PARTISAN!

The chaos and uncertainty surrounding the new Corbyn/Sultana party in the UK has left socialists across Britain in a lurch. Andreas Chari of Prometheus Journal offers a recap of the past few months and an outline of where the fight for a democratic process currently stands.

Your Party Launch(es)

The founding of a new left-wing formation, however broad, was a source of excitement for many across the British Left. Thousands of activists, from politically drained Jeremy Corbyn fans to revolutionary communists, saw an opportunity to fill the gap in left-wing politics on the national level. Finally, we had a terrain to fight for our politics at the level of the British State; instead of us revolutionaries burning out and getting stuck in a cycle of reproducing our respective sects, we could now build a principled left party with a mass base. This base initially materialised in 800,000 sign-ups to the initial mailing list, and the majority of left-wing organisations in Britain rushed to position themselves either for or against it. We hoped this would be the Palestine solidarity movement taking a party form and, alongside it, uniting tens of thousands of left activists into a single mass political body.

What we hoped and what we got were two different things. Since those early September days when Zarah Sultana, a former Labour MP who became the public face of the project alongside Jeremy Corbyn, launched the initial membership platform, everything has gone downhill. What started as an explosion of enthusiasm ended quickly when the Independent Alliance (an electoral pact of pro-Palestine MPs and Corbyn himself) released a joint statement urging supporters to ignore the “unauthorised email” sent by Sultana and her team, cancel any direct debits they had set up, and announced that they were seeking legal advice. Fellow Prometheus editorial board member, Archie Woodrow, has already covered the farcical launch process and the internal workings of the clique of self-appointed leaders that led us to the current state of Your Party, and I will not repeat them.

After a series of legal threats and the official launch of the membership platform by Corbyn’s team, we finally had a plan for a late-November conference. At the time of writing, one week before the founding conference, two Independent Alliance MPs have withdrawn from the process amid ongoing feuds between the Corbyn and Sultana camps in the bourgeois media.  With the conference happening in a few days, we still do not know how it will run, how many attendees there will be, what power, if any, the conference has, or which motions the online attendees are supposed to ratify.

Regardless of whether the Your Party founding conference leads to some functioning left-electoral vehicle or becomes the Fyre festival of the British Left, we need an alternative to the Labourite politics whose stench permeated this project.

Unity from the Movement

What has become increasingly clear over the past few months is that the so-called ‘leadership’ of the left, whether around Corbyn or Sultana, is not up to the task, prioritising backroom shenanigans that have exploded into wasteful public beefs. The small glimmers of hope that Your Party might be viable after the conference came not from them but from the politicised cadre themselves.

In mid-October, at The World Transformed (TWT), in Hulme, thousands of people came together to discuss the way forward for the left, especially how we relate to Your Party and the Greens. Over the three-day festival, organisers held assemblies attended by several hundred people to debate how socialist politics can develop in Britain. Before and after TWT, attendees and sympathisers alike formed political factions to help democratise the process of founding Your Party, strengthening its political foundation, and drawing lines of demarcation around transliberation, ecosocialism, and anti-imperialism. A number of these groups drafted a provisional Unity Platform, which the final TWT assembly adopted. Meanwhile, in the Your Party regional assemblies, the few opportunities to discuss politics came not from the leadership itself but from rank-and-file factions, with mass support from assembly attendees.

By the beginning of November, a second unity initiative, led by various far-left groups and building on the momentum of the original TWT Unity Platform, established the Socialist Unity Platform (SUP). This initiative aimed to intervene directly in the Your Party founding conference with a shared programme and an organised fringe.

While the SUP intervention focuses primarily on raising democratic demands at the founding conference, this is significant. What started as a platform of unity of seven factions around YP became a platform uniting them alongside a substantial portion of the far left in Britain. There is an objective need for unity in the communist movement, and we are witnessing the growing pains of this unity at this moment, happening organically. Even if the conference ends up being a farce, the far left is slowly gaining momentum and engaging with one another for once. There remains hope to unite the communist movement after all.

What happened in the past months leading up to the Your Party founding conference was not an accident or some conspiracy; it was the natural political manifestation of the worst of Labourism and the politics of the trade union bureaucracy. Backroom dealings between unaccountable Labourites that, throughout this process, were unwilling to make the membership sovereign in any decision besides copy-editing the founding documents. Their vision for this Party was not a mass party but a loose party brand for MPs to secure another re-election. Against this politics, we must demand better; we need the politics of the working class. A politics not for the domination of the aristocracy of the labour movement over its rank and file, but a politics of freedom from domination that takes members seriously as their own agents of liberation.