nation, it also means redefining progress, abundance and non-abundance, questioning hierarchies of beings, animality and humanity, thingness and aliveness.

Social relations of domination and exploitation among people are inextricably bound up with relations between humans and the non-human world. Building a new society based on equality, autonomy and reciprocity among people will entail a radical change in our relationship to other living beings and the world at large.

This is about much more than a sullen acceptance of “limits to growth”. We should emphatically reject the “pioneer spirit” of recent centuries (as well as even older injunctions of the “be fruitful and multiply; fill the earth and subdue it” variety). A renewed left must propose alternative cultural narratives to heroic tales of discovery, expansion and conquest – “Western” or otherwise. 

We are decidedly not “eco-modernists”, but neither are we “primitivists”. In articulating a politics of hope towards an emancipatory horizon, we should be free to envision a range of possible futures, that may perhaps include the continued scientific exploration of outer space, or the choice to radically alter our bodies. But in none of the futures we envision will “humanity conquer new frontiers”. There will certainly be no “colonisation” – not by fascist billionaires, nor by anyone else, nor will there be extraction of resources that have grown scarce on Earth from the Moon or Mars for the purpose of perpetuating a totally insane socioeconomic system.

In this context, beyond simplistic idealisations of “non-Western ontologies”, there is in fact much to be learned from cultures that have, or had, other ways of relating to the world than that which is today dominant.

The old orthodox left was committed to a vision of limitless growth. In 1920, Lenin announced that “communism is Soviet power plus the electrification of the whole country.” Electrification would transform the Russian empire from a “small-peasant basis into a large-scale industrial basis”; it would literally bring “enlightenment” to the people. But Stalinism’s storm of progress has left great wreckage, and too much of the left continues to think that human emancipation can be bought by the continued extraction of the planet’s dwindling resources.

A key faultline in the left, then, is between an extractivist and an anti-extractivist left. For instance, in South America the “pink tide” governments (often led by culturally conservative, Christian men) that so inspired the global left in the first decades of the century, in Bolivia, Brazil, Ecuador, and Venezuela, pursued mining, fossil fuels, logging and industrialised agriculture with as much vigour as the neoliberal governments they opposed. Similarly, post-apartheid governments in South Africa have pursued mineral extraction and fossil fuel exploitation, often accompanied by the repression of trade unions in these sectors – with little to show for it in terms of improving the incomes and quality of life of the great majority of the population. 

As another left has emerged in South America, grounded in indigenous and peasant communities and committed to an ecological, feminist vision of emancipation, the authoritarian left in the west has slandered it as neoliberal. 

A Planetary Left

In the face of capitalism’s globalising tendencies, some leftists have seen the nation-state as a grounds for defence against capitalism: inveighing against  “globalists”, fantasising about autarky, seeing national ownership as a shortcut to social justice, and advocating for extraction of resources as a path to national growth. We see this from the authoritarian currents in the “pink tide” to those on Britain’s trad left who saw the departure from the EU as a victory for the British working class. Radicalism wrapped in the flag is another form of conservative leftism.

In this text, we have tried to gesture towards a different kind of left, not just inter-nationalist in the sense of bringing together different national lefts, but one whose horizon is always already trans-national, rooted in the interdependencies between people and other living beings across borders: a planetary left.

Liberalism and Political Democracy

Our original statement included the word “democratic” in its title, which led some of our critics to see us as essentially liberal. We used the universalist language of rights in our text: “solidarity with the Palestinians should flow from a commitment to universal rights… struggles for democratic change and to win greater rights and equality [are] increasingly met by claims that those principles represent the hegemony of a ‘western liberal elite’… Our starting point as internationalists should be advocacy of universal entitlement to democratic rights… Leftist politics should aim to level up and equalise democratic rights, not to strip them from some in order to ‘redistribute’ them to others…The left should support the right to self-determination as part of a programme for democratic equality.”

What then is our attitude to liberalism and democracy?

Simply put, we think a radical critique of the limitations of political democracy is perfectly compatible with a spirited defence of its achievements. 

We prefer the term political democracy to “liberal democracy” for several reasons. One is that liberals of the 18th and 19th century were quite opposed to what most people today call “democracy”. The (limited, representative) political democracy that exists today (in a now ever-shrinking number of countries) is in many ways the product of struggles led by working class movements in the 19th and early 20th centuries, sometimes against liberals, and the struggles of anti-colonial, feminist and anti-racist civil rights movements of the 20th century. This alone makes “liberal democracy” a misnomer. Another reason we prefer “political democracy” is that it points to the limited purview of popular power in such systems of governance – systems that juxtapose top-down control of the economy, dictatorship in the workplace and authoritarianism in households, schools and hospitals, with a quite limited form of popular control over the government through elections.

We’re well aware that much western liberal democratic discourse relies on the assumption that only the “civilised”, “rational”, self-possessed, propertied individual deserves and is capable of democracy, such that its benefits have been restricted to “civilised” people and denied to others: limited popular sovereignty and public welfare in the rich countries were, at least in the 20th century, premised on much harsher repression and fiercer exploitation in the “periphery” of the capitalist world-system. As part of the same liberal democratic discourse, we have been told that political democracy only comes in a package deal with capitalist property relations. 

For many people in countries at or near the bottom of the global political and economic pecking order, such a system may seem even less attractive than for people in rich and powerful countries. That said, it is also a fact that political democracy can take root in very poor countries, and many people in, for example, Nepal, or Zambia, do see the point of it and are willing to go to some trouble to keep it. It is vital to defend what has been achieved in many parts of the world in terms of relatively free and fair elections, freedom of speech, press, religion, and assembly, separation of powers, judicial independence, rule of law, accountability and transparency in governance, protection of minority rights, etc, while at the same time insisting that our long-term aim must be a deep and thoroughgoing process of democratisation of all aspects of society: towards a global polity arising from the free association of radically democratic, egalitarian and self-governing collectives!

Clearly, the opportunity to vote for which politicians we delegate some limited political power to is not what we would call a “full democracy”. We have no illusions about a smooth or “evolutionary” transition: transforming “bourgeois” into “radical” democracy is not going to be an easy process. 

However, there are two aspects of our relation to liberalism that make us insist that we cannot stop at its critique.

First, we insist on the necessity of coalition building in facing the dangers of rising authoritarianism. Militant anti-fascism has historically been rightly critical of liberal forms of anti-fascism that fight the far right to defend the status quo or of Popular Front strategies that find the populist lowest common denominator against the far right. But when the left has failed to see the qualitative difference between liberal democracy and authoritarian drift (as in the Stalinist depiction of parliamentary socialists as “social fascists” – or, worse, the “After Hitler, our turn” mentality Stalinists adopted in 1931), this has had disastrous consequences. 

We see traces of this posturing ultra-left disdain for anti-fascist liberals today, for example when Trump’s catastrophic victories in 2016 and 2024 were partly enabled by a dismissal of his liberal opponents by some on the left who saw Trump as no worse than liberals or as the flip side of the same coin. We also believe this equivocation between liberalism and authoritarianism can be a symptom of the privilege of those parts of the (predominantly white, western) left that espouse it. This left is prepared to sacrifice our movements’ small but critical gains (from abortion rights or equal access to institutions in the metropoles of the world system, to the limited restraint the liberal international order places on the actions of war-mongering states away from these metropoles) in the name of ideological purity.

In a time of emergency, the left needs to work with liberal allies, and not impose standards of moral and ideological purity in advance – and we are in a time of heightened emergency today. 

Second, and perhaps lying behind the failure of the left to see authoritarianism as qualitatively worse than liberalism, is the illiberal, authoritarian streak within the left itself. Too many on the left have no concept of the importance of individual rights, and champion forms of collectivism that negate human autonomy. In the abstract love of humanity in general that is meant to underpin the left’s project, a basic regard for individual humans is too often lost. Basic civil and political rights are dismissed as merely bourgeois and liberal; basic principles of interpersonal behaviour, such as civility and respect, are scorned as tone-policing or respectability politics. While liberalism may offer a far thinner understanding of autonomy and emancipation than that which a renewed left requires, it offers more than the authoritarian left.

As an index of this failure, in the name of a world-historical teleology of “proletarian revolution”, some of the most brutal episodes in the left’s history continue to be celebrated. The aesthetics of Stalinism continue to exert a grip on the left’s imagination (from hammer and sickle emojis upwards). Left renewal requires jettisoning this anti-emancipatory nostalgia.

What are the political implications of this critique of the critique of liberalism? 

This brings us back to the framework with which we began: the need to simultaneously hold in play tactical thinking about the contingency of the current conjuncture, strategic thinking for the day after, and an eye on the horizon of a fuller emancipatory time. 

In this spirit, tactically, in the short term, we insist on the necessity, in the age of waiting, to engage with electoral politics, despite its limitations. Although we reject the principled electoral abstentionism of the anarchist movement, we are more critical of the privileged counsel of despair – the politics of irresponsibility, as Lawless puts it – of a (non-abstentionist but) maximalist left that cannot see the difference between a fascist or far right candidate and a tepid liberal one. 

Strategically, beyond the next election, the left needs a theory of change that will enable us to exit from our current state of splendid isolation and get us at least a little closer to something like justice. As the Hammer and Hope collective wrote on the eve of Trump’s second election victory, “Political power matters, and it’s important to understand how it operates — and how we might influence it.” Without such an understanding, the left is trapped forever eating its own tail as we slide “closer to barbarism and further from socialism”.

But, finally, in the longer term we must hold on to a vision of a deeper democracy, a more meaningful and concrete form of democracy that genuinely empowers individuals and communities. Like the vision of a world without borders, without patriarchy, beyond the gender binary and capitalism, this is a utopian vision, but one we can glimpse and – crucially – prefigure in the history and present of our movements.

Conclusion 

We are committed to an anti-capitalist, anti-racist, feminist, trans and queer liberationist politics that is radically critical of state and nation. An anti-authoritarian, grassroots-democratic politics that questions collective identities – ties of blood, family, clan, caste, sect, denomination, “race” and ethnicity – from their margins, from the inside, and from below. A politics that seeks alternatives to the domination of children by adults, as well as the contempt of the old, and rejects mainstream norms of beauty and ability. An internationalist politics that aims to undo and repair the destructive legacies of past imperialisms, colonialisms, and nationalisms. That, in the long run, would move us beyond the system of competing nation-states, and bring an end to unfreedom and exploitation worldwide – both in the reproduction of human life and the production of material goods. A politics, last but not least, that questions the rule of humans over other living beings and the world at large.

Contact

To contact the authors, email [email protected].

Summary

First of all

• We defend a consistently democratic, internationalist, anti-authoritarian left politics.
  
• We argue for broad coalitions, but remain critical of nationalism, authoritarianism, and confusionism.
  
• We oppose liberalism, but recognise the urgent need to form tactical alliances with liberals against the greater danger of the far right.

• We call for a left that balances short-term realism with long-term utopian aspiration.

Class and Interlocking Systems of Oppression

• We argue for a renewed focus on class without falling into class reductionism.
  
• We emphasise that class is shaped by and intersects with gender, “race”, sexuality, and other relations of difference and domination.
  
• Our class politics is planetary: link up “core” and “periphery” struggles, instead of placing them in competition. 

Emancipatory Politics

• We call for a re-imagining of what leftism means – bringing in the insights and themes of feminist, queer, ecological, anti-racist… social movements.
  
• We reject both reactionary anti-woke backlash and identity absolutism, and call for broad, emancipatory coalition-building.

Feminism and Gender Politics

• We argue that a feminist transformation of the left is essential and overdue.
  
• We are pro-transfeminist; our politics is shaped by queer and sex-radical feminisms.
  
• Gender and sexuality are material.

Micropolitics and Subjectivity

• We stress the need for radical left approaches to affect, emotion, and interpersonal power.
  
• We call for reflection on how projection, fetishisation, and nostalgia shape left politics.

Nationalism and Collective Identities

• We ultimately oppose all forms of nationalism, recognising its inherently exclusionary logic.
  
• While we support struggles against national oppression, we want to strengthen anti-nationalist and democratic tendencies within such movements.
  
• We advocate for planetary belonging over ethnonational attachments.

“Race”, Racism, and Atlantic Bias

• We challenge the Atlantic bias in dominant left conceptions of “race”.
  
• We insist on a more nuanced and global understanding of racialisation and of imperialism.
  
• We warn against left romanticisation of “anti-Western” powers like Russia and China.
  

Religious Fundamentalisms

• We oppose all religious fundamentalisms, including Christian, Muslim, Jewish, Hindu and Buddhist variants.
  
• We retain the term “fundamentalisms” to highlight these movements’ authoritarian use of religion and state power.
  
• We oppose liberal Islamophobia while defending emancipatory secularism.

Environmentalism and Extractivism

• Our ecological vision of emancipation is critical of extractivist versions of left politics.
  
• We call for rethinking abundance and transforming human relations to nature and non-human life.
  
• The left needs to recognise the centrality of anti-extractivist, indigenous and peasant movements to a global emancipatory politics.

Democracy and Liberalism

• We defend the existing limited forms of political democracy while working towards a deeper democracy.
  
• We criticise the authoritarianism within those parts of the left that dismiss individual rights and glorify past and present repressive regimes.
  
• We advocate tactical engagement with electoral politics, rejecting both abstentionism and maximalist detachment.