Find Them, Link Them, Arm Them: Transitional demands, community terrain, and what Cymru can teach the left
Part 3 of "The Terrain of Survival"
TL;DR While the left debates electoral strategy, Len Arthur and the People’s Assembly Wales have spent five years doing something the theory says is necessary and the practice rarely delivers: building transitional demands and actions in community terrain, in specific Welsh valleys, with real wins. The Royal Glamorgan A&E campaign and the universal free school meals victory are not illustrations of an argument. They are the argument. They show what it looks like when a small formation with the right political framework finds the organic leaders, links them to one another, and arms them with demands that exceed what capitalism can deliver. The question this article poses is not whether this method works. It does. The question is what formation carries it forward — and whether Cymru’n Codi is the answer.
Clwb y Bont is a community arts venue in Pontypridd, next to the river, that serves decent coffee and lets campaigners use its rooms at short notice and without charge. On the evening of 30 January 2020, Len Arthur, secretary of the People’s Assembly RCT — the Rhondda Cynon Taf group of People’s Assembly Wales (Cymru) — booked it from a mobile phone on the steps of the Cwm Taf Morgannwg University Health Board meeting, where several hundred people had just watched the board vote to explore downgrading the Royal Glamorgan Hospital’s accident and emergency department. The meeting was set for the following Thursday. An event notice went up on Facebook that same afternoon.
What followed was, in Arthur’s own description, a community uprising. Twenty-five thousand supporters, every locally elected representative, the main NHS trade unions, coach transport volunteered by Edwards Coaches from across the Rhondda valleys, a Senedd plenary debate that produced the first Labour backbench revolt in the Welsh parliament, 28,000 hard-copy petition signatures counted on a kitchen table and presented to the Health Board in an orange box on a trolley. Five months of sustained, accountable, open-meeting campaigning. And, on 29 June 2020, a Health Board vote to withdraw the downgrading proposals entirely and commit to the long-term future of a 24-hour consultant-led emergency department at Royal Glamorgan.
This article is about why that victory matters theoretically as well as practically, and what it tells us about what the left needs to build.
The problem the left has not solved
The revolutionary left has a persistent gap between its analysis of where political consciousness forms and its organisational practice. The analysis has been correct for some time: deindustrialisation, precarisation, and the feminisation of the working class have shifted the primary terrain of exploitation from the factory floor to the household, the neighbourhood, and the care economy. Hospital closures, school cuts, domestic violence services, childcare provision, community health infrastructure: these are where the working class in post-industrial Britain and Wales experiences its subordination most immediately and most acutely.
The organisational practice has not followed. The branch meeting still prepares people to sell newspapers at the factory gate that no longer exists. The election campaign still targets the ward where the party already has members. The theoretical framework still locates the decisive moment of class formation in the workplace, even as the workplace that anchors that framework has contracted to a fraction of its former weight.
Len Arthur identified this gap in a 2017 article for Transform Journal, ‘Transitional demands and action’, that deserves wider circulation than it has received. His central argument is that the left has set up an unhelpful dichotomy between transitional demands — directed at those in power, depending on collective mobilisation — and transitional actions: using the collective power already available to create alternative radical space. The dichotomy is false, Arthur argues, and the history of socialist practice goes against it. The question is not whether to work through mobilisation or through prefigurative alternatives, but how to maintain the political trajectory in both, the trajectory toward challenging and exceeding the power of capital.
His concept of transitional actions is the missing piece. A cooperative, a community energy project, a mutual aid network: none of these are transitional by virtue of their organisational form. They become transitional when the internal political debate argues for the trajectory toward transgression rather than accommodation. And they remain transitional only if the socialist leadership is present to make that argument. Without it, the cooperative becomes a business, the mutual aid network becomes a charity, and the service delivery becomes co-optation.
The Royal Glamorgan: a transitional demand in action
The SRGAE campaign is Arthur’s framework demonstrated in practice. Its first decision, taken at the open meeting of 6 February 2020, was to establish a single unambiguous aim: “The permanent retention at the Royal Glamorgan Hospital of a 24-hour, consultant-led, emergency department.” The word ‘permanent’ was added from the floor. Every subsequent decision followed from that clarity.
But the strategic content of the campaign is in what came next. The People’s Assembly group, drawing on its research into NHS austerity, immediately challenged the Health Board’s core argument: that emergency consultants could not be recruited. PA Wales research showed that Wales had one of the worst records in the UK for recruiting these staff. A later Plaid Cymru analysis confirmed that Cwm Taf had one of the worst records within Wales. A subsequent Senedd scrutiny committee investigation found that few of the posts had actually been advertised. The Health Board’s claim of clinical necessity was, in significant part, a consequence of deliberate policy: the South Wales Programme, agreed in 2014 as a rationalisation strategy that was rooted in austerity as much as clinical logic.
This is the transitional move. The campaign did not simply demand that this A&E stays open. It exposed the mechanism: consultant vacancies allowed to accumulate, locums substituted, the rundown made to look inevitable. It demanded not just the reversal of one decision but the exposure of the system that produced it. Arthur’s 2017 article explicitly warns against the alternative: demanding that a particular local hospital stays open with the risk of pushing the cut onto another community. The transitional demand links the local to the national, the immediate grievance to the structural cause.
The organisational form was as significant as the political content. An open Facebook group, accountable to open meetings, with every email received shared, every draft response agreed collectively before sending, every meeting with the Health Board reported publicly within hours. No small unaccountable committee. No sectarian exclusions: the campaign explicitly refused to be antagonistic toward parallel campaigns run by Labour and Plaid, recognising that all helped, and emerged as the primary community voice precisely through its openness and breadth.
The Health Board’s position shifted incrementally under this pressure. The insistence that consultant recruitment was impossible became ‘no stone left unturned.’ New appointments followed. The South Wales Programme, which had defined the parameters of the discussion, was quietly dropped from the final June recommendation. The 29 June Board paper read like a document that had absorbed the campaign’s arguments: the growth in A&E attendances, the pandemic context, the case for three emergency departments across the health board area. Arthur quotes a supporter’s comment on the day of the vote as the most resonant: ‘this was the first victory for the people of Rhondda since the defeat of the miners’ strike.’
That comparison is not hyperbole. It is the point. The Rhondda valleys had not experienced a collective victory against institutional power in thirty-five years. The Royal Glamorgan campaign gave 25,000 people the experience of organising, of winning an argument against a public body, of collective power exercised through democratic and accountable means. That is political subjectivity in formation. The question is what happens to it afterwards.
Free school meals: the transitional demand won and threatened
The People’s Assembly Wales launched its universal free school meals campaign in late November 2020, almost simultaneously with the Royal Glamorgan victory. The campaign’s launch meeting featured the Child Poverty Action Group, the Bevan Foundation, the National Education Union, and Unite Community. Its model motion was circulated to trade union branches across Wales. Its Senedd petition triggered the first of a series of debates that exposed the split in the Labour group — backbenchers increasingly unable to defend a position that left Wales as the least generous provider of free school meals in the UK, with over half of children in poverty denied eligibility.
The victory, when it came in November 2021, was the Plaid Cymru co-operation agreement with Welsh Labour that committed to universal free school meals for all primary school children. 200,000 more children. Adam Johannes, writing in Voice Wales at the time, framed the strategic significance precisely: ‘Free school meals are a building block towards the caring and sharing society that some of us call socialism. Universal is best. Universal is socialist.’
That framing is the transitional claim stated plainly. Free school meals are a social reproduction demand: they address the daily labour of feeding children, remove the stigma of means testing, free up household income, and are part of the infrastructure that makes it possible for working-class parents, disproportionately mothers, to participate in economic and political life. They start from material need, build collective provision, and open the question of what else should be universal.
The Welsh Government’s decision in July 2023 to axe the holiday hunger programme for the poorest children is the other side of Arthur’s frontier of control argument. The boundary between collective provision and market logic is never fixed. What was won in 2021 could be taken back in 2023. The PA Wales response was immediate: a statement, a template letter to elected representatives, a Hunger March in Cardiff. The demand did not disappear with the setback; the capacity to reassert it was the point.
What the free school meals campaign demonstrates, alongside the Royal Glamorgan victory, is the People’s Assembly Wales operating on the terrain that the ‘Life-Making as Class Struggle’ argument identifies as decisive: the social reproduction economy, the care infrastructure of daily life, the spaces where working-class women in particular experience both their exploitation and their collective capacity. Not the factory floor. The school canteen, the hospital corridor, the community meeting in Clwb y Bont.
The political trajectory question
Arthur’s 2017 article ends with a challenge that is also a question: ‘Finally, sustaining such a political process and trajectory does require a socialist party to prioritise the process of developing transitional demands and actions. Moreover, a radical socialist party is required to develop a manifesto incorporating these demands and actions and help to coordinate the transition to power at all levels and through electoral and direct action strategies.’
The People’s Assembly Wales is not a party. It is a campaigning network, part of the wider UK People’s Assembly Against Austerity, and its effectiveness in the Royal Glamorgan and free school meals campaigns comes precisely from that form: broad, open, cross-party, accountable to its supporters rather than to a leadership. But the political trajectory question — what carries the gains forward, what connects individual campaigns into a coherent political project, what provides the leadership that keeps the trajectory toward transgression rather than accommodation — is not answered by the PA form alone.
Cymru’n Codi (Cymru Rising) is a distinct formation, though one that shares activists, networks, and political space with the People’s Assembly in ways characteristic of Wales’s fluid grassroots ecosystem. Organisationally separate, the two are best understood as adjacent movements within the same activist ecosystem: sometimes collaborating, often overlapping in personnel, drawing on common experience of anti-austerity organising in Welsh communities. Cymru’n Codi brings a stronger emphasis on Welsh civic context and national questions alongside the social programme. What connects it to the PA Wales campaigns described above is not hierarchy but method.
Cymru’n Codi’s theoretical foundations run deeper than the manifesto alone suggests. Undod Chwith Cymru/Left Unity Wales, the ecosocialist formation in which Arthur was a central figure, developed the transitional demands and actions framework over several years, applying it specifically to Welsh conditions and drawing the connection between the Irish revolutionary tradition and contemporary Welsh radical politics. Their jointly produced pamphlet, How To Win An Independent, Republican And Ecosocialist Cymru (2024), represents the most sustained theoretical work on transitional strategy in a Welsh national context currently in print. That formation has now folded itself into Cymru’n Codi, bringing with it both the theoretical inheritance and the activist networks built over years of anti-austerity campaigning. The consolidation is significant: Cymru’n Codi is not starting from scratch but inheriting a developed political framework with documented practice behind it.
The ecosocialist movement Arthur has helped build, with over 200 participants across two years and a founding conference planned for autumn 2026, explicitly names its demands as transitional. Its programme document states: ‘We call these demands transitional because the struggle for these “day to day” demands inevitably poses, at the same time, the question of control and state power.’ This is Trotsky’s bridge formulation applied to Welsh conditions in 2025.
The manifesto itself is a serious document. Before the specific policies, it establishes the political overview through a founding aim that is consciously Marxist in its framing: ‘production for the needs of people, planet, peace and not profit.’ Arthur describes this as the key move — agreeing the political aim first, which then provided the framework within which the detailed programme could develop coherently. This is the transitional demands method applied from the top down as well as from the bottom up: the general aim names what capitalism cannot deliver, and the specific demands follow from it. The feminist and social reproduction content is strong: universal free childcare framed explicitly as a demand against the commodification of reproductive labour, women’s councils in workplaces, domestic violence services as a public provision not a charitable afterthought, the double burden and triple shift named and addressed. The cooperative economy section applies the transitional actions logic: Tower Colliery as the historical precedent, cymunedoli as the contemporary form, democratic collective control as the mechanism. The disability rights section is among the most principled in any left manifesto currently circulating in Britain, with the social model applied consistently and ‘nothing about us without us’ as a constitutional principle rather than a slogan.
What is distinctive about Cymru’n Codi’s electoral practice is not that it runs candidates but that it doesn’t. In the run-up to the May 2026 Senedd elections it conducted recorded interviews with three candidates from different formations: Heledd Fychan of Plaid Cymru, Tess Marshall of the Wales Green Party, and Beth Winter standing as an independent. The interviews tested each candidate against the ‘people, planet, peace and not profit’ programme, named the gaps between their parties’ manifestos and the ecosocialist programme, and published the exchanges on the Cymru’n Codi Substack. This is a specific form of political practice: not endorsement, not electoral substitutionism, but accountability. The programme is the benchmark; the candidates are tested against it; the gaps are named in public.
The Beth Winter interview is the most politically resonant of the three. Winter, formerly Labour MP for Cynon Valley, was standing as an independent socialist for Pontypridd, Cwm Taff and Merthyr precisely because Your Party had failed to field candidates — the YP fiasco made concrete in a single biographical fact. She describes being involved with Cymru’n Codi from the outset. Her answer on independence is a precise statement of the transitional logic applied to the national question: if independence is a route to socialism, which is the ultimate goal, she supports it. She is working with Leanne Wood on community energy in the valleys; a conference they organised had a waiting list. This is the organic leader in Trotsky’s sense: rooted in a specific community, trusted across political formations, working on the concrete infrastructure of daily life, and connected to a programme that names where it leads.
In the Marshall interview, meanwhile, she confirms that making landlords obsolete is now Wales Green Party policy, expresses unequivocal support for Palestinian solidarity and Welsh independence, and identifies where the Green manifesto falls short of the Cymru’n Codi programme on constitutional rights to housing and emissions targets. Heledd Fychan’s interview is the one that carries the most political weight in retrospect, since she is the candidate who was elected. She confirms that the Cymru’n Codi programme ‘very much aligns with why I’m in politics and why I think Plaid Cymru exists.’ She speaks from personal experience about the 2020 flooding in Rhondda Cynon Taf — ‘that could have happened here easily, we were lucky it didn’t happen’ — and her closing remark signals the political possibility the article has been building toward: as a newly elected MS in a Plaid minority government, she says progressives ‘need to think about the threat of Reform very carefully’ and expresses hope that parties will come together post-election around a positive and progressive Wales. That is Cymru’n Codi’s programme described as a goal by someone now in a position to help build it. The format produces political education regardless of which candidate wins; it builds the programme’s authority independent of any single electoral result. Of the three candidates interviewed, only Heledd Fychan was elected. The programme survives the election.
The formation is cross-party and explicitly anti-sectarian: its founding statement invites those ‘in other parties, some forming new parties, some on their own’ who agree with its gist. It has held ten public workshops developing its policies from below. It is oriented toward the Senedd elections as both an electoral and a movement-building project simultaneously.
What the Welsh case reveals
The argument this series has been developing — that the revolutionary left needs a social reproduction supplement to the classical transitional programme, that community control of care infrastructure has the same structural logic as workers’ control of production, that the organic leaders in the care economy need to be found, linked, and armed with a programme — is not, it turns out, entirely new. It has been practiced in Rhondda Cynon Taf for five years, with documented wins, by a formation with a coherent theoretical framework and the organisational discipline to maintain it.
That is not a reason for complacency. The People’s Assembly Wales and Cymru’n Codi are not large formations, and they are distinct: the one a campaigning network within a UK-wide anti-austerity structure, the other a Wales-focused ecosocialist movement building toward electoral intervention. The Senedd elections of 7 May 2026 — fought for the first time in the new 96-seat Senedd under the D’Hondt system — were the first serious test of that intervention. The result was, in the most important respects, encouraging for the left and devastating for it simultaneously.
Encouraging: Labour collapsed from 29 seats to 9, losing not just its majority but its position as the largest party. First Minister Eluned Morgan failed to retain her own seat — the first sitting First Minister in any UK parliament to lose their seat at an election. The party that has dominated Welsh politics for a century was reduced to single figures in an expanded parliament. Reform won 34 seats, becoming the second largest party; Plaid Cymru won 43 and will form a minority government relying on the two Green MSs, who won Senedd seats for the first time. The political terrain has shifted irreversibly.
Devastating: the left outside Labour and Plaid made no breakthrough. Your Party, which had held a 300-strong founding meeting in Merthyr Tydfil in October 2025 with Beth Winter, Mark Serwotka, Zarah Sultana and Jeremy Corbyn, failed to field Senedd candidates at all. Beth Winter stood as an independent, supported by most of the Welsh left; she did not win. The D’Hondt system, as Geoff Ryan notes in his post-election analysis for Anti-Capitalist Resistance, requires approximately 13–15% to win a seat in any of the 16 six-seat constituencies. Under a fully proportional system the Greens would have won 6 seats rather than 2; the left outside the main formations had no realistic path. Cymru’n Codi conducted interviews with Heledd Fychan of Plaid Cymru, Tess Marshall of the Green Party, and Beth Winter for Senedd; only Heledd was elected. Stand Up to Racism and Cymru’n Codi both worked to counter Reform’s advance — with, as Ryan puts it, ‘limited success.’
The question of what comes next is open. Ryan’s analysis concludes that ‘the best opportunity for building a left current that can challenge Plaid Cymru, Labour and Reform lies with Cymru’n Codi.’ The programme for People, Planet and Peace on the Cymru’n Codi Substack site maps where the Plaid, Green and Labour manifestos fall short of what the crisis of capitalism requires. The founding name is itself a political claim: Cymru’n Codi references the Merthyr Rising of June 1831, the workers’ uprising that is cited as the first time the Red Flag was carried in Britain as a symbol of socialist revolt.¹ The historical consciousness is deliberate. The strategic question — how a formation with correct politics and limited electoral reach builds the mass presence needed to contest the terrain Reform now occupies in the South Wales valleys — is the same question this series has been asking throughout.
But the Welsh case does reveal something the left needs to hear. The missing nuclei — the revolutionary socialist presence in the spaces where class consciousness is forming — are not imaginary. They exist. Arthur and the PA Wales group in Clwb y Bont in February 2020, in the Facebook organising group that ran daily from dawn to midnight for five months, in the model motions circulated to trade union branches, in the Senedd lobby, in the orange box on the trolley — these are the nuclei. They found the organic leaders, linked them to one another, and armed them with demands that led somewhere the Health Board and the Welsh Government could not follow without conceding more than they had intended.
Trotsky wrote in December 1938, just after the Transitional Programme: ‘It is necessary to understand how to find access to these leaders, to link them with one another, to arm them with a revolutionary program.’ He was writing about the factory workers of France who had been ready to go further in June 1936 and found no one to make the concrete proposition. The concrete proposition was made in Pontypridd in 2020, and in the Welsh parliament in 2021. The A&E is still open. Universal free school meals for primary children remain on the statute book. Reform has 34 seats in the Senedd and is sending Farage to stand beside the statue of Keir Hardie in Aberdare claiming his legacy. The strategic question — who finds the organic leaders in the valleys where Reform won, links them to one another, and arms them with a programme that starts from what those communities actually need — has not been answered. Cymru’n Codi is the most credible Welsh attempt to develop the formation that could answer it. The question is not whether the method works. The question is whether it can be scaled to the terrain where it is most needed.
Sources and further reading
Len Arthur, ‘Transitional demands and action’, Transform Journal, July 2017: lenarthur01.blogspot.com
Save Royal Glamorgan A&E campaign history: pawalescymru.blogspot.com
Adam Johannes, ‘Our Free School Meals Victory Will Help Thousands Of Families In Wales’, Voice Wales, November 2021: pawalescymru.blogspot.com
Geoff Ryan, ‘Caerffili – Victory For Plaid Cymru But Defeat for both Labour and Reform UK’, Anti-Capitalist Resistance, October 2025: anticapitalistresistance.org
Geoff Ryan, ‘A Defeat Manufactured in Downing Street’, Anti-Capitalist Resistance, 12 May 2026: anticapitalistresistance.org
Cymru’n Codi Senedd candidate interviews (Heledd Fychan, Tess Marshall, Beth Winter), 2026: cymruncodi.substack.com
Cymru’n Codi programme and Substack: cymruncodi.substack.com/p/cymrun-codi-programme
Cymru’n Codi manifesto: shared with permission. Undod Chwith Cymru / Left Unity Wales, How To Win An Independent, Republican And Ecosocialist Cymru (January 2024), ISBN 979-8876044907, available in paperback and Kindle, amzn.eu/d/06BZDxsz. People’s Assembly Wales: pawalescymru.blogspot.com. All PA Wales campaign documents cited are in the public domain. Senedd election results: electoral-reform.org.uk and Geoff Ryan, ACR, 12 May 2026 (see above). ¹ Merthyr Rising and the Red Flag: The Independent, ‘Uprising gets red-carpet treatment: Welsh celebration marks 1831 revolt claimed as origin of the flag of socialism’ (independent.co.uk/news/uk/uprising-gets-redcarpet-treatment-welsh-celebration-marks-1831-revolt-claimed-as-origin-of-the-flag-of-socialism-1382976.html). The ‘claimed as origin’ formulation reflects ongoing historiographical discussion; the claim is well-established in Welsh labour movement tradition.