Socialist Register (SR) is an annual publication that is a bit of an institution on the left. Like the useful present you look forward to getting from your favourite uncle each Xmas. Ralph Miliband (Environment minister Ed’s dad) and John Saville saw its role as trying to develop a ‘political space that was neither attached to Leninist parties nor beholden to social democratic illusions’.

Leninists had not won a significant mass base in the working class and we know what has happened to the social democratic parties. The failure of Podemos (Spain) and Syrizia (Greece) shows the gravitational pull of capitalist states and parliamentary institutions that can re-absorb radical political insurgencies.

Contributors to this substantial tome mostly deal with the rise and decline of new left populist parties/movements in Europe and in Latin America. They also discuss possible ways forward for the left.

We need to lift our heads above the action of today’s struggles and discuss strategy – how can we build a socialist alternative that breaks with social democratic or populist reformism but recognises some of the limitations of classical Leninist projects. This book is not a bad reference point for that debate.

The Register editors (p xiii) recognise the battle for serious reforms must aim to disturb the balance of the system, and maintain the momentum toward something greater. Much of the revolutionary left would call this the transitional method, originally developed by the Trotskyist movement.

We would agree with this method and SR’s conclusion that elections are never enough, you need a dynamic mass movement. However, the aims of this movement are not just to back up a workers government or occupy the political institutions but to develop new forms of democratic participation within and outside this state. 

Can workers just take over the existing state?

Socialist Register’s position in the preface sets out a rather unspecific idea of combining institutional and external struggles. Workers should try to avoid and not prepare for an inevitable, direct confrontation with a centralised state apparatus that will defend to the death the interests of the capitalist class. The writers accept this might happen but suggest that the working class is doomed in advance:

It is politically remote that a call to insurrection would ever find mass appeal in a decisive moment of revolt; and even if it did, the idea of directly confronting the terrifying coercive powers of the modern state was unthinkable

p xiii

One problem here is that it implies the confrontation we are talking about is purely a militarist call to arms whereas it is more likely that the crisis will be mass revolt involving strikes, occupations , community self organisation and so on. The question of physical force is raised as a defence of workers’ gains against a ruling class counteroffensive. It is not a minority putsch.

Those ‘terrrifying coercive powers of the state’ have to be carried out by human beings, often by people connected to the working class. Every revolutionary crisis we have ever seen leads to splits in the repressive apparatus e.g. in Portugal in 1974. Just repeating the mantra about combining parliamentary intervention and mass mobilisation does not deal with the reality that the ruling class will resort to extra parliamentary means to stop a revolution.

Even a mass strike like the miners in 1984/5 was defeated partly by the use of the repressive apparatus of the state.. Agreed, we need new forms of mass democratic participation but what do these bodies do when the state calls the police to reoccupy a factory or restore order in a neighbourhood.

This third way approach of SR rejects the notion of a revolutionary crisis and a period of rupture. The editors may criticise the failure of gradualism in Labourism but surely they then adopt a rather more radical gradualism attuned to the need to avoid confrontation with this unassailable, invincible state?

Questions for the revolutionary left

Even supporters of the need for a revolutionary ecosocialist party should not think they have all the answers either. What is the role of the party in relation to these new democratic forms of workers control and self government? Do we think we need a single revolutionary party?

Rigid models of a united working class requiring a single party have partly led to the horrors of the Stalinist regimes. How do we maintain an independent judiciary and system of law protecting individual rights? 

This book also discusses how new left mass parties can combine socialists from a Labourist tradition with Leninists along with many other non-aligned people. Such parties like Podemos (Spain) or Syrizia(Greece) failed to maintain political independence from Social Democratic governments that do not challenge neo-liberal capital.

More radical currents inside these parties failed to win a majority. Given the formation of Your Party (YP) with all its travails, the question of how you build such united fronts of a special type is crucial. Already there is a difference on the Left about how full a socialist programme YP should adopt.

We cannot do justice to every contributor to the book. We will focus on those we found most relevant to the debates on the left today.

Problems of Left governments

Panigiotis Sotiris’s article on the possibility or not of ‘left governments’ is very good on the key strategic questions. He takes us through classic texts by Marx and Lenin as well as modern Marxists like Richard Seymour or Nicos Poulantzas. He defends the idea of a transitional programme that makes a bridge between responding to the current needs of workers and a direct challenge to Capital (p 13).

Sotiris also supports the idea a rupture as a necessary condition for real reforms: ‘implementing reforms today can only be an institutionally violent process’. Correctly, he argues any process of profound transformation does not abstract itself from the use of existing apparatuses but these are presented as a transitional, emergency use.

New left populist forces like Podemos liked to use the formula ’neither right nor left’ and hesitated to place the working class as the key protagonist in any real transformation. Sotiris, on the other hand, does not agree and rejects ‘left populist optimism regarding the possibility of discursively constructing a people’. In practice this meant Podemos neglected intervention in the workplaces and constructing community bases in favour of electoral projects centred on its leader, Iglesias’s, media expertise. 

One obstacle to socialist change is how capitalist ideology has been so successful in presented its economic system as the only possible historical horizon. This is why any left government with a strategic vision has to:

Expand the free provision of public services, nationalise part of the infrastructure and enhance the development of forms of self-managed and co-operative production

p 22

Like the NHS such arrangements provide material experiences where the iron hand of capital is absent or at least tightly controlled. Of course as we have seen with the dismantling of the post war settlement by Thatcher such a combination of economic relations cannot be stabilised for a long time and has to be conceived as part of a strategy of rupture.

New openings for British Left

Michael Calderbank and Hilary Wainwright address the strategic dilemmas for socialists in Britain following the end of the Corbyn project. They provide an accurate chronicle of how Starmer led a successful offensive against the left leading to its current weakness inside Labour.

They are good on the legacy of Corbynism. Unlike many triumphant analysts in the mainstream media they recognise that the disparate transformative practices at the base of Corbynism have not disappeared and that the defeat Starmer inflicted on the left ‘might be much less absolute and definitive than Stamer’s circle believes’.

Their question about whether the Greens would be ‘capable of responding to Labour’s lurch to the right by developing its own trade union links’ has been answered by a huge surge in its membership to over 180,000, many of whom are active in their unions.

Your Party now exists with over 55,000 members so the other part of their speculative question about the emergence of a new left has been answered positively. Finally the writers were prophetic when they refer to the contradictions of some of the Gazan independent MPs with the ‘class politics’ of Corbynism. 

Understanding the ‘pink tide’ in Latin America

Jeffrey Webber’s contribution on Latin American left populism particularly deals with Bolivia. His detailed analysis cuts though some of the uncritical cheer leading of the pink tide governments in recent decades.

He argues that Ernest Laclau’s theory of populism in which personal leadership is forged through a particular discursive rapport with the people is an obstacle to real understanding. You also have to place the rise of left populism in the context of the world market and such phenomena as a country’s commodity prices. He provides us with a sophisticated five level analysis (p165):

1. Crisis of hegemony – levels of social mobilisation of politically excluded labouring classes cannot be contained by the existing political institutions
2. State as arbitrator of class struggle – it contains social conflict and establishes conditions for renewed capitalist accumulation albeit with concessions to workers and peasants
3. Asymmetrical multi-class coalition – the capital-labour contradiction is displaced and classically reformist themes of integration and redistribution come to the fore. The people/nation are pitted against the oligarchy and/or imperialism
4. Mobilises broad popular support, on the basis of top-down, controlled inclusion. Antagonistic sectors are co-opted, self-organising is gradually neutered
5. Contains a self-undermining paradox – mobilisations carry the leaders to power but once there they undermine workers and peasants self-organisation

Some of this analysis could also apply to reformist political movements in Europe.

And the rest of the contributors…

The above were the stand out contributions. However there is a useful history of the difficulties of the radical left in Portugal over the last twenty years or so by Catarina Principe. A fascinating article by Umut Ozsu informs us about international law and how the Israeli government has benefitted from its failure to contain the genocide against the Palesinian people Other articles outline the rise of the AfD in Germany (Ingar Solty) and of late fascism and the Turkish regime (Sebnem Oguz).

The experience of the radical Barcelona En Comu movement is described by Charnock, Mansilla nd Ribera-Fumaz. Milei and the anarcho-capitalist road in Argentina are dissected by Ruth Felder and Viviana Patroni. Ayyaz Mallick discusses the new conjuncture in Pakistan. Two articles on America deal with inequality and Black Americans (Toure Reed) and Nick French takes a look at the US Left’s rank and file strategy in the unions. Feyzi Ismail discusses the Climate movement, the Suffragettes and the meaning of militancy. Finally Arun Gupta provides a contemporary history of the US Palestine solidarity movement.

The 2025 Socialist Register provides socialists with a wide-ranging and illuminating volume of articles dealing with many of the key strategic dilemmas of our time. 

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