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.
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.’