join the tendency · popularpower@protonmail.com
Organising for Popular Power is an anticapitalist basebuilding tendency. Our goal is to popularise our vision of socialism from below, achieved through the active organising of the mass member.
How are we organising?
Our main effort is the Lighthouse Project: a practical programme to show, not tell, what the tendency thinks mass socialist organisation should be doing.
As part of the Lighthouse project, we’re hosting a weekly organiser-to-organiser group call where branches get to talk about their organising, hear a presentation from an organiser to inspire them and prompt discussion, and then some action thinking.
The Lighthouse Project works hand in hand with four thematic working groups which feed each other with experience, reflections and ideas for future experimental organising and political education, that we can use to develop the tendency and maybe get some publishing done too! They are:
- Worker organising & trade unions working group
- Tenant & community unions working group
- Social infrastructure & culture working group
- Anti-Imperialism working group
Sound interesting?
What are we for?
(This is an excerpt from our interview with Prometheus published 22 October.)
We want socialist mass organisation that’s capable of transforming the state but also helping build an organised class power that can break the back of capitalism in this country and go some way towards shaping a socialist society. Our arguments start from this premise. Mass organisaton branches need to be sites that provide infrastructure, mobilise and train people, and form beautiful community relationships for our organisations and movements. In the short term, we need to strengthen the capacity of multiracial class power organisations to fight the immediate battles against the bosses, landlords and financiers ripping apart our lives. In the long term, we need to practice running our societies, from food distribution to healthcare, from the ground up.
We have to avoid a rehashing of the kinds of community organising attempted by Labour in the past, which had no real grassroots base and was a superficial add-on to electoral strategy. Realistically, current socialist leadership doesn’t have the sort of knowledge to make that happen, so we emerged as a group partly because we felt there was a vacuum there – a knowledge vacuum. We feel that the organised left and those in local branches are in a better place to start building branches from the ground up and encoding the kinds of organising efforts that genuinely build class power into the DNA of our mass socialist organisations.
An example of something we want is for socialist organisers to have access to a cross-cutting national training programme to skill up thousands of new organisers in the kinds of activity we’re advocating for. We want branches to be able to deliver that training themselves based on the needs coming up within the branch, and depending on the local ecology of left groups and social infrastructure.
We also feel that without being meaningfully rooted in social movements and working class struggles, there’s nothing holding our elected politicians to account, and nothing building the class power that we actually need to fight for socialism. Our position is that electoral politics should be subordinated to the class struggle, not the other way around. This isn’t to say that we will ignore elections – they will be a crucial terrain on which we organise. But mass socialist political programme and strategy should be formulated, applied and revised through cycles of member-led struggle and organising in neighbourhoods and communities. So that means asking: how can tenant organisations, rank-and-file trade union networks, antiracist organisations, Palestine solidarity networks, and other institutions benefit from mass socialist organisaton in their own right? Really what we want is to achieve a synergistic relationship between political organisation and our grassroots organisations – because we recognise that both are necessary for advancing towards a socialist future.
We expect members of our tendency to be rooted in their local branch and to be involved in the practical organising efforts that we’re suggesting. This will be the main mechanism for disseminating our ideas.
We’re not primarily interested in fighting for perfect positions or questions of policy, though we’re aware this will be necessary if we want some of our ideas to be realised; but the key goal will always be the advancement of practical organising work that builds class power and moves us towards socialism.
