04.09.2025
Don’t put off democracy
Max Shanly and Jack Conrad debated the pros and cons of sortition for the founding conference of Your Party. Should we seek to mirror the average? Or raise the average through electing delegates? Carla Roberts reports
On August 31, Max Shanly addressed the Online Communist Forum to argue that communists and socialists should join him in arguing for a system of sortition (lottery) to pick members to attend the Your Party founding conference in November. He debated with the CPGB’s Jack Conrad, who argued against any such system - a video of the exchange available on CPGB’s YouTube channel.1
Comrade Shanly’s background is certainly interesting. A prominent member of the Oxford University Labour Club, he sat on Young Labour’s national committee during the Corbyn years. In 2020, he stood as part of the Momentum Renewal slate (linked to the ousted Jon Lansman), which was defeated by Forward Momentum. Not that there was much between them politically: under the guidance of former Liverpool councillor Alan Gibbons, Forward Momentum continued to enforce the witch-hunting constitution written by Lansman, which barred from membership all those who had been expelled from Labour - and, needless to say, Gibbons eventually became a victim of that rule himself.
Comrade Shanly has moved rather rapidly to the left since those days and clearly has learned some important lessons in terms of democracy and political programme. He has been arguing vocally for Your Party to have democratic structures similar to the Democratic Socialists of America, including the right to form permanent factions and platforms.2 He continues to have the ear of key players in Corbyn’s inner circle, while many of his contributions are enthusiastically picked up and supported by groups like RS21.
At the Communist Forum, the comrade started off by explaining that, unlike Ed Griffiths, he was not “a complete advocate of such a system of sortition and it is not useful in the long term. I believe in elected delegates.” Personally he advocates a system of “sortition plus”, which would ensure some representation for organised platforms - more on that below.
The comrade congratulated all those who had taken the initiative to set up local proto-branches: “that is an expression of the first shoots of grassroots democracy in action”. However, the “refusal by those at a national level who control the data rights and the mailing lists to share access” has meant that those proto-branches “have had to rely almost entirely on pre-existing activists’ networks and social media. While these have great value, they cannot then connect themselves to the great mass of people who signed up in the hope of genuine participation.”
There is no democratic mandate to elect delegates - and, crucially, no intention from those above to allow such elections. The danger therefore was that without a system of sortition “those at the top could be hand-picking the people they want in the room for the founding conference and I have already heard through conversations with friends who are more in touch with what’s going on above, that that is what some people really want.”
There was also the danger of this becoming a “room-packing exercise for small groups. And running the conference in that fashion will create a situation whereby the decisions taken in the room can easily be overruled by the good people at home, so it doesn’t even matter what people in the hall vote for.” This would be “letting those at the top off the hook”. For the founding conference “to have any democratic legitimacy, it has to be representative”, and sortition would “ensure the greatest amount of equal rights for participation. Importantly, sortition is far better than what the alternative is.”
The comrade explained why he is focussed on trying to convince those at the top: “They’re the ones with the access to the data and the funds and everything like that. So it’s going to be them doing it, whether we like it or not.”
Comrade Shanly hopes that some on the levers of power might support his proposals, which can be read online, in full3:
This system would fulfil the idea of ‘one participant, one vote’ which is, I think, ultimately what Zarah Sultana has been arguing for. I think she’s fluffed it a bit by saying OMOV. In conversations I’ve had with people who are close to her I argued that, actually, we want ‘one participant, one vote’. They’ve been fairly open to it, which makes me think she would be as well.
Voiceless?
The socialist left would not be rendered voiceless, he said (his ‘sortition plus’ bit): “Any registered participant - not just the ones who have been elected by a sortition - would be able to submit motions, amendments, proposals, strategy papers - all sorts - if proposals are supported by, say, 200 other registered participants.” In addition, 10% of the delegates at the founding conference would be made up of “factional observers”, who
… have set out their political platform prior to conference, and what motions they’re going to be supporting - everything like that. So the CPGB could set up a platform and you could put forward 10 names, and then there would be a vote by single transfer vote using the Droop quota. And then, based on the percentage of the vote you get, you would have X number of representatives.
He later made the argument that, realistically, of those “maybe 10,000 people” who would put themselves forward for the sortition pool, “the overwhelming majority would probably be members of the organised left or otherwise politically advanced - comrades who are far less wedded to the cult of personality, for example, than a room of hand-picked conference attendees would be.”
All these elections “should be conducted by an independent and neutral third party, purely because we know what some of the people at the top are like. And they will try and manipulate the result if they have the chance.”
Manipulation
Jack Conrad started with comrade Shanly’s last point, expressing his fear that such a system would “actually be incredibly easy to manipulate”. He continued:
It is quite conceivable that those above - who you don’t trust, quite rightly - will say, hey, here’s a good idea thought of by Max and Ed. We’ll take it. And why not? After all, they will get to choose, in practice, who the ‘experts’ are on the day, who the chairs are, how options, motions and factions are being presented. Say the CPGB manage to get five delegates and we want to raise an objection and the chair says, ‘No I’m not taking you’. What can we do under those circumstances? Very little.
A system of sortition or lottery “is great for juries, where you have to say ‘yes’ or ‘no’”, comrade Conrad said, “but political parties are entirely different.” He thought comrade Shanly was taking the “wrong approach”:
We should not worry about representation in some statistical sense. I’m not a mathematician, but my understanding is that for 800,000 people, all you need is to get 384 randomly chosen people into a room to give you a 95% certainty that it reflects 800,000 people in terms of gender, age, views, etc.
But you will get politically inexperienced people stuck in a room for a weekend who will have to go through a huge stack of documents, motions, amendments. It is almost impossible for them to come to an informed decision in this way. So those above could easily go for a system like that.
But it is what we need? Take the foundation congress of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party. That congress took two months. If you read the minutes, you can see how they painstakingly went through all the rules, heard amendments, discussed issues. We don’t want the launch conference of Your Party to last two months, but you can see how that is an entirely different way for members to exercise real democracy. What about the party programme? What about party statutes? What about a party strategy? What about a party election? Our approach to the Greens, the Labour left?
These are complex questions that do require time and require us to become experts. Can anybody become an expert? Yes. But it does take time and it takes effort. Sortition will choose average members, not the best delegates.
The comrade then outlined the CPGB’s alternative, as previously explained in the Weekly Worker: The proto-branches should continue to meet; they should demand the sign up-lists; they should get together regionally, nationally, and they should also elect delegates for the launch conference:
We need to build this party bottom-up, no matter what they do at the top. Yes, there is a risk that the SWP will pack those meetings. Or they might not, because if you read Socialist Worker, you can get a sense that they are fearful of their members mixing with others, being pulled into all sorts of directions and perhaps being convinced by people with better politics. Who knows? But this is a potential risk we have to take, because we are not just arguing for democracy: we are also arguing for a political programme for real change. That is what we should focus on.
Comrade Conrad then mentioned the DSA, which comrade Shanly had referenced as a positive example of the “New Model Party” we should be fighting for. The recent congress in Chicago was interesting, he said, because
the so-called Majority Caucus, which wanted to do away with branch delegates and introduce an OMOV Zoomocracy - turned out not to be the majority after all. They were defeated! Small groups like the CPGB could act to swing votes at a truly democratic conferences - and we have in the past. Exactly the role our comrades in the Marxist Unity Caucus are now playing in the DSA. They have something like 100 members and they’ve influenced the DSA, which has over 50,000 members. They could not have played that role if delegates at that convention had been chosen by sortition.
In agreement
Moshé Machover, who has argued for a system of sortition under communism,4 intervened from the floor to explain why it would not be a good system to elect delegates: “The main argument against this decision-making by sortition is that it leaves out of the decision-making process the vast majority of members. Whereas decision-making by a full conference, or by delegation, demands that every member takes part, either as a delegate or as an elector of the delegates.”
Replying to the lively discussion, in which one participant argued that Jack Conrad’s view was “elitist, because it implies we know better than the rest of the membership”, comrade Conrad replied:
You know, if I broke my leg, the last thing I’d do is hobble out the door, pick the first random person I come across and ask them to fix it. I would try to get the best possible medical treatment. And that applies to politics. We don’t want the average, which is what sortition achieves - we want the best. Now of course the branches might not choose what I might call the best people - but it should be up to them. And, crucially, delegates should be elected and accountable. Members should be able to ask, ‘Why on earth did you vote that way?’ You cannot really do that with somebody chosen by lottery.
We want an active, engaged membership, meeting every week or so, getting to know each other and their politics, arguing, convincing each other - not atomised, passive people, hoping to be picked by lottery. We want members to questions delegates, to criticise them - and if they don’t like what they see, they should become leaders themselves and replace them.
Comrade Shanly explained that “we are entirely in agreement, generally, about what kind of democracy we want the party to have. But we also have to be realistic about what is likely to happen. I hope we can all unite around the minimum programme for maximum democracy.” He concluded: “You have all given me a lot to think about and I will seriously think about it - I’ll probably even write about it.”
We are certainly looking forward to discussing this, as well as other questions, with the comrade!
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medium.com/@maxshanly/towards-a-new-model-left-party-5947dc71b727.↩︎
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medium.com/@maxshanly/born-for-life-or-marked-for-death-a12d87220e42↩︎
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Collective decision-making and supervision in a communist society: eprints.lse.ac.uk/51148/1/__Libfile_repository_Content_Machover, M_Machover_Collective_ Decision_Making_Machover_Collective_ Decision_Making.pdf.↩︎