21.08.2025
Whose party is it anyway?
While Your Party remains in gestation, it can be all things to all people. But sooner or later lines will have to be drawn. Paul Demarty argues for open contestation between programmes, not individuals
Despite the rather shambolic manner in which the thing was initially launched, Your Party - as the long-heralded Jeremy Corbyn split from Labour is, hopefully temporarily, called - has gotten off to a good start.
It achieved 800,000 sign-ups within just weeks, and even in the worst-case scenario - where every last one of them is a wholly passive clicktivist - that is still a significant reservoir of goodwill to draw on. Of course, the worst case is not at all likely to be true: very many will have been activated by, in particular, the Palestine solidarity movement, which has drawn millions into active protest.
In previous iterations of the anti-war movement, the question has inevitably arisen: what happens after the big demonstration? Where do people go? What do they do next? Too often, the left has only had one answer: the next march. When Jeremy Corbyn was Labour leader, there was that option, and indeed Labour’s membership swelled spectacularly at that time. Now we have another option - or at least, the germ of one.
Exactly what this thing is to become remains wholly obscure. The difficulties of the public announcement in the end are merely symptomatic of a refusal of decision. Is this supposed to be a mass membership political party? A loose umbrella group for occasional electoral campaigning? What is its political character? Who is in charge?
So far, these questions have fallen at the feet of a heterogeneous clique of former Corbyn-world notables and people thrown into prominence by ‘independent’ electoral campaigning in last year’s general election. These people have hopelessly divergent views on all the essential questions, which has led to paralysis. Now that the initiative has been smoked out by Zarah Sultana - to her credit, she at least has the requisite gumption to get things moving - the shadowy working group has been left with no choice but to call a founding conference, though the disagreements continue over what form that will take.
Infighting
The latest indication of such infighting comes from Max Shanly, who claimed on Twitter/X that “there has been a coup of sorts in the working group responsible for the founding conference, with decision-making power now centred around an even smaller group of people”, who are apparently representatives of the “LOTO faction” - that is, ‘leader of the opposition’, so presumably insiders of the Corbyn Labour leadership like long-time Unite official Karie Murphy (Shanly does not name any names, unfortunately). This would put MPs in the driver’s seat for the founding and presumably result in a centrally directed party with no real structures.1
No independent confirmation of this has been forthcoming, but, regardless, complaints on the part of Shanly - a well-connected semi-insider in the whole process, who has drafted a constitution for the organisation and has definite ideas about how the conference should be organised - may be taken as dispositive that there is some dispute in process about these matters within the totally opaque circles in charge of such things.
We cannot know what the motivating reasoning is here, but it is suspected that part of the problem will be keeping on top of the existing organised left. Organisations of the latter - the Socialist Workers Party, Socialist Party in England and Wales, Revolutionary Communist Party, and even far smaller outfits like ourselves - punch above their weight. They can get branches of the new party going more easily, stand delegates and get their policy in front of more branches far more effectively than isolated random individuals. The celebrity clout of a Jeremy Corbyn or Zarah Sultana can too easily result in a ‘generals without armies’ situation (or rather, generals without NCOs), and therefore reversion to bureaucratic methods to maintain control.
It is no surprise to find such thinking reflected within the old-school far left itself, alas. Thus Dave Kellaway, a member of the pro-imperialist-Mandelite Anticapitalist Resistance, worries about how the influence of “Leninist” groups can be controlled. He rejects the idea that the participation of such groups “is a bad thing … If you are an open, inclusive party, you cannot put a veto on the participation of several thousand seasoned and dedicated activists.”2
But “sometimes Leninist groups do alienate people by the crass way they work in the mass movement. For instance, the Revolutionary Communist Party has already said it will be joining to transform the party into a revolutionary Marxist vanguard party. Farage - no mug - even invited one of them onto his GB News programme.” Therefore the new party must clamp down on “fruitless propagandising” by way of “firm rules on discussion”. Rules, no doubt, to be drawn up and enforced by a certain comrade Dave Kellaway …
A milder version is on offer from the independent socialist (and occasional Weekly Worker contributor) Edmund Griffiths, who takes the view that delegate elections from branches are inadequately democratic because they will tend to be unrepresentative. In his words, delegates will tend to be “(a) independent councillors and other local bigwigs, (b) members of pre-existing left groups with experience ramming their slate through meetings of front organisations, and (c) mouthy, self-confident individuals who managed to make it clear they would be annoyingly upset to be left out”.
Random selection
His preferred method is sortition - the random selection of individuals to participate in the conference:
Sortition means giving up the idea that political decisions should in general be taken by the people who are ‘best’ at taking them (because they are the most popular, or the best educated, or the richest, or the mouthiest, or anything else). A random sample is statistically representative of the whole membership. Subject to some not-too-big margin of error, it will vote the same way as the whole membership would - if there were a way of getting everybody in the room and letting them debate the question together … It will be sociologically typical of the whole membership: delegates will not be much older or younger, much richer or poorer, much likelier or less likely to have a disability, much likelier or less likely to have a PPE degree, than the average of the membership. They will not systematically differ from the average in any way at all - something elections struggle to achieve even when they are supplemented with targets and quotas.3
There are huge problems with this approach - leaving aside the fact that it is totally undemocratic. It is first of all not clear that a random sample could be large enough to be representative in this way - a point discussed in Edmund’s article. I leave this aside, since that is a matter of the concrete numbers involved.
There is a related practical problem, which is: a random sample of who? The 800,000? If so, what if someone gets selected and does not want to do it? Presumably then the duty falls to someone else. There is an old story of a prisoner locked up on remand, who sees written on the cell wall: “Congratulations. Your future is in the hands of people too stupid to get out of jury service.” It is not stupidity that is the matter here, but simply that the people who pick up the baton will tend to be more actively interested in politics, and therefore more likely to be one of Edmund’s bigwigs, big-mouths and Trots. If it is not the 800,000, then how is a smaller core selected? I cannot see a way of doing so that does not select in precisely the same way.
The last practical problem I will mention - say we have our sample, and it assembles to found the party at this conference. What business lies before it? What does it vote on? Is part of the duty that these random individuals are to do a bunch of homework and provide worked-out policies in good time? Are we to assemble a constitution in real time, clause by clause, like a great bureaucratic game of exquisite corpse? In any real-world scenario, this material would have to be provided, as a jury decides on evidence submitted by the defence and prosecution. And it would be provided, as are the exhibits in a criminal trial, by ‘specialists’, whether that means credentialed experts or experienced political operatives.
Consciousness
The practical problems point to more fundamental ones. The first is that political decisions are never taken ex nihilo. We confront these choices as, in the first place, matters of radical uncertainty involving intangible value judgments and, secondly, as choices between already available alternatives. If something really new arrives in the course of debate, it emerges from the conflict of the antecedent positions. A well-informed decision therefore requires, so far as possible, that all well-supported alternatives are before the body making the decision. Delegate conferences do this imperfectly, but better than all the alternatives, since it is political organisations that are both most able to formulate policy and best at ensuring they have delegates to advance it.
The second fundamental problem has to do with those intangible value judgments. They do not appear ex nihilo either. They are formed through our lives and particular experiences. Being a member of a disciplined left organisation provides a certain sort of formation (or range of formations), but those who are not such members also have their fundamental commitments, gut feelings and conscious priorities shaped by forces external to them as individuals. For all their faults, the left organisations uphold traditions of political practice and reflection on political history far in advance of the ‘spontaneous’ ideas of untutored individuals. The latter will never attain sufficiently adroit and well-informed political consciousness without confronting the best ideas - such as they are - that are already out there, which necessarily belong to such organised traditions (that is not to say, of course, that they must in the end adopt any of these ideas).
The trouble with the left groups is that they tend to erect barriers around their members to prevent the confrontation of their ideas with rival programmes. So, for example, we read in Socialist Worker that the SWP “hopes that a new left alternative is broad and pluralist, one which revolutionary socialists can be part of, while maintaining independent revolutionary organisation and politics”.4 Pluralism is precisely a way of avoiding direct conflict, and thus a recipe (presumably) for building up SWP ‘base areas’ within the new party where their members can be protected from rival political visions. Instead of doing its duty and raising comrades up to new heights, the SWP in this way serves to deaden their political instincts and leave them helpless when real conflicts do, inevitably, arise.
In reality, the shape of the conference will be decided by the mysterious working group; it will be done, however, partly reactively, in response to the ‘facts on the ground’. For our part, we strongly encourage initiatives to go ahead and form branches or proto-branches, not wait obediently for an email from Jeremy Corbyn or Zarah Sultana (never mind Karie Murphy!) instructing us to do so. We must take the initiative - not least because the éminences grises at the centre of all this seem quite incapable of doing so, with honourable exceptions like Sultana and Shanly. The initiative will be taken, if indeed it is, by people of some political experience - which means membership or past membership of the left groups or Labour (and active, not paper membership).