Progressive movements face a crisis of fragmentation at precisely the moment when unity matters most. The rise of authoritarian politics globally and the consolidation of far-right movements that have proven adept at building coalitions across their differences stands in stark contrast to the Left’s tendency toward factionalism and fracture.
Too often, disagreement becomes division; our political cultures struggle to hold tension, navigate conflict, or sustain relationships across difference. This isn’t a fringe concern: in conversations with organisers across the UK and internationally, we hear the same assessment repeated – that our movements are weaker than they need to be, and that we lack the spaces, skills, and practices to build the kind of broad alliances that create collective power.
The moment calls for a renewed anti-fascism; not one confined to a particular subculture or set of tactics, but a form of resistance capacious enough to welcome the wide range of people who share a stake in defending democratic life, from trade unionists to faith communities, from feminist organisers to climate activists.
Yet there are few opportunities for people engaged in this work to step back from the urgency of their own struggles, meet as humans, and learn from others navigating the same challenges in vastly different contexts. What follows is a reflection on that gap – on the habits of left political culture that keep us fragmented, and on what it might look like to practise what we preach.
The debate trap
The Left has a long and proud tradition of debate. But debate, as a default mode of collective engagement, has serious limitations, and when it becomes the only mode, it actively undermines our capacity to act together.
This year’s The World Transformed (TWT) festival in Manchester offered a vivid illustration. Over 3,000 organisers gathered for four days of panels, presentations, and an experimental assembly process. The energy was remarkable – a palpable sense of collective possibility, a mood of “let’s stop deferring to those above us and build something together.” Peter Mertens, general secretary of the Workers’ Party of Belgium, electrified the room by commanding us to “Win! Just fucking win!”
But look beneath the energy, and a familiar pattern emerges. Three assemblies of 300–500 people were held across the weekend, framed by the organisers as spaces to “analyse our conjuncture, discuss the latest developments in left electoral politics and decide on our collective political strategy.” The process was framed as deliberative – but not designed for deliberation.
We cannot enter the struggle as objects in order later to become subjects. — Paulo Freire
A select few spoke from the pulpit (and it was literally a pulpit – the assemblies were held in a church). The audience listened for hours. After each round of presentations, some people from the floor could ask a question or make a comment. People quickly cottoned on: this was their only opportunity to speak, so they used it as a soapbox for prepared statements regardless of the topic at hand. It’s tempting to blame those individuals, but we see this as a design problem: People wanted to share their thinking, and used the only channel available.
The chairs posed genuinely challenging questions – one of our favourites was this: “We say we want to both build broad-based support whilst platforming the most marginalised within our society. How do we do that?” But attendees were unable to answer it. Not because the question was beyond them, but because it’s a hard question that requires actual deliberation: time to think, to sound out ideas with the person next to you, to develop a position collaboratively. The format did not enable answers to these questions to emerge.
The collective response was possible because no one person held the power. — adrienne maree brown
Meanwhile, the usual dynamics reasserted themselves. Speaking in front of a large crowd, with no way to test your ideas first, is not inviting to most people. Reasons ranging from neurodivergence to migration status to simply knowing you’d freeze with all eyes on you meant the assemblies were a space of passive listening for the vast majority. The “loudest voices” problem we all recognise went largely unaddressed.
None of this is unique to TWT. It is the default culture of the Left: panels, presentations, debate from the floor. Combined with the fact that most other sessions at the festival followed the same format, there was almost no structured opportunity for people to talk to each other outside of socialising with people they already knew. Without the depth of collective sensemaking, the feeling of shared purpose, however real in the moment, will not last.
Rebranding the Circular Firing Squad with Pink Paint
If the debate trap is about how we fail to think together, there’s a related pathology in how movements relate to one another. And few episodes illustrate it as starkly as Extinction Rebellion’s early relationship with the wider environmental movement.1Marginnote disclosure1Full disclosure: We were deeply involved in XR ourselves at that time, so the following is more of internal critique than an attack from outside. Practising what we preach, we want to invite a conversation about these issues, not open another debate. ↩
XR’s very first major action, in October 2018, was to occupy the London headquarters of Greenpeace – an organisation that has had its ship blown up by the French state and its activists shot at by the Russian navy. XR’s message was that established environmental NGOs were “part of the problem,” their messaging “too narrow,” their approach complicit in the crisis. Two years later, activists linked to XR co-founder Roger Hallam went further, throwing pink paint over the offices of Greenpeace, Friends of the Earth, Amnesty International and Christian Aid, claiming these organisations had done “fuck all that was meaningful.”
The gesture was designed to shock – and it did, provoking outrage across the climate movement. XR UK quickly distanced itself from Hallam’s actions, but the broader dynamic is worth examining. A new organisation, rightly diagnosing an urgent crisis, the inadequacy of existing responses, and a problematic “NGOisation” of movement spaces, chose to define itself against allied organisations rather than alongside them. Whatever tactical logic this may have had in generating attention, it damaged the ecology of movements that any serious challenge to the status quo depends on.
This is a pattern we see again and again on the Left: the impulse to differentiate by attacking those closest to us. The far right, by contrast, has proven remarkably adept at holding together coalitions that span libertarians and authoritarians, religious conservatives and tech accelerationists. They manage this not because they agree on everything, but because they’ve developed cultures and practices that subordinate internal differences to shared strategic goals. We have not.
The XR story has an instructive coda. By 2023, XR UK had pivoted dramatically, announcing it would “prioritise attendance over arrest and relationships over roadblocks.” It organised “The Big One” – a four-day mass demonstration in London – as a broad coalition effort. Over 150 organisations signed on, including many that wouldn’t previously have touched XR. Among them: Greenpeace. The same organisation whose offices XR had occupied five years earlier now marched alongside them. This wasn’t capitulation; it was the fruit of a conscious shift toward coalition-building. It suggests that the damage done by movement-on-movement antagonism is not permanent – but also that years were lost that didn’t need to be.
What collective sensemaking actually requires
To be clear, we are not arguing for an end to disagreement, or for some bland consensus politics that papers over real differences. Disagreement is essential. The question is whether our spaces and cultures allow us to disagree productively – to hold tension, learn from conflict, and still act together.
Nor are we calling for a return to those lockdown Zoom calls where the host would say “we”re going to put you in breakout rooms to discuss topic x with three other people who also don”t have a clue and just wanted to listen in while relaxing on the couch.” *shudders
But there is a vast space between passive listening and aimless breakout groups. Simple techniques, such as turning to the person next to you to discuss what you’ve just heard, can dramatically improve the quality of questions and the diversity of people speaking. More sophisticated deliberative methods can interweave the contributions of brilliant speakers with structured opportunities for participants to develop their thinking together, so that each enriches the other.
Several people working together can solve more complex problems than individuals working alone and can also find solutions that are more satisfying to more people. — Anna De Liddo
Getting this right matters because the challenges we face demand it. How do we build broad-based support while centring the most marginalised? How do we develop strategy that can unite trade unionists, climate activists, faith communities, feminist organisers, and the many others who share a stake in defending democratic life? These are not questions that can be answered from a podium. They require the kind of collective intelligence that only emerges when people are given real space to think together.
What we do about it
We bring organisers together and support them to achieve more than they thought they could. This work includes identifying potential collaborators, shared goals, and developing collective strategies. A recent example of this is supporting factions pushing for democracy within Your Party to find a common position at TWT, which was presented at its third assembly and passed with an overwhelming majority. This led to Ash Sarkar exclaiming “A joint proposal from multiple factions on the left – who’s ever heard of that?!”
The moment that factions found common ground and presented a unified proposal is a small proof of concept for what becomes possible when we invest in the connective tissue between us rather than the barriers. It doesn’t happen by accident. It requires facilitation, trust-building, and a willingness to create spaces where people can be honest about their differences without those differences becoming ruptures.
This is the work of movement ecology: creating the conditions for a progressive ecosystem that is stronger than the sum of its parts. Not by imposing unity from above, but by building the practices, spaces, and relationships that allow diverse movements to discover shared ground and act on it.
The energy at TWT this year was real. The hunger for something more was unmistakable: more participation, more depth, more genuine collective strategy. Energised and hungry for more, now is the time to get our shit together and collaborate on shared goals. We need to build a cohesive movement that can shape political parties, not the other way around.
This starts with practising what we preach – creating spaces not just for speaking, but for listening; not just for debate, but for deliberation; not just for rallying, but for the slower, harder work of building collective understanding across difference.
We’ve quote Pepe before, and god dammit, we’re going to have to quote him again:
The left is divided by ideas, the right are united by interests. — Pepe Mujica