Don’t like the old party? Just build a new one! Don Flynn argues that there are social and political forces that shape our options when it comes to building forces for change. Is “Your Party” really the way to go, or is it just an arc that leads back to the same dead end?
“With one bound, Jack was free.” This device was much used in the silent movies of the Douglas Fairbanks Jnr epoch and the radio serials of the 1940s, which allowed the hero to chuck aside any number of chains the plot had entrapped him in up to that point, and leap back into the battle fray with replenished energy.
There’s a large chunk of that spirit in the wave of enthusiasm which has greeted Jeremy Corbyn and Zarah Sultana’s announcement of “Your Party” (YP), launched at the end of July.
In under 400 words, the embryonic party’s founding statement set out the fact that “the system is rigged”, evidenced by the fact that 4.5 million children live in poverty, while giant corporations make a fortune from rising bills.” For the statement’s authors, this summarises the major cleft in society, marking out the 99 percent of people who would identify with the plight of the children from the 1 percent who come out to support the giant corporations.
The rush of interviews with people intimately involved in the YP project shows the influence of theoretical work on left populism, which they seem to have immersed themselves in since the calamitous end of Corbyn’s leadership of the Labour Party in 2019. First time round the movement’s populism seemed to have been made up on the hoof as JC worked to build the platform he had been fortuitously gifted when Ed Miliband quit the Labour leader job in 2015 and the parliamentary party failed to put forward a credible candidate who could rule from the stance of the centre-right.
This time, getting an understanding of what the Corbyn-Sultana movement would do required a deep dive into political theory, with James Schneider holding one’s hand every inch of the way.
In his extended interview published on the New Left Review “Sidecar” blog, Schneider adds detail to what had previously been a quick outline sketch of the aims and methods of a left populist party. Its tasks are, firstly, “the construction of popular unity: taking the constituencies that currently form a sociological majority and translating them into a political majority”. Then the construction of “popular power” by extending democracy and “decommodifying” parts of the economy currently run on a for-profit basis.
The final construct is that of a “popular alternative” which, with popular unity and popular power already under its belt, will demonstrate “alternative ways to organise society as a whole, while also building a majoritarian programme for government that is capable of meeting people’s needs in the short to medium term.”
That is the theory, at least, and it can seem a little finicky to have to remark how similar it sounds to the very thing that social democratic political formations have claimed to do since the end of the Second World War. Popular unity came via the electoral blocs, which got leftist parties into power in many countries, and popular power followed with nationalisations and the welfare states, creating the basis for full employment and rising living standards for the working class for the thirty good years that preceded the neoliberal counter-revolution.
But it has to be admitted that social democracy’s version of left populism stalled at the point of Schneider’s third construction – the building of a viable alternative to the capitalist system. It seems that its very success in forging a popular majority, which won so many elections across its European stronghold, and the comfortable ways of life for so many working class families enjoying high wages, free education and health care, made it less pressing to go on towards the job of constructing an even more comprehensive alternative to the corporate capitalist system.
It was at this point that the post-war progressive movement ran out of ideas and opened the road to the Thatcher-Reagan free market reaction. Falling profit rates, inflation and stagnating growth gave rise to a political movement which aimed at the systematic dismantling of the electoral blocs and the economic and social infrastructure that supported postwar social democracy. What is there in Corbyn-Sultana-Schneider and company YP formation that would make us think the problem can be cracked this time round?
At this point, it looks as if Jack’s bound to get himself free from the snares of Labourite failure can’t be assumed to have worked out. This is because they have deep roots in the politics and culture of a system of capitalist accumulation which has been around for 400 years. It is the dead weight of this history that traps the left and makes it so difficult to move beyond stumbling reformism and the sense of exhaustion of ideas which characterises social democratic parties across the world today. There is no “one bound” into left populism which will move us on from this predicament.
At this point, we should be ready to admit that there is no right or wrong decision for anyone committed to the idea of socialism when it comes to deciding whether to join the YP. Whether you take that leap, stick with Labour, or maybe sniff around the Greens to see what they have to offer is, at this point in time, an individual decision based on what is most likely to be fruitful to yourself. Political activism for people on the left invariably means finding a project you feel comfortable with and that supports your idea of what progress looks like.
We under-estimate how much of this sort of activism is going on at the present time. The left in Britain, as in other countries, supports a vast range of activities covering issues like book and magazine publishing, research and lobbying, as well as community and street-level mobilisations which bring tens of thousands of people out into the public arena to state where they stand on issues from the rights of migrants and refugees through to the genocide in Gaza. The YP initiative chimes with these moods and supports the idea that the time is right to capture it in a party organisation which will go up against Labour to contest its claim to represent the progressive wing of politics in the UK. Sensing the possibility that there might be as much as 30 percent of the electorate prepared to vote for its brand it is not surprising that for many this seems to be the time to take the plunge with a new brand.
But is it correct to locate the cleavage in the politics of the progressive left in the simple question – for or against Labour? A fragment of the coalition that supported Corbyn during his years as Labour leader remains in the party, with John McDonnell representing the old guard and Clive Lewis a generation below. They have been working in unpromising conditions since 2019 – a combination of the Starmer purges that followed his ascent to party leader but also the wave of abandonment of active membership by tens of thousands of disillusioned activists. Widespread acceptance of the idea that Starmer had won and Labour was now lost to the left failed to consider the shakiness of the right’s victory as the new government took on the impossible task of restoring stability to British capitalism while also delivering on the key demands of its working-class electors.
Starmer’s first year in power has exposed the shallowness of the programme of the Labour right across every aspect of its work. Flat-lining economic growth; a pallid response to the needs of the public sector for investment and reform; an arm’s length relationship to trade unions despite its Employment Rights Bill; betrayal of groups victimised by the Conservative governments (WASPI women, welfare benefits recipients, the disabled and more); an egregious attack on civil liberties closely tied to anxious appeasement of the American president; immigration policies that mirror the Powellism of the fractious1970s; and, most notoriously, complicity in the Gazan genocide are all fully-justified charges against the Starmer clique.
Against this there is a pressing need to unify a currently fragmented left in order to concentrate fire on the atavistic conservatism of the Labour right. The model that would best support this approach is along the lines of a progressive alliance of the left, drawing in politicos, community activists, writers and commentators, researchers and academics, trade unionists, human rights campaigners, anti-racists and feminists – an idea currently championed by the Compass grouping that retains a place that straddles the Labour party and other left and centre-left movements.
Forming a new party to break from social democracy seems like self-delusion by those who don’t fully grasp its complex social and cultural forces. There is no “one bound” that will get us out of this dire situation. Building a viable democratic left in Britain is a project that has to be addressed as a staged process of learning and consolidation. YP might at best be one moment in the experiments we need to work through, but it should not be allowed to displace the work of others who see more fruitful ways of utilising their time and energy.