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Historical Materialism London 2025
Ian Allinson will be speaking as part of a panel titled “Left strategy: mobilising, organising and revolution“.
Building on Jane McAlevey’s distinctions between mobilising and organising and between structural and self-selecting organising, Ian Allinson argues for considering three types of organising:
- Primary organising: involving new people
- Secondary organising: working with those already in a movement to influence political and organisational development
- Sustaining and developing revolutionary organisation
Secondary organising is too often dominant on the left, while a minority focus excessively on revolutionary organisation. Thinking about the three types can help revolutionaries struggle to achieve a better mix.
Without primary organising the working class can’t build real power, and without engaging in it revolutionaries retreat to a lefty bubble and lose touch with the experiences, concerns and views of the majority of the working class. As the experience of struggle is a key factor in challenging the ruling ideas in society and developing better ones, attempts to build revolutionary organisation divorced from struggle are doomed to fail.
When revolutionaries take part in struggle, we come under pressure to accommodate to those around us and to neglect building revolutionary organisation – ‘liquidating’ ourselves. The development of collective revolutionary organisation is essential not just because of its anticipated role in a revolutionary situation, but to support its members in resisting pressures to politically accommodate.
Other panellists will discuss trying to achieve a good balance of the three types of organising, drawing lessons from their experiences of organising around housing in London and around issues from pensions to Palestine and Trans+ oppression in a manufacturing workplace.