One year of RISE
On 30 September 2019, RISE was publicly launched with a flurry of publicity. The reception went from the predictable Life of Brian references, to a right-wing website analysing our ‘What We Stand For’ point by point, to more positively, people contacting us to find out more and join. In our launch statement, we promised to build “RISE as a radical socialist organisation” as well as contributing “to the building of a broader mass party of the left, with a vibrant democratic culture of debate and discussion.”
One year on, having fought a general election and entered a global pandemic and deep economic crisis, how have we measured up to this task? On the whole, we can be very proud of the work that we have done. Our tasks are evidently very far from achieved - but RISE has grown quantitatively and qualitatively, establishing ourselves and making a modest impact. We have sought to maximise each opportunity to develop a broader pluralistic force on the left.
What stood out for many people looking at our launch, captured in the red fist holding a green leaf in our logo, was the centrality of the ecological dimension to our vision of socialist change. Environmentalism was not tagged on as an optional extra. Instead, drawing on Marx, we identified the rift of humanity from nature as being a core contradiction of capitalist development, and the climate crisis as representing the most pressing driver of ‘barbarism’ threatening humanity. As a consequence, we identified as eco-socialists and promoted the necessity of a Green New Deal based on socialist measures including public ownership and democratic planning in order to ensure a rapid just transition to a net zero carbon economy.
We affiliated to the Global Eco-Socialist Network and our members actively participated in Extinction Rebellion (XR) protests and meetings. While XR, like other movements, have been hampered by the pandemic, that fundamental analysis, has been largely vindicated. The pandemic which dominates life around the world today is precisely an expression of that ‘metabolic rift’, and is a consequence of the nature of capitalist agriculture today. Meanwhile the evidence of impending climate catastrophe continues to mount, most recently with the devastating forest fires on the west coast of the US and news of rapid ice loss.
General Election 2020
Shortly after our launch, we were faced with a general election. We knew that we faced a challenging political environment. However, our members and supporters rose to the occasion - with a vibrant dynamic campaign, with over 50 volunteers helping us knock on 25,000 doors, distribute close to 200,000 leaflets and erect 1,500 posters, including our ‘Get Out The Vote’ posters for election day, which featured a picture of Mr. Burns from The Simpsons and a slogan ‘The rich are going to vote.. Make sure you vote today’. At the heart of our election victory, maintaining our seat in Dublin South West, was a political approach which engaged positively with people’s strong sentiment to kick out Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael. We championed the need for a left government with socialist policies and pointed out the unfortunate reality that Sinn Féin was willing to go into coalition with the establishment parties to manage capitalism.
The election delivered an unprecedented blow to the political establishment and gave people a glimpse of the possibility of a government without FF and FG. Again, we engaged positively with this hope of people - pushing for Sinn Fein to form a minority government excluding FF and FG, which we would vote to allow to come to power, while pushing from below for the socialist measures necessary to really deliver on the change people wanted. Paul Murphy’s speech explaining that approach in voting for Mary Lou McDonald was viewed 118,000 times.
With the impact of the pandemic, the political sands shifted somewhat, with the establishment parties using it to accelerate their progress towards a coalition including the Greens. More than any other force on the left, we oriented to the debate in the Greens. We understood that it was very likely that the Greens would pass the Programme for Government and enter coalition, but we sought to connect with those grassroots Greens who rejected this approach and who were looking towards the left and eco-socialist solutions. The Journal article we wrote was viewed 17,000 times and had an impact. While those disillusioned with the Green leadership did not leave in an organised way and join with the left to found a broad eco-socialist left party as we urged, this is not yet a finished process. Left and eco-socialist former Greens have the potential to play an important role in building a broad party of the left.
Pandemic plans
With the beginning of the pandemic, workers’ rights and struggles around health and safety measures became the centre of our work. In the absence of active trade union organising, and a large vacuum, we were able to use our TD position and social media presence to amplify the demands of many groups of workers. We were first to speak out about the conditions of meat factory workers, we assisted the UNITE construction branch in forcing the shutdown of sites at a time that the Construction Industry Federation were aiming to keep them open despite the rapid spread of the virus, and we continue to stand alongside Debenhams workers in their vital struggle for a fair redundancy. Many more groups of workers have been in touch and we are working with many to assist them in organising to fight for their rights.
The pandemic changed not just the content of our work, but even its form. Social media took on an even greater importance and here we have had outstanding success. Our TD’s facebook has the greatest reach of any left facebook page on a weekly basis, regularly reaching one million people a week and usually coming close to the largest Sinn Fein pages in terms of engagement. Our videos are now regularly being viewed by over 100,000 people, and we have developed a core audience of tens of thousands who are highly engaged with our page. We are on track to double the followers of our TD Facebook page in 2020.
The pandemic delayed our plans for the launch of our eco-socialist quarterly, Rupture. However, in July 2020, the first edition came out and promptly sold out, necessitating a second print-run. With over 400 copies now sold, and around 50 subscriptions, in its first edition, it has already achieved a wider circulation than other socialist magazines. In its striking and beautiful appearance, combined with its revolutionary Marxist content, it demonstrated that it is possible to present socialist ideas today in accessible and attractive ways. The next edition, focusing on healthcare, is due in November.
The other big media success of RISE was the launch of the Left Inside podcast, recently relaunched as Rupture Radio. Originally conceived as a short-term project presenting a left analysis of weekly events during the pandemic, it’s now achieved success far beyond our expectations. After producing just 21 episodes it has had over 8,000 downloads, and has reached tens of thousands more on social media.
Debates and discussions
Alongside the success of RISE’s outward facing initiatives, we’ve had many discussions on the lessons of the crisis of the revolutionary left and clarifying the role of RISE in contributing to both the building of a revolutionary party and the broader redevelopment of the workers’ movement. An important part of these ongoing discussions have been the deepening of connections with our co-thinkers in the Reform & Revolution caucus of the Democratic Socialists of America in the US, and with the Lernen im Kampf (Learning through struggle) group in Germany. We are in the process of discussing formalising our connections and, with others, seeking to contribute to building the revolutionary Marxist movement internationally.
In our year of existence, we have experimented with new ways of organising ourselves through collective participatory democracy - ensuring maximum membership involvement in decision making and collective responsibility for carrying out those decisions. One example is the model of secret ballot we have adopted for elections to our committees, which was enshrined as part of our new constitution. Debates around the constitution were only one of a series of different debates which featured as part of the lively internal life of RISE, which has seen two full Members Bulletins produced, as well as the distribution of multiple documents on different questions.
We have also placed an emphasis on political education within RISE. RISE reading groups were established dealing with topics as diverse as Gramsci’s theory of hegemony, John Bellamy Foster’s ‘Marx’s Ecology’ and Trotsky’s ‘My Life’. We also completed our new members reading pack with a series of recommended readings and are working through these with our branches.
Recognising the increased interest in eco-socialist ideas we also launched a public reading group on May 1, which has so far discussed three books and is currently studying Andreas Malm’s ‘Fossil Capital’. Through this and our other work, we have met many new people interested in joining with us in RISE. The result is our membership has doubled, with most RISE members having joined since our launch, and we now have three branches.
In the coming months, alongside our focus on promoting eco-socialist ideas will be the necessity of promoting united front action amongst the left to cut across the growth of the far-right. Their capacity to tap into widespread alienation and frustration underlines the need for united action to resist them, as well as the necessity to build a mass party of the left to mobilise working class people against the capitalist class responsible for the multiple crises on our planet.