Reading ‘The Many’ CEC slate’s vision for Your Party, published in Tribune recently, a fundamental question comes to mind. If they want a party that ‘appeals broadly enough to challenge for power’, then why not just join the Green Party after all?
The Greens are already best placed to facilitate a media-friendly, personality-led left populism that has socialist tendencies but isn’t in itself socialist. They’re already consolidating the membership and voting intentions of the post-Labour soft left. So as it stands, there’s little to distinguish this version of Your Party, in politics or strategy, from the existing, and already reasonably successful, leftward shift we’re seeing under Zack Polanski.
If there’s nothing distinct about the ideas of ‘The Many’, the slate can instead be defined against the more cogent alternatives that are vying for power within Your Party, namely the DSYP-endorsed Grassroots Left – a slate that more closely aligns with the democratic will of rank-and-file members as expressed at November’s founding conference. This may explain the myriad bad-faith claims in the Tribune piece (and elsewhere) aimed implicitly at the Grassroots Left and anyone who might be minded to back its candidates.
What’s unfairly described as ‘internal wrangling’, members ‘sooner [fighting] allies than our real enemies’, or being ‘more animated by internal processes than ordinary people’s problems’ is simply a healthy democratic culture, to be especially expected in a nascent party as ideas, positions and governance are hashed out for the first time. The idea that what’s cynically called ‘infighting and navel-gazing’ is preventing the party from ‘[fighting] tooth and nail for a more just and equal society’, rather than robustly, democratically enabling it, is thoroughly disingenuous. As the Tribune-published response from Grassroots Left supporters notes:
‘To be concerned with internal processes is a necessary part of establishing a party that can unite hundreds of thousands, and millions, of people. A party that aims to unite the initial hundreds of thousands needs trust, clarity, and transparent processes. Without them, rumour and anonymous press briefings replace accountability. With them, argument becomes productive: the way members test strategy, develop policy, resolve differences, and build unity.’
That this process of establishing a democratic structure is being questioned belies a deeper problem with The Many’s positioning. All their ideas are inflected with a lament that those who originally hoped to rule the party have lost their grip on power through the all-too-inconvenient consequences of member-led democracy. Hence the talk of a desire to ‘get Your Party back on track’. For this, read: ‘we don’t like what conference democratically decided, and would prefer to do things differently’.
While not present in The Many’s Tribune article, we can place the commonplace denunciation of factions or ‘splits’ in this category too. Every political organisation runs on factions. They’re not symptoms of dysfunction, but signs of a healthy democratic body comprised of members keen to organise together and get things done. Anyone that’s participated in a party or trade union election knows this. The critics know it too. Such a position only serves to stifle democratic fervour. Nobody should fear heterogeneous socialist groupings organising in search of common ground: the whole point of Your Party was to provide an organisational locus around which these various leftist positions could coalesce, free from the stultifying auspices of the Labour Party and spared from disconnected irrelevance.
This latent suspicion of democracy belies yet a further truth. How officials wish to treat the membership is how in turn they see those on the outside of the party: the electorate, the people, the working class of this country, the oppressed and dispossessed the world over. The expressed need to ‘appeal’ – which in essence foregrounds depoliticised, transactional electoralism over real movement-building and political struggle – exposes the limited political horizons of a patronising, top-down would-be party establishment. It has the makings of a party that wishes to function on behalf of a working class they hardly understand, rather than empowering it to be organically grown from within it.1 This is not what the membership wanted, nor voted for. Nor are these the ingredients of a stable long-term socialist project.
Conversely, aspirations for a democratic-socialist country deserve a democratic-socialist party capable of realising it. This is the real business of party formation. The Grassroots Left et al are not participating in ‘purity politics’, or ‘[fighting] each other’, but are instead practising the same mode of politics that their organising will adopt outside of the party. The real work of socialist organising is not a myopic hashing out of ‘viewpoints’ and ‘issues’, but the mobilising of social blocs and the forming of political coalitions. That’s what needs to be built and consolidated to ‘take the fight to Starmer and Farage’, not merely saying and doing the right things as mediated by an eternally hostile establishment press.
But the question of ‘why not the Greens?’ – or, as refracted through The Many, ‘why not Corbynism 2.0?’ – begets deeper questions about the nature and efficacy of socialist organising, and its relation to the unmaking and remaking of the British state. The central attraction of The Many’s proposals appears to be a suggestion that it would enable a return to the ‘success’ of peak Corbynism. But the unspoken reality here is that the left-wing surge under Jeremy Corbyn’s political leadership did not work, and never could have worked, and not just due to it occurring within the limitations of the Labour Party.
Corbynism never really developed a working theory of the state, or reckoned with the ways in which, if it somehow managed to win the 2019 General Election, its agents – the civil service, the armed forces, the inextricability of the British government and British capital, etc – would immediately have moved to suppress it. As it stands, there is little to indicate that the Polanski-led Green movement could stand any better chance of overcoming this same problem.
A broad socialist movement requires its own theory of the state – how it will work against them, how it must root-and-branch remake the entire thing, how its activists must be mobilised to take on the runnings of the state, from top to bottom, in lieu of those reactionaries who currently do. If the strategy of populist parties remains some variation of ‘articulate people’s grievances, propose agreeable solutions, get elected and do nice things in government’, they will continue to get steamrolled as soon as they butt up against the real power and mechanisms of the state. In Wales and Scotland, where the British state’s legitimacy is open to challenge, there may be ways, however tentative, of cracking this open, however slight. In England, where the polity and the existing state are more intrinsically entwined, the task is yet more insurmountable.
There are few reasons to be cheerful when it comes to the trajectory of Your Party. Once the initial enthusiasm dissipated, the whole affair became largely dispiriting, and often outright embarrassing. But some pockets of hope remain. In contrast to those currently steering the party, the Grassroots Left and the DSYP have been very impressive, both in their vision for the party and how they communicate it. Theirs is the example to follow if a popular socialist alliance is to have any chance of success in this country. They more fully understand the stakes, and the task at hand, far more ably than ‘The Many’ or the Greens.
- Unfortunately, this positioning is embedded in the very name of the party – a point I shall return to at a later date. ↩︎
Disposable Everything 