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Our people have been organised for abandonment. We are poorer, sicker, lonelier and more disempowered than working class people have been for generations. We are told that the people to blame for this aren’t those who govern over us and rake in millions in shareholder profits. We’re told our neighbours - Muslims, migrants, the disabled, the criminalised - are to blame. We don’t accept this. The working class in this region is a beautiful mosaic of everyday multiculture, power and strength. We want to transform that mosaic into a movement for the good life for everyone. We want to build political power that belongs to our people. We want socialism.

But to achieve socialism, we cannot just get leftwing people elected or elect leftwing governments. Whilst our people absolutely need elected socialists representing them in the council chamber and Parliament, for those elected representatives to be truly effective, they need to be accountable to a popular movement that can exercise its will beyond the ballot box, in workplaces, in the streets and in our neighbourhoods. There is no socialism without politically organised working class power. This is the mission of Bread&Roses.

Bread&Roses would be tasked with building working class power across North Staffordshire by developing and sharpening class consciousness, supporting subsistence struggles locally and fighting for a vision and practice of popular welfare. Bread&Roses would operate through regular meetings, and assemblies, training each other and a wider crowd of left-curious people on best organising methods, but also cultivating a community of supporters and friends across the region, encouraging them to get more closely involved, and maintaining a membership subscription system to fund running costs. Bread&Roses would operate as a vehicle within three interconnected spheres of activity, defined by the needs of the moment:

• Know where we stand: We need a scoping analysis of our region, mapping the organisation and culture of everyday life, identifying where power currently sits and who is injured by it. We need to focus on structures of ownership and governance, institutions and capital flows, discipline and criminalisation, revealing the peoples and places ravaged by capitalism, most urgently in need of a socialist politics and providing the most open terrain for effective organising activity. Bread&Roses members could research and share these analyses, helping to sharpen our awareness of the ways in which capitalist power is refracted through the particularities of our region. We could also train members in popularising these ideas as popular educators both in-person and online.

• Meet people’s needs: We need to crack open spaces for socialist politics at ground level, fomenting a long revolution by creating opportunities for people to build understanding of the ways they are abandoned within this capitalist society and capacity to transform their lives. By committing our time and energy, using the various skills and interests that we bring to the group to conceive and promote projects together, trying to harness the commitment of friends and supporters and to get involved with and enhance preexisting endeavours. Kojo Kyerewaa’s three Rs – Relief, Repair, Revolution – indicate methods for creating a popular coalition across the city that can improve people’s lives through class struggle and increase the basis for an insurgent political movement across the Potteries. Our success will lie in building a deep socialist community across North Staffordshire.

• Elect socialist representatives to build power: We need to coordinate support for socialist candidates for elected office in the region, whether Green Party, Your Party, Potteries Party, other independents, or indeed, ourselves. As an independent socialist organisation, we would not be bound by purely electoralist logics, but could play a part in utilising elections to create organised, powerful political bases such as Paris’ ‘Red Belt’ or New York’s ‘Commie Corridor’. Electing councillors offers the possibility not that we would have socialists voting through austerity, spending their paid time in tiresome, ineffective committee meetings, but instead using the time, resource and platform afforded councillors to build working class bases in their wards and organise for their constituents.

These three spheres should not be viewed as silos, but as elements of one project symbiotically related to each other. Logistically, Bread&Roses would act as both a hub generating and sharing knowledge and analysis, supporting old and new struggles, and as a launch pad for social infrastructure and advice projects, and these activities should feedback on each other in closely entangled ways; all will contribute to and be informed by electoral campaigns. This will be communicated in a regular newsletter or reels update, which would allow us to bring coherence by telling an evolving story generating interest, trust and commitment. But if Bread&Roses is to flourish it will be through projects that put us face-to-face with our people more broadly.

For decades, the possibility of change has seemed slim. People have grown pessimistic about the prospects for improving their own lives, and in many ways - as wages fall, prices rise, interest rates increase, climate change hurtles forward, and war escalates - they are right to be. In this context, parties such as Reform UK profit off people’s misery, turning politics into a zero-sum game, where white working class people are told to blame their neighbour for their woes. But for us, if you’re here, you’re from here, and you’re one of ours. If we want to dismantle people’s pessimism at the prospects for change, we have to organise with people to win real tangible improvements in our lives, chipping away at the zero-sum logics that dominate society. This also means building networks and capacities to act when even leftwing parties enter office and renege on their policy commitments. We want genuine power for the people. That is the core tenet of socialism for us.

Bread&Roses is not strictly a political party, it is a political movement. We will support principled candidates from other leftwing parties and sometimes we may choose to nominate our own. But our focus is on multi-stranded consciousness-building and infrastructural work. Getting the right people into office isn’t ultimately how the right will be beaten. The defeat of the politics of Nigel Farage and Tommy Robinson requires upending the miserable conditions which produce them. Join Bread&Roses. This is the only project that has a chance of building resilient working class power in our region.

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