A Party of Activists

There is a general rule in socialist politics: the more the Left focuses inward on itself, the more idiotic its fallouts will be. In this case, the argument has taken place between two camps surrounding the MPs who founded the party, Corbyn and Sultana. The battles have not been over issues of policy. Instead, they have focused myopically on process and structure: when the new party would be founded, how it would conduct its first conference, whether it would have coleaders, how the party would roll out formal membership, who would sit on its executive or occupy its senior staff roles, whether it would give sufficient voice to its activists.

There has been a lot written in recent days about the specifics of each of these disagreements, with the fallout over membership being the most explosive. But there has been far less written about the degree to which these disagreements, taken together, symbolize a much deeper problem: the fact that, in Britain and elsewhere, the Left is ever increasingly focused on itself rather than on the class it aims to mobilize and lead.

Your Party may have been launched in July, but the initiative has been in the works for far longer. Corbyn was suspended from the Labour Party five years ago. Sultana was suspended by Labour barely a month into the new government in the summer of 2024. Discussions about this new party have been ongoing for a year or more. And yet, in all that time, the project has failed to cohere around even one policy to present to the public, begin campaigning, and define itself.

This is especially galling given the dismal record of the Labour government. It has offered a plethora of opportunities: the cutbacks on the winter fuel allowance, the failure to lift the two-child benefit cap, the botched attempt to impose widespread welfare cuts, the watering down of its workers’ rights legislation. Maybe most damagingly of all, it has utterly failed to tackle the cost-of-living crisis — the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development forecasts Britain to have the highest inflation in the G7 this year. You could imagine a powerful national campaign on energy bills and public ownership in response but, although the Your Party founding statement hinted at this direction, nothing of the sort has been forthcoming.

Instead of pursuing this outward focus, the message from Your Party since its launch has been clear: the public comes second. We, on the Left, have to spend a few months focusing on ourselves, engaging in a long and drawn-out process that makes our own activist base feel better about itself, and then, perhaps, we will take the fight to Keir Starmer and Nigel Farage and the immensely powerful interests conspiring to make life worse for millions of working people across Britain.

Doubtless, there are defenses of this position. Many will argue that it is about party democracy, something that was ruthlessly crushed in the Labour Party by Starmer and his coterie. But the socialist ideal of democracy is a mass one, premised on the mobilization and empowerment of millions of workers toward a more participatory society based on common ownership. But there is another kind of democracy, which the Left knows all too well, a sham democracy that steadily leads to greater and greater participation by a smaller and smaller clique of activists. A process designed to satisfy an existing base rather than to build a broader one.

In order to avoid this trap, socialist projects must place a focus on connecting with the public and channeling popular demands. Far too often, the focus on catering to our own activist base traps us in a cycle of sectarianism and marginality. Rather than emphasizing what unites us as socialists and taking our case to the people, we slip into debates over obscure points of theory or technicalities around structural issues that convince even people as politically aligned as Corbyn and Sultana that they are factional enemies. What’s worse: this process does not, in fact, prefigure the challenges of a future democratic society — the internecine warfare of the Left has little in common with the battles to win people over in a workplace or neighborhood.

Not Enough Cooks in the Kitchen

Certainly, no one could deny that Your Party enjoys a certain public appeal. Eight hundred thousand sign-ups to the party’s website in its first weeks suggest an appetite for an alternative to Starmer and Farage. The 20,000 who signed up during the brief and ill-fated membership drive suggest the formation was on its way to a sizable, if perhaps less impressive, total. One hundred thousand members would be a historic milestone for a party to the left of Labour, larger than the Communists in the postwar era. But it would still be far less than the half million that swelled the ranks of Labour under Corbyn.

This brings us to another glaring absence from the early stages of Your Party: the trade union movement. Socialist ideals of democracy, as we have said, are premised on the mass participation of workers. This is a difficult thing to achieve, no doubt, in an era of retreat for the Left. But the nascent Your Party project stands out from precursors by its distance from the organized workers’ movement. Would it really be too much to expect a historic left split from the Labour Party to have come with a number of affiliated unions? What about a process that involved the many unions — many led by socialists — that are not affiliated with the party? Even if you could argue that it is too early for affiliation, how many prominent trade unionists are associated with Your Party from the start? Unfortunately, these questions seem like an afterthought.

One plan that isn’t, however, is the proposal to select participants for the inaugural Your Party conference by sortition. Much has been made of how this idea owes to Trinidadian Marxist C. L. R. James and his inspirational pamphlet Every Cook Can Govern. But little attention has been paid to who James imagined taking part in this emancipatory democratic exercise. “The average Labour Member of Parliament in Britain would fall in a fit,” he wrote, “if it was suggested to him that any worker selected at random could do the work that he is doing.” The tract continues by saying democratic participation should be seen as “part of the working day” and includes an entire section on the class struggle.

If it is to be consistent with James’s vision of democracy, Your Party must aspire to be — in the classic sense — a mass party of the working class. But what evidence is there that this is its basis? Clearly, without a public accounting of its sign-ups or members, it isn’t possible to be sure. But its distance from the workers’ movement raises questions. So, too, does the early polling, which was widely reported as encouraging in left-wing media. However, when this polling was broken down by social grade, it told a different story. While 17 percent of the C2DE voters (manual and unemployed workers) would consider voting for Your Party in a putative general election, an enormous 72 percent would not.

This is not by any means a problem that is unique to the British left. Across the West, socialists have struggled to build a class coalition in recent years. Instead, we have increasingly come to represent only a fraction of that class: young, urban graduates and, to some extent, minority voters. This is not a base that we would want to alienate, but it is also not a constituency that paves the road to electoral victories or social majorities. Instead, it often leaves us mired in culture war coalitions we hope to avoid. The Green Party, another force seeing a membership surge in recent weeks, is even more limited in these terms.

Rising to the Moment

The class question is particularly concerning when it comes to Your Party because of the threats on the horizon. Much of Britain clearly agrees with the Left that the current Labour government is a failure, but far from coming to our solutions they are finding theirs elsewhere. Farage’s far-right Reform party has enjoyed a commanding polling lead for months and is the favorite to form the next government in 2029. This would be a catastrophic result for workers across Britain, unleashing a wave of attacks on trade unions, a curtailing of civil rights, the repeal of a range of social legislation, and unprecedented assaults on public goods such as the National Health Service.

Perhaps the most damning reality facing the British left is that, if Reform is to win the next general election, it will be on the back of votes in what was once its own heartland. In the North East of England, in the council that is home to the Durham Miners’ Gala, the recent local elections saw Reform sweep Labour from power for the first time in a century. Projections based on the latest polls suggest that Reform will win every single one of the seats in the North East in 2029.

This would not only be a tragedy, but it would be an avoidable one. Some commentators have been quick to write off postindustrial communities as irredeemable and keen to remake the Left as a cross-class movement of progressives corralled into the bigger cities. But contrary to this analysis, workers in the North East have not gone extinct with the departure of industry. In fact, the region has the highest proportion of unionized workers of any in England — almost twice the level of London and the South East.

Any socialist initiative worth its salt would begin with a program that aims to cut through to these workers, that offers real solutions to the issues they face and begins to rebuild communities neglected by successive governments. It would expose the skin-deep demagoguery of Farage and Reform and focus on providing an alternative that connected with people’s day-to-day experiences.

Fundamentally, it would face outward toward a public that is looking for solutions rather than inward to the comfort of its own activist base. Anything else would be an immense failure at this moment in history. The task, after all, is to build a class for itself — not a Left for itself.