Overview

What does it mean to build effective movements today? This collection gathers Red Mole's most-read essays from 2025 on the left's organizational failures, strategic dilemmas, and paths toward genuine revolutionary transformation. For activists and organizers facing fragmenting movements, compromised leadership, and the relentless pressure of capitalist accommodation, this book offers something rare: rigorous strategic analysis grounded in historical lessons and Fourth Internationalist theory, written for people actually building movements-not academics debating abstractions. The Crisis We Face The traditional left is collapsing. Social democratic parties have become indistinguishable from conservatives. Radical parties that win elections discover parliamentary pressure inexorably pulls them toward compromise. The far-right monopolizes opposition to neoliberalism by default, not superior strategy. Meanwhile, the revolutionary left fragments into competing sects, each convinced the others are sellouts or sectarians. This isn't accidental. It's structural. And it's predictable. Red Mole diagnoses how these collapses happen-and more importantly, how to prevent them. What's Inside Part One: Ideological Mapping & Strategic Frameworks Understand the four distinct forms of ""conservative leftism"" now dominating European and American politics-from Sahra Wagenknecht's red-brown fusion of left economics and far-right cultural politics, to the campist defense of authoritarian regimes, to social democratic surrender to neoliberalism. Learn to distinguish genuine working-class politics from its pale imitations. Explore the theoretical debates shaping revolutionary strategy: Why does permanent revolution theory struggle with 21st-century conditions? How did the Fourth International survive the collapse that destroyed every rival Trotskyist formation? What can historical organizational splits teach us about preventing future defeats? Part Two: Contemporary Organizational Analysis Real organizations, real crises, real lessons. Why did the Committee for a Workers' International (CWI) fail to support Ireland's historic left breakthrough? How did the Dutch Socialist Party's electoral success mask a catastrophic loss of organizational independence? What can we learn from Die Linke's recovery as it faces the AfD's fascist advance? Each piece analyzes living organizational struggles with named protagonists making strategic decisions under pressure-the kind of analysis that helps activists understand what actually happens when radical parties face the gravitational pull of parliamentarism. Part Three: International Left Strategy The Ukraine war isn't just a geopolitical crisis-it's exposed fundamental divisions in how the international left understands imperialism, national liberation, and revolutionary strategy. Red Mole cuts through the fog of campism (supporting any regime that opposes ""the West"") and false pacifism to clarify what genuine anti-imperialism means in a multipolar world. Analyze the French left's NPA split between ""open"" (strategic united front participation) and ""closed"" (sectarian independence) approaches. Examine how Scotland's left learned the hard way that centralized, London-based ""new parties"" fail without genuine national autonomy. Understand why Lenin's critique of ""imperialist economism"" remains essential for contemporary revolutionary organizations.

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