The Left Doesn't Have a Unity Problem, It Has a Criticism Problem

Check out the author's Substack!

I think the left has a strange relationship with criticism. We are very good at demanding that powerful institutions listen to their critics. What we are less good at is listening when the criticism is directed at us.

Every disagreement can become a fracture. Every demand for something better risks being dismissed as ideological purity. A political movement that cannot tolerate criticism is not necessarily united. It may simply be unwilling to examine itself.

The recent controversy surrounding the World Ultimate Club Championships in Limerick is a good example of the problem. The Ireland Palestine Solidarity Campaign has called for the Israeli team New Age to be excluded from the tournament, and decided to protest the games from the sidelines. What unfolded was the direct action of one man, John Maloney, who ran onto the pitch and disrupted the game between Israel and Germany. Maloney was subsequently arrested. Rather than praise his actions, IPSC chairperson Zoë Lawlor distanced the organisation from what he had done in statements to Gardaí. Aontach has criticised this as hypocrisy, and I must say I agree. IPSC’s decision to distance itself from someone who had taken a civil disobedience stance in support of the same broader cause deserves scrutiny. If it rejects this particular tactic, it should be able to explain why.

That does not mean every tactic of protest should be accepted uncritically. It means a movement can recognise a diversity of tactics while still arguing about which are effective, justified or strategically useful. Scrutiny of a tactic should not automatically become condemnation of the person using it. If an organisation rejects a particular tactic, that explanation should itself be open to review.

IPSC is no more immune from criticism than the institutions it criticises. If an organisation argues that civil resistance is justified against institutions it considers complicit, it is reasonable to ask why it draws the line where it does. That does not mean every act of civil disobedience is automatically justified. It means the organisation itself should be open to the same scrutiny it asks of everyone else. The same principle should apply reciprocally. Those who demand that organisations listen to criticism should also be prepared to explain and defend their own criticisms when challenged. Criticism cannot become a one-way entitlement in which one side is permanently the critic and the other permanently the defendant.

You can support a cause while criticising the tactics used in its name. You can also support a movement while disagreeing with the organisation leading it. You can even believe someone has identified a genuine injustice while thinking they have chosen the wrong way to respond to it. None of that should make someone a traitor to the cause.

There is clearly fragmentation on the established Irish left. We’ve seen this in the group of left-wing parties that backed Catherine Connolly's successful presidential campaign, which has already faced disagreements between its constituent parties. We’ve also seen a clear schism within People Before Profit in the last year.

It is true that disagreement can have harmful aspects. If organisations spend more time explaining why other left-wing organisations are insufficiently left-wing than they do organising, campaigning or persuading people, they will struggle to build anything. There are moments when division genuinely weakens a movement, and there are disagreements so fundamental that working together becomes difficult or impossible.

This is where I think the conversation about "fracturing the left" gets confused.

There is an important difference between unity and conformity.

The left does not need everyone to agree on everything. It does not need universal agreement about Marxism, electoralism, republicanism, trade unionism, feminism, environmentalism or the ultimate destination of society before people can work together. What it needs is the ability to disagree without treating disagreement itself as evidence of political betrayal.

Unity is useful and often necessary, but unity cannot become an end in itself.

Disagreement over a substantive question should not, by itself, be mistaken for the left falling apart. One side can even be wrong without the disagreement itself being the problem.

The more important question is what happens after the disagreement. Does it produce a better argument, expose a weakness or even cause one side to change its position? Or does it simply become another opportunity for political point-scoring?

I'm not arguing that every side of every argument is equally valid. Some policies really are bad. Some strategies really do fail. Criticism matters partly because it gives us a way of working out which is which.

There is a particular mentality on the left that because someone is doing something, that something must automatically be better than doing nothing. Evaluation of that action is then interpreted as obstruction or an attempt to "fracture the movement". Not all change is good change. A policy can have good intentions and still be badly designed, a campaign can be morally justified and still fail strategically. Even an organisation doing important work can get things wrong.

If we genuinely believe that society can be transformed for the better, why would we not subject our ideas to serious scrutiny?

That does not mean criticism is automatically constructive. There is a world of difference between saying, "This policy is inadequate because it fails to achieve X, and here is an alternative," and saying, "Anyone supporting this policy is a sell-out." The first is political criticism. The second is often ideological performance. The uncomfortable yet human truth is that I’m equally as susceptible to this as anyone else because of the human ego. Being able to recognise that is part of the solution.

The simplest test is whether the criticism is trying to improve the politics or merely demonstrate the critic's own purity. If someone can identify a problem, explain why it matters and offer a better alternative, the movement should listen. If their contribution ends with telling everyone else that they are sell-outs, there isn't much to work with.

Criticism can also become a substitute for organising. There is a point where endlessly identifying problems without trying to solve them becomes its own form of political laziness.

There is a difference between criticising a decision and refusing to accept that a decision has been made. You can argue against a decision and still accept that the argument has been settled. If every disagreement becomes an excuse to reopen the same argument indefinitely, critique stops being useful and starts becoming paralysis.

The left needs to become better at telling the difference. Organisations should create space to review their own campaigns and decisions, allow members to give and receive criticism without questioning one another's loyalty, and be willing to change their approach when criticism identifies a genuine problem. That could mean regular post-campaign reviews, where members are expected to identify what worked, what failed and what should change, with scrutiny directed at decisions and strategies rather than the loyalty of the people who made them. 

The same should apply between organisations: disagreement should be something to engage with, not automatically something to suppress.

There are examples of this kind of thinking elsewhere on the left. The Maoist tradition placed particular emphasis on criticism and self-criticism as a means of correcting political practice, while the Kurdish revolutionary movement's tekmil provides a structured space for criticism and self-criticism. Neither should simply be copied, but both demonstrate that criticism can be treated as part of political practice rather than evidence of disloyalty.

James Connolly is a great example here in an Irish context, not because he was always willing to accept criticism, but because he was always prepared to subject the political traditions he inherited to review.

In Labour in Irish History, Connolly did not treat the history of Irish radicalism as something to be politely admired. He dissected it. He singled out James Fintan Lalor for particular praise while sharply criticising the wider Young Ireland movement for what he saw as its failures. For Connolly, learning from history meant examining what previous movements had failed to understand, not simply celebrating their intentions.

That is worth remembering.

We rightly celebrate Connolly as one of the great figures of the Irish left. However, if we only celebrate the parts of his politics that are comfortable to us, we miss something much more useful about his political thought: he looked at previous movements and asked what had actually worked, what had failed and why.

The history of the Irish left is not a history of people sitting in a room and agreeing with one another. Why should ours be?

The difficulty today is that social media can make political disagreement feel much larger than it actually is. The most argumentative people can often be the most visible. A handful of highly active accounts can make a disagreement appear to consume an entire movement when the reality may be considerably less dramatic.

That does not mean criticism should simply be dismissed as "Twitter nonsense". Quite the opposite. Some people shouting online will have identified a genuine problem. Others will oppose something simply because they did not propose it themselves. The fact that both exist means we have to actually examine the critiques rather than automatically accepting or rejecting them.

A movement that treats every critic as an enemy eventually loses the ability to correct itself.

The left doesn't need to have all the answers. It needs to be able to admit when it has got one wrong. An organisation should be able to hear a criticism and say, "Actually, that's fair." An activist should be able to change their mind without feeling that they've betrayed everything they believe in. Surely that's not weakness. It's how you get better.

None of this means that the left should abandon the idea of unity. There are campaigns where working together matters more than emphasising differences. There are moments when division can genuinely weaken a movement. We should be honest about what actually causes those divisions.

Sometimes it's disagreement. Sometimes it's personality or ego, or simply an unwillingness to compromise. Ultimately, sometimes two groups genuinely want different things.

Calling all of that "fracturing" does not solve it. Nor does pretending that every criticism is constructive. Some people will oppose anything, regardless of what is proposed. Others will use every disagreement as an opportunity for ideological grandstanding. That doesn't make criticism itself the problem.

So how are we supposed to tell the difference?

A healthy political movement should be capable of arguing fiercely, criticising honestly, changing its mind when necessary and still organising together afterwards.

That is not fracturing.

That is politics.

If the left wants to change society, it should be prepared to subject its own ideas to the same scrutiny that it applies to everyone else's. That means asking whether a policy actually works, whether a campaign is actually building support and whether an organisation is actually serving the people it claims to represent. Sometimes the answer will be yes and sometimes it won't.

We should not be afraid of being wrong.

We should be afraid of becoming incapable of recognising when we are.

Sources

• Aontacht Media, “Brave Limerick Man Interrupts Israeli Team At Frisbee Championship As IPSC Shamefully Disavow Action,” 16 August 2026. Primary source for the article's discussion of John Maloney's intervention during the Israel vs Germany match, his subsequent arrest, IPSC chairperson Zoë Lawlor's response, and Aontacht's criticism of IPSC's handling of the incident.
• James Connolly, Labour in Irish History. Primary source for the discussion of Connolly's analysis of Irish radicalism, the Young Ireland movement and James Fintan Lalor. 
• The Irish Times, “‘Sinn Féin were never left’: Inside the political splits that threaten the Catherine Connolly coalition,” 30 May 2026. Supporting source for the discussion of disagreements and tensions among the parties associated with Catherine Connolly's presidential campaign. 
• The Irish Times, “People Before Profit activists quit party over possibility of Sinn Féin-led government,” 10 June 2025. Supporting source for the discussion of internal divisions within People Before Profit. 
• Mao Zedong, “Speech at the Chinese Communist Party's National Conference on Propaganda Work,” 12 March 1957. Primary source for the discussion of the Maoist tradition of criticism and self-criticism as a means of correcting shortcomings in political practice.
• Havin Guneser, The Art of Freedom: A Brief History of the Kurdish Liberation Struggle, PM Press, 2021. Supporting source for the discussion of tekmil and the Kurdish movement's practice of collective criticism and self-criticism. (Note: Downloadable PDF version and in web HTML of this text is available HERE)