Peer2Politics

It is an old question in social movements: Should we fight the system or “be the change we wish to see”? Should we push for transformation within existing institutions, or should we model in our own lives a different set of political relationships that might someday form the basis of a new society?

The notion of a popular front has drawn so much suspicion in the past that its usage has almost been dropped completely from our political vocabulary. The historic example of The Workers’ Movement raised the materialised spectre of collaboration, compromise and the dilution of more heterogeneous radical intents through an adoption of the formalities of state politics. Did these endeavours to form popular fronts, an effort to massify, become one with the notion of a ‘historical compromise’? Whilst in Italy in the 1970s this phrase marked the willed vicinity of the Italian Communist Party to state power, could it not be said, reading this history backwards, that some form of ‘historical compromise’ came to mark the Workers’ Movement in general? A history of compromise with power as it was already instituted and hence a compromise with the forces of capital? At the parliamentary origins of the British Labour Party there was the Lib-Lab pact that got Kier Hardie elected as an MP; at the origins of the Communist Party of Great Britain there was a streamlining of the movement via the adoption of the Bolshevik Central Committee’s 21 points which enabled its legitimating membership of the Comintern.1