The Conservative Left: Campism, Organisational Failure, and the Politics of Liberation Selected Analysis from Red Mole, 2025-2026
Something has gone wrong in a substantial section of the British and international left. Not recently. The roots run deeper than the Corbyn years, deeper than Stop the War, back through the formation of political habits and organisational cultures that were already being diagnosed as failures before most current activists were born.
This collection names it. Drawing on ten pieces of strategic analysis published in Red Mole between August 2025 and May 2026, The Conservative Left maps a formation that has become impossible to ignore: socialists who sound, with increasing frequency, less like the left than the right. Defending borders. Excusing authoritarian repression. Retreating from every liberation struggle that cannot be mapped onto a geopolitical binary. Wielding Palestine solidarity as an alibi for silence on Iran, Ukraine, and every other inconvenient working-class struggle against Bonapartist rule.
The Portuguese socialist Francisco Lou?? put the diagnosis with characteristic precision: the conservative left's past is campism, its present is sectarianism. Both tendencies are examined here in their British forms, with the specific organisations and protagonists named, and the specific arguments engaged rather than caricatured.
The collection opens with an ideological map: what the conservative left is, where it came from, and why a section of the socialist tradition keeps gravitating toward positions that serve ruling-class interests regardless of the intentions behind them. It moves through the specific history of the Socialist Workers Party, the formation that shaped British revolutionary politics for fifty years, whose organisational pathologies Livio Maitan diagnosed in 1972 and whose current condition suggests the diagnosis was never acted upon. It examines how trans-exclusion entered the British socialist mainstream: not as an aberration but as the logical conclusion of a conservatism that was already abandoning liberation politics one retreat at a time. It closes with the international question: campism as theory and practice, and why principled anti-imperialism requires more than hostility to Washington.
These arguments are not parochial. Socialist formations in Portugal, Spain, and Germany are making the same diagnosis independently, from different national contexts and different organisational starting points. The conservative left is a European phenomenon. So is the response.
Red Mole works within the analytical inheritance of the Fourth International: not as institutional commitment but as theoretical resource. The distinction between a united front and a popular front, the concept of the broad vanguard as a social layer between the party and the class, the insistence that campism is not anti-imperialism but its inversion. These tools were developed for exactly the conditions the left faces now. This collection puts them to work.
The Conservative Left is not a comfortable read. It names organisations whose members will disagree with the characterisations. The standard applied throughout is whether those organisations would recognise themselves in the description: not whether they accept the critique, but whether the critique is aimed at positions they actually hold. The harder work, always, is to take the arguments of the conservative left seriously enough to show precisely where they fail.
Published by Folrose Press. Available through Draft2Digital.
