Not a serious response, comrade Macnair

I have titled this letter “Not a serious response, comrade Macnair” because that is what Mike Macnair’s article “Beware of Sparts bearing gifts” is (see Weekly Worker issue 1574). Macnair avoids most of the issues in dispute, goes down long historical rabbit holes on tertiary points and, once again, attributes to us several positions that have nothing to do with what the Spartacist League writes and does. Alas, let’s unpack again.

Sharpness and optimism

Comrade Macnair believes we are shocked by the tone of his letter and how “sharp” it was. He proceeds to teach us at length about “civility” in the workers movement, and explains that sharp polemics are necessary to clarify differences. This is quite bizarre. We are the Spartacist League, after all. Everyone on the far left knows that sharp polemics are our bread and butter—and we wholeheartedly agree that they are essential to clarify differences. The problem with Macnair’s original letter (‘Spart Cannonism’, February 12) is not its tone or supposed sharpness. It is that the letter had no bearing whatsoever on reality; no bearing on what the Spartacist League writes, and what it does. It was—excuse my sharpness—ignorant, which is why I called it a bashing exercise. Thoughtful but sharp polemics are useful for the workers movement. Bashing jobs to score points, which ignore the actual arguments of the other side, aren’t.

Unfortunately, Macnair’s recent article is again made up of a lot of this. For example, almost the entire first half of the article is a long polemic accusing us of being blind optimists. Why? Because I dared to say that the merger of the RCO with the Spartacist League of Australia was a “major win” for the communist movement, which it is! But for Macnair, this is the latest iteration of a supposed 80-year history of mistaken optimism by the Trotskyist movement, going all the way back to James P. Cannon’s 1946 “Theses on the American Revolution” (a document which, by the way, James Robertson, our founder and supposed cult-leader who everyone always accuses of every crime, repeatedly criticised for… its blind optimism).

With all due respect, the accusation that the Spartacists are blind optimists is laughable. If Macnair had bothered to seriously read our most important articles of the last period, he would have quickly seen that our world perspective is that we are at “the dawn of a reactionary period of capitalist offensive,” with the workers movement worldwide in a position of weakness (see “The World at a Turning Point”, Spartacist supplement, 13 November 2025). Whether during the strike wave in 2023, the Palestine movement, the Gen Z “revolutions”, or the recent strikes in Italy and France, we have consistently attacked the blind optimism of the left, underlined the weakness and impotence of the strategy of the leaders, while fighting for a different course. In fact, one of the most common accusations levelled against us on the left is that we are “pessimists”. Macnair would know this if he had actually studied our positions. But he clearly hasn’t.

Macnair’s method is the following: he has forged his idea of the Trotskyist movement in the 1970s and 1980s. Thus, rather than seriously dealing with what the Spartacist League says or does today, in 2026, he simply picks sentences and goes on autopilot by forcing them into his decades-old “boxes”.

Divorced from the working class

Now, let’s deal with the real issue of controversy: should small communist groups today, which are largely composed of petty-bourgeois elements, seek to consciously push some of their members to take jobs in the industrial proletariat? We think yes, while the CPGB raises a number of arguments against this.

Many of Macnair’s arguments are based on his own experience from the 1970s, and that of the IMG’s turn to industry. We dealt with this method in our previous letter: to argue that turning to industry was a failure for some does not mean that turning to industry is wrong in general. We have no intention of defending the IMG’s course here, so let’s not dwell on this.

Our central starting point for insisting on turning to industry is that the socialist movement today is totally divorced from the working class. Macnair responds by saying that this is “just not true” because “the major left groups have significant involvement in major trade unions”. We can debate whether “totally” is appropriate or not, but if we look at the British far left today, it is undeniable that its composition is overwhelmingly made up of students, middle-class elements and retirees. Go to any Your Party meeting and survey how many people are actual workers. Look at a group like the RCP: it is almost 100% made up of students. Some, like the SWP, and particularly the SP and the CPB, are more present in the trade unions. But this presence is most often found in the upper layers of the union bureaucracy, with their influence among rank-and-file workers being small or simply non-existent. Thus, even those groups with “significant involvement” in the trade unions are, in the main, divorced from the working class.

We are not saying that the socialist left has no workers. What we are saying is that, in the past decades, the far left has lost almost all its influence in the industrial working class and has grown mainly from campus recruitment. This is a problem, because although work on campus has its importance, a revolutionary party made up in its majority of petty-bourgeois elements will inevitably embrace the politics of the petty-bourgeoisie.

Macnair counters that the far left “is marginal in the working class; because it is generally politically marginal”. There is some truth in this. But this presents the problem purely in objective terms. It evades the issue that most left groups today have a conscious orientation towards the petty-bourgeoisie. This is why we argue that, in current conditions, a conscious turn to the working class is needed.

Who is a worker?

To my statement that “it is much better for young revolutionaries to become plumbers, electricians, welders, nurses or even teachers” than to pursue academic or white-collar jobs, Macnair basically argues that those working-class jobs do not really exist anymore, and that almost everyone is a worker anyway. He writes: “The proletariat is, for Marx, the social class which lacking property, is forced to work for wages.”

This is a classic revision of Marxism, which dissolves the centrality of the industrial proletariat into a sea of wage earners. According to this definition, there is no difference between a dockworker, an assembly operator at Land Rover, an Oxford University professor, or a lawyer in the City of London. All earn a wage, right?

Wage earners have existed since way before the birth of capitalism. Yet, the possibility of socialist revolution appears only with the creation of the industrial working class, who not only have to sell their labour to survive, but who also work in socialised production, i.e. industry. It is because the industrial proletariat is at the heart of capitalist production, which has become socialised on a large scale, that the industrial proletariat is a revolutionary class, that is, a class which carries within it a new, progressive mode of production: socialism. It is because the industrial proletariat is concentrated in key areas of the productive process that it is objectively pushed towards collective forms of struggle. When Marx and Engels talked about the proletariat in the Communist Manifesto, they were not merely referring to people earning a wage. Those existed even in Roman times. They were talking about the modern industrial working class.

So, no, not anyone who receives a wage is in the proletariat. Academics, lawyers, students, even employees in small shops (like the famous barista, who often comes up in discussions with RCOers) are not proletarians. These layers form various strata of the petty-bourgeoisie. They have class interests which sometimes clash with those of the proletariat and thus tend to have a political consciousness at odds with it. They have few or no links with social production and little to no social power. Of course, the communist movement must seek to win those layers over and support their struggle, provided they align with the interests of the proletariat. But they are simply not part of the revolutionary class. This isn’t an insult; it is a social fact. As for nurses or teachers, while they are not formally industrial workers, they do occupy a central role in the economy, and they do form a critical mass, with potentially powerful trade unions.

Why does all of this matter? Macnair’s conception dissolves the centrality of the industrial workers in the fight for socialism. If anyone is basically a worker—from Amazon drivers to PhD students—then there is no need for communists to focus on the industrial proletariat. In turn, it does not matter if communists are now near-irrelevant in the proletariat, because all wage earners are workers anyway. Unfortunately, the conception Macnair expresses has become widespread within our movement, particularly with large-scale deindustrialisation. Yet, the numerical weakening of the industrial working class does not change the fact that it is this class, and this class only—not the students, not the university teachers, not the baristas, but the industrial workers—which can bring about socialism, and, in turn, the liberation of all the oppressed.

So, yes, since the communist movement is the movement for the emancipation of the industrial proletariat, young people who become communists should be encouraged to join its ranks—particularly if they are from petty-bourgeois backgrounds.

CPs and the working class

Macnair takes issue with my simple assertion that “every single communist party that went from a sect to a national force did so by organising workers and leading decisive sections of the proletariat in struggle.” Macnair responds with this extraordinary statement: “No evidence is offered in support of this argument and it is very doubtful that any can be.” This is astonishing, coming from someone we assume knows quite well the history of the workers movement.

The SPD, so dear to the Weekly Worker, became influential by essentially building the German workers movement. Then, what made the KPD a mass force was not merely the product of the Halle Congress and the subsequent unity with the USPD-left, but the fact that the KPD had won decisive influence among the Revolutionary Shop Stewards in the heat of the 1919-1920 strike waves. The French CP consolidated itself as a real force not merely with the Tours Congress, but by leading the CGTU, which organised the most militant sectors of the French proletariat, notably in the metal and rail industries. The Bulgarian “Narrow” CP became a force by focusing almost exclusively on the industrial proletariat, and leading many strikes. The Italian CP was able to lead the resistance because it spent years building illegal cells in factories like Fiat, enabling it to lead the 1943 strikes. Even the small CPGB became a force in the 1920s because of its decisive influence within the shop stewards’ network and among the miners. Macnair focuses on the formal foundations and Congresses of those parties, at the expense of the decisive element which made them a real force: influence in the proletariat.

This is not at all to say that these parties had good politics. For example, the Italian CP would proceed to use its weight to betray a revolutionary situation. But every single one of these examples confirms my basic statement that these parties became a force not because they led vague “political actions” or had mergers in congresses, but because they led workers in key industries. It is quite astonishing to have to actually provide proof for what should be an ABC of the communist movement’s history.

Red unions?

Classically, Macnair ends his article with an entirely false polemic, stating that the Spartacist League does not want to engage in “the real existent trade union movement” and that our conceptions are “closely analogous to the ‘red trade unions’ policy of the Comintern’s ‘Third Period’”. This is a straight-up fabrication. Anyone who bothers to read a single one of our articles detailing our work in trade unions, whether in Britain, France, Germany, or the US, would realise this. Everywhere we work, we seek to gain influence among the existing structures of the unions. We always argue against splitting unions, and we also constantly denounce the left’s attempts at bypassing the union bureaucracy rather than frontally confronting it. However, everywhere we work, we do put ourselves sharply in opposition to the programme and strategy of the union bureaucracy, which is probably what Macnair confuses with “red unionism”. If one wants a broad overview of our conception, we recommend our article “For Revolutionary Work in the Trade Unions”, Spartacist No. 70, May 2025.

In conclusion, our insistence on turning towards the working class must be understood in today’s context. Today, the small communist movement, at least in the West, is largely divorced from the working class and rooted among students and intellectuals. But more broadly, even the once-large CPs and social-democratic parties have lost much of their influence in the proletariat. In most of the West, the main political force among workers is often the insurgent right. In Britain, I would argue that Tommy Robinson or Nigel Farage have much more traction among industrial workers than any Labour politician or trade-union leader. This is in large part because the left has become associated with liberal and middle-class politics.

This is a major problem for our movement, but one that Macnair denies even exists. While sending young communists into industrial jobs alone will not solve it, it is at least a step forward, and a crucial one for building the communist movement of the future.

Comradely,
Vincent David