Class-Oriented Politics

By the time I returned to Manifiesta this year, I was a little more hopeful. I’d spent the previous year researching cases of real-life democratic planning all around the world — from worker-run factories in Argentina to worker co-operatives in Jackson, Mississippi, to community energy in North Wales. If you look long enough, it really isn’t hard to find examples of people putting socialist principles into practice.

But the PTB still stood out as one of the only national parties that was even trying to mobilise people around a socialist electoral project. And this year, their hard work seems to have paid off. The PTB made significant gains in the 2024 local elections, including in Antwerp, where the party went head-to-head with the far-right N-VA, doubling its vote share.

For Peter Mertens, the party’s general secretary, the secret to the PTB’s success is ‘class-oriented politics.’

‘We start from a class point of view, which means focusing on immediate economic demands, like the salary question and inflation, but also housing and health. We start from this point because it unifies the whole working class.’

I’m sure that some people on the Left will read this statement with scepticism. The fact that so many people consider class politics reactive and exclusionary speaks to the extraordinary success of the far-right in colonising this terrain after it was vacated by social democratic parties in the 1990s.

Peter is emphatic that a focus on class politics means organising the working class in all its diversity. He contrasts the position taken by the PTB with that of Sahra Wagenknecht, who split off from Die Linke in Germany to form the anti-migration BSW Party.

‘I’m not happy with their tendency, this kind of socialism and chauvinism combined, because they are locking themselves up inside of Germany.’

In contrast to parties like the BSW, the PTB sees class politics as a unifying force that can directly tackle the divisive, reactionary politics of the far right.

‘The workers of Moroccan origin, for example, they support us because of what we say about salaries, and what we say and do about healthcare and housing. This class point of view — it’s unifying.’

And they really are doing things on healthcare. Medics for the People is a healthcare organisation set up by young communists in the 1970s, which now works closely with the PTB on a number of campaigns.  I spoke to Janneke Ronse, who runs the organisation.

According to Janneke, the young doctors who started the PTB realised they needed to be close to the people they were trying to help.

‘They were wondering what to do with their lives and considered the idea of working for free in working-class communities. They decided to start in communities close to factories, so they could organise the people to change their conditions.’

A critical part of this model involves challenging the ‘doctor-patient hierarchy’ that underpins what Janneke calls the ‘neoliberal approach’ to medicine. This means taking ‘mutual decisions’ when it comes to treatment options and tackling the ‘social determinants of health.’

‘When people are sick, you are confronted with why they are sick. It’s important that you can discuss this with patients. Otherwise, people feel guilty about what they’ve done, and they feel alone.

‘So, if someone is coming with back pain from the harbour, we have to explain about working conditions. If someone is coming with a child with lung problems, we have to talk about housing and traffic conditions.’

As part of these conversations, doctors can support patients to take action to improve their lives. Janneke cites the example of a group of patients who were unable to afford medicine in Belgium.

‘We knew that drugs were cheaper in the Netherlands… so we took 500 people by bus across the border to pick up their prescriptions. The national TV came and we made a statement together with the patients. So, these patients had their cheaper medicine, and at the same time felt very good because they were able to talk about these expensive prices for their medicine and to fight for an alternative.’

Medicine for the People is just one part of a much broader strategy to root the PTB in working-class communities and build trust and solidarity with the people the party is supposed to represent.

Nessim, a local Party activist in Brussels, describes the influence of Medicine for the People as ‘really significant.’

‘They have built a community that people know they can turn to for any kind of need they have, but also for social interaction and feeling supported in their daily lives.’

Connecting With Communities

The PTB has also been extraordinarily successful at mobilising young people through its youth wing, Red Fox. I spoke to the leader of Red Fox, Alice Verlinden, and her colleague, Onno Vandewalle, about how they did it.

‘Young people don’t need to be patronised,’ Alice tells me. ‘If we want to reach young people, we have to have young people in the party.’

Red Fox is run by young people, for young people, so it’s able to meet them where they are. Onno mentions that they run ‘sports activities, cultural workshops, cinema nights,’ but these are always organised ‘with a political goal in mind.’

This approach is part of what brought Alice into the movement in the first place. ‘I was a real fan of cinema. They party were looking for people to organise the public cinema night, and this was the first time I got some responsibilities within the organisation.’

It’s very easy for young people to join Red Fox — you don’t have to be a member of the party to do so.

‘There are very few obligations,’ says Onno, ‘but there are always members who want to get more involved, so the goal for us is to get them engaged in running the organisation, and then getting them to join the party.’

Onno mentioned that, during the most recent elections, he met groups of young people who said that they would vote for the PTB ‘because it’s the party that represents and defends young people.’

‘They were really saying “Finally there’s a party that’s listening to what we have to say.” We don’t have this judgemental little finger of “Young people should do this,” we help them to address their problems from their perspective.’

This approach of collective empowerment underpins everything the party does.

‘We have set up mechanisms to ensure working-class leadership in the party and in the parliament,’ Peter tells me. ‘I think this point of having spokespeople who come from a similar background as yourself, that’s really important.’

The approach has paid off. The current co-chair of the party’s Labour Department, Nadia Moscufo, was once a trade union leader at Aldi, where she worked for 21 years. In a previous interview, Nadia described how when she arrived at the supermarket chain, the checkout staff didn’t have chairs and they had to pay for the water they drank at work.

Nadia joined the PTB after receiving treatment for depression at a Medics for the People hospital. Her doctor helped her to come off anti-depressants and supported her to get more involved in politics.

‘I always saw the PTB at the pickets, at the demonstrations. I became a sympathiser. Little by little, I got more involved.’

Perhaps the greatest challenge to the PTB’s appeal among the working class is the rise of the far right, which has been astonishingly successful at embedding itself in deindustrialised communities all over Europe. The only way to root them out, Peter argued, is to be honest with voters and proud of what you’re able to offer as a party.

‘We are convinced that the working class is ours. We need to kick the fascists out of our communities.

‘Among dock workers, we are saying, “What did your fascist party ever do for social security, healthcare?” They only ever create division and hatred.

‘You have to be on the offensive, but also meet people where they are. We will continue to speak with those working-class people who have voted for the far right. Our point of view is that we can regain their votes — not all of them, but most of them.’

But this strategy only works if the people you’re trying to organise actually trust you.

‘People can smell if you’re honest. You have to live there, you have to be there — in the pubs, in the workplaces. We’re there having conversations with people about public transport, about housing.

‘There is this middle-class tendency of looking down on these “stupid working-class people.” And this moral high ground, petite bourgeois approach, this is disastrous.’

The PTB’s ability to engage working-class communities is partly down to the party’s democratic structure, which allows local members like Nessim to take on positions of leadership.

‘It was a very rich and intense experience,’ Nessim told me. ‘I’ve learned a lot about organising and doing local politics.

‘We’re doing all this day-to-day political work where we’re in the streets trying to meet as many people as possible, organising barbeques and gatherings throughout the year.’

When I asked if Nessim felt the party was democratic, he answered in the affirmative.

‘We have local meetings once a month when we discuss political issues with the other members, and we exchange ideas about strategy. You always know who you need to ask if you have questions. And the party really focuses on training members at all different levels.’

But this democratic structure doesn’t create the kind of naval gazing you see in many leftist organisations.

‘When the party decides that there will be a focus, everyone in the city, the region and the country applies this direction. And this priority is based on the information they actually get from people through outreach — it’s very representative of the priorities of the working class.’

A concrete example of this connection to the community are the ‘solidarity projects’ the party runs all over the country, as Peter Mertens explained.

‘Every section in every neighbourhood and factory will have a solidarity project — maybe for a Palestinian family, maybe for a food bank.

‘There was a debate in the party where people said, “That’s not political.” I pushed back against that and said that building that community is important. For example, the local swimming pools are closing down all over Belgium, so we stage a creative action at the swimming pool involving everyone in the community.

‘We start by listening to people and asking them what’s important to them.’

All of my interviewees mentioned the ‘enquette’ process undertaken by the party, through which it surveys local communities on the issues that matter to them before collating the responses at the national level. Peter reassures me that this is not an exercise in repeating people’s opinions back to them uncritically.

‘We are not a populist party. We have our point of view — but we do start by asking people what their issues are.’

‘As a party, you have to be anchored in the local community,’ Nessim echoed. ‘And you have to recognise the importance of every conversation, every exchange, every social interaction you have when you are acting as an organiser.’

Such an approach has been helpful for the PTB from an electoral perspective, allowing them to stay ahead of other parties when it comes to identifying election-defining issues. But, more than this, it has helped the party build the confidence of communities that have been decimated by neoliberalism and deindustrialisation.

‘When you work with patients like this,’ says Janneke, ‘you give them a way to cope and to solve their problems collectively. And when people see this, they gain a lot of confidence. They participate in an action. They mobilise… They stop saying, “I’m not good enough, I’m not trying hard enough”, and instead, they realise that the whole society is trying to tell them something that isn’t true.’

Establishment Hostilities

While the PTB seems to be one of the only left parties in Europe successfully building class power, it faces its fair share of problems — not least a national political culture designed to exclude them. When the party performed well in Brussels, George-Louis Bouchez, the leader of one of the liberal parties, said there must be ‘consequences’ if the PTB was able to enter local government.

‘People are always very hostile towards the far-right, but when it comes to the far-left, we find a whole series of arrangements,’ Bouchez remarked. This was an astonishingly bad faith argument to make in Belgium, where the far right has a significant presence across local government.

While the party has a clear strategy for tackling the far right within peoples’ communities, this strategy can only go so far when political debate in the country is shaped by parties that have no interest in centring class politics. While the PTB did perform well in the most recent local elections, in many areas, they fell short of expectations.

This disappointment speaks to the challenge of building class power in individualistic societies. Most people are not used to engaging in the forms of political activism, or even basic community organising, that the PTB champions.

Workers today spend most of their lives in workplaces in which unions are either absent or so institutionalised as to prevent much real radicalism. They return to isolated households that consume highly personalised forms of news media designed to stoke anger at marginalised groups and reduce the salience of class politics. And the community spaces in which they may once have gathered to discuss the issues affecting them have been closed down or privatised.

But none of these shifts are irreversible. Competitive individualism seems extremely deeply embedded in people’s psyches because it defines their attitude towards so many things — from work, to education, to free time, to relationships. But the strength of this ideology is an illusion that stems from the absence of any real alternatives. Once you show people that there is another way, the scales drop from their eyes, and there is no turning back.

The most encouraging thing about my discussions with Peter, Janneke, Alice, Onno and Nessim was that each of them seemed very aware of the need to support working people to take back control of their lives.

‘The system is made so that people feel themselves to be very, very small.’ Peter tells me. ‘And I think that the basic thing of the Left is to empower people, to make them proud, to make them feel part of something again, part of a bigger history, a bigger collectivity, a class, a movement that they can be proud of.’