The Red Network leaves People Before Profit: A response

RISE member Robin Koenig responds to the decision of the Red Network to leave People Before Profit, and reiterates the need to build a radical and pluralist ecosocialist party.

On the 9th of June, 2025, the Red Network, one of the three organised networks within People Before Profit - the others being RISE and the Socialist Workers Network (SWN) -  announced it had unanimously voted to leave and set up an independent organisation.[1] I believe that this is a very unfortunate decision. 

This is not because I think that splits are fundamentally a negative thing in every instance. The organisation I’m in, RISE, is a product of a split from the Socialist Party, for example. However, in my opinion, the departure of the Red Network will weaken the pluralist nature of People Before Profit, and will also lead a group of hard-working and dedicated activists down what is, frankly, a dead end. 

The Red Network has stated that it will “still be working with many of the same [PBP] activists in campaigns and movements”[2]. This is a positive attitude, and I hope that People Before Profit and the Red Network continue to work together in united fronts on issues such as housing, Palestine, neutrality, and opposing the far right.

While I do believe that People Before Profit should continue to work and engage with the Red Network, there is much I disagree with, some of it vehemently, with their perspectives and politics. In particular, I find the political developments within the Red Network on the questions of social oppression to be wrong-headed at best, and deeply concerning at worst. 

Again, while I think a split like this is destructive, I hope it does provide an opportunity for pause and reflection for all sides. I hope this article is a useful addition to that process

The wrong answers to the right questions 

People Before Profit is not a perfect organisation by any means. I’ve often found myself, as a member of RISE, voting with, and arguing on the same side as, members of the Red Network at various PBP national councils and AGMs. It is regrettable, then, that instead of staying in PBP and patiently arguing for their perspective, the Red Network has decided to leave.

The Red Network raises multiple issues with PBP. These range from the accountability of representatives, to freneticism, to the right to openly criticise.[3] However, every time issues like this have come up over a number of national councils and AGMs, it is clear that there are large minorities, or even majorities, in favour of strengthening rep accountability, or for a more strategic approach to organising [4] These are ongoing arguments in PBP and it's a shame that the Red Network has left instead of continuing to engage, which is vital if we are to build a mass workers party on this Island. 

It is also worth pointing out that, on the issue of freneticism, I believe that this is a somewhat inevitable consequence of PBP’s public profile and mass responsibilities. We are a small party with limited resources, but we are expected, by both the media and our voters, to have a stance on, and get involved with, all the issues that affect working-class people. Of course, we should be better at prioritising issues in a more strategic way, but PBP is one of the few radical left groups in the country where our intervention can make a serious difference in a campaign (which is why thinking seriously about our approach to interventions is so important). The size of the Red Network will mean that they will struggle to make an impact, despite having a number of experienced activists amongst their membership.

A significant grievance raised by the Red Network is the motion passed at the last PBP AGM on “open polemics”. This proposal, to “discourage” open polemics, was supported by the SWN, with leading figures arguing that “this was merely about discouraging harsh or personalised criticisms not banning debate”. [5] While, as I have argued in the past, the Red Networks’ style of belligerent and over-personalised debate has served to obscure and muddy rather than clarify [6], I, along with RISE and many non-aligned party members, voted against this motion, in what was a relatively close vote. 

There are certainly some issues with PBP that the Red Network was correct to criticise. However, again, none of them is a good enough reason to leave. It is also clear that the Red Network was not alone in voicing these frustrations around issues of freneticism or accountability.

Though the Red Network has decided to leave, I hope that the push for increased rep accountability, a more deliberate strategy, and an open party culture continues to be advocated by those who believe that it is necessary to continue to build PBP into a broad ecosocialist party that represents the working class. 

The wrong answers to the wrong questions

In their leaving statement, the Red Network article states, correctly, that socialists need to be straight with people.[7] This also means that socialists should be straight with other socialists, particularly about our disagreements. 

For the purposes of this article, there are two major points of serious disagreement between me and the Red Network. What kind of party should we be building, and perhaps even more significantly, how to approach so-called “divisive” issues of oppression, or the “culture war”, as well as fighting climate change? 

There is also disagreement on the issue of left government, which I will not get into here, due to the fact that Rupture has covered this debate in detail elsewhere. 

Suffice it to say, I believe that section 1.1.4 of PBPs new constitution “The only government that People Before Profit would consider joining is a left government which is committed to breaking the rules of capitalism and fighting for eco-socialist change through mobilising people power from below to challenge and overcome the power of the capitalist class” provides a useful bulwark against drifts to coalitionism, though it will remain up to the members to ensure the party does not fall into that trap. 

What kind of party?

Having decided that the issues with PBP are insurmountable, the Red Network has decided to launch as an independent revolutionary organisation, and then, what? To seek to build towards a party of thousands by itself? Because the task towards building a mass workers party remains whether one is within or without PBP.

It is clear to me that the path to such a party is not via slow, steady, linear recruitment, especially in this time of great urgency and climate collapse. 

Instead, I think it’s more likely that the radicalisation of significant numbers of workers and young people will result in the building of broad parties, like PBP, which are not revolutionary but nonetheless represent a significant step forward, and one that Marxists should engage in. Personally, I would prefer to be a part of that process. The process of rebuilding the workers’ movement on a political front, as well as attempting to rebuild in the labour movement and in our communities. In my view, PBP remains a vital component of that rebuilding process. 

It's true that, due to its broad character and aspirations towards mass politics, PBP is under far more opportunist pressure than a small sect that does not engage with mass work like, for example, the RCI (IMT). Their sole focus is recruitment and propaganda. But the Red Network correctly wants to do mass work, contest the electoral space as well as engage in community work, etc.[8]

Putting aside if achieving a TD seat for the Red Network is even possible (I think it would be at best extremely difficult), there is the ever-present danger of localist pressures. Many good, left independent elected representatives (and it would be as functionally as a left independent that any Red Network rep would be perceived) who espouse socialist ideas have ended up simply building local constituency operations which are not developing Marxists or contributing to the building of a national organisation. 

This is not due to any desire on the part of said left independents to go in that direction, but without a broader organisation to be part of, the pull to that style of politics is extremely strong.

But what kind of organisation does the Red Network want to build?

The Red Network wants to build a party that is politically “narrow” but numerically “broad”. [9] This is an impossibility in the present conditions, unless one were to build an organisation that is extremely undemocratic. 

If the best-case scenario were to happen and the Red Network became a truly ‘small mass’ force, it would inevitably move to the right politically. This is simply due to the present levels of consciousness among the working class. The Red Network leadership would have to clamp down on internal democracy in order to keep the politics “narrow” and purely revolutionary. 

In my view, the path forward instead is to build openly Marxist forces and networks within broad parties like PBP, while attempting to grow that broad party on the best basis possible. 

The Red Network also takes issue with the lack of any real party programme for PBP. I agree! A collection of loose policy positions and election manifestos does not a programme make. However, the answer to this is not to set up a smaller organisation with your idea of a perfect party programme.[10] The answer, in my view, is to do the awkward, messy work of arguing for and building a programme for a broad party like People Before Profit. A party that is contradictory, but dynamic, small, but with some real roots and a significant public platform. 

RISE and other groups and individuals within PBP are already making that argument. 

RISE has a programmatic orientation. Unlike the Red Network, which favours a version of the minimum maximum programme, RISE argues for using the transitional method to develop a programme that “connect[s] immediate struggles to our shared end goal of socialism”. [11] An example of a transitional programme would be the RISE’s “What we stand for”. To be clear, I am not proposing that PBP take on RISE’s what we stand for in toto, as any real programme for PBP will by necessity be collaborative, and receive input from a number of different viewpoints, tendencies and political outlooks. 

I raise this simply to make the point that the idea of a programme for PBP was not something belonging to the Red Network alone, and they were not and would not have been alone in advocating for it. Despite the Red Network's departure, I know others will continue to push for a PBP that takes programme seriously. 

Class war, culture war, climate war

It is clear that we are living through, both globally and in Ireland, a period of reaction. Far right and fascist forces gain strength, or are currently in government, from Argentina to Germany, from Portugal to the United States, from the UK to India. In Ireland, this swing to the right has manifested itself via racist far-right street movements, reaching a horrific nadir during the recent anti migrant pogroms in Ballymena. The state has responded to this by deepening its own already significant racism, with Jim O’Callaghan, minister for justice in the southern state, gleefully ramping up deportation flights. [12] 

Alongside this, attacks on queer people in general, and trans people in particular, continue to deepen. The southern state ranks worst in the EU for trans health care [13], and in the north, trans youth face a deeply cruel puberty blocker ban, and trans people in the north generally must deal with the fallout of the recent UK Supreme Court ruling defining women on “biological grounds”. [14] 

All of this in the context of continued capitalist-driven climate collapse, which the ruling class seems content to either do nothing about or to exacerbate. 

All the questions above are extremely relevant to socialist organising and the working class. Where does the Red Network stand? 

It is striking that in their new draft programme, there is only one mention of climate change.[15] It seems to me that such a historic crisis facing the earth must shape our entire programmatic and strategic approach. Therefore, for example, it is absolutely correct for PBP to define itself as ecosocialist, and frankly, I think PBP should be more consciously ecosocialist!

In a recent article (which I will return to), Red Network member László Molnárfi briefly raises one aspect of the fight against climate change, that is, the campaign against data centers, in a fairly dismissive manner. [16] He even blames RISE for introducing the idea of campaigning against data centers to People Before Profit!

This is odd, not least because one of the strongest voices against data centers on a local level in Ireland has been Councillor Madeleine Johansson (who has since left PBP with the Red Network) [17]. Johansson led the fight against data centers in south Dublin.

It is also strange to single out being against data centers as being somehow alienating to the working class. With even top civil servants now saying we will have to choose between housing and data centers [18] and data centers now consuming more than a fifth of national electricity in the southern state [19], the anti-data center campaign will become ever more relevant. The idea that it will not be relevant to the working class is a bizarre claim. The choice between access to electricity and data centers mostly used by algorithms tracking us and trying to sell us things we don’t need is an extremely easy one. 

While environmental struggles barely get a mention from the Red Network, struggles against oppression do get mentioned. However, they are generally mentioned in a negative sense. 

To be fair, they do say that they “are absolutely opposed to all divisions in the working class”[20], but they insist on the primacy of the class war over the so-called “culture war”. 

I reject that framing.

The oppression of trans people, of women, of people of colour is not just ‘culture war’. It is part of a class war to specially oppress sections of the working class and to divide the working class on grounds of race, gender, sexuality, country of origin, etc.

László Molnárfi’s article critiquing a counter-protest in Dublin last April [21] is a good example of what I disagree with in the approach of the Red Network. Of course, I agree that we need to consciously and consistently speak to those who may consider attending rallies called by the far-right. And crucially, we need to organise those who may be open to attending these rallies because they want to oppose the government and fight for what they see as their community’s interests. But we do also need to recognise the growing and baleful influence of the far-right, which Molnárfi significantly understates, as well as the need to actively confront it.

It is true that, while we will not beat back the far right by counters alone, and that they are not our only nor even our strongest tool, we must be resolute and consistent in centering our anti racist politics in everything we do. Redirection or rhetorical sleights of hand will only get you so far. Sometimes you have to call a spade a spade.

However, it is the Red Network article “The Machinic Enslavement of Programmatic Nihilism” also by Molnárfi, that most forcefully articulates this turn away from seriously opposing oppression. The article covers a lot of ground, but I would like to focus on this quote:

“The truth is that there are demands which are of the utmost importance, but around which a mass movement cannot be built, for instance, trans rights. It is only through deferring trans rights for now until we hold political capital built around other demands that we can wield our future power for this specific minority.” [22]

This line of argument, that we must not build campaigns for unpopular causes until we have built up enough political capital by campaigning on “popular” issues, has been skillfully dismantled elsewhere. 

But it seems to me that this approach, broadly, is the one the Red Network has chosen to take. This is clear from the way that the Red Network programme hardly mentions social oppression.[23] Though it correctly labels immigration as “not a crime”, it makes no mention about anti racism beyond that, or anything whatsoever about queer or trans liberation. 

This is part of a wider trend in sections of the left, from the CWI/Militant left, to the Workers Party, to the Revolutionary Communist International, to Jacobin Magazine in the United States, that deprioritises the struggles against oppression in order to focus on economic demands deemed popular with the working class (often defined implicitly as white, native born, cis and straight). At its most extreme, this strategy can lead to the abyss of the BSW in Germany, or George Galloway’s British Workers Party, and total capitulation to the most backwards ideas on migration, race and gender. 

I am not suggesting that the Red Network is primed to go down this path, and many of its activists have good records on these issues as individuals, but this calculated silence on issues deemed to be too unpopular to raise is its own opportunism. 

It also forgets that the struggle against oppression is part of the struggle to build a working class ‘for itself’, that it’s not just an object of exploitation. This inevitably involves struggle within the working class, where we will often start from the position of being in a minority. As Lenin argued, “the Social Democrat’s ideal should not be the trade union secretary, but the tribune of the people, who is able to react to every manifestation of tyranny and oppression, no matter where it appears, no matter what stratum or class of the people it affects.”[24]

Conclusion

Building a party of the left is a difficult thing, especially in times like these. The pressures and pulls from liberalism, economism, opportunism and ultra-leftism are constant and severe. We are low on resources and tend to rely heavily on a small base of activists who are always on the verge of burning out. Splits and unproductive arguments are an inevitability. 

As I have said from the outset, the departure of the Red Network is regrettable, and I worry that, as an independent organisation, the concerning trends towards avoiding having positions on social oppression will continue. Though my position remains that, on issues where we have common ground, we should enter into common struggle, without covering up or hiding our significant differences by one iota. 

I would like to end by calling on people who agree with the general perspective outlined by me in this article, and who have not already, to join People Before Profit or, if you are already a member of PBP, consider becoming a supporter or active member of RISE. Join, and help to build a democratic, broad, ecosocialist party that will fight “any and every manifestation of police tyranny and autocratic outrage” [25], and give voice to working-class anger, in every terrain of struggle it can. 

We owe our movement and our class to try and make this work, and with enough persistence, principles and preparation [26], we just might. 

Notes

1. The Red Network, “Why The Red Network Has Left People Before Profit”. 9th June 2025

  https://rednetwork.net/articles/2025/06/why-the-red-network-has-left-people-before-profit/

2. Ibid

3. Ibid

4. Robin Koenig and Cian Prendiville, “PBP AGM 2025: Biggest ever AGM debates strategy for era of extremes”, Rupture, 18 March 2025 https://rupture.ie/articles/pbp-agm-2025

5. Ibid

6. Ibid

7. The Red Network, “Why The Red Network Has Left People Before Profit”

8. James O’Toole, “People Before Profit: What It Was, What It Is, What It Should Be!”, The Red Network, 7 February 2025 https://rednetwork.net/red-theory/2025/02/people-before-profit-what-it-was-what-it-is-what-it-should-be/

9. Ibid

10. The Red Network, “Programme”, https://rednetwork.net/programme/

11. Diana O’Dwyer, “What's the point of a transitional programme”, Rupture, 26 September 2022 https://rupture.ie/articles/whats-the-point-of-a-transitional-programme

12. Cate McCurry, “Justice minister Jim O’Callaghan defends deportation of children”, Irish Examiner”, 6 June 2025 https://www.irishexaminer.com/news/arid-41646832.html

13. Alice Linehan, “Ireland ranks worst in EU for Trans healthcare”, Gay Community News, 1 November, 2022 https://gcn.ie/ireland-worst-eu-trans-healthcare/

14. June, “Supreme Court attacks trans people – the fight for liberation goes on”, rs21, April 16, 2025 https://revsoc21.uk/2025/04/16/supreme-court-attacks-trans-people-the-fight-for-liberation-goes-on/

15. The Red Network, “Programme”

16. László Molnárfi, “The Machinic Enslavement of Programmatic Nihilism”, The Red Network, 7 June 2025 https://rednetwork.net/red-theory/2025/06/the-machinic-enslavement-of-programmatic-nihilism/

17. Azmia Riaz, “Protest against lifting ban on data centres in south Dublin amid blackout fears”, Irish Independent, 16 November 2022 https://www.independent.ie/regionals/dublin/dublin-news/protest-against-lifting-ban-on-data-centres-in-south-dublin-amid-blackout-fears/42149470.html

18. Caroline O'Doherty, “Power shortages mean we’ll have to choose between new homes and data centres, top official warns”, Irish Independent, 29 May 2025https://www.independent.ie/irish-news/power-shortages-mean-well-have-to-choose-between-new-homes-and-data-centres-top-official-warns/a298785474.html

19. Sean Murray, “Ireland’s data centres now consume more than a fifth of national electricity”, Irish Examiner, 10 Jun, 2025 https://www.irishexaminer.com/news/arid-41648528.html

20. The Red Network, “Why The Red Network Has Left People Before Profit”

21. László Molnárfi, “We Need Class Struggle And Organic Anti-Racism Not Performative Politics”,The Red Network, 28 April 2025 https://rednetwork.net/articles/2025/04/we-need-class-struggle-and-organic-anti-racism-not-performative-politics/

22. László Molnárfi, “The Machinic Enslavement of Programmatic Nihilism”

23. The Red Network, “Programme”

24. Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, “What is to be done”, 1901 https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1901/witbd/iii.htm

25. Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, “What is to be done”

26. Cian Prendiville, “The challenge of broad left parties in 2025”, Rupture, 26 February 2025

https://rupture.ie/articles/broad-lefts-2025