LTS report 2026

The left is facing existential challenges. In the last few years, we have witnessed major, unchallenged acts of imperial aggression, acceleration in ecological breakdown, and the advance of the far-right. The forces driving these crises are increasingly networked and coordinated across borders - able to leverage complex supply chains, political affiliations, and technology to advance their aims.

These systems sometimes feel too opaque, and entrenched, to intervene in. However, discussions at LTS showed that workers continue to find ways to organise within and against them. Panels on agriculture, migrant labour struggles, and organising, in what Gramsci called the “time of monsters”, gave opportunities to hear from participants confronting the challenges of intensive exploitation and repression, particularly in the Global South.

One possibility raised by these exchanges was that workers’ positions within global supply chains can become sources of collective leverage. This was illustrated by a panel about workers’ and researchers’ efforts to halt Israel’s genocidal assault on Gaza. In the absence of effective government action, many ordinary people have sought to disrupt the flow of military material sustaining the war. They have taught themselves the workings of military logistics and shipping, traced the movement of goods, and physically blocked cargo bound for Israel at ports.

It represented a very rare opportunity for cross-movement learning… I was stretched in my sense of what I think of different political tactics and strategies.

In contrast to many labour-focused conferences and events, LTS emphasises the affective and experiential knowledge that arises from the process of struggle. Across the School, both in and outside of the formal sessions, this reciprocal relationship between knowledge and action is explored. Sessions are loosely structured, meaning that participants have the freedom to share their experiences as they choose. Discussions move easily between the tactical, the theoretical, the ethnographic, and the imaginative. 

Broadly speaking, LTS participants come from four different kinds of organisation: established trade unions, rank-and-file groups, movement groups or NGOs, and research institutions. It is a well known problem that these different formations are not very good at talking to one another. Researchers are encouraged to produce knowledge that never escapes the university library; unions can become entrenched in their own patterns and structures; grassroots groups struggle to access the resources or accumulated knowledge built up by larger organisations. Transformation of institutional forms was a recurrent theme - from discussions on how movement groups need to get better at learning from their mistakes, to how we can develop rank and file infrastructure to organise both inside and beyond traditional unions.

The LTS model brings people working different theories of change into the same conversations. The benefits of this approach were evident on a panel that explored the human cost of chronic underinvestment in health and social care. Organisers working at very different scales - from the hospital floor all the way up to international federations - shared their responses to the challenges posed by our crumbling infrastructure. We learned about the wins achieved by hospital workers fighting unfair outsourcing and low pay even when the hospital itself is facing financial precarity. We also heard about what worker-led direct action can achieve in social care settings where extraordinary power is exercised over migrant workers’ dependence on restrictive visas. These stories from the front line were contextualised by presentations on what reimagined care or pharmaceutical systems could look like, from those who are exploring these subjects at a transnational level.

“Conversations and (now) joint projects with comrades who I rarely have opportunities to meet.”

LTS aims to connect workers’ struggles across uneven histories of colonialism, industrialisation, and incorporation into global value chains. This year’s School brought together people working in a huge range of sectors, including healthcare, transport and logistics, agriculture, care, and the arts. Participation by activists from the Global South is prioritised and materially supported through bursaries. This means that workers and researchers who are normally separated by considerable barriers are able to meet and build relationships. These cross-border understandings help us glimpse horizons beyond our own. 

Sessions like Learning From Each Other: Confronting Organising Strategies invite participants to share the lessons of their organising terrain. As we learned from a delegate from the union Langile Abertzaleen Batzordeak (LAB), in the Basque Country they have had three General Strikes in as many years - including one in solidarity with Gaza. LAB is now preparing for a major coordinated rent strike. In other places, such as the UK, these tactics have not been seen in many decades. When we spend so much time working to the limits of our own organising context, alternative political forms sometimes appear impossibly remote - but these encounters remind us that they are not.