It’s been decades, at least, since so many people in the United States have identified as socialists. Paradoxically, though, these millions of people lack their own socialist party. The largest socialist organization in the United States, the DSA, campaigns for and runs candidates as part of a capitalist and imperialist party. 

As revolutionary socialists, we need to do whatever we can to reach wide sectors of workers and young people with our ideas. How can we best do that? One idea that has been discussed for many years is the creation of “broad left parties” that bring together different left currents — uniting reformists and revolutionaries (and sometimes even bourgeois nationalists). This idea was presented by the United Secretariat of the Fourth International (USec) at their 2003 congress, where they called for “broad anti-capitalist parties.”¹Fourth International, “Role and Tasks of the Fourth International,” 2003.

At an online event on September 25 about Building the Revolutionary Left Today, the Tempest Collective in the United States focused on this proposal. Speakers were from the Socialist Workers Movement (MST) from Argentina and Anticapitalistas from the Spanish State. Speaking for Tempest, Natalia Tylim called for the construction of revolutionary organizations while simultaneously “building broader formations.” Tylim continued: “We think it’s a mistake to reject with a single stroke the broad party experiences.”

We would certainly agree that the broad left parties that emerged over the last 10 or 20 years deserve more than a single stroke! For a brief moment, neoreformist parties like Syriza in Greece and Podemos in the Spanish State represented the hopes of a generation who came of age while capitalism was in constant crisis. But these parties quickly joined capitalist governments and betrayed their supporters — leading to disappointment, demoralization, and depoliticization.

Left Cover for Reformism

At the Tempest convention in 2021, Aaron Amaral gave a talk about “Four distinct approaches to revolutionary organization.” In this model, the four approaches are: 1) electoralism; 2) base building; 3) sectarianism; 4) broad leftism. Since we generally agree with Tempest in our rejection of models one and two, we would like to debate about points three and four. For Marx, sectarianism was when socialists focused on whatever divided them from the broader working-class movement.²“The sect sees the justification for its existence and its ‘point of honour’ — not in what it has in common with the class movement but in the particular shibboleth which distinguishes it from it.” — Karl Marx, “Letter from Marx to Schweitzer in Berlin,” October 13, 1868. So is it “sectarian” for socialists to reject the goal of a broad left party that unites reformists and revolutionaries?

You might also like: The “New” European Reformism and the Failure of the Broad Left Party Strategy

For Amaral, a “wholesale rejection” of “broad-party experiments over the last couple of decades” can only lead to “sterile propagandism.” The comrade names no names, but does link to an article published on Left Voice about the failure of Syriza and Podemos. What is meant by “wholesale rejection”? If a neoreformist party is able to politicize and enthuse many thousands of young people, we — of course — agree that revolutionaries need to engage with them. This means fighting together for the rights of working-class and oppressed people, alongside members and even leaders of neoreformist parties. But this kind of unity in action does not require us to sign up for parties whose stated goal is to administer the capitalist state.

We can work alongside and debate with members of Syriza, Podemos, and similar formations. We can stand shoulder to shoulder with members of reformist organizations in protests for abortion rights or in union struggles. Yet we can and must also be absolutely clear that we have a radically different strategy than reformists, who are trying to win elections, form coalitions, and join the government of a capitalist state. ³As a very concrete example: I helped organize a public meeting with the Trotskyist factory worker Raúl Godoy in Athens in 2013. The main sponsor of the event was the local Syriza youth. This did not prevent Godoy from criticizing Syriza’s reformism. Similarly, we gave support to circles in Podemos that were fighting for clear revolutionary politics.

Both Syriza and Podemos contained revolutionary socialist groups who helped build up these new parties — only to see them applying austerity measures against their own voters. This is because such parties were never based on the political independence of the working class from the bourgeoisie and its states. As a result, they cannot take advantage of upsurges in the class struggle — the leaders are constantly presenting themselves as potential administrators for the ruling class. This kind of experience can only demoralize the young people who placed their hopes in such projects. 

You might also like: Syriza and Podemos: A Necessary Balance Sheet

A “broad left party” is ultimately a euphemism: it means a party uniting reformists and revolutionaries. But to be more precise, we are talking about reformist parties that get support from revolutionaries. While we believe that revolutionaries can participate in all kinds of transitional formations, we need to be clear about our goal of fighting for a revolutionary party that rejects reformism and the bureaucracies that hold it up. This precludes any kind of long-term political support for reformist ministers-in-waiting.

This might all sound abstract. So let us look at these two European cases in detail, before moving on to two further cases in the Americas.

Greece

Syriza became a mass force at a time when the working class in Greece carried out dozens of general strikes against the austerity policies imposed by the European Union and the International Monetary Fund. The party’s leader, Alexis Tsipras, promised that a “left government” could end austerity by winning at the ballot box — without the need for working-class struggle beyond one-day strikes. Syriza was always an electoral apparatus without a mass membership. Even when it was the most-voted party in Greece, it never had more than 30,000 paper members, with a minimal presence on the street. The only action the party proposed to its supporters was to vote. 

Syriza won an election and formed a government in 2015, together with the far-right party ANEL. But their attempts to negotiate a better deal with the Troika — the European Commission, the European Central Bank, and the IMF — failed rapidly. They ended up implementing the very austerity measures they had been elected to stop. This not only meant attacks on the living standards and labor rights of the working class in Greece — it was also a historic blow to workers’ morale, which has still not recovered from the betrayal.

You might also like: SYRIZA and the Position of Revolutionaries

What happened to revolutionary socialists who formed part of Syriza and helped the party win control of government? The Trotskyist group Workers Internationalist Left (DEA) was part of SYRIZA since its founding.⁴DEA had been expelled from the International Socialist Tendency (IST) in 2001 and was a kind of unofficial sister organization of the International Socialist Organization (ISO) in the United States. DEA won two seats in parliament as part of the SYRIZA list. These two voted for the coalition government with ANEL.

For half a year, the SYRIZA government was implementing different austerity measures. The cabinet included figures from SYRIZA’s left wing such as Panagiotis Lafazanis — as the minister for energy and mining, he was responsible for a number of environmentally destructive projects that were defended by the police. It was only after half a year of betrayals that SYRIZA’s left wing, including DEA, split away.

They formed a new party, Popular Unity (LAE), but they lacked any credibility as leftists. Their main programmatic demand, far from any kind of socialist transformation, was to leave the Euro and create a new national currency state — which would have meant a different form of austerity for workers. LAE failed its first electoral test, getting below 3 percent of votes, and has since disappeared without a trace. The last time anyone saw Lafazanis, he was supporting chauvinist demonstrations against Macedonia. 

The problem was not that Tsipras and his ministers failed to negotiate hard enough with the Troika, or that they were generally bad people (even though they were). The problem was that they always had a strategy based on reaching agreements with capital and pacifying class struggle — this was the basis of their election campaign. And there was no way to support this campaign while defending a completely different strategy.

It is fair to say that DEA, while they surely had quite a ride on the roller coaster of reformism, came out of this entire experience with fewer material forces than they had before. This small group might have gained a bit of prominence by riding the coattails of a reformist party — but they could not disassociate themselves from the betrayals of SYRIZA and the rotten politics of LAE. In the case of Greece, we can say that support for neoreformism was actively harmful for revolutionary organizations.⁵In an interesting side note, Socialist Alternative from Australia has long been critical of the broad left party strategy — and especially of the disastrous project RESPECT launched by the Socialist Workers Party in Great Britain. Yet SAlt leader Mick Armstrong makes an exception for SYRIZA, arguing that it was correct for revolutionaries to support SYRIZA until well after the party formed a capitalist government. His argument is that DEA was “was able to grow significantly.” This is simply mistaken. Anyone can visit a demonstration in Athens or check social media to see that DEA today is a very small group — and noticeably smaller than when it broke from Greece’s Socialist Workers Party (SEK). And even if DEA had grown, would that justify waving the banner of a party that will forever be associated with reformist betrayals? Armstrong further praises Popular Unity (LEA), the left nationalist and reformist party formed by SYRIZA’s expelled left wing, as a new vehicle for socialists to gain mass influence. But Popular Unity has since disappeared entirely. Armstrong rejects the anticapitalist alliance ANTARSYA, including SEK, because of its poor electoral results. But ANTARSYA, despite numerous weaknesses, has represented a political alternative to reformism. Armstrong’s generally solid critique of the broad left strategy is undermined by his incomprehensible support for the very worst example of such a party. This can likely be explained by SAlt’s international affiliations: SAlt and DEA were expelled from the IST around the same time, although moving in very different directions. SAlt also has “observer” status in two international tendencies that support reformist parties, the USec and the MST from Argentina. See: Mick Armstrong, “The broad left party question after Syriza,” Marxist Left Review, Nr. 11, Summer 2016.

Spanish State

Podemos in the Spanish State had a similar trajectory. The new left party was launched by the university professor Pablo Iglesias in 2014. It was an attempt to take the youthful discontent that had erupted onto the public squares with the 15M movement and the cry “they don’t represent us,” and channel it back into parliament. Iglesias was clear that his strategy was always based on reaching a parliamentary agreement with Spain’s neoliberal social democratic party. The party never aimed to play a role in the class struggle — it was a “machine for winning elections.”

To create a party from scratch, Iglesias got valuable organizational help from a group called Anticapitalistas, connected to the USec. Within just a few years, Podemos was able to win control of several big city halls, including in Madrid and Barcelona. In 2019, in an alliance with the Communist Party and the United Left, Podemos joined the Spanish government as a junior partner of social democracy. 

Iglesias, who had once denounced the “political caste,” became the deputy prime minister of an imperialist state. This government has been responsible for a series of military interventions in dependent countries, for continuing the national oppression of the Catalan people, and for evicting countless working people from their homes — just a normal neoliberal government with a “left” cover. Anticapitalistas left Podemos shortly before the party joined the national government in 2019. But they did not organize a revolutionary break. Quite the opposite: Anticapitalistas leader Teresa Rodriguez appeared next to Iglesias in a video announcing what the bourgeois press dubbed an “amicable divorce.”

You might be interested in: Is it a Betrayal for Podemos to Join the Spanish Government?

Speaking for Anticapitalistas at the Tempest event, Andreu Coll argued that Anticapitalistas had become stronger by building up a party that now helps administer Spanish imperialism. But is this true? Looking at demonstrations, strikes, public events, etc., Anticapitalistas does not seem to have expanded their militant forces since the days before Podemos, when they were still called Izquierda Anticapitalista. Coll mentioned that public figures like Rodriguez and Miguel Urbans have a higher profile in the bourgeois press. That is certainly true — but aren’t these figures mostly known for being friends of the neoliberal minister Iglesias? Similarly, we can say the DSA in the United States also has some very well-known members — but the question is what they are known for.

In the Spanish state, Podemos took the hopes of a generation of young people — and viciously disappoint them. This is the context in which far-right phenomena like Vox can grow. The failures of neoreformism allow parties like Vox to present themselves as the only alternative to a “leftist” establishment. In other words, broad left parties are not just a dead end for socialists, but they can open a path for the Far Right.

Now let’s look at two similar experiences from the Americas.

Argentina

When we mention the Left in Argentina, socialists will hopefully think of the Workers Left Front (FIT). This Trotskyist coalition can mobilize thousands of people on the streets — its members lead struggles by precarious workers, university students, and poor people without housing — including strikes that ended with factory occupations and production under workers control.

The FIT also won 1.3 million votes in the last national elections and got four seats in the national congress, independently of any bourgeois party. We from Left Voice have long argued that the FIT represents an inspiring model, showing how socialists can unite on the basis of class independence: we can reach millions of people while remaining independent of bourgeois and reformist forces. (The FIT never got anywhere near the election results of neoreformist parties. But that is precisely because the FIT does not aim to win a parliamentary majority. The Trotskyists aim to play a leading role in the class struggle.)

The FIT is not a broad left party, as it doesn’t include reformists. But there was a broad left party in Argentina that offers important lessons on the limits of such a project. Two decades ago, at the time of Argentina’s economic collapse in December 2001, leading to an uprising known as the “Argentinazo,” the Socialist Workers Movement (MST) was the largest Trotskyist organization in the country. Today, the MST’s forces are much depleted, and it is the third largest organization in the FIT-U coalition. Of the four Trotskyists in the national congress, three are from the Party of Socialist Workers (PTS, Left Voice’s sister organization) and one is from the Workers Party (PO). Zero are from the MST.

There are many reasons for the MST’s decline, but the most relevant to this discussion is the “broad left party” they helped found in 2007: Proyecto Sur. This new party was led by liberal figureheads like the film director Pino Solanas, but the rank-and-file activists for this non-socialist party came from two socialist groups: the MST and the Maoist PCR. Proyecto Sur had a few electoral successes in its first years, but increasingly dropped its leftist profile and merged into mainstream liberalism.

In Argentina’s highly polarized society, the figureheads of Proyecto Sur were eventually coopted by the two main camps of the bourgeoisie. Most ended up with the center-left government of Cristina Kirchner — a few ended up in with the right-wing government of Mauricio Macri. This is why the MST was not part of the Workers Left Front (FIT) when it was founded in 2011. Only when Proyecto Sur effectively collapsed did the MST discover the principle of class independence.⁶Another important factor was in 2008, when large landowners rebelled against the Kirchner government. The MST saw this as a “peasants’ revolt” and declared their support. The socialist groups who formed the FIT, in contrast, recognized this was a dispute between bourgeois factions. For a longer discussion of this, and more generally about how the MST joined the FIT, see: Octavio Crivaro and Matías Maiello, “A Brief History of the Workers Left Front,” Left Voice #5. For a discussion about how sectors of the Trotskyist Left are coopted by bureaucracies, see: Matías Maiello and Fernando Scolnik, “Which Way Forward for the Trotskyist Left?” Left Voice, July 18, 2019.

After Proyecto Sur collapsed, the MST shifted somewhat to the left. There was no broad left party to support, and the FIT was experiencing a lot of success with a program of class independence. The MST eventually joined with the FIT to form the FIT-U in 2019, after they had been obliged to abandon their remaining coalitions with “progressive” and populist bourgeois forces at the local level. Argentina is probably the most dramatic example of how a broad left party strategy has prevented socialists from forging unity on the basis of class independence.

The United States

The United States has not seen anything resembling a broad left party in this century. The closest thing might be the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), a large socialist organization with many different tendencies. But the DSA is integrated into a bourgeois party, and is therefore nothing like Syriza, Podemos, or similar projects. To be clear: Broad left parties do not offer class independence — they have programs that call for uniting with sectors of the bourgeoisie. But at the very least they are organizationally independent of ruling-class parties, even if they are not politically independent. The DSA would need to break with the Democratic Party to be anything like a broad left party.

The recent scandal of DSA members of Congress siding with the Biden administration to impose a contract on national railroad unions has led to a certain crisis in the organization. Many members are questioning this strikebreaking activity, and more generally the efficacy of aligning with the Democratic Party. This means it is more important than ever for revolutionary socialists to argue in favor of a political and organizational break from all bourgeois parties.

Another U.S. experience that seemed broad and left: from the late 1990s until 2016, many U.S. socialists supported the Green Party. The strategic hypothesis was that the Green Party could be transformed into a broad left party, and eventually into a genuinely socialist party based on the working class.

See also: A Socialist Case Against Howie Hawkins and the Green Party

Starting in 2000, the International Socialist Organization (ISO) and Socialist Alternative (SAlt) enthusiastically campaigned for the Green Party presidential nominee. Ralph Nader, a consumer advocate and a critic of corporate power, inspired a sliver of young people who were fed up with the two bourgeois parties. Yet he was always explicit in his support for capitalism, and his party was based on middle-class activists, with no organic connection to the workers’ movement.⁷Full disclosure: My first political experience as a teenager in Texas was campaigning for Nader. After the dismal failure of his campaign, I was looking for more radical alternatives, and was happy to see that a number of socialist groups had refused to support Nader because of his pro-capitalist views.

After his defeat in 2000, when many of his supporters believed that they had inadvertently helped elect George W. Bush, Nader moved to the right. The Green Party ran increasingly embarrassing candidates like Cynthia McKinney and Jill Stein who had nothing to do with socialism. Yet the ISO and SAlt continued campaigning for them — even though leading members would admit in private that this was only because they believed they had to vote for somebody. 

When Bernie Sanders announced his candidacy for the Democratic Party primaries in 2016, he received far more support than anyone, including him, had expected. This represented a conundrum for the ISO and SAlt: they had always defended the socialist principle of not supporting either Republicans and Democrats. But now that they had campaigned for Ralph Nader and even for Jill Stein, why not campaign for Sanders too? He had the same reformist politics as the Greens, but was actually slightly more radical and far more popular. The principled opposition to the Democratic Party sounded hollow.

SAlt reversed their longstanding position — and expelled several hundred members in the process. With their #BernTurn, they began campaigning for progressive Democrats. The ISO collapsed in 2019, so it’s hard to say how their politics would have evolved. Their leadership correctly opposed Sanders, but they had disarmed themselves with their support for “Green” bourgeois candidates. A number of those former ISO leaders have since come out in support of social democrats inside the Democratic Party.

A Green Party was never an option for socialists. As has been shown in every country where Green Parties have been successful, these are not instruments to bring the masses closer to socialism — rather, they are at best instruments to draw socialists into bourgeois politics.

See also: Can the Green Party Be a Vehicle for Socialists? A European Perspective

In the United States, socialists need to fight for more than just a “third party.” Breaking from the Democrats and Republicans is an essential step, but completely insufficient as a program — just ask Ross Perot or Pat Buchanan! Socialists should advocate a working-class party that fights for socialism. Such a party wouldn’t be about winning the biggest number of votes. Rather, a working-class party is about uniting our struggles with a strategy to beat capitalism. That includes participating in elections — but only as a way to build up revolutionary factions inside the working class, in order to be able to lead millions in struggle.

A Call for Class Independence

We could list further examples where the broad left party strategy has been little more than an excuse to support a reformist government of a capitalist state: Brazil, Portugal, Denmark, etc.⁸There is also the case of the New Anticapitalist Party (NPA) in France. But this is not exactly a broad left party, since it was formed by different anticapitalist forces and did not include open reformists. The NPA is currently in crisis precisely because it’s leadership is looking to unite with non-revolutionary forces. But rather than making this article any longer, we can say that the balance sheet of broad left parties has been dismal — for the working class as a whole, as well as for revolutionary socialism.

Socialists should break with this failed strategy. We should not advocate unity with reformists in the form of broad left parties. Comrade Amaral of Tempest might say this would condemn us to “sterile propagandism” and isolation from real political struggles. But we don’t think this is the case. There is a wave of working-class activity across the United States, and “Generation U” has few illusions in the strikebreakers of the Democratic Party. This is the time to agitate for a workers’ party that fights for the political independence of the working class — not to search for reformist allies in order to build up a party that seeks to administer the capitalist state.Our limited experiences as a small publication, relatively new on the U.S. Left, point in the same direction: We have been able to take initiatives for big demonstrations and strikes in defense of abortion rights — working alongside comrades from Tempest, SAlt, the DSA, and many other organizations. Consistent opposition to Sanders, the Democrats, the Green Party, and reformism is not an impediment to being part of broad mobilizations.

Neoreformist parties are not the only vehicle to unite socialists. The Workers Left Front (FIT) in Argentina has showed that different socialist groups can unite on the basis of class independence: Rather than aiming to govern the capitalist state, the FIT’s goal is a workers’ government. This model has been most successful in Argentina, but not only there. In Chile, for example, socialist groups formed a Front for Working Class Unity (FUCT) in order to create a socialist pole of opposition to the government of Gabriel Boric, who was betraying his supporters as soon as he came to power. Similar revolutionary socialist projects have been launched in Mexico (FIA) and Brazil (PSR).

A workers party that fights for socialism won’t be built by simply uniting different groups of socialists under the same banner. But such a tactic can be useful for making an independent socialist program visible at a national level. Socialists can unite on the basis of class independence — That’s exactly what we call on the comrades of Tempest and other socialists to do. This will not be easy in the United States, with its unbelievably undemocratic laws and fairly weak socialist tradition. But we can take first steps by bringing socialists together to agitate for a working-class, anticapitalist, and socialist alternative, without hiding the many political differences that we have.

While difficult, this is nonetheless far more realistic than founding yet another broad left party together with reformists and hoping that it doesn’t lead to yet another catastrophe. Rather than seeking unity with reformist bureaucrats and “Green” capitalists, the goal should be a working-class party that fights for socialism.