The Machinic Enslavement of Programmatic Nihilism

1. Introduction

Tensions that have been lying dormant within the revolutionary socialist left in Ireland are being activated by the worsening domestic and international situation of right-wing dominance. Two main tendencies are on an imminent collision course. Social reality is forcing this confrontation, as a groundswell of clashing ideas arises. 

2.  Petit Bourgeois Pole

The Socialist Workers’ Network (SWN) of People Before Profit (PBP) are the dominant Trotskyist faction within the party. They are also programmatic nihilists, lacking a defined minimum-maximum party programme. (see note 1) Programmatic nihilism leads to the tailing of each progressive fluctuation because no issue is weighted any better than the other, hence there can be no ‘line of march’ with a specific focus towards which energy is directed. The idea to create a loose left-wing group without a programme, acting as a nexus of catch-all activism, and trusting the totality of spontaneous movements with their reformist demands to snowball into knowledge of Marxist theory, class consciousness and revolution upon entering conflict with the State as they converge is a mechanical materialist mistake. The role of conscious politics is reduced to nothing, and society is conceived of as marching towards revolution on its own, without the need for concrete intervention. At the same time, this leads to the recruitment of atomized individuals from the tailed progressive fluctuations, regardless of political consciousness, to ‘build the revolution’, which is a voluntaristic-idealist mistake. This is the dialectical rule of the unity and struggle of opposites and is called a ‘twin-error’. Two sides of the same coin!

The SWN activist thus comes into contact with a wide array of popular movements, but in a fragmented way. Programmatic nihilism is a vortex which attracts each particle it circulates near; a non-defined programme leads to the definition of the programme by outside forces. This is the vortex of tailing the liberal left and the ultra left, the dominant currents of popular movement, both expressing petit bourgeois politics. The ant mill of their constant talk of racism and then Malcolm X, LGBTQ+ rights and fox hunting, then erratically jumping on housing, Palestine and healthcare waiting lists, not to mention ‘ecosocialism’ and data centers. (see note 2) Out of nowhere, an incident derails the machine for days, and it is advertised everywhere that party TDs refused to answer a question from the right-wing Gript.ie newspaper, as if this is praxis. A heroic resistance! Who cares? Who does this speak to? Does this petulant and performative behaviour not alienate the other journalists, as well as, more importantly, the masses in Ireland, and was this taken into consideration in the pro- and contra- balance sheet of whether to undertake this action? The newly-recruited are introduced to this way of doing things, dare not question and therefore the only conclusion is that activists must revolve around ‘listening to the people’ from the ‘outside’, day-in-day-out, hence its externalism. Rather than deep organizing where the levers of collective power lie, sent out from the party to participate inside the community organizations, the trade unions and the student unions/grassroots groups, they are sent out to orbit already-ongoing happenings and recruit individuals from therein. Their organising is thus sporadic, engaged in and then dropped from moment to moment. With this comes the sole ideological coating broad-stroked enough to cover each progressive fluctuation of the people, which is moralism. Hence, external moralism rather than strategic intervention in the popular movement. 

The SWN bends, but does not direct. Like a tree towards the sun it stretches its party apparatus outwards to this or that, shapeshifting itself, to the imagined, not real, audience of the ‘working class’, as it tails the liberal left and the ultra left. This is a bad infinity. Ouroboros politics. Chasing one’s own tail(ism). A worker has a bowel movement and the SWN sets up across the street with party flags and binoculars to see if they take a shit! 

The long-term trend of tailing progressive movements rises beyond isolated incidents and leaves lasting patterns on the SWN. There is no programmatic protection, so this is a smooth process. The tailing of the liberal left imprints upon their activists a monomaniac (see note 3) division of labour based on single-issue movements, because no plane of consistency holds the disparate campaigns together under a ‘line of march’. Through ivory-tower language and identity politics the SWN finds a natural home in its non-formal amalgamation with the liberal left, reaching as far as fraternization with the Labour Party and its state-appendage, SIPTU, as well as NGOs, student unions, academia and so on. On the flip-side, the tailing of the ultra left Maoists then demands the utmost revolutionary posturing. Recruitment is from both trends. Stuck in immediatism, an eclectic mix of activists chasing progressive fluctuations results in kaleidoscope politics. Organizing is dragged towards this baseline, like crabs in a bucket, of competing protest movements. The subjective paralysis of the Occupy movement from the early 2010s finds expression anew, contoured by the structure of the party. Under such circumstances, it is solely the subjectivity of moralistic externalism continuously drawing down from progressive fluctuations which can hold together this territory, at the center of which programmatic nihilism has nested itself. Each issue is as important as the next. This is the party’s self-annihilation, dissolution into nothingness and fundamental anti-politics as it demands to be fed around the vortex with fresh causes. Activists, even those who were once revolutionary, cannot escape this trap. From the one side, there is a standstill on political action that would arise from a ‘line of march’, and on the other, an active recruitment drive to ‘march towards’ revolution. The sum total of popular movements, do not, in fact, crystallize into revolutionary socialism by their mere convergence. The structural sin of programmatic nihilism has thus determined the consciousness of the activists and this reciprocal emergence has established a deadlock, trapped within the liberal left and the ultra left without transcending either. This behaviour disorganizes, disassembles and dissipates social forces into the void, as a consequence of its inability to consciously intervene with a programmatic plan in politics.

In formal logic, the so-called ‘politician’s syllogism’ expresses the essence. 

1. We must do something.
2. This is something.
3. Therefore, we must do this.

This political birdsong is moralising preaching, tailist-parasitic attachment to social movements and abstract idealism. If campaigns are initiated, they are then dropped, so as to tail whatever is in mainstream discourse. Pragmatism becomes the watchword of compromise. “We are for everything good and for nothing bad!”, so proclaim the activists of the petit bourgeois left, and as such there is constantly an issue to tail, selected from whatever is in popular discourse at the moment. An ever-shifting stream of slogans, campaigns and policies at the whim of outside forces. The revolution of the party around the vortex of ever-changing external forces leads to a state of paralysis. The activists, being pulled towards this center of gravity, erratically jump from here to there, without recognizing that they are not mobilizing beyond an already-radicalized core. There is an appreciation for individual members of the party with outstanding activist credentials, whether unelected, councillors or TDs, but this is disconnected from the collective organization. The 50,000 or so voters of the party are thus not held together by a party programme, but by blips, whereupon by virtue of personality, activists drift away from the party’s demand to jump from place to place and anchor themselves in communities. ‘The people who complain about everything…’, is combined with ‘This person is a fantastic organizer… ’ as far as word on the street goes. This confusion creates dissatisfied members of the working class (including student (see note 4)) organic intellectuals, the advanced layers, who would not touch the party with a ten-foot pole despite being class conscious, ordinary members of the public who think it is an utter joke, and an appreciation for individual activists, reflecting the eclectic nature of the party. If activists secure a base in a community, this is done despite the party’s demand for programmatic nihilism, and its pull towards petit-bourgeois politics. The self-identification of the SWN with the ‘working class’ conceals the fact that it, in reality, is identification with the tailing of petit bourgeois attitudes, that is expressed by the liberal left and the ultra left, which have become substituted for the ‘working class’. 

This is where morbid symptoms emerge: various groups merge into a single stream of imagery shaped by SWN’s movement around the vortex. This stream fuses with a liberal left sub-pole of progressive trends, manifesting in repeated calls for ‘left unity’, alliances with reformist parties, centrist trade unions, liberal student unions, NGOs, and similar organizations. It is here that the demand for ‘No criticism!’ is raised too. (see note 5) SWN is unable to rupture from this pattern. This ‘left unity’ transcends united fronts and approaches quasi-fusion through shared interest as SWN covers for its inability to find roots amongst the masses with a focus on the liberal left being tailed. To put it simply, the SWN would not challenge the liberal left within the student unions (see note 6), trade unions (see note 7) and in the potential ‘Left Government’ coalition will not invoke its ‘red lines’ due to this shared interest, and so it goes above unity within a united front, and enters non-formal programmatic unity around which an orbit is established. SWN do not have a programme of their own hence the  dissolution into a liberal left amalgamation where talk of revolution, socialism and workers’ councils is downplayed, to the point of non-existence in public, tucked away to internal meetings in private. It is not possible to have a tightly-knit revolutionary pith buried deep inside the party and act like social democrats on the outside, as the latter will decay the former. The idea of socialism is annihilated by programmatic nihilism, and programmatic nihilism in theory is then annihilated by everyday practice, and for all intents and purposes the party is diluted to social democracy. 

At the same time, from the opposing orbit, the stream fuses with the ultra left sub-pole. A van is crashed onto the Shannon runway; red paint is thrown over a state department; an actionist from a pro-Palestine Maoist grouping is arrested, but the State machinery turns its wheels unhindered. The SWN rushes to the scene. ‘The movement is here, something is happening!’, so it speaks. Is it?  The Maoists are correct on the principle of applying pressure on the State, but because they are ultra-reluctant to let in new recruits due to ideological purity and hence refuse to cast their net in the wider movement, they cannot transcend the already-radicalized core either. The ‘security culture’, an anarchist ultra left import across the entirety of the revolutionary socialist left, intensifies the paranoia constricting of the movement … it had occurred to no one, it seems,  that the best defence is absolute openness on the way to a mass movement. The ‘anti-fascist’ scene pretends-play the 1936 Battle of Cable Street, shouts ‘Nazi!’ at thousands of working class people, so dances with the minuscule petit bourgeois far-right in Ireland, and the SWN stands next to them.

It is also here that the Socialist Party (SP) attaches itself to the assemblage. The SP, posturing to the leftwards of the SWN but rightwards of the Maoists but acting the same, adds to this clamour of streaming imagery, through their front group ROSA, and protest the ‘manosphere’, ventilate of ‘Trumpism’, uncritically praise and revive the ghost of #MeToo without understanding the implications of their positions (see note 8) and expend considerable energy on making sure no one touches the breasts of the Molly Malone statue. As if touching the private parts of statues has not been a favourite pastime of humanity for millenia due to its inherent transgression! A hammer mill of cultural events, everything must be subsumed under this ‘feminist’ framework where all phenonema is patriarchal, misogynist, sexist and contributes to rape culture and so on… which is mirrored in their wider belief that ‘that civil liberties, elections, courts, all bourgeois democratic forms, are a gigantic put-on, a fantastic manipulation’ (Camejo 1970). This totalizing drive is typical of those situated around left-deviationist tendencies. The world is in neverending free fall. Reality has been disemboweled, substituted for by abstracted framework, rather than engaged with through the lens of class struggle. The subject’s perception is directed by an impersonal force that has taken on a life of its own. 

The SP is similar to the SWN except that (1) there is an increased tendency to organize action for the sake of action and (2) some of it is externalized in (a) front group ROSA, then there is (b) core group, and to this attaches (c) ‘hidden arm’ of trade union work in Unite where activists conceal their political identities and (3) the rhetoric is stronger, due to the disagreement about ‘Left Government’. Yet, the progressive imagery flows as one stream. All in all, an eclectic construction where the disparate arms of the party apparatus are not linked organically via consistent politics, but go off and tail in their own silos, (a) and (b) liberalism/ultra leftism whereas (c) the trade union bureaucracy. The Revolutionary Communists in Ireland (RCI) flanks the SP/ROSA even further from the left but the Maoists from the right, and like the Oracle of Delphi atop Mount Parnassus, prophecies about the ‘end of the world as we know it’, through the ‘crisis’, uncertainty’, and ‘storm’ of capitalism. Both the SP and RCI have programmatic planning in theory, but this is annihilated by their programmatic nihilism in practice, as they too tail the liberal left and ultra left, in varying mixes, for recruitment. Their programmes are just for show. Let us note their participation in the April 26th 2025 United Against Racism (UAR), a front group of SWN, counter-demonstration as an example. 

The SWN is thus torn between social democracy and revolutionary adventurism. What remains: social democracy with revolutionary aesthetics. Dialectical! This engineered monstrosity is spectacular … it stands for nothing, yet does everything, it is nowhere, but everywhere…. no one runs it, yet it runs. There is an inherent paranoiac over-drive in this sort of construction, the speed of its oscillation between orbits, the tension between its sub-poles… its whack-a-mole of where revolution might come from, and when, anytime, anyday, anywhere! Consider the line of thought of the fated UAR-SWN counter-demo on April 26th 2025 which insisted on using ‘racism’ as a rallying call, rather than anti-government messaging, best summed up as follows: “Everything that we can say, we must say, everything that we can do, we must do, because resistance to injustice is a moral task!”, without weighing the costs and benefits, or as (Camejo, 1970) says, “Anything! Just do something, everybody! For Christ’s sake!” because “it’s 11:59” to the imminent collapse of the world through a takeover one way or the other, socialistic or fascistic; and then see that the SP/ROSA expresses this through their ‘feminism’ and the RCI the same in their prophecies. (see note 9) Socialism and fascism, hinging on a coin’s toss, moments away, ever approaching, endlessly postponed. This is the paranoiac drive arising from moralist externalism, which itself arises from tailism of the liberal left and the ultra left, which in turn arises from the vortex of programmatic nihilism, whether claimed (SWN) or unclaimed (RCI, SP/ROSA), all circulating around itself, all eating itself, all amalgamating into itself… For the activist, it is machinicial enslavement; for the onlooker, it is a confused caricature; for the Right, it is a blessing. 

The Right can point to the entirety of it as ‘Liberal’, and has done so for issues such as (1) Hate Speech Legislation and (2) Response to Anti-Immigration Protests. In these cases the SWN, were swept, to greater or lesser extent, by the liberal left or the ultra left, all expressing a preference for progressive aesthetics over substantive revolutionary class positions. The dissent expressed by the SWN for (1) was meek in the face of the pre-existing ‘left unity’, so as not to offend. It should have been forceful and tapped into the on-the-ground energies of the working-class reflex of “The State Won’t Tell Me What To Say!”, later taken up by the Right in political expression. It seems these fellow activists have forgotten that the capture of these energies and their left-wing redirection is one of the primary tasks of revolution! (see note 10) Revolutionary socialists should not be afraid to ridicule liberalism’s excesses for populist reasons. On (2), the SWN promptly enjoined itself with the liberal left and the ultra left, with the ‘anti-racist’ ontology, the ‘fascist takeover’ discourse and the ‘militant anti-fascism’ game. In general, the open attractor of programmatic nihilism, its spinning vortex, sucks in and expunges a constant stream of off-putting culture war signifiers, call-out culture, cancel culture, purity culture, privilege discourse and the likes on the back of identity politics, which it subsumes from the liberal left as well as from the ultra left. 

This convergence is hardly surprising. As per (Camejo, 1970), the liberal left and the ultra left are two sides of the same coin, sharing a distrust in the masses of the people. The liberal left and the ultra left imprint themselves on the SWN. From this point on, rather than speak to the imperfect masses, SWN begin with a preconceived idea of what type of politics they want to practice, and recede into a bubble of purity. The masses, rather than being seen as agents of change, are engaged with as passive voters. This is an outwards projection of politics, rather than politics which intervenes alongside the masses. This bubble of purity is maintained by the continued tailing of the liberal left and the ultra left. The tailing of the liberal left and the ultra left started in the first place because of programmatic nihilism. And so on and so forth! The party apparatus can no longer be directed at will; it is directed by an impersonal force, the momentum of the vortex, puppeted by an invisible hand of bureaucratic self-preservation. If it worked for us so far, why change course? From the vantage point of the SWN, as such, the real movement is the petit bourgeois pole, but what is missing is the wider working class. The entrenchment of the petit bourgeois pole alienates the wider working class from the SWN. The SWN are compelled to use illusory explanations where the petit bourgeois pole is substituted for the wider working class. Let us quote (Day, 2025):  

Two points of discussion following the rally was the claim that the anti-immigration march represented the ‘true’ feelings of Ireland’s working class today and that the counter did not adequately include the working class. This simply isn’t the case. Class is not determined by appearance.  It’s not about how you dress, where you live, or even your accent. At its core, class is about your relationship to the means of production. Working-class people are those who must sell their labour in order to survive – that is what defines them.

What this argument was likely trying to highlight was not so much a question of class, but rather the fact that the anti-immigration rally was attended by predominantly white Irish men drawn from a more despairing, demoralised section of the working class. It’s absolutely essential that we engage with these individuals, and I’ll address this in a moment, but conflating their identity with class is, at best, a misunderstanding and, at worst, dangerously reactionary. It perpetuates an outdated and harmful stereotype of the ‘white working man’ –  a narrative I thought we had long left behind.

The key point I want to emphasise here is that being working class is not determined by identity alone. You can be trans and working class. You can be brown-skinned and working class. You can speak differently, dress differently, and still be working class. Identity is important, but we must not lose sight of the fact that class is defined by material conditions. Crucially, this means that the majority of people in the world today are working class. We are the majority, and we hold immense power when we recognise this. It only benefits the 1% at the top to divide us based on identity.

The working class in Ireland, and globally, is diverse. It is queer, it is brown, it includes migrants. The narrow focus in some places on the ‘correct’ identity often reflects more about their own biases than the true dynamics of class in modern Ireland. When we confront the rise of the far right, we cannot afford to throw the most marginalised members of our society under the bus just to placate those whom the far-right claim are important

It is a hard sell that the SWN’s demographics adequately include the working class. The SWN recruits from the university strata. The recruits are also often people who have not organically participated in community organizing; would they have, the confrontation between the desired effect of their politics and the real outcome would force an adjustment to focus around material, rather than abstracted thinking. The university strata is a slice of the working-class, but the latter cannot be substituted for by the former, via an abstract sleight of hand. It is simply a fact that the SWN is concretely lacking in the disenfranchised strata who marched on April 26th 2025 as well as other disenfranchised sections of the working class, be they migrant workers (18.5%) or local workers (81.5%). There is a qualitative unity between these strata by virtue of the relationship to the means of production being the same for 99% of people in Ireland, but also a quantitative difference between them within the aforementioned unity in terms of education, income, life expectancy and so on. Diversity of a certain kind is secured, whereas diversity of another kind is missing. There is nothing deterministically negating the capacity of the university strata to practice politics that transcends the petit bourgeois. However, the SWN refuses to speak to the disenfranchised strata in a way where understanding is a possibility… having been separated by its enslavement to the liberal left and the ultra - left … and thus stays within its own strata, repeating the cycle ad infinitum. Given that there has been a decaying inner-group democracy in the party combined with the current strata it has locked itself into recruiting from, there is nothing to anchor the movement to a different strata by switching from programmatic nihilism to programmatic planning, and thus their practice will not readjust according to material conditions; recruitment from the same layer continues. The number of activists continuously hover around 300, for two decades, as the turnover rate is high, due to the burnout caused by tailism. (see note 11)

The university strata should not be mechanically associated with petit bourgeois politics. They can hold politics which can cast a wider net, as much as the disenfranchised strata can hold politics which are petit bourgeois. However, this strata is primed for the tailist whack-a-mole politics espoused by these groups - did the students at University College Dublin (UCD), for instance, weigh whether participation in the forum with an opposing viewpoint might have been better strategy than cancelling the anti-immigration event on May 8th 2025, because it makes the left appear anti- free speech? Hardly! Despite the left already being known for its attempts to restrict free speech, and there is a dire need to reverse this perception, this was not considered. Or that it would give further momentum to the event? A foregone conclusion, rather than careful consideration! No one disputes the need to deplatform fascists. However, as previously recognized, the right-wing is increasingly being lumped in with fascism, which is a categorical error. 

3. In Motion

We cannot be for “everything good, and for nothing bad!”, in equal measure. To be for everything is to be for nothing. Social reality places the demand upon us to campaign on what works. As per dialectical materialism, society cannot be mechanistically put into ‘motion’ by activism, it is already in ‘motion’, at which point we can intervene in it. This ‘motion’ is either on-the-ground, in peoples’ attitudes, or it has already been activated and found political expression. In both cases, intervention is possible. To organize on commonly-held demands is ‘independent mass action’ (Camejo, 1970) which will drag the entirety of society to the left. Revolutionary realpolitik demands this sort of compromise. It does not demand to abandon principles, however. The truth is that there are demands which are of the utmost importance but around which a mass movement cannot be built, for instance trans rights. It is only through deferring trans rights for now until we hold political capital built around other demands that we can wield our future power for this specific minority. ‘Deferring’ does not mean take out of the programme; ‘deferring’ in this sense is meant merely to illuminate that it makes little sense to mobilize around this issue, even if non-landing attempts are made to bridge it with the broader struggle, in the sense of ‘Trans rights are workers’ rights!’. And then: ‘Migrants’ rights are workers’ rights!’ and ‘Traveller rights are workers’ rights!’ and ‘Animal rights’ are workers rights!’ and so on and so forth leads back to the same ant mill of progressivism where everything has to be tackled at once and pragmatic prioritization is disavowed. Trans rights cannot be used as a focus for mobilisation, but the party can still produce articles, hold talks, do fundraisers and so on. This is because there is little chance of any sort of mass movement that will enable us to pass the much-needed legislation on trans healthcare. This was seen when an attempt to boycott the Irish Times failed to enact a moment of ‘rupture’, as the participants remained limited, and in fact this way backfired on the left’s ability to put forth its arguments on various issues in the media. The point is that while the position expressed here may seem counterintuitive, it is actually what is the most effective in the long-run for trans rights! To hook into the immediate experience of the masses of people in a populist way is the initial step on the actual path to deal with all of these issues; a campaign only has measurable impact if it strikes a chord with mass mood, otherwise it falls flat. It does not make sense to ‘appeal’ to the morality of the masses for trans rights as it is well-known that the population hold a mix of progressive, confused, apathetic or reactionary views towards this issue; this is wasted energy as there is no strong basis for class unity. The same can be said for migration, open borders and ‘anti-racism’ in general. It can thus be summed up: popular issues now, unpopular issues in motion, socialism ultimately. In the current conjecture, what is needed is left-populism around core issues of cost-of-living, housing and wages, as well as Palestine. These movements can be non-socialist, and necessarily so. However, our intervention in them should be with a socialist outlook: 

(1) Embedded in institutions via deep organizing for years, not orbiting them and their protests. Then find nexuses, ruptures and moments. This flips the entire process on its head. Whereas SWN are recruiting atomized individuals from tailed protests, this would be the organizing of collective individuals in specific localities towards action;

(2) Building the party with timely intervention in political discourse based on the a minimum-maximum programme and with strong delineation between revolutionary groups and liberal groups, online or offline, in media, at door knocking and so on;

(3) Only sparsely calling actions, only when there is energy to do so, only when there is mass mood to do so, only after weighing whether their benefits outweigh their costs. Do not do it just for the sake of it;  

(4) De-prioritizing attending random protests for the sake of it, while attending ones that are strategic; 

(5) Writing political theory, pamphlets, articles which directly deal with real-world conditions through a Marxist lens, in local, national and party newspapers;

(6) Recruiting working-class (including student) organic intellectuals from each locality but not in a way to drone them into burnout-inducing repetitive tailist work as the SWN do; inherent to this is a test of political consciousness. Stop with the tendency of having 30  activists out for a random issue one day and then the same people for another issue the other day, and so on and so forth. Much better to send out those 30 activists on their own for years into their communities, universities and workplaces, let them build a base, and not haul them here and there to protest.

(7) There should be an electoral strategy. This should be pragmatic, focused and community-rooted. The SWN’s equal treatment of all issues was mirrored in their attempt at frantically searching for, and running a candidate, without regards for political consciousness, in every constituency at the 2024 Irish general election. 

If done right, this will mean that people with reactionary views on various other issues will move on the popular issues, standing side by side with comrades of a higher political consciousness, and this should be welcomed with open arms. This is the dirty world of revolutionary realpolitik! It means that we are meeting the people where they are at. A shift in subjectivity will develop amongst newcomers throughout the course of the struggle. At the moment, there exists a layer of class-conscious advanced workers, who are alienated by the petit bourgeois trends of the SWN, so the more reactionary voices within the working-class are dominating the conversation. This is the way of involving these organic intellectuals, empowering them and letting them lead the movement. At this point, organic anti-transphobia, anti-racism and anti-patriarchy develops because it is tied together by the universal characteristic of class, which is the primary field upon which these differences are made to dissolve as political consciousness increases in the leftwards shift (“The ruling-class seeks to divide the working-class across identity lines, but see comrades, we are part of one fight!”). Difficult conversations will be had, with each and all. The hook, however, has to be libidinal, emotional and simple. The slogans should be rooted in the material world and non-abstract, that is to say, achievable. As per the logical conclusion, these are, in fact, conscious socialist interventions in focused single-issue campaigns that do not converge into the kaleidoscopic abstracted multi-issue amalgamation as a purity-test platform to which all participants must subscribe to at the outset (e.g. “Stop racism, transphobia, sexism, imperialism and capitalism and so on!”). To quote (Camejo, 1970): 

Now, if we want to build a movement against the Vietnam war, it cannot, by definition, be multi-issue. That’s like saying we want a single-issue movement that’s multi-issue. The “multi-issue” antiwar movement is the trick which is the key to how the liberals and the ultraleftists can get together organizationally, politically, socially, etc, get married, and live happily ever after.

[…]

Just think of a strike situation. When there is a strike for higher wages where a big struggle takes place, masses come into motion and people begin to question all types of things. What’s the response among the workers, after a single-issue strike, to someone who says, “Look, none of the Democrats and Republicans supported our strike. Yet we voted for them last year.”

Thus, praxis needs to be imbued with the ‘line of march’ of ruthless pragmatism that narrows the focus on building institutional party power through participation in movements on commonly-held demands. Movements can be mass, and the party can remain programmatically clear throughout its participation in them, a distinction that tailists blur. Without a line, a spiral. The development of revolutionary socialist consciousness will take place not through automatic convergence of any and all movements, but through conscious intervention, in a focused manner. With this method, we can cease to organize ill-fated events such as the April 26th 2025 UAR-SWN counter-demonstration, and instead, tackle issues in a deep-rooted way. 

4. Revolutionary Pole

What then, is the other pole? Against the  petit bourgeois pole stands the revolutionary pole. There is a striking difference in carry-on. This is the pole of patient, organic and measured work in places where true levers of power lie. These places are the (1) working class housing areas reachable by community organizing, (2) workplaces reachable by trade unions and (3) universities reachable by student unions and grassroots groupings. (see note 12) From amongst the masses of people in (1), (2) and (3), it is the truth that this power also lies with those who have never heard of what a pronoun is, who have questions about migration and who think it is funny to touch the breasts of Molly Malone. These ordinary people do not fit the aesthetic of the petit bourgeois left, yet are feeling the immediate squeeze of the ruling mode of production, in the cost-of-living, housing crisis and low wages, and are on average pro-Palestine. “We can (and must) begin to build socialism, not with abstract human material, or with human material specially prepared by us, but with the human material bequeathed to us by capitalism. True, that is no easy matter, but no other approach to this task is serious enough to warrant discussion” (Lenin, 1920). This pressure of the domestic and international situation of right-wing dominance thrown a wrench into the workings of the petit bourgeois pole, and against it, the revolutionary ideological pole rises:

• Lasair Dhearg correctly deviates from the liberal left and at its meeting on the 24th of May 2025 launches its migration policy deals with the concerns of the working-class in a comprehensive fashion, with sober analysis, without liberal language and which pushes to the left; we believe there are some contradictory points in the policy but hope to participate in this ongoing discussion.
• The Socialist Voice, newspaper of the Communist Party of Ireland, runs an article on the liberal’s use of language around the migration issue; 
• Red Network, the smallest faction of PBP, expresses its discontent with the moralising tendencies of the liberal left in multiple articles and clearly adopts an ‘in motion’ attitude and opposes socialist participation in a ‘Left Government’ (only external support on a case by case basis); 
• Social Rights Ireland criticises the April 26th 2025 counter-demo;
• Connolly Youth Movement consistently holds a programmatic focus on community organizing; 
• Dublin Communities Against Racism (DCAR) and Community Action Tenants’ Union (CATU) attempt to embed themselves in local areas. 
• Éirígí
• Tromlach

If one grouping merges around the petit bourgeois pole, it is clear another merges around the revolutionary pole. At first, this is done not in a formalized fashion, but as a convergence. One pole runs around like headless chickens, and the other tries to relate to the immediate experience of the working class and anchor themselves in.

5. References

Camejo, Peter. 1970. “Peter Camejo Archive. Liberalism, Ultraleftism or Mass Action, June 14, 1970.” Marxists.org. 1970. https://www.marxists.org/archive/camejo/1970/ultraleftismormassaction.htm.

Day, Alexandra. 2025. “‘Let No Irishman Throw a Stone at the Foreigner.’” REBEL. April 28, 2025. https://rebelnews.ie/2025/04/28/let-no-irishman-throw-a-stone-at-the-foreigner/.

Johansson, Madeleine. 2025. “Cllr Madeleine Johansson Reply to People before Profit HQ.” Rednetwork.net. 2025. https://rednetwork.net/articles/2025/04/cllr-madeleine-johansson-reply-to-people-before-profit-hq/.

Koenig, Robin, and Cian Prendiville. 2025. “PBP AGM 2025: Biggest Ever AGM Debates Strategy for Era of Extremes.” Rupture. March 18, 2025. https://rupture.ie/articles/pbp-agm-2025.

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Note 1: Minimum demands are those that can be achieved while the ruling class is in power and maximum demands are those that can be achieved once the working class is in power. 

Note 2: ‘Ecosocialism’ and data centers are from the RISE network, a minority faction within PBP, and this is their most visible contribution, integrated into the ant mill.

Note 3: Monomaniac = Interested in one thing.

Note 4: It is memorable, for instance, that at the peak of Students4Change, a multi-tendency socialist group headquartered at Trinity College Dublin, the membership of around 130 contained merely a few PBP activists. 

Note 5: PBP’s AGM held on the 1st and 2nd of March 2025 voted to “‘discourage’ external polemics” (Koenig and Penderville, 2025). They also banned steering group minority members from external polemics.

Note 6: Including its confederated version, the Union of Students in Ireland (USI).

Note 7: Including its confederated version, the Irish Congress of Trade Unions (ICTU), as recently demonstrated by the soft response to the weak  ‘moment of reflection’ campaign held on June 4th 2025.

Note 8: The experiment of putting this slogan into practice in the present day by the radical-liberal aberration of the ‘rapist effigies’ campaign at Trinity College Dublin, which sought to weaken due process because ‘everyone is to be believed’, ‘protect survivors not rapists’, ‘everyone is on the side of the patriarchy’, is well-known…

Note 9: It might be humorously remarked that the Trotskyists already suffer from the ‘paranoia of the icepick’ and thus have a tendency to be insular.

Note 10: An example of such détournement can be found in (O’ Toole, 2022) on Ukrainian refugees and the housing crisis.

Note 11: e.g. “Many of the people who joined through the Palestine movement were put into a PBP led campaigning group called “Action For Palestine” which degenerated into a small group taking small scale direct action with many leaving the party after a period” (Johansson, 2025).

Note 12: Naturally, via electoral politics too, running for local and national office, and building around the constituencies.