When I was first invited to Manifesta, the annual conference of the Workers’ Party of Belgium (PTB), I had no idea what to expect. I had never heard of the PTB, and I knew very little about Belgium — still less about Ostend, the coastal city where the conference took place.
Arriving at my hotel, a grand, imposing building flanked by rows of columns that stretched along the seafront, I felt like I had travelled back in time. I have an abiding memory of walking into the high-ceilinged restaurant for breakfast to be seated at a table next to a huge mural of an old Belgian tourist advertisement for Ostend, depicting a woman sporting a billowing white dress and a parasol.
Given the air of nostalgia that pervades the town, I expected that the PTB would be no different. Most Communist parties are not, after all, paragons of modernity. As I made my way to the event, I expected to enter a dull conference in a grey, rectangular building filled with old men surrounded by earnest young radicals.
So, when I approached the gates, I was more than a little taken aback. I was greeted by a young, enthusiastic activist, who whisked me past winding queues of people of all ages. They were waiting to be waved through the gates by stern-looking security guards checking bags and wristbands. I realised that this was not a conference, but a festival.
We walked through the main gates and arrived at the top of a flight of stone steps that looked out over a vast field filled with tents, food trucks, and thousands of people wandering across the grass. The thing that struck me most was the colour. Not the grey walls flecked with red that I had expected, but an explosion of greens, blues, pinks, and yellows, interspersed with Palestinian flags and the PTB’s logo — a red heart surrounding a white star.
Manifiesta is like The World Transformed on steroids. Guests from all over the world are invited to address the ranks of the PTB, and tickets are available to the general public, too. Alongside panel discussions and political rallies, there’s art, music, sports, and even a cinema. This year, more than 15,000 people attended.
The first time I spoke at Manifiesta in 2022, I was politically and emotionally burnt out. When Jeremy Corbyn lost the general election in 2019, and the world was plunged into lockdown, I refused to mourn. I held out hope for socialist movements in other parts of the world, and I imagined that perhaps the pandemic would revive the spirit of mutual aid and solidarity that has always been the foundation of the socialist movement.
By 2022, none of these hopes had come to fruition. I finally allowed my grief to catch up with me. Maybe we really had missed our moment of opportunity. Maybe democratic socialism really was a lost cause.
What I saw in Belgium suggested otherwise. Here was an example of a party mobilising the working class in all its diversity, with strong links to the labour movement, the climate movement, and an array of social movements, and a deep sense of international solidarity. It didn’t just tick all the boxes you would hope for in a modern, left-wing party — it was actually building power.
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.’
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.’