New Left of Labour Political Party?
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I attended a “Zarah Sultana and friends” meeting yesterday where she was on a panel with the National President of the Bakers Union, a youth activist and ex-Labour ex-District Council Leader.
They all spoke for 15 minutes and there was only time for three questions afterwards.
The youth activist had some good points about leadership and global issues but their desired implementation did not stray form the usual leftism – better leaders, reparations, fairer national politics.
The Union Leader gave a rabble rousing speech urging a party that resembles late-1940s Labour, but with more accountable MPs. The meeting was in a brewery and he was the one who made the obvious joke about the proverbial piss up – a good speaker.
Zarah Sultana gave another rabble rousing speech which included lines about being called a socialist was a badge of honour and something to be proud of, but she didn’t define socialism and she of course means reforms, and not just wanting crumbs from the table – she also had some funny lines about the Labour Party being like a toxic ex. With all the talk about it being “Your Party” there is still a tone of her being a leader in power and supporters outside.
When it finished a whole bunch of SPEW members appeared with bundles of their paper and lined the exit. Various other groups handing out leaflets too but I did manage to pass out a few of our leaflet among the chaos.
Thanks for the meeting reports. It sounds like there’s a lot of energy and confidence and we’ll have to see if YP can maintain this momentum. We’ll also have to see if it leads to far left groups being weakened if lots of their members cross over to YP. The Green Party has tried to divert some of the left’s attention with all the media appearances of its new leader recently.
Another leftwing organisation responding to Your Party (UK). They want to replace one reformist party with another reformist political party.
https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2025/10/22/gtsv-o22.html
https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2025/09/19/aztj-s19.html
They are proposing Trotskyism, which is even worse, and it is similar to Stalinism, Leninism and all its variants, proven to be a total failure like the Social Democracy. The only real alternative to socialism in England and around the whole world is the World Socialist Movement/ Socialist Party
The WSWS site is run by one of the Trotskyist sects which have decided not to “enter” the new party — the Socialist Equality Party, one of the relics of the old WRP.
Our leaflet on the new party has not just been handed out in Stroud but also in Preston, Huddersfield and Merthyr. We are also planning to distribute it in Manchester, London, Cardiff, Doncaster, Brighton, Gillingham and other places.
Incidentally, here’s what Sultana was reported as saying in Merthyr on 25 October:
“The closing speech from guest speaker Zarah Sultan MP brought the house down. She said we shouldn’t just be talking about taxing the rich or nationalising a few utilities, but about replacing capitalism with socialism, a democratic economy under workers’ control organised for social need and ecological balance. We don’t just want a bigger slice of the cake, we want the bakery”.
Stirring stuff designed to bring the house down but the chances of the new party adopted that as its aim are nil and those of it actually campaigning for this less than that. In the end, its only us who are committed to campaigning just for socialism as a system based on the common ownership and democratic control of the means society needs to survive, with production directly for use not profit, and distribution on the principle of “from each according to their ability, to each according to their needs”.
ALB
Keymaster
The WSWS site is run by one of the Trotskyist sects which have decided not to “enter” the new party — the Socialist Equality Party, one of the relics of the old WRP.
———————————–There are Trotskyist sects all over the world, and the SEP is also in the USA, competing with the Republican and Democratic parties. They do not have any branches in China, but they have in Hong Kong; they do not have any in Cuba, but one member of the Central Committee of the CPC was a Trotskyist. They have not entered the New Party because they have not found any benefits for themselves
I read a lot of what is written on this forum and I follow your organization closely. I also follow this Trotskyist organization closely.
You say it is a sect, and I would like to know why you consider it so, or what your arguments are regarding your organization as well, since many also consider it a sect.That people (not just us) refer to Trotskyist groups as “sects” will be because there are so many groups claiming to be Trotskyist, even to be the legitimate continuation of the “Fourth International” that Trotsky set up in 1938 (there are at least four of them), with the differences between them unclear to outsiders. The comparison will be with the array of non-conformist Protestant sects from the 17th century onward, each claiming to be the true Christians.
True, we have been called a “sect” by members of the Communist Party and Labour Party as a way of not having to take our criticism of them seriously. The Communist historian Eric Hobsbawn even dismissed us a “conventicle”.
I understand, and for me, you are the ones who have made me understand what socialism is.
I read the World Socialist Web because they provide daily news from a left-wing perspective, and many of you quote them often.For the Trotskyists, Leon Trotsky is a god that can not be questioned; they have turned him into a religion, and he must be worshipped, and the same thing has been done with Lenin, and there are hundreds of Trotskyist groups around the world who have had a different conception of Trotskyism, and they have had their own disputes, like the evangelicals, all of them claim that they are the real trotsyists followers, in the same way that all evangelicals groups are the real followers of Jesus.
Many conceptions about Leninism and Trotskyism must be critically questioned, and we have done that, especially since Trotsky was the one with the least socialist knowledge of all the Bolsheviks. All religions are based on sectarian conceptions, and most Leninist groups are also based on sectarian conceptions. Lenin wrote around 42 volumes, and only a few of his works are important, and they are wrong too, including Imperialism, What is to be done, and the state and the revolution, and the worst one is about national liberation. All of them have been debunked by the Socialist Party, and we have proven that between Trotsky and Stalin, there were no essential differences, only a management style of how to oppress the workers
Their central conception, which is the permanent revolution, has been taken without being questioned because it was taken from Marx’s view about the failure of the German bourgeois revolution; it has nothing to do with skipping economic society toward socialism, the development of capitalism can not be skipped and socialism can not be established on economic backward society, and Lenin, without questioning it he also adopted it, therefore, their conception is only applicable to third world countries and it is also wrong too,
Some followers of Che Guevara are trying to apply his Maoist conception to developed countries like England, Germany or the US. His grandson said that those conceptions were wrong too, and he was an anarchist who lived in Mexico. And hundreds of Che Guevara sects have turned him into a god, and all his ideas are universally applicable, and there is a church in Bolivia for Saint Ernesto Guevara; all his conceptions are pure idealistic, and all who have followed him have failed, and they have only produced death, chaos and crisis, and we have also critically questioned his conceptions. He had no socialist conceptions at all; he only advocated one, which was a society without a monetary system, and he became the director of the Cuban Central Bank. In Argentina, there are hundreds of Guevara sects, and he is mainly worshipped because he was from Argentina, and Argentine workers rejected their conception during the last presidential election.
Mao was also turned into a god that can not be questioned, and his conceptions are universally applicable like the Jewish bible, and they followed him like a god figure, and all of them are like religious sects. I have dealt with all those sects, and I know how they are and what they advocate. And many people died in vain following those sects, and most of their groups were controlled by high school and university students without any fundamental socialist knowledge; they were minority groups confronting a power structure known as the state, and they were disbanded, and many groups vanished from the face of the earth.
The Socialist Party has not turned Marx, Engels, and socialism into a god that can not be questioned; we have a critical view about socialism/communism and Marx and Engels and our own organisation, and members are allowed to raise criticism on the organisation, even more, we have said that without Marx and Engels we could have created our own conception of socialism.
Those who are saying that we are a sect it is because we do not follow their uncritical point of view, and we do not follow their religion, their churches and their god, and we do not make an alliance with them. We can publish articles proving that Lenin and the Bolsheviks’ revolution was a failure, and they, without reading it and without questioning it, have rejected them; we do not do that; we publish and read some of their failures, and we take positive and negative points of view about their conceptions, and we accept whatever is correct.
I read the World Socialist Web because they provide daily news from a left-wing perspective, and many of you quote them often.
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We publish articles and pamphlets from other Leninist groups, including the Internationalist Perspective, the International Communist Current, Marxist Humanists and other Left communist groups, but they do not publish any of our articles.
I published several articles written by the WSWS about the origin of Human beings because they are correct.
We are open to ideas.I published two articles from the Internationalist Perspective about the war in the Middle East on a so-called Marxist forum, and they were rejected because they indicate that Hamas is part of the problem and they are the rulers of the Palestinians, but for them, Hamas is the real Palestinian resistance, their conception are based on the national liberation, in our article titled: Was Marx ever a Leninist, show where that wrong onception come from. They are intolerant.
I published two articles written by Martov, and one Trotskyist asked why I support right-wingers, and he had not read anything about Martov. Even more, they call themselves Leninists, and they have not read anything about Lenin
To expand a little more about sects and divisions among the left :
A participant wrote :That people (not just us) refer to Trotskyist groups as “sects” will be because there are so many groups claiming to be Trotskyist, even to be the legitimate continuation of the “Fourth International” that Trotsky set up in 1938 (there are at least four of them), with the differences between them unclear to outsiders. The comparison will be with the array of non-conformist Protestant sects from the 17th century onward, each claiming to be the true Christians.
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Leon Trotsky’s wife, Natalia Sedova Trotsky, left the Trotskyist movement in the early 1950s. She resigned due to her disagreement with the Fourth International’s political positions, particularly their acceptance of the Stalinist states in Eastern Europe as “deformed workers’ states” and their support for the Chinese Communist Party under Mao Zedong.
Sedova believed the Fourth International was persisting in errors and making concessions to Stalinism. She felt that defending the Stalinist regime of “barbarous oppression” was a betrayal of socialist principles.
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Key issues for her included the movement’s decision to categorise Soviet-dominated Eastern European countries as “deformed workers’ states” and their support for the Stalinist governments of China and North Korea. She made her break public in a letter to the leadership of the Fourth International and the U.S. Socialist Workers Party in May 1951.https://www.worldsocialism.org/spgb/socialist-standard/2000s/2009/no-1263-november-2009/workers-state-pull-other-one/ Workers state? Pull another one
Despite leaving the political movement, she continued to advocate for the rehabilitation of her husband’s reputation in the Soviet Union.
She never mentioned that her husband was killed by an ex-Trotskyist who had access to the fortress where he was living in Mexico, and he became a KGB agent, and then he became an exile in Cuba, and several Trotskyist sects supported the so-called Cuban Revolution, and before the 1959 Castroist revolt, the CPC had provided support to the dictatorship of Fulgencio Batista.
The concept of a deformed workers’ state also created a huge division among the Trotskyist movement.
In Argentina, where there are many Trotskyist groups, the movement has suffered many crises and internal divisions.
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The Maoist movement suffered a great division in Latin America when the Chinese government started to support the Chilean dictatorship and the Albanian tendency for themselves, a big chunk of the Maoist movement under the banner of anti-revisionism
All those internal struggles and divisions created several sects similar to the divisions within the evangelical churches and groups. In every neighbourhood, there is one church claiming to be the real Christian or the followers of Jesus, and the pastors are worshipped like divine gods.
Apparently, she also accepts the concept that the Soviet Union was a state capitalist economy, but she did not abandon Leninism and Trotskyism, similar to the stand of CLR James, who rejected Lenin’s vanguard party and the concept of state capitalism, but he did not reject Leninism.
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There was a Marxist Leninist organization that was dissolved by their own members in a national congress when they started to question Lenin, Stalin, Enver Hoxha, Mao and their own Leninist principles, there was not an agreement in the congress decided to disolve the organization, most Leninist groups are in disagreement before they start to be formed and internal they always have disagreement based on leadership and worshipping of personality.At the SPGB, we have raised criticisms against individuals, and it has not been dissolved. Since we do not have leadership, we do not have conflict over who is or must be the boss; its own members democratically govern it, and we do not have a central committee, although some outsiders have claimed that the executive committee is like a central committee.
And then, they are claiming that we are a sect, as I told a Leninist, to shoot the gun at yourself, not toward us.
We covered the YP’s member-only assemblies in Manchester and South London today with our new leaflet.
I don’t know about Manchester but in London most of the the minor Trotskyist sects were there — Worker’s Liberty, Counterfire, Workers Power, Spartacists, International Bolshevik Tendency, Socialist Equality Party, and Communist Fight (never heard of them before, but they want the YP to set up a workers’ militia). Also met John Hamilton, who was the Workers’ Party candidate for Mayor of Lewisham last year. He said he had joined the YP. I couldn’t get out of him whether this was as an individual or as their policy.
They all went in as YP members except those from the SEP (which has decided not to “enter” the new party). With the SWP, SPEW and Anti-Capitalist Resistance going in incognito, sounds like the meeting might have been a real bear garden.
Notable by their absence was the RCP. Apparently, according to their Trotskyists rivals, they have turned to the Greens as a better prospect. There seems to be some truth in that as the conclusion of this articles shows:
“We will continue to provide analysis and comradely critique of the Greens’ programme, and we look forward to continuing discussions with Green supporters and sympathisers – on the street, in workplaces and universities, and within the movement.”
https://communist.red/whats-behind-the-green-surge/
It might be shrewd turn on their part as more young people — their target — have joined the Greens than the YP. Certainly, most of those going into the assembly couldn’t be classed as young.
“Let a hundred flowers bloom; let a hundred schools of thought contend”. Mao. That expression of Mao applies to all the Trotskyist sects; every day, a new one emerges, and all of them compete against each other. The main problem of those groups is the concept of leadership; they are followers of leaders
3 of us gave out about 100 leaflets at Manchester yesterday.
Spartacists, RCG, Socialist Equality Party, SWP, budding leaders of the poor benighted proles all, were at it too, as was a new one on me Greater Manchester Left Caucus. Or was it Carcass?
According to Gary, who peered in en route to the lav, the hall seemed to be about half full – so about 250 attended.
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