The Revolution Will Not Be Mobilised

By Cian Prendiville

Last year more than 900,000 people voted for Catherine Connolly, winning an overwhelming majority. This historic victory was powered by a mass campaign, with 15,000 volunteers organised through campaign groups in every corner of the country, and by affinities such as students, trade unionists, artists and more.[1]

While socialist and centre-left parties played a role, the movement was far larger than the coalition of parties. Thousands of people who had never belonged to a party raised their hands to knock doors, make phone calls, organise trad nights and take responsibility for building the campaign in their communities. We saw that left politics could find mass support in society and, for a moment at least, organise networks of people to reach into their communities and mobilise them to vote.

However, if we are to truly change society, we need more than momentary mass movements. We need to rebuild genuine mass organisations: class-struggle trade unions, powerful organisations of tenants, students and a mass socialist party which brings together leaders from across those movements into a political project. This is one side of the two tasks for revolutionaries which Murphy & Ní Cheallaigh outlined in Rupture [2] before: “redeveloping that advanced layer of the working class in terms of both consciousness and organisation.” In Marxist terms, it is the process of developing the working class from a ‘class-in-itself’, into a ‘class-for-itself’, from a class which objectively exists and has distinct class interests to one that is organised to fight for those interests.

The Atomisation of Neoliberalism

It is important to remind ourselves that this is a task of rebuilding because this has been done before. Socialists like James Connolly helped to found mass trade unions and parties, which for a long time provided structure and a scaffolding to organise working class power. But the neoliberal era hollowed out not just those institutions, but also our communities in general. We have been left with an increasingly atomised society, where we live and confront capitalism primarily as individuals: individual workers grumbling about our jobs, individual tenants complaining about our landlords, individual voters shouting at the politicians on the telly and individual social media users doomscrolling through videos of unfolding disasters. 

Of course we still lead highly social and interconnected lives, but what has been eroded are the institutions capable of bringing those relationships together into conscious collective action. Unions, parties and organisations are seen as an external ‘other’, a service you may subscribe to or complain about rather than an organisation you are part of. 

That atomisation cuts both ways. While it left us more isolated, it also weakened the whole ‘consensus-building’ machinery of capitalism from the church and the media to political parties and class-collaborationist trade unions. 

Explosive structurelessness

When the crash came in 2008, the establishment quickly burnt through any remaining political capital. It was the socialist left, small as it was, that first stepped in to fill the political vacuum, particularly after the betrayals of Labour, implementing austerity with Fine Gael from 2011. 

What started with the campaign against the household tax in 2012 grew into the water charges revolt of 2014 - 2016. We were able to rapidly build a serious movement; mass meetings threw up campaign groups across the country. Estate-level meetings set up groups to block the installation of water meters. People knocked doors, leafletted their neighbours and encouraged their friends and family to boycott the bills and join the protests. It was chaotic, as there was very little existing infrastructure to give it shape, but that also meant there was no rooted bureaucracy sitting on top able to hold it back or trade it away at the negotiating table. A militant left could give a lead to hundreds of thousands of people - and win.

However, that absence of infrastructure which freed the movement also limited its long-term impact. After the water charges were beaten, we struggled to keep up momentum. While the socialist left made important electoral breakthroughs, and did manage to sink some real community roots, we only captured a fraction of the energy. 

The limits of riding the wave

There’s a real danger of drawing he wrong lessons from that period. It would be a mistake to conclude the task of socialists is to simply wait for the next ‘hot button’ issue, call a public meeting, mobilise for a protest and hope a movement emerges.

The mobilisations of the last decade have been impressive. The Ireland for All protest, the recent demo against Trump and, above all, the Palestine solidarity movement have brought huge numbers onto the streets. But far more energy has gone into turning people out than building the structures that could hold them, and without that the protests have lacked real power or a strategy to win.

Knocking on doors in estates that were once bastions of the water charges movement, many of us have learned a lesson: Just because you mobilised someone once doesn’t mean you have won them to the movement for life. A wave recedes. What matters is what it leaves behind on the shore.

A race with the right

Over the last five years, the Irish far right has been growing rapidly. What started largely online was supercharged by the pandemic, nurtured by right-wing forces overseas and has exploded onto our streets and into our estates with violent effect. Working on that fertile soil of social atomisation, the far right has grown into a dangerous force. 

They have other advantages over the left. Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael have fanned the flames of anti-migrant sentiments to try to distract from their own failings and divide the working class. Elon Musk has used his billions to amplify their rhetoric on Twitter.

If the anti-migrant riots showed the threat of the far right, the Connolly campaign proved that the fight is not over. The battle for influence in the Irish working class is not just a question for elections - it rages every day in our communities, workplaces and in the press and social media. To win, we must build real, durable power - and that means we must evolve from mobilising to organising.

Organising for Power

The helpful distinction between mobilising and organising comes from the US trade union movement, and especially the framework developed by the late workers' leader Jane McAlevey [3]. She critiques the unions for abandoning the ‘organising’ model which built them and following a ‘mobilising’ model. 

A mobilising model sees a small layer of union staff develop a plan and then issue a call on the broader membership to show up to whatever the planned action is. In the best case, the call turns out to be popular, and there’s a lot of already-motivated activists who champion it. You get the posters up, the leaflets out, and thousands show up to the protest. 

McAlevey argues her ‘organising model’ makes the members central to drawing up the plan, and taking on responsibility for the different aspects of it. Organisers look not just for the already energised activist layer, but for the ‘organic leaders’ who have real social weight and can bring people with them. Mobilisations aren’t an end-goal, but a ‘structure test’, a way to test your organising power, identify where we need reinforcing.

There have been important critiques of McAlevey’s model, and how it can over focus on paid organisers as the force for change [4], but for now I want to focus on what we can learn from serious engagement with these ideas and techniques. They can help us not just in the task of organising workplaces and communities, but in thinking about how we can apply them to the task of building a political alternative as well. For now, I want to focus primarily on a few key ideas which I think are particularly relevant.

The role of an Organiser

In McAlevey’s framework, an organiser is someone who organises people - not things. The key job of an organiser isn’t to write the leaflet, put up the posters or book the venue, but to build a team capable of doing those things (and more), by developing, empowering and supporting others. 

Organising starts with understanding (mapping) the people you are organising, their interests, abilities and connections and working with them to develop key goals and a strategy to achieve them. The challenge for the organiser is to identify or recruit the key people to develop as leaders to implement that strategy, and to coach them to carry out all of these tasks. In other words, the fundamental job of the organiser is not to lead the campaign or plan events, but to recruit and train more organisers. The key measure is how many new leaders exist at the end of a campaign. 

For instance, in People Before Profit’s ongoing campaigning against Council rent hikes, our goal is not just to get people out to a protest, or to pressure their councillors. We want to assist tenants themselves in self-organising to fight for their rights. We want to organise community meetings in the areas affected, support the tenants in organising their neighbours and encourage them to join CATU so that the collective consciousness outlasts this one fight through building organisation. 

Mapping

The first concept from ‘organising’ I want to highlight is McAlevey’s ‘mapping’, that is the “careful methodical, systematic, detailed analysis of power structures among the ordinary people who are or could be brought into the fight.”

In a workplace, that means knowing the shifts, the departments, the social groups and above all who people trust or go to when there is a problem. She argues these ‘organic leaders’ are usually not the ones who put their hand up first at the meeting (the ‘activists’), but are the crucial people to recruit to the cause, because they are the ones who can turn a minority campaign into a movement of the majority. 

Applying mapping to a community campaign means knowing the networks that exist before you arrive: the residents association, the GAA club, the estate WhatsApp, the resident who organised the last community event. 

Mapping a party branch means knowing your fellow members. Where do they work? Are they in a union or campaign group? What are they good at? What do they care about? Often this information is scattered across the organisation, half-memories in the minds of different long-term members. An organiser’s first task is to gather that information, and systematically build a picture of the branch.

The ladder of engagement

An organiser should have a clear picture of where every person stands in relation to their project, and a plan to move each of them one step. Organising trainers often draw this as a ‘ladder of engagement’ or a ‘bullseye’, and McAlevey has a connected concept of ‘charting’.

At the bottom of the ladder or outside the circle are the people who have never heard of your organisation or campaign. Then there are sympathisers, who agree but have done nothing, and supporters who have taken some action (signed the petition, donated, came to a meeting). Next are those who are regularly active, and the leaders who bring others with them. At the centre of the bullseye, or the top of the ladder, are organisers who are developing other leaders.

The point is to know, by name, who is in each layer, and to always be working out the next step for each person, and who is going to ask them to take it. How can you get someone to go from signing the petition to getting others to sign as well?  From leafleting their neighbours to organising a group to attend the next event? From attending a meeting, to preparing and delivering a talk or report? 

In the Connolly campaign, we started with a large list of volunteers. We then did a survey of that list to find out more about them. This involved getting volunteers to help with a mass phone bank, which was our first big ‘ask’, the first step for people to go from supporters to activists to organisers. Thousands of phone calls were made, mapping our supporters and also asking them to take the next step of attending an online campaign launch rally. From the rally, we moved to identifying potential organisers, supporting them to build local groups and affinity groups, organising events and canvasses, training those canvassers into canvass leaders, etc. We could only grow as fast as we could identify those leaders and develop them as organisers.

The organising conversation

Organising is about relationships, and relationships are built one conversation at a time. McAlevey and other authors on organising add a level of thought about those conversations that most of us on the left could really learn from. 

These conversations must start with listening. The organiser must start with questions: what is the other person interested in, what are they worried about, what would they like to see changed? Only then can you connect the dots between what you have heard and the bigger picture. The aim is not just to inform the person of whatever your organising project is (campaign, union or political party), but to show that this is the path to achieve what they are looking for, and to help them see the role they can plan in that organising. This is done through a “hard ask”, that is a clear and concrete next step we ask them to commit to, and a plan to follow up on it.

The follow-up is crucial. If we truly believe that the task we have asked this person to do is important - we should demonstrate that by checking back in. If people are genuinely our movement's greatest strength, then we should show that by taking each potential activist seriously. Too often we get someone to agree to something, and then just leave it with them. But the lesson we are teaching them is that the task is not all that important, or the person isn’t really needed. If we approach this as a checkbox exercise, passing off responsibility so we can avoid blame if it doesn’t happen, then others will sense and learn that.

Some of these techniques are also relevant for canvassing as well. We can utilise what’s called ‘deep canvassing’ where we start with questions and get the other person talking so we can understand their concerns. The canvasser's task then is to show how their goals and ours align, and “making the ask” for them to vote for our candidate. However, we should also be more ambitious in our asks, we want to not only mobilise people to vote for us, but to organise them to campaign with us. We should be seeking to turn voters into supporters, people who we build deeper political relationships with and work with on the issues that they care about. 

Organising for socialism

None of this is new to the socialist tradition, but it is something we must relearn.

Lenin in 1901 argued that a socialist newspaper was needed not for propaganda and agitation but as a “collective organiser”, comparing it to “the scaffolding round a building under construction” [5]. A newspaper requires writers, sellers and, of course, readers. It requires training people to follow, analyse and report on events, identify people who may be interested in reading such a paper and develop a relationship with them. It trains your members, therefore, to develop their political analysis and also to connect with broader layers of workers.

Lenin argued socialist branches should be in “regular contact” with “all the factories in [their] district, as well as the largest possible number of workers’ homes in that district” and that this “will be of enormous value, both for demonstrations and for an uprising” as it would be a way to build up those political relationships. What’s more, he warned that it “is too late to start organising the distribution of literature at a time of unrest, a strike or turmoil; this work can be build up only gradually”.[6]

Selling the paper was in many ways what McAlevey would consider a “structure test” - a way to see where the movement was strong, and identify weak points, see what branches and members had built up strong links in their areas and where improvement was needed. It was a proxy for building up an unwritten ‘database’ of supporters and organisers, and training your organisers to understand the concerns and interests of those they were trying to organise.

Due to the changing nature of how people engage with media, the paper is no longer going to be that collective organiser - but we do still need to develop new ‘scaffolding’ around which to build deeper organisation.

Organic leaders and organic intellectuals

Applying ‘organising methods’ to the socialist project as a whole poses some interesting questions. A union drive organises a workplace, but a socialist party has to work across workplaces, estates, campuses, unions and campaigns at once. In practice that means it is a series of overlapping organising projects, and the particular job of the party is to link them, so that the leaders we develop in one fight learn from and support the leaders of another and generalise from specific struggles to a movement for socialism.

That changes what leadership development means. To paraphrase Lenin, our ‘Ladder of Engagement’ doesn’t end with people being a trade union secretary but a “tribune of the people” able to respond to every case of oppression wherever it appears and explain how each connects to the whole. McAlevey highlights the importance of organic leaders, the people with real roots, but this cannot be our sole focus. Part of the task of a socialist party is to develop those and others to be what Gramsci called “organic intellectuals”: people who can generalise from their own experience and articulate the interests of their class, beyond their own workplace or community. That requires socialist political education, study and debate as a core task, not just a hobby alongside organising. 

An organiser who understands why the housing crisis happens has a better conversation at the door than one who only knows the demand. An organiser who has studied the history of past movements, and the theories developed from it, will be better able to navigate the ups and downs of future movements and contribute to the development of a theoretical understanding of our epoch.

It also requires supporting and encouraging those activists who do put their hand up first, or those who join socialist organisations through an interest in theory to become embedded in the class. Large numbers of young people are becoming very politicised, reading and studying socialist and Marxist theory, or very active in different protests, actions and campaigns. We need these ‘activists’ and the ‘intellectuals’ to become ‘organic leaders’,, that is to become the person colleagues, neighbours or classmates go to, to earn the trust and build up the relationships that cannot simply be claimed by having the ‘right ideas’.

The ‘hard asks’ for you

Socialists must urgently embrace an ‘organising’ approach to build real roots and deep organisation. We cannot continue to simply mobilise the already convinced, or hope for another wave of mass action we can ride. 

The far-right is organising in the space left by the collapse of the old institutions. The Dublin riots were not the end of that project. A global far-right network, well funded and backed up by significant corporate power, is actively trying to shape politics here. We should not simply laugh off Steve Bannon’s promise of an “Irish Trump” [7]. But we should also not fatalistically accept that as the inevitable future. The Connolly campaign was a brief glimpse of the potential that does exist. The question is whether we can turn mass support for left-wing positions, anger at the landlords, big tech billionaires and opposition to war into real, durable, organised power. 

So what are the ‘asks’ I am making of you, the reader?

Study organising. Read Jane McAlevey’s No Shortcuts, take the Organising for Power training course, start a reading group, and come to organising trainings and workshops such as the ones RISE and PBP have put on. Reject ‘amateurism’, which makes a virtue of not thinking about the how and why of organising. Consider it as a science, with methods that can be taught, tested and improved, and as an art or craft that can only really be learned through practice. 

Start organising. Whether that is joining a union at work, CATU in your area, or getting involved in a campaign you are passionate about - get involved. If you want to see a socialist alternative built, then join People Before Profit as well to help connect these movements.

Become an organiser. In your workplace, your estate, your campus, your union and your PBP branch: map it, develop your ladder of engagement, identify the key people to develop, have the one-on-ones, develop the plan collectively, build the team to implement it, monitor it and review it. Ask yourself: who am I organising? Who am I developing as an organiser? 

The revolution will not be mobilised. It will be organised, or it will not happen at all.

Notes

1. For more on the Connolly campaign, see ‘How Catherine Connolly Won Ireland’s Presidential Election’ https://jacobin.com/2025/11/connolly-ireland-presidential-election-left

2. https://rupture.ie/articles/by-the-fight-and-in-the-fight

3. No Shortcuts: Organizing for Power in the New Gilded Age

4. https://reformandrevolution.org/2023/01/10/labor-mind-your-assumptions/

5. https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1901/may/04.htm

6. https://www.marxists.org/archive//lenin//works/1902/sep/00.htm

7. https://www.irishtimes.com/politics/2025/12/30/steve-bannon-promises-irish-trump-and-says-he-is-working-to-form-national-party-in-ireland/