Editorial

A week ago Critical Mass published our 1000th article since we launched our website in September 2021. So what have we achieved and where do we go from here?

We are a small group of socialists who were inspired by Corbyn’s leadership of the Labour Party and then plunged into despair by the successful campaign to demonise him by the right wingers who controlled the PLP and the Labour Party machine, culminating in the election defeat of 2019. Since then Starmer has led a witch hunt against the left in the Labour Party and trampled on the principles of democratic debate. Labour is now the unashamed party of big business. It backs NATO and Israel unreservedly and allows no dissent on these issues. Its final betrayal was Shadow Chancellor Reeves’ announcement that Labour would renege on its pledge to fund a green prosperity plan because serving capitalism takes precedence over saving the planet.

Meanwhile, the Tories, who seemed impregnable after Johnson’s landslide, are in total disarray. They are rapidly descending into a parody of Trump’s Republican Party. The sheer level of corruption and incompetence, alongside a worrying clampdown on any form of dissent and the endorsement of culture wars in which even the social liberalism of Cameron’s so called ‘caring conservatism’ is venomously derided, should ensure electoral disaster at the hands of voters who have been thrown to the the wolves, first during the pandemic and now in the cost of living crisis.

But this is not just happening because the calibre of our political leaders is so low. World Capitalism is in crisis and this is exposing not just the personal failings but the political inadequacy of mainstream politicians. They have no way out of the crisis so they revert to racist scapegoating, attacking the poor, waving the flag, and war-mongering. It is all they know.

So what about the left and our place within it? We began as a Zoom group who called ourselves Creating Socialism. But, in order to create socialism, you have to create socialists and bring them together. So we launched an online magazine. One of us thought Critical Mass was a clever name for a magazine, so that’s what we called it. Now we have @CriticalMassMag which publishes articles during the week and The Sunday Socialist which comes out once a fortnight on the web and as a free PDF. And we also have you, the 600+ subscribers who have signed up for our email list, our followers on Twitter and Facebook, and the readers and writers on our Telegram group.

Out of all that reading and writing and feedback from you, our core team of editors and writers has developed a political consensus of sorts.

1. Class struggle is central to the struggle for socialism.
2. Elections can help to build the socialist movement but capitalists are never going to give up their power because we voted for it.
3. The struggle for socialism is also about the struggle against oppression, be it race, sex, gender, or any of the so-called ‘woke’ issues that are used to divide us.
4. We are anti-war.
5. We are eco-socialists.
6. We cannot trust the Labour Party and need to build an alternative.
7. And now we are stuck about what to do next because we are not aligned to any political party or tendency and we do not claim to be the nucleus for a new party.
8. But all is not lost because the revival of working class struggle and the current strike wave holds out the possibility that rank and file workers on the front line will decide that they need to build a political alternative.
9. It used to be the case that revolutionary socialist parties tried to build rank and file movements. How about supporting rank and file workers who want to build a revolutionary socialist party?
10. So this is our plan. Stick to your principles, learn from history, and listen to the workers.

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Mike Stanton

Life long socialist. Now retired, I have been an office junior, a bookseller, a docker and a teacher. I write a lot and read a lot more. Committed member of the Society of Authors, English PEN and the National Education Union. Uncommitted member of the Labour Party. Will they expel me before my direct debit expires?

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