People Before Profit: What It Was, What It Is, What It Should Be!

The Red Network has been arguing that People Before Profit needs to change. We believe you can build “broad” - in trade unions, in workplaces, in working class communities, by using elections and united front campaigns - while also using the authority you’ve won through that broad work to argue for a working class revolution.

The separation that exists between day to day activism and the ultimate goal in PBP is damaging. Without a party programme there are no bounds set to what members can do or say and members aren’t trained up to explain the path from immediate campaigns to the needs for socialism.

This separation exists on the far left in general. There are those who talk about revolution from the sidelines without any connection to the working class. Then there are others who do broad work but fail to connect it to any kind of revolutionary goal. We Reds reject both.

Before making our arguments let’s be clear - PBP reps and countless grassroots members all across the 32 counties work hard every single day for the working class, for their communities and for the oppressed. But that work will go to waste if the party doesn’t change tack and become a clearly defined working class revolutionary socialist organisation.

In a world of growing inequality, war and division, if the left doesn’t return to the politics of working class revolution it will perish.

To understand any party you need to examine it in form and in content - that means looking at the politics it promotes, its underlying principles and its class basis. You need to understand how the formal politics and underlying class composition of a party can change over time - using that historical journey to shine a light on the present.

Let’s start with the history of People Before Profit.

As a participant in all of the key debates that have taken place over the last two decades this piece will have to include some personal reports of those debates but I will draw out political conclusions from those points. I’ve been lucky to always take notes at every meeting I’ve attended and I have kept my diaries of the last 20 years - that information will help to illuminate the way.

People Before Profit was founded 20 years ago, in October 2005, as an alliance between the Trotskyist Socialist Workers Party (SWP), the Community and Workers Action Group (formed out of the Bin Tax campaign around former Socialist Party rep Joan Collins). Deceased SWP theorist John Molyneux wrote that: “People Before Profit was not set up on the basis of any pre-elaborated theory or plan. Rather it evolved gradually and “organically.” “We rather stumbled into it,” as Kieran Allen, currently PBP national secretary, once put it.”

Molyneux touched on a key part of the politics of the SWN and of PBP - making it up as you go along. But it’s not entirely true to say there were no political influences.

They were looking over at the British Socialist Workers Party who had been developing the idea of a “united front of a new type” - the British SWP had joined the Socialist Alliance and later formed Respect with MP George Galloway. Former British SWP theorist John Rees called these political alliances a “united front of a particular kind…uniting left reformist activists and revolutionaries in a common campaign around a minimum programme”.

This informed the Irish SWP in creating People Before Profit - they were taking their cue from the British SWP and from the development of local campaigns which provided an opportunity to build such a new “political united front”. One important difference was that while the British SWP often failed to stand their own candidates preferring to back some reformist politician the Irish SWP would at least stand themselves.

As John Molyneux wrote, PBP was initially focused on two key areas: “Ballyfermot, a strongly working-class area in West Dublin, and Dun Laoghaire, a more mixed (working-class and middle-class) suburb south of Dublin. In Ballyfermot, PBP grew primarily out of the struggle against the Bin Tax between 2001 and 2005.”

The key to the classical united front tactic had always been the complete political independence of revolutionary socialists and a focus on uniting with reformists in social movements to fight for particular practical ends like protesting the Iraq War. That way you could pull their supporters into action and through struggle and debate win reformist workers over to revolutionary politics.

Political alliances though usually favour the bigger reformist political forces and require agreeing on a set of demands they would find acceptable. A political alliance made up of revolutionaries and reformists would pull in two different directions at every key turning point in struggle. That’s why the united front was always about pulling the reformists out of the councils and parliaments and into the streets where they could be shown up in front of their supporters on the basis of a clear practical aim.

Of course there are times when revolutionaries have adopted an “entryist” tactic and entered into larger parties, like British Labour, to recruit members and emerge stronger. But when socialist thinkers like Lenin suggested entryism it was a temporary tactic to grow the socialist left and based on the peculiar nature of British Labour which allowed (when Lenin wrote) other organisations to join.

There have been other occasions when leftward moving reformist forces have been captured by the socialist left. The formation of the German Communist Party in October 1920 out of the reformist USPD is an example. In all those cases the revolutionary socialists were intent on winning people to their own political platform. The German revolutionaries didn’t join the reformist organization as a tendency - they split it.

After separation it was necessary to unite but in a different way - in united front movements that brought the remaining supporters of the reformist parties into common action alongside revolutionaries. Separate politically, unite for practical ends. That was the key to the successful application of the united front method.

It was vital the revolutionaries were a clear pole of attraction with their own political organization. They didn’t police a broad reformist political space or intend to create a left reformist party and then later win it over to socialist politics. Alliance style parties like the Greek Syriza Party had revolutionary factions inside who were irrelevant to changing the overall direction of the party.

The PBP model was set up to be self-limiting for revolutionaries, with SWP members talking as left reformists but intentionally. From the start the model was set up to play down politics. There were constant debates in the SWP about not “wearing two hats” but you can’t set up a model of political organization that requires wearing two hats and then complain about everyone wearing two hats. The failings of the model were blamed on individuals.

Everytime a socialist would speak clearly as a socialist the SWP would feel the broader space was threatened and police it, they made up the right of their own front. In a regular united front revolutionaries act as the left of the movement and exercise a revolutionary pole of attraction. The SWP tried to have their cake and eat it - playing the role of the defenders of a “broad” reformist space while claiming to be the revolutionaries simultaneously.

“You don’t get socialism by talking about it!” they’d say. But you don’t get socialism by not talking about it either. “Struggle educates!” was their mantra.

But as those of us who’ve been through many social movements understand, struggle is only the first step in awakening people to political life. Every social movement is a battlefield of ideas as the ruling class, unions and other organizations all intervene to shape the political flux. The political looseness inherent in the SWP’s semi-anarchist “struggle educates” formulation led to the building of a very loose PBP, that looseness would feedback into a further loosening of the SWP.

The argument they made was that PBP would develop “like a snowball” - it would be loosely packed at the edges but the automatic pressure applied by its growth would concentrate the inner circles. Many of us supported the PBP strategy at that time as a way to break out of the left bubble and bring in people from a working class background.

The left had stagnated for far too long on the margins of the working class. The SWP in Ireland, for example, was formed in the early 1970s but 30 years later, in the early 2000s, still didn’t have serious roots in any key working class area.

But the condition for building PBP for many of us was - that we had a socialist newspaper at every meeting and protest, that we gave out socialist flyers, that we did public stalls as socialists. We wanted to advocate for socialism in public, using authority won through struggle to gain the ear of the working class. There was always a tension between those of us who wanted to push the SWP and those who wanted to play it down to build PBP.

Electoral gains made by key figures like Richard Boyd Barrett started to turn the head of the previously ultra-left SWP. In the 1990s they’d written letters to the Socialist Party conflating standing in elections with electoralism, taking an ultra left approach and wasting several decades protesting on the margins when they could have put down roots.

They now swung rightwards under the pressure of vote catching: “A marker of the advance made in this period is that when Boyd Barrett stood in the 2002 general election for SWP he polled 876 first preferences. When he first stood for PBP in 2007 he polled 5223 first preferences and only just failed to get elected” argued John Molyneux.

This was pure formalism by Molyneux and he tread a dangerous path by suggesting that they had gotten more votes by dropping their socialist politics. The name change didn’t magically produce the increase in votes - serious local campaigning did. The Save Our Seafront campaign in Dún Laoghaire had taken place in those intervening years. A turn to serious local work in the estates got results.

Care worker Gino Kenny started building a base out in Clondalkin in Dublin Mid West. Gino got 1,044 votes in the 2004 local elections. He would eventually be elected to the local council with 1,137 votes in 2009. PBP’s first electoral outing in the North came in 2007 when Seán Mitchell stood in the Assembly elections in West Belfast, polling 774 votes.

When the banking crash came the unions in the 26 counties called one major protest of 120,000 workers and a one day national strike of 200,000. But then they actively suffocated potential movements in order to promote the Labour Party in government as the only chance for change. With the main unions sabotaging mass struggle the far left took a few years to get any social movements going.

This was a sign of the general confusion among working class people under the impact of the banking crisis but also an indication of the level of purchase the far left had outside of certain key working class areas. In the 2009 local elections about 20 total far left councillors were elected, including 6 from the Socialist Party and 5 from PBP.

The abstention of the unions from the fight against the bank bailout led to a few confused years of mass suffering and class anger, yet low levels of struggle. In 2010 I was tasked with launching the Right2Work campaign to try to mobilise the unemployed and we had some successful small protests at the Dáil but they fizzled out after a few weeks.

We had an ultra left perspective - we thought that we could just “trigger” a massive explosion of working class anger despite organisational and political deficits in the class, not to mention the active sabotage by the larger unions on behalf of propelling Labour to government. The peculiar nature of Irish capitalism meant that Fianna Fail had always been able to capture working class voters and now those voters were dislodged from their traditional loyalties there was a period of immense ideological flux and confusion. Labour used control of the unions to win those voters - many of whom would later move over to Sinn Féin, with some older working class voters moving back to Fianna Fáil.

We supported many strikes by workers in 2009 and 2010. We defended the Thomas Cook workers occupation, we worked closely with the MTL dockers strike and Coca Cola strikers. After the Arab Spring, Indignados and Occupy movements broke out the SWP felt that this international wave of protest could be brought to Ireland without really thinking through the specific mediations of the Irish situation.

Campaigns like the SWP initiated “Enough” campaign or the anarchist led “Occupy Dame Street” never took off or connected with significant layers of working class people. They couldn’t escape the left bubble. But every worker you spoke to was still boiling with anger over austerity. Organisational and political deficits require years of work to overcome and can’t be jumped over spontaneously.

Not only that but rank and file union activists were facing the dead weight of the pro-Labour union bureaucracy bearing down on them. Then, as John Molyneux explained: “in the 2011 general election, which saw victory for a Fine Gael/Labour coalition, there were 5 far left TDs elected under the banner of the United Left Alliance - Seamus Healy of the Workers and Unemployed Action Group (WUAG) in Tipperary, Joe Higgins and Clare Daly for the SP and Richard Boyd Barrett and Joan Collins for PBP.”

The United Left Alliance had been launched in late 2010. It was a contradictory time. Working class people were furious but there was no mass struggle. There were constant heated arguments in the United Left Alliance about whether it should be socialist or not with the SWP arguing strongly against it being a socialist organisation. At one ULA meeting in Liberty Hall SWP members argued so hard against socialism that many leading members of the SWP were embarrassed afterwards.

But the main problem with the ULA was that the alliance didn’t really do anything. It became another left bubble. As John Molyneux wrote: “the ULA fell rapidly into a state of inertia, and by 2013 it had dissolved following walk outs by WUAG (Seamus Healy’s group) and the SP.”

Kieran Allen used the opportunity to attack the very idea of a socialist programme, he wrote: “An ounce of struggle is worth a ton of political programmes. The ULA spent a lot of time discussing a ‘principled socialist programme’ and far less time in actually campaigning. An internalised atmosphere pervaded many of its gatherings because of this emphasis. The assumption was that if agreement could be reached on an extensive socialist programme, this would inoculate the ULA against any reformist deviations. In reality, a broad left party needs a fairly minimal programme.”

The SWP argued that: Principles didn’t matter, struggle did. They argued the left should stop talking and get fighting. A good start. But then where? And what if workers started fighting? What then? A party without a programme makes no promises and a “fairly minimal programme” means articulating only immediate demands, pointing out no path to your final goals.

Lenin said that a party programme indicated your “line of march” - informing workers that we want to start with certain minimum demands to arrive at certain maximum demands. A programme is a promise to workers and marks out your intentions. You can be held to those promises.

The Russian revolutionary Lenin wrote against the exact same views the SWP had expressed in the ULA, Lenin wrote: ““Every step of real movement is more important than a dozen programmes.” To repeat these words in a period of theoretical disorder is like wishing mourners at a funeral many happy returns of the day. Moreover, these words of Marx are taken from his letter on the Gotha Programme, in which he sharply condemns eclecticism in the formulation of principles. If you must unite, Marx wrote to the party leaders, then enter into agreements to satisfy the practical aims of the movement, but do not allow any bargaining over principles, do not make theoretical “concessions””.

A principled socialist organization could fight for socialist politics and engage in social movements. The key issue was that the far left didn’t have an organisational lever with which we could move the unions or the wider working class into action. The argument had always been that mass struggle would give us entry into the bureaucratised unions, yet we needed rank and file pressure from within the unions to get the struggle going in the first place.

During the water movement this lack of a “transmission belt” between the left on the streets and the rank and file in workplaces meant the movement couldn’t escalate beyond a certain point. The potential of the period just before the water charges was beyond the organisational capacities of the far left to focus and this then led to frustrations in the ULA. There weren’t enough socialists to satisfy the objective needs of the crisis situation.

Mass protest is very, very important - just look at the 1979 tax marches or the water charges movement. But so is assessing any given situation and being honest about where you’re at and what your key focus should be. The SWP would cheerlead everything that happened from the Arab Spring to Occupy Wall Street - always looking for a shortcut to the slow hard work of building in workplaces.

They’d win new recruits on the basis of immediate enthusiasm for those movements, often playing down the politics of those leading the movements, but then never return to the topic. As soon as members got some experience and started to question strategy they’d be accused of “internalisation” and pushed aside, replaced by a new person who was only too happy to cheerlead the latest fad. New members could be used to out vote critical voices at member’s meetings.

In the North in 2011 young working class activist Gerry Carroll had polled 1,661 votes in the Assembly elections and 1,751 votes in a Westminster by-election later that year. Sinn Féin’s role in government during the austerity years created an opening for socialist politics, this was married to a Belfast branch quick to seize on opportunities to protest and who worked hard to organise in communities like West Belfast.

A protest by students in Nov 2010 was smashed by the Guards when we led a breakaway to occupy the Department of Finance. The state mobilised riot cops with horses and dogs to terrify students and make sure discontent didn’t infect the working class. There was a backlash against the far left in the colleges afterwards and some student members left.

A real opportunity to break out of the left ghetto came with the Household Tax campaign which was launched at the end of 2011 and saw thousands of working class people mobilise. The marches were small compared to the later water charges, with 12 to 15,000 marching to a Fine Gael conference for example, but the campaign laid down a network of working class activists nationwide that would later play a key role in the much larger water movement.

The activist skeleton of the movement provided a pre-existing network, beyond the existing far left, that could help to mobilise on water. It was an intervening mechanism, a lever that could help the left to mobilise beyond its own ranks. There were arguments about whether to focus on building the boycott locally or building national protests. The SP wanted a local focus, the SWP a focus on protests. In fact, we needed to do both.

In April 2014 PBP called a public meeting on water charges under the “Right2Water” banner in the Gresham Hotel Dublin. It was a small meeting but had speakers from the Unite and Mandate unions and led to a subsequent meeting in the Dáil where Richard Boyd Barrett TD brought together PBP, Sinn Féin, Unite and Mandate. At a subsequent meeting in the Unite offices we decided on a national protest.

I’d suggested street meetings to local PBP branches in April 2014 and we started rolling them out in Clondalkin. The street meeting model caught on like wildfire and we knew a mass campaign was on the cards. I was tasked with setting up the Right2Water social media and myself and Richard Boyd Barrett TD were the PBP reps to the organising team of the water campaign.

There was a protest 100,000 strong on Oct 11th 2014 and 200,000 marched in nationwide local demos in November, before we surrounded the Dáil 80,000 strong in December. There were intense battles in local estates against water meters and PBP reps like Sharon Briggs were hosting street meetings with 120 people at them in areas like Bray.

In the local elections that year PBP and the Anti Austerity Alliance (a broad political front formed by the Socialist Party) got 28 councillors elected and would have got more if the locals had come after the big protests at the end of that year. The local election came before the big mobilisations. Many of our candidates narrowly missed out on seats and would have been elected a few months later.

In May and October 2014, Socialist Party reps Ruth Coppinger and Paul Murphy won Dail by-elections for the AAA in Dublin West and Dublin South West. That same year, 2014, saw Gerry Carroll elected to the City Council for Black Mountain in West Belfast. The implantation of the left in working class estates was taking a massive stride forward.

But some of the newly elected councillors in the 26 counties would almost immediately jump ship. They didn’t have socialist politics. This was the problem with electing reps on an “anti-austerity” platform or simply because they opposed water charges. “A fairly minimal programme”, as Kieran Allen called it, led to fairly minimal commitment.

Cllrs Sonya Stapleton, Barry Martin and Ruth Nolan all quit PBP. In 2015, in the Westminster election, Gerry Carroll came second to Sinn Féin and then topped the poll in the 2016 Belfast West Assembly election with 8,299 votes. He was elected with 4,903 first preference votes in 2017, then in the 2019 Westminster general election he came second to Sinn Féin with 6,144 votes. The loss of votes was due to Sinn Féin attacks on PBP over Brexit.

During the water movement there was a debate on the question of “tailism” at the SWP Central Committee and at an SWP National Council. The SWP was losing dozens of members to the water movement. The argument had always been that struggle would build the party. But the branches were so politically loose that the SWP lost over 100 registered members.

The water movement wasn’t building the activist base of the party. Our voter support increased but the activist base fractured. New branches of PBP were formed across the country while in other areas reps defected. The looseness inherent in the PBP model meant it couldn’t hold its ground within the rising tide of a mass social movement - never mind in a future revolution.

I suggested the problem was the deeper tailist politics of SWP founder Tony Cliff and of the SWP but others blamed me and Richard Boyd Barrett TD for not being “hard enough” on union leader Brendan Ogle. When the political model fails, blame individuals. There was no problem with the philosophy they argued and so there must be some moral failing on the part of individual members.

This lack of questioning of the model itself would continue up until 2025 with Kieran Allen saying members who had an “episodic relationship” with the working class failed to articulate revolutionary politics. But they were given no guide. Then the youth of his network would try to kick him off the PBP steering group, blaming individuals again instead of the political model or underlying philosophy.

At one point during the water movement the SWP leaders suggested telling Brendan Ogle to “fuck off!” and argued we should just walk out of the Right2Water campaign if we couldn’t get what we wanted. We were fighting for an activist assembly of the movement which Ogle was blocking so he could protect Sinn Féin from a vote on the boycott tactic.

An assembly could have started to develop a structure for the movement beyond the small meetings of representatives in the Unite Union office. Otherwise the danger was the movement would remain atomised individuals with no organising role, who came to the mass protests and then went home.

The SWP call for me and Richard Boyd Barrett TD to walk out was just ultra left childishness and when they put Brid Smith in as a third PBP rep to the Right2Water meetings she couldn’t shift union rep Brendan Ogle either. We were outvoted by most of the left who just tailed the union leaders. The Socialist Party voted against an assembly too because they argued “it won’t allow a vote on the boycott anyway!”

The SWP Central Committee suggested that walking out of Right2Water would be the path to forming an “Irish Podemos” from the water movement. In the end this was idle talk because we just couldn’t walk out of the vehicle leading the biggest social movement the country had seen since 1979.

The combination of mass struggle and intense reading led to me developing criticisms of SWP theory. I wrote an article defending Lenin’s “What Is To Be Done?” and had to fight to get it published. I pushed through a review of PBP branches so that we could get a look at what forces we actually had. This was resisted by most leading members who said a party review was “internalisation!” and that we should just simply continue to focus on the mass protests.

Enthusiasm for the water movement was to magically overcome organizational, political and ideological deficits. This again went to the heart of the political line of the SWP. But no one could answer the question of why we were losing members to the movement. You cannot advocate a political philosophy and then blame members when they operate according to it. This just led to moralism.

The victory against water charges in 2016 represented the high point of the wave of post-2008 struggle. The tide of working class struggle would recede from this point on. We saw 3 PBP TDs elected in 2016 - Richard Boyd Barrett, Brid Smith and Gino Kenny. They’d taken 15 years to get to that point, often by ignoring the demands of the SWP central office and working in their areas.

Now the party had a lot of money from the bourgeois state that could be used for Dáil staff and new field organisers, for local offices and for case workers. A relatively small, loose and chaotic organisation with roots in only a few key working class areas suddenly had a massive influx of state cash. They lost their heads and wanted to further diminish the SWN in order to promote PBP - they thought we’d continue to grow in a straight line.

This political shift to the right came at the same time as a slow change in the class composition of the party. During austerity the full time organisers were mostly from poorer working class backgrounds. We were really weak in colleges and students paid little attention to the water movement. Once the water charges movement was over the Repeal movement and the so-called Green wave had a much more college educated, white collar and middle class activist base.

There was a lot of frustration among working class organisers as they sensed the party turning away from the estates. Most of the organisers from that period joined the Red Network when it formed. Burnout is often blamed on individual failings. But the most common cause of burnout is the disparity between aims and action. When people are convinced of the cause they are fighting for they can suffer torture, jailings, exile and death.

Fighting for a political line you don’t believe in is spiritually corrosive. Once each working class organiser left they were mostly replaced from the colleges. Many of us argued that the party needed to operate on two tracks - campaigning for Repeal but also maintaining a connection with the poorer working class through mobilisation on housing. The shift of front from economic to social issues was a ruling class tactic. Repeal was vital but it was important to keep the second track.

The party did some good work in those years pushing forward the National Housing and Homeless Coalition and intervening in Take Back The City and Apollo House. The ruling class was using concessions on social issues to win back voters they’d lost over austerity. Their new found “liberalism” was skin deep and tied to defence of their economic system. As the economy recovered for some the housing crisis escalated year after year.

John Molyneux argued that the Repeal movement “was also important in terms of PBP’s internal development, that is, its transition from being an alliance against austerity to being a rounded socialist party.” This was a formalist analysis. The class composition of the party was changing.

The changing class activist base of the party meant the recruitment of people who were stronger on abstract left politics but often much weaker on class politics. We were recruiting people who were more inclined to performative left politics and open to the idea of entering government. The more PBP recruited from these layers the more the politics shifted right, the more the politics shifted right the more these layers were attracted to PBP. This was a retreat back into the left bubble and to having an “episodic relationship with the working class”.

The downward trajectory of struggle in the working class estates meant we had arguments about PBP’s social media, which I was running. They wanted to tone down working class anger and appeal to white collar workers. “Anger sounds like moaning!” they repeatedly said. We needed to imitate the “positive” politics of Jeremy Corbyn. But if we stopped expressing blue collar working class anger we’d leave an opening for the far right to misdirect that anger.

The SWN majority continued to shape their politics to suit the needs of the moment and that meant recruiting white collar, student and middle class individuals from the Repeal and Climate movements. Meanwhile the level of working class engagement in politics continued to decline. The mass struggles of the water charges years had defeated the hated charge but hadn’t broken the political establishment.

The movement fell back in the face of a huge political deficit - workers didn’t understand how that task could actually be done. This was an international phenomenon as the wave of post 2008 crisis struggle fell back - from the Arab Spring and the Indignados to Podemos and Syriza they all fell back in defeat, confusion or after incorporation into the system.

In 2018 the SWP decided to change its name to the Socialist Workers Network - the last in a series of decisions like getting rid of their newspaper, dissolving student branches into PBP, getting rid of their own flags and flyers and deciding to stop doing any public stalls as the SWP. The SWN was to be an “internal” network inside PBP. This meant that the soft message of PBP was the only public face of SWN reps. They were enshrining the “two hats” approach they often complained about.

Why did those who disagreed stay? What other options were there on the socialist left? The Socialist Party was awful on imperialism and also on the nature of the state. The Communist Party had supported the union bureaucracy all throughout the water charges movement, never mind their support for capitalist governments around the world - as long as they waved a red flag or mouthed some opposition to US imperialism.

We wanted to avoid both opportunism and ultra leftism. There was no one doing that. And we had built PBP for many years. I was also in the process of working out a theoretical critique of the politics of British SWP founder Tony Cliff which would serve as the foundation for any future break with the SWN. It took time to get our politics straight and figure out what had happened. Political clarity leads to determined action. We had to get to the root of the problem.

Dublin Bay North Cllr John Lyons quit PBP because his local branch voted against his choice of running mate in the local elections. He was also angry that the SWN was collapsing itself into PBP - which he saw as an SWN takeover of PBP. It was the other way around. The SWN became a place to discuss abstract Marxist politics, disconnected from the day to day concerns of working class people, while the day to day politics was dealt with as PBP.

The disconnecting of Marxist politics from day to day activity and the changing class basis of the party meant members became more reluctant to talk as socialists in public, losing the ability to make connections between day to day events and deeper politics. When socialist politics was brought up it was usually in reference to global issues and blended with performative moralism. This global performative consciousness was not class consciousness, although it might sometimes contain some elements of it.

The politics of most members of PBP was “eclectic” - a mish mash of ultra left, performative and reformist political positions. “The 2019 local elections in the Republic were tough for the left,” wrote John Molyneux. But that was not what they’d said before the election.

Before the 2019 local elections Richard Boyd Barrett TD stood up at a Socialist Workers Network National Council (where delegates from all branches met) and said that because Sinn Féin hadn’t done well in that year’s Presidential election that we had nothing to worry about and the coming elections were going to be easy for us! I resigned from the SWN Central Committee to argue freely at members’ meetings.

I was met twice by leading SWN members Brian O’Boyle and Kieran Allen. Their first argument was that if I quit then the SWN Central Committee would “shift right” and that although they didn’t agree with my positions they understood I was “acting as an anchor” keeping the party left. A second meeting in a cafe became a shouting match between me and Kieran Allen as I challenged their conception of PBP and their understanding of what constitutes a genuinely socialist organization.

The Green wave of 2019 had PBP rushing to make everything about the climate. But the estates stayed at home and mostly didn’t vote. The arc of struggle had risen from 2008 to 2016 but fell from 2016 on. Sinn Féin began to rise in the polls on the back of working class demoralisation, lack of mobilisation and the hope that a change of government would solve the problems people faced. But eventually the lack of mobilisation would begin to hit them too. The pendulum of struggle and the rise and fall of political groupings don’t exactly coincide.

The political expression of misguided working class hope, Sinn Féin, rose but only to a certain point. The falling level of struggle and the consequent rightward swing of the pendulum started to exercise a gravitational pull on them too. In the run up to the 2020 general election arguments over left government and a “red lines” approach went on in People Before Profit.

The SWN majority position was to suggest to workers we’d join a Sinn Féin government if certain “red lines” were met. Tell the working class you’d go in and then find an excuse to walk out of talks. Lies are not tactics, many of us argued. There were a few of us defending the position of external support, case by case for any Sinn Féin led left government. That way you could engage with the desire to get rid of Fianna Fáil/Fine Gael but maintain an independent socialist voice.

Heated arguments on left government and socialist tactics had gone on since the election of Syriza in Greece. During the water movement union leader Brendan Ogle had tried to pressure PBP into being the fifth wheel of the Sinn Féin bandwagon by forming his “Right2Change” political platform, but we resisted. He wanted to clamp down on the “boycott” wing of the movement.

This raised the question of left government and how PBP should reply to Brendan Ogle - the Socialist Workers Party Central Committee split on the issue with Richard Boyd Barrett, Brian O’Boyle, Melisa Halpin and others arguing we should just say “yes, we’d join a Sinn Féin/Right2Change government”. On the other side of the argument myself and Madeleine Johansson argued that the tactics of Lenin, of external support, were an important guide here. John Molyneux defended a revolutionary line on Syriza but not on the question of PBP and left government.

It was then decided to have “red lines” so PBP could tell workers they’d join a government under capitalism, insinuate they’d go in with Sinn Féin but prepare “red line” principles that Sinn Féin couldn’t stomach, justifying a walkout of government negotiations. The red line approach allowed Kieran Allen to tone down the potential split in the SWN Central Committee - he probably thought “Richard Boyd Barrett TD can go around saying he’ll go into government” while “James O’Toole can say our red lines include a new form of democracy”.

The whole position was based on avoiding talk of the need for revolution. They trained members to repeat this position for 4 years and then later wrote documents condemning them for not knowing how to talk about revolution in everyday language!

When the 2020 election came around we asked for a copy of the red lines and were told they “hadn’t been saved anywhere” by PBP HQ. The SWN hated being tied into programmes or promises. They’d rather make it up day to day. That meant that Richard Boyd Barrett TD went into talks with Sinn Féin in February 2020 without any clear red lines. For a long time the SWN leadership of PBP absolutely refused to publish any red lines.

John Molyneux had defended this refusal to publish them, writing: “The exact nature of the demands will have to be determined according to the circumstances prevailing at the time, but they would need to be both radical and popular, making sense to a lot of working-class people.”

The steering group was eventually forced to publish red lines under pressure from PBP members. But they did this dragging their heels all the way and after many arguments at NCs and AGMs. Independent socialist Eddie Conlon played a role in arguing for publishing red lines before any election.

They dressed up the party’s left government position as being about some far flung future radical left government, even though everyone in the country knew the discussion was actually about Sinn Féin, as Molyneux wrote: “PBP wants to see a genuine left government that actually takes on capitalism and will only consider joining the government (that is, taking ministerial posts) if its core demands are met.”

Yet Lenin had written: “Only scoundrels and simpletons can think the proletariat must first win a majority in elections carried out under the yoke of the bourgeoisie, under the yoke of wage slavery and must then win power. This is the height of stupidity.”

If socialists formed a future government with reformists like the Soc Dems (or even what the SWN refer to as “Corbyn types”) then those reformists would stab them in the back. There isn’t one single example in history of a so-called “ruptural” government. And conflating a Sinn Féin government with some future “ruptural” left government actually made Sinn Féin seem radical when they weren’t.

We went into the election implicitly painting Sinn Féin as a radical option just as 100,000 SF voters were about to defect. But the argument from the SWN was that by getting people to fight on the red lines (which weren’t published!) workers would come up against the system and struggle would open their eyes as to the nature of the state.

This was stagism. We were to drip feed the working class left parliamentary politics instead of fighting to build a class conscious minority who could exercise a decisive pull on wider layers of workers because they led struggle but could articulate revolutionary politics in a way workers related to.

Sinn Féin did well in the election but were nowhere near forming a government. PBP did well from massive Sinn Féin surpluses but they wouldn’t let that happen again. Then the Covid lockdown hit. Locking people up in their homes for close to 2 years had a devastating effect on working class confidence and led to a rise in conspiracy theories and racism. This was worse in areas where the left had no base.

I quit the SWN in March 2020, after 19 years as one of their most active members, when they decided to let Sligo Cllr Gino O’Boyle take a mayoral position and go on Paddy’s Day junkets to the USA. After opposition in the SWN they decided to let him go but got him to pay his own fare. The SWN members’ meeting had been divided on the issue until Richard Boyd Barrett TD swung the room.

Madeleine Johansson and a few other future Reds stayed on until the SWN conference later that year, putting forward a list of changes that were needed. She was shot down by most of the leading SWN members. At the conference the SWN used the most opportunist formulations possible to win the day. The needs of the moment can override principles when you have no programme.

John Molyneux told the SWN conference that: “Lenin was for joining a capitalist government!” This was referencing the fact that Russia was an aristocratic dictatorship and therefore their revolution was what’s called a “bourgeois revolution.” Lenin was for democratic assemblies of armed workers and peasants which he called “the democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and the peasantry” taking power to complete this “bourgeois revolution” but then he wanted to “test the boundaries” as see how far they could push along the path to socialism.

What had this to do with saying you’d join a Sinn Féin government? It didn’t matter. SWN members applauded and the leaders came up with whatever opportunist formulations you needed to win the argument on the day. Many working class members were angry and started talking until we reached the point where we had dozens of potential Reds and a clear critique of the SWN’s politics.

We then formed the “Red Network” after a meeting of about 50 members of PBP - most of whom disagreed with the SWN’s left government position, the tailism in PBP and the lack of workers in the party. Dozens of working class members would have quit PBP if it wasn’t for the formation of the Red Network. But we weren’t thanked for it. Most of the Reds were shop stewards and union members.

Young members of PBP did great work intervening on the Debenhams workers picket line with some workers temporarily joining PBP but later drifting away. During Covid the party set up a Trade Union Department and had a few zoom meetings where members were urged to become shop stewards and put down wage motions.

The Red Network had most of PBP’s union activists in our ranks. The SWN majority on the PBP steering group later dropped union work and voted down a motion for a party union caucus that was debated at a members meeting. The union organiser was taken off union work and put on fundraising for elections before being let go.

Myself and my partner PBP Cllr Madeleine Johansson got eviction notices at Tathony House in Dublin 8, starting our gruelling 18 month battle to keep 34 families in their homes. The SWN had to change tack and couldn’t be seen to be directly attacking us. But when we organised our first demonstration there was a shouting match in PBP HQ about sending out a text to members to support us. Independent PBP member Eddie Conlon said they should, but Kieran Allen refused to send it out. In the end the text was sent to our immediate area only.

Richard Boyd Barrett’s office was very helpful with Cllr Melisa Halpin organising PBP internal meetings to coordinate solidarity with us. Young members of the SWN, particularly from Dublin North West and Dublin Mid West, attended most protests and Brid Smith was helpful when it came to calling Dublin City Council allocations. But the vitriol previously thrown at the Red Network meant some PBP members were confused as to the extent of solidarity they were to give the Tathony House anti-eviction campaign.

Red Cllr Madeleine Johansson got elected onto the PBP steering group in 2023 as did some representatives of Paul Murphy’s RISE, who’d split from the Socialist Party and joined PBP in 2021. But we were outnumbered by the SWN. Myself and Madeleine were elected in 2024 alongside 2 from RISE. That left 10 seats between the SWN and Eddie Conlon.

As soon as members of other networks got onto the PBP steering group the SWN set up an “officers board” which could act as a leadership within the leadership. It was technically supposed to make organisational decisions at a meeting in the Dáil but minutes from the officers board took on more and more political decision making and often they’d come to the PBP steering group saying “oh we already discussed that at the officers meeting!”

The SWN had wanted RISE to dissolve into a common organization to be called the “revolutionary socialists”. Leading SWN members talked about “absorbing RISE and pushing the Red Network out”. This would have lost them 50 key working class members. It didn’t work though. They eventually had to accept there were 3 networks in the party - SWN, RISE and Reds.

Divisions in the SWN itself led to some openings to push PBP left. The SWN was divided into undeclared factions. The Belfast branch would often argue against the Dún Laoghaire branch. Derry and Belfast would argue with each other despite both being run by the SWN. The SWN was divided into a softer wing around Dún Laoghaire, a centre group around Kieran Allen/Brid Smith and PBP HQ and a left wing in Belfast.

Tailing electoral politics in each area had divided the party into numerous fiefdoms where every branch fought for its own local interests. This tailism was inherent in the politics of the SWN. People fought over symptoms but never tackled the cause.

The SWN youth often sided with Belfast but would sometimes shift to support Kieran Allen if anyone challenged the SWN line at PBP member’s meetings. These divisions allowed criticism to emerge and opened up some room for debate. The problem was that even these arguments in the SWN were conducted in an opportunistic manner - as whispering campaigns against the old guard. No one ever wrote out their position in a document.

Cllr Gino O’Boyle caused a massive argument at PBP national meetings after he’d made a deal with a Fianna Fáil rep to take the role of Deputy Mayor in a rotating mayoral position in Sligo. Unaffliliated PBP members in Cork had put forward a motion criticising Cllr O’Boyle. The right wing of the SWN and many of Kieran Allen’s supporters came up with every excuse in the book to defend the Sligo rep.

They said the position was purely ceremonial. We argued that it crossed a line and wasn’t about the technicalities of the Sligo mayoral position but about political perception. We were criticizing the far right for supporting the establishment and couldn’t be seen to engage in hypocrisy.

But a motion was passed criticising O’Boyle, with the support of the Belfast branch. After this he refused to step down from the deputy Mayor position, rejecting party democracy. He was rewarded by the steering group majority by being allowed to stand in the general election. At that point Belfast went along with the rest of the SWN saying “it’s a done deal now!”

There were massive arguments about a motion for staff in the Dáil to take the average wage with Belfast SWN breaking ranks arguing against Dún Laoghaire and Kieran Allen’s crew. But despite all the bluster, after the 2024 election there were still Dáil staff breaking the agreed average wage rule. Hardly anyone applied for field organiser jobs and most applications were for the lucrative Dáil positions.

The 2024 local elections saw the far right do well and PBP lost the seat in Dublin 8. Bríd Smith TD had asked me to run in Dublin 8, knowing I couldn’t do it because getting a seat would mean leaving the housing list. I couldn’t do this with the Tathony House eviction looming over us. The housing list was our only lifeline.

The locals were indicative of the low mood in the country. The Dublin 8 council seat was lost after over 15 years of hard work building roots in that area. Conor Reddy was elected in Finglas Ballymun and Darragh Adelaide in Clondalkin LEA. Red member Cllr Madeleine Johansson managed to retain her seat and make a small increase in her vote in a very difficult election for the left.

The far left pool as a whole shrank but PBP was able to take a bigger share of that smaller pool. The party went into the 2024 General Election with roots in a few key areas and we Reds argued for prioritising those areas because of the mood of demoralization in the working class. We wanted to focus on the existing TD areas plus Conor Reddy who was standing in Dublin North West.

Richard Boyd Barrett TD argued against this saying “politics can turn on a sixpence!” Kieran Allen stood up at a PBP national members meeting just before the election and said if we captured the imagination like the French Popular Front had done we could win! Of course such empty rhetoric drew applause at the meeting.

They wanted to rally PBP members with this empty rhetoric and then they’d wonder why they’d burn out after the election. As Kieran Allen spoke the Blairites in the French Popular Front had already stabbed the alliance in the back. During the election campaign, when Richard Boyd Barrett TD was asked if he’d join a Sinn Féin government he said “Yes, Of Course!” No red lines were ever articulated, no principles were ever outlined.

Leading SWN members said the election offered the opportunity for a “transformative” government. Sinn Féin in coalition with Labour, Greens and Soc Dems would be “transformative”? The PBP line was to give a left colouration to non-socialist organisations.

The party lost thousands of voters in key working class areas, losing 2 TD seats. It would have been better to say “we’ll do everything we can to kick out Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael but Sinn Féin haven’t shown they’ve the stomach to stand up to the establishment. That’s why socialists want to be in a strong position to discipline a Sinn Féin government. Vote for fighters!”

Working class members felt confident in articulating that line but many SWN members were reluctant to say anything other than they’d enter government. At the pre-election meeting Reds stood up and said many workers were seeing Sinn Féin as a flip-flop party but this was rejected by SWN speakers.

Sinn Féin lost 100,000 voters and PBP didn’t win them. The Red Network position on Sinn Féin would have had PBP carving out a clear space for itself as a socialist alternative fighting for the working class. Some young SWN members came to the same conclusion but after the election.

The post-election analysis by Kieran Allen had one eye on holding the SWN together which necessitated some left language. They downplayed elections, talked about Lenin and the importance of political education of members. We’d seen those turns many times before. They last until the next social movement or fad comes along.

They argued we should use the United Against Racism campaign to win over Soc Dem voters while Reds wanted to put the emphasis on getting back into the working class estates. That didn’t mean ignoring the recruitment of students and white collar workers. By tailoring agitation and propaganda to win the blue collar working class you could recruit students and white collar workers who understood the centrality of the blue collar working class.

If you chased after Soc Dem voters and atomised cross class youth you’d end up with a party with “an episodic relationship with the working class”. You can’t mourn a situation you fight to create. White collar workers are members of the working class. But they often have a lower level of real class consciousness and are more caught up in global performative politics than immediate class issues.

Kieran Allen now stole some of the points the Reds had been making all along and presented them as a new party line. The united front wasn’t about political alliances but instead about practical unity to fight on issues like housing, he wrote. We’d been arguing that all throughout 2024. The party had to “fuse” with the working class and needed to recruit “working class influencers”.

We needed to be stronger politically, he argued, and define ourselves more clearly - critiquing the soft left. All of these were points the Reds had argued before the election. That’s when they actually mattered.

This SWN “tailism” - arriving late to conclusions - is at the heart of the politics of PBP and the SWN. It leads to freneticism, disorganisation, demoralisation and burn out. Kieran Allen brought a proposal to ban public debate to the steering group - an attempt to outlaw articles like this. The vote passed 8 to 4 with Reds and Rise opposing. Richard Boyd Barrret was nervous about a complete ban and asked them to change the wording to “discourage”.

The SWN feel that telling the working class periphery of the left about debates on the left is scandalous but that can only be justified if you believe that playing down politics and focusing on the next protest will automatically develop workers. Don’t talk about disagreements in front of the children, they think. Lenin was for letting the advanced workers know about everything.

What Is People Before Profit?

John Molyneux wrote: “It is not a united front. Perhaps it had some characteristics of a united front when it was first formed, but it certainly isn’t one now. A united front is an agreement between two or more different organisations and forces (parties, unions, campaigns, etc) to form a common front on a particular issue or cluster of issues such as combating fascism, fighting racism, defending workers jobs, defeating water charges, etc. PBP is clearly a political party that not only consistently contests elections but also has a comprehensive programme of policies.”

Policies are not a programme. Policies set no boundaries. Who is to implement these policies? Who is in power? Policies without a path to power are just a reformist wishlist. Minimum demands made in policy form need to be connected to an ultimate goal (other than a left government!) The SWN argued that: “if we mobilise people behind these policies then they’ll confront the system!” or “each policy isn’t radical by itself but the system can’t deliver the totality of these policies!”

This is an argument to keep workers in the dark, let us bang our heads against the system and hope our class will figure out we need to go further. It’s very patronizing. They also refused to publish red lines until forced to.

We Reds believe that socialists are supposed to be at the heart of every struggle, ahead of events, helping to educate the most class conscious workers as to the tasks ahead, including ultimate tasks. You cannot avoid the necessity of a party programme that lists your immediate, what are called “minimum” demands and also uses authority won fighting for those minimum demands to articulate our maximum demands.

John Molyneux argued that the reformist path was safe because of the secret socialists leading PBP, he’d written: “Above all, the leadership of PBP is in the hands of avowed revolutionaries of long standing - comprehensively in their hands.”

That means that the reformist policies of the party are in the hands of secret revolutionaries? But if they keep those views secret then how are they their actual views? Being a revolutionary in private and a reformist in public is opportunism no matter how you dress it up. We are asked to bank on the individual moral fibre of the leadership but not on the programme or on the politics of the organization - it doesn’t matter because the people on top are good people!

The outward positions taken by PBP corrupts the inward position as was evident on left government. The inward position (supposedly still revolutionary) is silenced to prevent it interfering with the outward position. But the class struggle requires one answer to key questions - you cannot have two answers to everything. They give one answer - the outward answer.

Molyneux admitted this when he wrote: “Is it (PBP) then a fully fledged revolutionary party? No, not yet. And I do not mean that just in terms of numbers or implantation in the working class. It is also not the case that it is programmatically committed to smashing the capitalist state or to revolution by means of working-class insurrection and workers councils. You do not have to be a revolutionary (still less a Marxist) to join PBP, and obviously many PBP members are not anything of the kind.”

PBP makes no programmatic commitments, but neither does the SWN. They publish a conference document each year to outline some perspectives but that’s it. At least Molyneux had the guts to try to put this all down on paper whereas other PBP leaders just make it up as they go along and the SWN youth refuse to articulate why they want their old guard gone. Apart from Molyneux and Allen there was no other attempt to describe PBP.

Molyneux argued that: “A good term to describe this contradictory and moving reality is to say that PBP is a “transitional organisation,” that is, its aim was and is to be a kind of transition belt between the working class and the party. This is how PBP was characterised by Marxists working within it, especially Kieran Allen.” But it’s been “transitional” for 20 years!

October 2025 marks the 20th anniversary of the organisation. It was stagism - step one: go out as a reformist, as a secret socialist and create a pool of reformist workers around you and then later progress them to socialism. But the “later” never came because of the requirement of building the wider pool which was never stable because of the downplaying of politics.

Or that “later” was defined as an automatic progression of workers to socialist consciousness in struggle. The advantage of an actual united front - on a particular struggle - is that you maintain your own political identity and also engage with broader pools of working class people.

Political alliances and “transitional” organisations don’t allow for the correct relationship between party and movement. They import the contradictions of the movement into the party itself. For the first few years the then SWP had a newspaper and stalls and tried to direct recruits from PBP into their party.

But later the socialist newspaper and socialist stalls were abandoned and socialism became something for “inside” PBP. This was based on the SWN’s philosophy that “struggle educates” which justifies playing down the necessity of arguing for socialism publicly, to your periphery and the wider working class. This should always be done with an awareness of where people are at but it needs to be done all the same.

“The argument was that the working class was radicalising but that workers who were moving from conservative or mainstream politics (e.g., Fianna Fail or Labour voters) or who were “non-political” would be unlikely to move directly to revolutionary socialism” Molyneux wrote.

True, especially if that option is not provided. It’s like saying “I doubt they’d want to go all the way but we’re not going to give them that option”. John Molyneux argued that there was “no organised reformist pole developed in PBP.” It didn’t need one, the SWN provided it. They policed the wider space, enforced the position on left government, argued “struggle would educate” and controlled all leading positions in PBP.

For an organization to “transition” from reform to revolution it would be necessary to pull in the direction you want to go. The SWN constantly pulled PBP back. This frustrated some SWN members who thought they’d left behind their old revolutionary politics. But the tailism inherent in the PBP model was always a key part of the political philosophy of the SWN, it was just expressed in different ways.

The SWN in Ireland is an offshoot of the British Socialist Workers Party - a Trotskyist group that was set up by Jewish socialist Tony Cliff in 1950, starting as the “Socialist Review Group”. They started with 33 members, mostly intellectuals, recruited from the British Labour Party. They began as “Luxemburgists” rejecting Lenin’s concept of the revolutionary party and wholeheartedly supported Leon Trotsky’s 1904 Menshevik sponsored attack on Lenin.

Tony Cliff wrote: “Rosa Luxemburg’s conception of the structure of the revolutionary organisation – that they should be built from below up, on a consistently democratic basis – fits the needs of the workers’ movement in the advanced countries much more closely than Lenin’s conception of 1902 - 4, which was copied and given an added bureaucratic twist by Stalinists the world over.”

Cliff rejected Lenin’s conception of a vanguard party, where the most advanced section of the working class fought for leadership, proving itself in struggle and using authority won in struggle to argue for socialist politics. The Socialist Review Group became the International Socialism Group (IS) at the end of 1962.

Later, Tony Cliff wrote a multi-volume biography of Lenin that twisted Lenin’s politics to force Lenin to give voice to the political positions of his rivals in the Russian socialist movement. He took a quote from Lenin in 1905 about the workers (during the Moscow insurrection) as being “spontaneously socialist” and argued this was Lenin from then on. A glance at Lenin’s complete works would show how stupid this is.

The SWP’s turn to Lenin at the end of the 1960s was merely to accept “democratic centralism” as a mode of decision making. Democratic centralism means open and free debate and then unity in action. It was common to both the reformist Mensheviks and the revolutionary Bolsheviks in the Russian socialist movement. It wasn’t by any means the key to Lenin.

Tony Cliff made just one alteration to his book on Rosa Luxemburg to indicate this shift. The turn to Lenin in 1969 came after 19 years of promoting Luxemburgism as their organisational and political model. The SWP grew from the protests and strikes at the end of the 1960s but Cliff soon got tired of recruiting workers and with some shop stewards being pulled by the “Social Contract” of the incoming Labour Party, decided to take a shift towards anti-racist work and recruiting youth - indicating the SWP’s desire to go chase pools of easy recruits.

They always tailored their theory to fit the necessity of open door recruitment. During the Korean war in the 1950s their slogan was “Neither Washington Nor Moscow” - equating both sides despite the war being an imperialist war. When the 1960s anti-war movement rose against the Vietnam War and there was the prospect of recruiting lots of students the SWP changed tack and focused on the USA.

The objective reality of imperialism underlying both wars hadn’t changed. These were the same wars. What had changed was that in the 1950s the SWP tailored their arguments to recruit from pacifist CND and condemned both sides and in the 1960s they tailored their arguments to recruit from the student anti-war movements. Pools of potential recruits determine political positions, not objective reality.

They’d recruit people on the basis of cheerleading the current fad - and lose them just as quickly. In January 1977, the IS was renamed the Socialist Workers Party. By 1982, the SWP was refocused completely to a propagandist approach, with geographical branches as the main unit of the party, a focus on abstract Marxist theory and an abandonment of the perspective of building a union rank and file movement.

They spent the 1980s huddled in local branches talking abstract Marxist politics - apart from the occasional intervention as during the Miners strike. But the perspective was to huddle and talk politics. They refused to use electoral work to leverage some small support in working class communities which could act as the basis of a left recovery when Thatcher went. Local branches shrunk and most leading members were academics and students.

They wasted a decade. They could have campaigned in working class estates, electing local councillors and prepared for a future upturn. Tony Cliff once infamously argued that tactics can contradict principles - Cliff’s Irish disciple Kieran Allen took this subordination to immediacy seriously and ran with it. This was a form of opportunism, but from below.

The German reformist Eduard Bernstein had once written: “For me the movement is everything and the final goal of socialism is nothing”. The SWP echoed this opportunism from above but transformed it into opportunism from below. The final goal of socialism is for the SWN an abstraction, a Sunday school sermon to be related to members at internal meetings, but for the working class? No. They only get the politics of the moment.

Policies will drive the workers into a battle with the system and they’ll figure it out on the hop. But the opportunists from below are saying the same thing as opportunists from above. Subordination to the moment is everything, the final goal is an abstraction. Don’t talk about revolution in the estates. It’s “abstract”. It is Bernstein, but from below.

Lenin made a remarkable insight when he argued that this opportunism from below, by tailing social movements, while arguing that politics would come automatically through struggle, failing to create worker leaders, actually disarmed the working class and left the movement in the hands of non-workers. It’s the perfect ideology for what Lenin called “petty bourgeois” Marxists. It’s a form of Marxism that’s close to anarchism.

By petty bourgeois Lenin meant the middle class. Not white collar workers but the actual middle class - managers, lawyers, judges, career criminals, the self employed, farmers and academics - they are all petty bourgeois. The Marxist left will always contain middle class elements. Lenin spent 20 years unmasking them.

Talk of “we listen to the workers, we don’t teach, we don’t have the answers, people learn through struggle” sounds very “bottom up” but when translated into the practical requirements of any given social movement becomes nonsense. It disarms workers and guarantees the movement is led by petty bourgeois leaders, by the middle class. This is why academics like Kieran Allen refuse to talk about the middle class. No one likes a mirror. He argues: “I have a major difficulty using the term middle class. I don’t understand it. Why are you in the middle, and between whom?”

Let’s take a socialist worker who has had experience of a picket line and then became a socialist. The idea that they shouldn’t relate the lessons they’ve learned to other workers but should instead “listen” and wait for other workers to “learn from struggle” is highly damaging and is asking that worker leader to hold back. This is an attempt to disarm the advanced members of the working class. Tailism is inherent in the political philosophy of the SWN.

Kieran Allen, who was a decades long UCD sociology lecturer, rants against theory all the time: “Those who came from the SWP tradition never thought that we had a programme that would guide the working class. We did not claim to have a ‘transitional programme’. We did not go to a few books and look up what sort of demands would move working class people. Philosophically, we were often empiricists. We listened. We talked to working class people to identify the issues they were concerned with.”

The isolation of the Trotskyist left from the working class created two wrong paths - the programmatic formalism of the Socialist Party and the programmatic nihilism of the SWN. The SP and other Trotskyist “transitional programme” fetishists argued that the correct “transitional” demands would save them from marginalization. They’d argue incessantly about what constituted a “transitional” demand - one that wasn’t quite revolutionary but pointed workers in the direction of revolution.

This “transitional” approach led to the Socialist Party’s parent organization in Britain arguing that the Labour Party in government could be won to implement socialist policies. A crazy position that finds an echo in the current left government position of the SWN. The transitional programme was a form of desperate magical thinking and led to obscene formalism. “Give us the correct piece of paper and the world is ours!”

But the SWP took another mistaken path.

They correctly identified the defects of this Trotskyist formalism but they rejected all programmes. They said “throw yourself into today’s struggle and the world is ours!” Their programmatic nihilism, their opportunism from below created a frenetic organisation with a revolving door membership that over the course of 50 years never rose above 300. In fact when PBP was launched the SWN had 300 registered members and now PBP itself has about 300 activists.

The SWN in Ireland was formed in 1971 and after 54 years has about 150 activists. “Listening to workers” is of course part of constructing your minimum, everyday demands. But even then there’s always the necessity of understanding the economic and political situation, rising above the moment and selecting demands on the basis of a future line of march.

When it comes to social issues like racism and sexism the SWN wouldn’t just “listen” - they’d filter out reactionary demands. That process of selection on the basis of Marxist politics, on the basis of theory, is key to the selection of any demand. Once you start to think about it the “we don’t have a programme, we listen!” is ideologically incoherent and intimately connected to the building of a disorganised, frenetic organisation.

Each branch is “listening” to different groups of workers and the consistent application of this philosophy leads to each area articulating its own interests. That’s why the SWN is divided into competing factions, each blaming the failings of individuals and refusing to find a programmatic reason for those failings.

You always need to build a path from minimum demands to maximum demands. When the left is made up of academics and students they have to be told to be careful and “listen to workers”. When the left is made up of workers and you say “don’t lead, listen” you disarm those workers. Context matters. Class matters.

The SWN’s Kieran Allen also berates those workers who read “Marxist textbooks”:

“If you want to see what that means in practice, have a look at how People Before Profit started. It began when Richard Boyd Barrett began agitating to keep Victorian baths in Dun Laoghaire for the people. It was never written in any Marxist textbook on strategy to ‘Raise the demand for Victorian baths’… Now remember what Marx did – or maybe you won’t remember. Marx was a student radical who read all the books he could about Hegel and Feuerbach. But guess what turned him into a revolutionary? It was when he took up an issue concerning peasants having a right to gather firewood for free. That was Marx’s break. That was when he stopped philosophising about the world and set out to change it.”

This is a disgusting attempt to deprive workers of theory. Marx never stopped studying capitalism. He wrote Capital many years after seeing peasants collecting firewood. The choice Kieran Allen offers is either sitting in a college philosophising or tailing the everyday concerns of working class people. It’s a bit rich for an academic, who gets paid to theorise, to tell working class people they don’t need revolutionary theory, that they should just get out and fight.

This political philosophy is damaging and is precisely the politics attacked by Lenin in “What Is To Be Done?” When workers necessarily need to theorise where do they turn? Don’t worry because SWN academics know how to write books and theorise! You see how this con works? Disarm worker leaders, deprive them of theory and when a position paper is needed the academics will write it.

Marxists are not “empiricists” - the “facts” are the surface appearance of the capitalist system. We have to go beyond the “facts”. Demands are constructed by analyzing capitalism and then tactics are about how you translate that into language workers understand on the basis of their current level of class consciousness and combativity.

The SWN reduce the Marxist method to “listening” to whatever the social movement you’re recruiting from is saying at any given moment and referencing those “facts” as the basis of ever changing demands. And the idea that Marx never wrote about saving a local swimming pool is just ridiculous.

Karl Marx wrote about not getting lost in day to day battles, they were a vital underpinning of all socialist activism but only a first step to winning workers to a wider political perspective. That never happens automatically. As Marx wrote on day to day battles:

“At the same time, and quite apart from the general servitude involved in the wages system, the working class ought not to exaggerate to themselves the ultimate working of these everyday struggles. They ought not to forget that they are fighting with effects, but not with the causes of those effects; that they are retarding the downward movement, but not changing its direction; that they are applying palliatives, not curing the malady.”

Lenin called those who used the SWN’s method “the petty bourgeois idealist method” of constructing demands. He wrote that this was about finding out what was in people’s “minds eye” at any given moment and bending your message to that. Instead Lenin made a deep analysis of the Russian economy and could predict for example that the Russian liberals, as factory owners, would jump into bed with the Tsar. This objective analysis informed a programme, demands and tactics. Social Democracy had traditionally used the minimum/maximum method. Your minimum programme was the demands you were making day to day that met the needs of workers, but you’d use the reputation you got fighting on the minimum demands to articulate maximum demands - the need for a revolution and a new kind of state, a workers state.

Shouting maximum demands from the sidelines is childishness. But minimum demands alone won’t lead to revolutionary conclusions unless you spell them out. The SWN argued that the Social Democrats forgot about the maximum demands and only organized around the minimum. Well then don’t forget to articulate the maximum!

If a programme is a set of promises made to the working class, outlining your line of march and intentions the SWN argument reduces itself to “Social Democracy broke their promises so there’s no point making promises!” This philosophy was evident in the refusal to publish red lines for government until forced to. The opportunist from below doesn’t want to be tied to any commitments beyond the immediate requirements of mobilising.

The SWN’s opportunism from below becomes opportunism from above because the argument that you simply “listen” and deduce your demands from the campaign of the moment easily translates into “what do voters want?” A clear example of this is that before the 2024 election Kieran Allen’s pitch for the PBP steering group was to call out “people who want to talk about revolution on the doors!”

An attack on workers in the Red Network. After the election he wrote a document stating that PBP has “an episodic relationship with the working class” and that the class basis of the average PBP activist meant they’ve a tendency to water down their politics and not talk about revolution! In the space of a few months, weeks or days they can throw out their line and do a complete 180 degree turn. But wait a few weeks. They’ll do another turn and another.

The SWN is divided between the North and South because in the North pure Cliffism and the mere tailing of immediate struggles raises a problem - politics in the North is undeniably mediated by sectarian political forms. This “tones down” the Cliffism of the Belfast branch. But they still vote with the SWN as a whole when it comes down to questions of principle - or posture at national meetings and then vote with the rest behind the scenes.

The problem in the SWN is often caricatured by SWN members themselves as requiring the removal of the old guard like Kieran Allen. But if you replaced him tomorrow with people with the same SWN politics the result would be the same. It’s not about personalities, it’s a political problem.

As long as the SWN dominates PBP it will never live up to its potential or “transition” to being a revolutionary socialist organisation made up of workers. Socialist politics isn’t merely the “expression” of working class interests, it has to set out to shape our class too. To win people. An organisation that blurs the lines between reform and revolution has traditionally been termed “centrist” by classical Marxists.

The SWN’s hero Leon Trotsky described centrism as follows: “In the sphere of theory centrism is impressive and eclectic. It shelters itself as much as possible from obligations in the matter of theory and is inclined (in words) to give preference to “revolutionary practice” over theory; without understanding that only Marxist theory can give to practice a revolutionary direction.”

Practice over theory? Sounds about right. Trotsky wrote: “The centrist always remains in spiritual dependence upon right groupings, is induced to court the goodwill of the most moderate, to keep silent about their opportunist faults and to regild their actions before the workers… Between the opportunist and the Marxist the centrist occupies a position which is, up to a certain point, analogous to that occupied by the petty bourgeoisie between the capitalist and the proletariat.”

The Hungarian socialist Lukacs described the problem arguing with opportunists while in a common organisation: “For if the war with opportunism is conceived exclusively as an intellectual conflict within the party it must obviously be waged so as to put the whole emphasis on convincing the supporters of opportunism and on achieving a majority within the party. Naturally, it follows that the struggle against opportunism will disintegrate into a series of individual skirmishes in which the ally of yesterday can become the opponent of today and vice versa. A war against opportunism as a tendency cannot crystallise out: the terrain of the ‘Intellectual conflicts’ changes from one issue to the next and with it changes the composition of the rival groups.”

One day you argue about a Cllr doing a deal, the next about wages, but the real issues never come to the fore. Hence the necessity of organising the Red Network to attempt to crystallize out the actual differences of political philosophy and not just get caught up in this or that example of opportunism. It’s not about individual moral failings. It’s a programmatic problem. Boundaries aren’t set by the party.

Lenin once said that the reason for the victory of the Russian revolution was that in no other country had the revolutionary left spent 20 years tearing the mask off of the petty bourgeois left. PBP is a centrist organisation that claims to have been “transitioning” for 20 years. The class basis of opportunism is the presence of the petty bourgeois in the Marxist left. We have to fight to build a socialist left that’s working class in form and in content, in ideas and in class composition.

The separation of the working class from the middle class is a necessary process of revolutionary socialist party formation. We want PBP to be a socialist organisation. The SWN are standing against that. What arguments are made by the SWN against PBP becoming a real socialist organisation?

The SWN argued it would be “formalism” to declare PBP a socialist organisation. But they are the ones engaged in formalism: PBP is a very small organisation of about 300 activists with about 2,000 passive paper members and roughly 50,000 voters. After 54 years in existence the SWN has about 150 activists North and South, the Red Network is 4 years old and has 42 members and RISE was formed in 2019 and has about 30.

All the networks self describe as “Marxist” - therefore it’s “formalism” to pretend PBP is something other than an organization of 300 activists most of whom self-proclaim to be Marxists. If we call it something other than what it actually is it gets “broader”? That’s precisely formalism. They want to appear bigger by merely claiming to be bigger.

But of course it would be formalism in a sense the SWN don’t mean - you cannot transform the petty bourgeois, opportunist, elements, mostly grouped around the SWN, into working class elements by waving a magic wand or simply changing the political programme. But a working class party can accept individuals from other classes only on the condition that the majority of members are working class and the programme of the party is working class. Opportunism from below is not a working class ideology no matter how many times they quote Marx.

We in the Red Network want to unite the socialist left but on the basis of clear revolutionary socialist politics. We want to put workers at the heart of organising on the left. We want to use struggle to win authority in our class and then use that to clarify the need for a revolution. We want to build “broad” - using mass united front movements, serious union work, community activism and election campaigns - to argue for socialism.

There has to be a battle on two fronts - against those who would sit on the sidelines spouting abstract Marxist theory and against those who while doing broad work fail to talk about the need for a revolution. To paraphrase Lenin: Those who don’t talk about revolution are traitors, those who only talk about revolution are fools!

Lenin’s conception of a revolutionary party was politically “narrow” but numerically “broad” - he understood that we should fight to win over all the best workers to socialism, tens of thousands. In Ireland the “vanguard” of the working class is fractured and atomised.

Lenin’s argument for a “merger” between socialists and the advanced workers requires uniting the fractured vanguard and winning workers to revolutionary politics. This will be a long, hard process of struggle and debate. Small streams will have to unite, argue, engage in common work, before we can get a mighty river. But unless the socialist left unites on the basis of clear revolutionary politics the project will fail time and time again.

The fight for a vanguard party is a fight for a politically strong but numerically broad party, a party with clear minimum demands that can mobilize workers and open them up to our maximum demands. Both have to be articulated.

Opportunism from below undermines the merger. Every time you lay down a line of bricks it pulls them back up. The decades of Trotskyist isolation from the working class after the Second World War was compounded by the impact of neoliberal years when the left retreated into the colleges. There is a constant questioning of Marxist first principles - the opportunist philosophy of the SWN runs counter to any effective party building. Therefore it needs to be challenged. We need to get back to the politics that Lenin took for granted.

To the far left outside PBP we say:

Talk to us Reds about a return to working class revolutionary politics. Many groups are engaged in dead end ultra leftism or performative posturing. Whilst we are critical of electoralism, we Reds understand that standing in elections is a vital means of promoting the socialist message and building a base. PBP has 50,000 voters who have stuck with PBP for many years. That working class base can be won to socialism. How do you propose doing that?

Most of the smaller groups on the socialist left are content to fester in self contained left bubbles. That’s a dead end. We want to win the left back to the politics of Lenin.

To any genuine Marxists trapped in the SWN we say:

It’s time to throw off the baggage of Tony Cliff and discard your organisation’s “opportunism from below”. It’s not a working class ideology. List the arguments of the reformist Mensheviks, Lenin’s rivals in the Russian socialist movement - they are the same as your arguments, can’t you ask why? Why did Lenin oppose such arguments? Why did Tony Cliff put their arguments into Lenin’s mouth?

They serve to disarm workers in the interests of the middle class. Overthrowing your old guard won’t change the core politics of your organisation. It’s not political to blame individuals like Kieran Allen instead of looking at their political philosophy, the philosophy of the SWN. This ideology is a trap and many of you are too valuable to the left to remain confused and trapped.

It’s opportunist to kick out your old guard without articulating a clear political difference. You should join the Red Network and commit to clear working class politics.

To non-affiliated PBP members we say:

Join the Red Network, we have a clear analysis of where the left is at, we are workers and we are fighting for revolutionary socialist politics. We are willing to fight within PBP for principled Marxist politics. If we lose that fight our path may take us elsewhere. But one thing is for certain, we will never, ever give up that fight - to unite the socialist left on the basis of clear revolutionary politics with an orientation towards mass struggle. We believe in the working class. We are working class.

We have a world to win, or lose.