The fight inside Your Party is not an accident, and not a question of bad personalities landing in the wrong jobs. It reflects a deeper problem that any attempt to build a new workers’ party in Britain will run into: the hold of the labour and trade union bureaucracy over working-class political life.
That bureaucracy is a distinct social layer. In the unions it consists of officials and full-timers whose function is to mediate between workers and employers. In politics it includes the MPs, councillors, staffers and sundry operators whose function is to mediate between the working class and the capitalist state. They live by negotiation and brokerage, and that social function shapes their politics.
If your job is to manage struggle, contain it and translate it into safe institutional channels, you are not going to welcome rank-and-file initiative, democratic control from below, or any movement that escapes your grip. You are going to prefer caution, message discipline and safe parliamentary manoeuvres. You are going to see the working class not as the force that can transform society, but as something to be represented, managed and, when necessary, restrained.
Anti-democrats
That is why reformist leaders are always uneasy with real membership democracy. A passive membership that retweets and fills up the coffers is desirable. Members who insist that leaders are accountable and—horror of horrors—earn a workers’ wage, are considered a menace to their privileges and prestige.
Left-populist models like Podemos and France Insoumise are becoming increasingly attractive to the political wing of reformism for exactly this reason. They offer broad appeal and centralised control while avoiding the difficult bit: organised workers exercising democratic power. When invited to do so, members can register, click, endorse and vote. But the leadership sets the question, controls the machine and keeps hold of the real levers.
It is actually a consultation exercise dressed up as democracy, and it cannot build durable working-class organisation. It can gather support and generate a sense of momentum, but it cannot train militants, develop leadership from below, or sink roots in workplaces and communities. It is designed to mobilise support without creating centres of power outside the leadership’s control.
Momentum was a typical example. For a brief period, it looked as though it might become a real organising centre for members. The moment that became a serious possibility, it was cut down and turned into an instrument for imposing unquestioning loyalty to Corbyn—with disastrous results.
The people now shaping Your Party’s apparatus were schooled in that tradition. They were never going to discover a love of branches, delegates and democratic accountability simply because they had changed organisational vehicle. Their instinct is to keep control at the top, and disperse organised pressure from below.
That is the real content of the fight in Your Party. It’s not an abstract row about structures, but a conflict over whether the party becomes another top-down electoral shell or something rooted in working-class self-organisation.
The Left
The left has not produced good answers to this problem. One response is adaptation: keep criticisms soft, don’t push too hard on democracy, and hope that influence at the top can substitute for struggle at the base. In practice it means permanent accommodation — talking about realism and breadth while drifting inexorably to the right.
Another is abstention: a rapturous greeting for every new formation, then dismissal as soon as reformist pressures appear. One month the party is a breakthrough, the next month parties don’t matter much and real change happens in the streets anyway. That is the method of the SWP who soured on Your Party once it became clear they would have to fight for a seat at the top table.
Then there is the sectarian fantasy, the idea that the answer lies in some unity of the left organisations, detached from any real movement in the class. What the working class needs is not a larger sect. It needs a democratic party of activists and organisers, with organised currents inside it that develop its practice through debates over programme, strategy and leadership.
How to fight
Revolutionaries recognise we can’t bypass the struggle with reformism—we have to fight it. That starts with the united front: where union officials or reformist leaders are prepared to act over concrete immediate questions—against the far right, against cuts, against war—revolutionaries should be there, arguing for the broadest and sharpest common action possible.
But unity in action is not the same as political accommodation. The point of common action is to organise and clarify politics through experience, not to disappear into somebody else’s machine.
Alongside the united front, we need rank-and-file organisation: in the unions, networks of militants capable of pushing against the caution of the officials; in a party like Your Party, real branches with elected delegates, accountable representatives and membership control over decisions and resources.
None of that is possible from outside. A new workers’ party will not spring fully formed from Jeremy Corbyn’s head, and it will not be built by walking away from every partial and contradictory attempt to create one. The fight over branches, accountability and democratic control in Your Party is where the real argument about what a workers’ party is for is currently being conducted.
If reformist bureaucrats succeed in turning it into another empty electoral vehicle, that is a defeat. But it would be a deeper failure still if the socialist left proved unable to offer anything better than accommodation on one side or despair on the other.
The hold of reformism over the working class’s organisations isn’t broken by denunciation. It is broken by organising people to take control of their own struggles, and staying in the fight long enough to do it.
