We plan to:
- share our own writing and reflections
- highlight contributions elsewhere that we think are valuable – sometimes with summaries or our own commentary
- conduct interviews and surveys with leaders, grassroots activists and supporters of the left
- facilitate conversations between these people.
Having productive conversations
We want discussions of internal left challenges to be:
Practical – theory matters a lot, but we think it’s important to ground theoretical discussions in concrete practice, to think about what our debates mean for what we should do.
- Broad and pluralist – by framing our discussions in terms that can hopefully be accepted by a wide range of radical traditions, we’re more likely to get more people to engage with them and build consensus around practical conclusions
- Public – having such debates openly means they can benefit from a broader range of viewpoints and there’s more chance of people buying into their practical conclusions.
- Accessible: Like any specialist domain, conversations on the radical left often involve jargon and require significant prior knowledge to make sense of and participate in. At the risk of over-simplifying matters, we want to cut through as much of this jargon as we can so that as many people as possible can engage with these issues.
The internal challenges we discuss here are the origin of many bitter intra-left struggles and recriminations in the wake of defeat. And our enemies wield them against us. So, avoiding open debate about them, except in theoretical, factional or private discussions, has a defensive function – it avoids potentially rancorous public debate and denies ammunition to our opponents.
We don’t want to be defensive – we want to win. And making any progress towards that requires us to also make progress on these issues. So let’s talk about our issues more openly and usefully.
The New Common Sense 