On single leadership vs collective leadership, the latter won. On keeping the ban on dual membership, Team Jeremy lost. On enshrining trans liberation in the constitution, that vote was won. All these might have been tighter or lost if the secretive organising committee hadn't ham-fistedly imposed themselves on proceedings on the previous day. And in ballots over the weekend, measures emphasising local branch democracy and initiative, anti-cuts principles, trade union relationships, and positioning YP as an explicitly working class socialist party all passed. The only thing Corbyn got his way on was the ridiculous Your Party name. It was good to see him strike a contrite note in his interviews, and likewise Zarah Sultana apologise to conference for her role in making the founding of this party a mess. In all, despite the overdramatic protestations of Corbyn superfans, something was achieved. If YP was in the toilet following the last round of bilious fallings outs, the membership scooped the project out of the bowl as the party's would-be elites yanked hard on the chain.
There are still unresolved issues. Who gets to be the leadership now? With MPs and councillors barred from the incoming executive committee, this is an opportunity for the party to put forward a new generation of leaders. Corbyn will forever remain YP's figurehead, but there's now a chance the party can transition from one-man-band status to something other than his needy dependent. And though existing self-declared Leninist outfits are not barred, what kind of relationship they should have in the new party is in the new committee's gift. Keep them as is, require them to fold into party platforms, re-impose the block? Whoever the leadership will be and whatever they decide to do, the membership have already demonstrated good sense. The chances of the SWP or the other little Lenins taking over or wrecking it through sectarianism is thankfully, for once, remote.
To be sure, Your Party is taking risks organising this way. As others have pointed out, in politics having a stand-out figure is a boon. Ask Reform. Ask the Greens. Without that, how can YP capture the public's eye? This is now especially difficult as September's stupidities have ensured Zack Polanski is hogging much of the space that was YP's for the taking. Where there are still openings is where the left are much stronger than the Greens. I.e. In the workplaces, in community organising, in street movements, in solidarity campaigns. We build from there. Owen Jones argues that time is of the essence, and that's true. But he also knows from his labour movement history and that building the political capacity of our class isn't dependent on elections. There are other ways, and the existing collective experience of YP can counter Labour and the rise of Reform outside the ballot box. It's not the mainstream way of doing things, but then again YP is not a mainstream party.
Doesn't collective leadership and the recall of lay officials suppose permanent factional struggle? Yes. But if the project is organising our class as a political party, it cannot be any other way. The working class is as diverse as it is vast, and anything aspiring to this role has to be a clearing house for experiences and opinion. Discussion, debate, the freedom to form platforms and factions around positions, all these are necessary for formulating strategy. The way forward is not going to be handed down from superhumans living on a higher plane. A democratic workers' party is a noisy party, not a personality cult, not an agreement of diplomatic silences, not a narrow mono-idea sect. This is the challenge YP's membership has set. Which demonstrates a level of political maturity over and above the caricatures attributed to the left - even, sometimes, by itself.
Politics is not easy, especially class politics. Nor are there any guarantees. YP's membership have chosen a difficult path, but in the circumstances, it was the right path, the only path. Drawing a line under the mistakes and idiocies of the last few months means moving on from Corbynism. With all the dust having settled, it's clear this is what Your Party has started to do.
“The chances of the SWP or the other little Lenins taking over or wrecking it through sectarianism is thankfully, for once, remote.” How? They are baked in now they can have dual membership. As is made clear in this by Alex Callinicos of the SWP, the reason for all the sects joining YP is to build their sect through membership of it. Their loyalty will always be to their party, their comrades, their line. They seek to grow the host party in so much as they can leech of it. That & their culture of hectoring & sermonising that is characteristic of all the sects will be a disaster.
ReplyDeleteGiven that the YP membership have just conspicuously asserted their independence from those who would lecture to them or seek to control them, why should YP supporters be afraid of anybody having dual membership...?
DeleteThe gauntlet is thrown down, now. "Do your worst". I'm here for it.
The International Socialist Organization, the US counterpart to the SWP, faced a Comrade Delta-style sexual abuse cover-up crisis in 2019, but because it allowed dual membership with the DSA, which was at that point nearing 50 thousand members, almost all of the ISO's rank and file members just joined the DSA, and the ISO dissolved later that year.
DeleteMoreover, the SWP has ~3500 members, so even if all of them were to join YP and exclusively vote for their own slate, they'd only be able to get one seat on an 18-member CEC.
ReplyDeleteI think the closest analogy to the YP iis the ALBA party that split from the SNP. It had a figure head in Alex salmond, 2 MPs, an MSP, a number of Councillors and capable party apparatus plus the enthusaism and ideological drive of members determined to push for Independence. It entered elections with optimism - and with a PR system to help - and got 1% of the vote in a good day, lost its MPs and MSP and most of its local reps. It continues to exist and agitate without making impact ofn the electorate or the Independence movement. YP seems to be intent in becoming irrelevant, though the infighting will be interesting to watch and read about.
And it seems the mainstream media have decided to treat YP as a comic opera, a matter for mild amusement, with rolling eyes and ironic comments on 'what do you expect from the left.'
Bringing up Alba is interesting, because their initial (and decisive) rout had some striking qualities. The one which really stuck in my mind was the highly visible way in which the anti-trans lobby seemed to get themselves associated with it; I got the strong impression that they tied themselves like a millstone around its neck, and couldn't have better served both their most hated political nemesis (the at-the-time all-conquering Nicola Sturgeon) and the pro-union Westminster establishment if they had been trying to do so.
DeleteIf you're a political insurgency taking on very strong vested interests, without the secret backing of equally strong vested interests (c.f. Farage), then never, ever let yourself get associated with any politics of the reactionary elderly. Rebellion is young and punk, or it is dead in the water.
YP's mass membership are showing signs of collectively understanding this...
I agree with both of you. It is good to remember the history of the fou ding of the Labour Party. It took years. This is early days, good to have moved away from the cult ideal to significantly utilise the membership (broad church is good). However I think it is a bad idea to allow members of another political party in. All or nothing it should be. I look forward to seeing how the movement develops
ReplyDeleteAn honest and interesting take, thank you! ✊️
ReplyDeleteIf the "Little Lenin's" and "sects" are so effective why can they never grow beyond 2k members?
ReplyDeleteWe cant keep strangling democracy in new orgs with massive potential (Enough is Enough, Momentum) for the sake of guarding against scary "sects" who aren't really that effective when you take the long view of them.
It’s not that they are effective, but their behaviour, culture, hectoring & lecturing style thst engenders talking at people & not listening to them will drive people away.
DeletePrediction: No-one from Your Party will ever be invited to appear on BBC Question Time... even if they consistently go above Labour in the polls. It simply will not happen.
ReplyDeleteI will be interested to see if they are considered (by the media establishment) sufficiently farcical and non-threatening that they DO get invited onto Question Time, in the expectation that they will either get themselves conspicuously eviscerated, or underline their status as non-entities!
DeletePhile you've done plenty of canvassing surely? You must know that the general public identifies parties with their leaders. It's utterly self-defeating to insist on having YP led by some group of members whom no one has heard of. The Greens' idea of joint leadership was daft enough, which is why they dropped it in favour of one identifiable leader. YP only decided on this model to avoid a massive scrap between Corbyn and Sultana. And they allowed SWP etc joint membership because from what I hear SWP has already taken over many YP branches. YP have rendered themselves irrelevant, except in so far they'll take a few votes off Labour and Greens in some marginals, resulting in any even bigger win for Reform. Only good news is that Sultana will probably lose her seat at the next General Election.
ReplyDeleteThe Greens didn't have a leader figurehead. Now they do have one. See how that works?
DeleteWhatever does or does not transpire you have 2 MPs that have spent a large part of their time on 90K plus a year setting up a new Party. Was this what they were elected to do? We need just a bit more accountability .
ReplyDeletePlease. Don't be quite so obvious.
DeleteI doubt that you could find many admirers or supporters, of either Corbyn or Sultana, to say that challenging Starmerite Labour from its left isn't exactly what they think that Corbyn and Sultana should have been doing.
The myriad tiny Trot sects haven't been good at building mass revolutionary parties, neilcaff, which isn't surprising given both their calcified, semi religious, versions of marxism and Leninism, and because the UK is nowhere near a pre revolutionary social crisis. But, a big BUT, they have been very effective in destroying many, many, potentially large, radical reformist proto socialist efforts over the years with their destructive entryism. And they are repeating this model yet again within the chaos of Your Party. My bet is that Sultana will join the Greens next year , and Jeremy will break off contact with Your Party now he wont be Leader, and spend the rest of this Parliament in the Commons Tea Room, and his allotment.
ReplyDeleteThe policy bundle of Your Party is identical to the Greens, and utterly middle class though the Greens are, so are the Your Party membership, despite their delusion about being a "party of the working class". Hence the same, limited appeal, policy bundle.
I guess this is our regular commenter, who seems to think that the natural constituency of the left is still legions of gruff, traditional, hard-bitten mine and factory workers.
DeleteAssuming that his living room window actually looks out onto the mainland of the UK, I don't think he's taken a look through it in the last 35 years.
"Pot and Kettle" time , Anon 00:21 . HAVE you in turn looked outside of your actually rather small middle class radical Liberal echo chamber, bubble ? The very electorally important huge lost ex Labour-voting "Red Wall " lower paid, unskilled and semi skilled working class voting bloc are still there (abstaining or voting for Reform now) , not having all died off, as you, and Phil seem to believe.
DeleteYour fantasy that the voting number advantage belongs to people who hold your radical Liberal values is just a demonstration of your narrow social circle. In fact the Your Party potential voting cohort is the same, rather limited in electorally important numbers, mainly big city, cohort that The Green Party have represented , with ONE MP, for many years. The full policy package of The Greens has all the appeal of a bucket of cold sick to most of the electorate, including the socially conservative, electorally concentrated, Muslim communities, rightly or wrongly.
And so it will be for the clearly shambolic Your Party with the same policy bundle , should this chaotic new party still be in existence come General Election time in 2029, which I doubt. Still don't let these facts impinge on your fantasy world.
Your mistake, Anon - apart from your obvious emotional need to find a way for your own backwards social views to remain relevant, without giving up on your collectivist dreams - lies in thinking that those fabled lost "red wall" voters are still available to any genuine leftist party. They aren't. Those of them that remain in reality are either smart and wise enough to move with the times socially if need be (thus making them too pragmatic to be diehard social conservatives, and excluding them from your fantasy cohort); or they belong to a far more wretched and benighted grouping... specifically those of the former industrial working class who are so thoroughly atomised and broken by Thatcherism, that they have adopted nationalism wholesale as their only means of preserving a sense of self-worth, at the same time as they have been forced by the economic landscape of Thatcherism into the ranks of the petit-bourgeousie precariat. They are therefore easy meat for any faithful servants of the oligarchy who adopt a nationalist reactionary position with a tissue-thin veneer of socialism; and no true leftist party has a hope in hell of competing with those servants for the votes of morons. Farage only has to temporarily make a facade of tacking slightly to the left and they are his, no matter what a socially reactionary version of Your Party might do to woo them.
DeleteConservative Muslim voters may be concentrated enough to account for a handful of actual seats, but they also fall into two equivalent categories. Firstly, those who understand the danger of their true position within the country, and are capable of voting in their own best interests. Secondly, those pitiful fawners who will drape themselves in a union jack in the hope of making their ethnicity a non-issue. The second group have only one lone belief or position in common with any leftist - that being foreign policy towards Israel - and are therefore of marginal relevance to any real leftist party.
Tell you what, reactionary anon; let's suppose for a moment that you are right and that the fabled lost Labour heartlands are still available to a genuine leftist party, just as long as it doesn't respect trans people. (Because that's really the group which you are thinking of whenever you write "identity politics" and "radical Liberal values", isn't it?)
DeleteOnto the next problem with your position: the assumption that those voters are available at the same time as the social liberals (big city or otherwise, middle class or otherwise) which any leftist coalition now requires in order to be significant.
Any kind of "punching down" against vulnerable minorities is the reddest of red lines to the latter group. The smaller and more vulnerable the minority, the redder that the line gets. So you can't have both.
Now you need your fantasy coalition to stand on only the phobic red wallers and the strongholds of socially reactionary minorities, because no party which needs the social liberals can be seen cooperating with you.
From the outside it all looks like a colossal waste of time and energy
ReplyDeleteA passing of the torch from Corbyn, to a new generation which took its first political inspiration from him, was my fondest hope for YP - and maybe that's actually happening.
ReplyDeleteThe kids who sang "oh, Jeremy Corbyn" at Glastonbury had to go somewhere. So did the 300-500K members which the Starmerites, and the wretched dug-in little old guard posers of the local Labour branches, bent their whole being towards driving out of the party which they clearly felt was theirs by right.
After being continuously shat upon by every government and mainstream party throughout their entire lives, whilst also being ruthlessly economically disenfranchised by the zombified corpse of a socio-economic order which their parents unwisely chose for them, we should be able to hope for the next generation to show some facility for common purpose! Perhaps starting with a rejection of the atomisation and divide-and-conquer hierarchies by which Thatcherism built a world that has done its damnedest to offer them no hope at all.
Congratulations to the YP conference attendees in winning this important battle! Resoundingly in spirit with the much-maligned name, too - which may yet prove itself. Keep it up.
You are seriously mistaken about the typical Glastonbury attender nowadays, Anonymous 00:49 ! " "Kids" they are definitely not in the main ! It costs a huge amount to get tickets and attend Glastonbury, plus the type of job to get the time off. There are a lot, an awful lot, of quite old , well off, trendy types at Glastonbury, including a lot of aged old Labour Right Wingers , like Tom Watson et al, attending during the Corbyn Surge years if you recall ? Rich people playing at being1960's Hippies for a few days , and singing "Oh Jeremy Corbyn," for a laugh does not represent a genuine mass movement for, for instance imposing much required taxing of the rich , nationalising key sectors of our economy, ie, radical socialist change , sadly.
DeleteAnd MOST people's parents most certainly did NOT in any way "choose" our current socio economic order. They, like us, were and are trapped, powerless, in a repressive , capitalist system with a pseudo democracy and overwhelming ideological dominance by a billionaire-owned mass media, anon. The "kids" you bet your hopes on are equally trapped, with genuine socialist politics, the only way forward, now pretty much defunct and replaced by dead end identity politics.
Really, anon? Most peoples' parents didn't vote for Thatcher, or her successors? One wonders how they got elected, then.
DeleteYour obsession with "identity politics" is telling. Literally nobody calls it that except for two groups: right wing bootlickers, and mentally decrepit fogeys who can't get past their indoctrinated ick towards non-heteronormative people. Neither of them are any friends of socialists.
Calm down, Anonymous 15:48, you seem to be getting very irrational when upset. A serious socialist should understand the hugely powerful role of the capitalist class control of the ideological narrative , via their control of the mass media, and not blame ordinary folk for falling for this lifelong all-embracing false consciousness inducing wall of capitalist propaganda . Blame the bosses for Thatcherism, anon, not the deluded working class Tories. Our job is to offer a coherent socialist counter narrative, backed by mass action, to dispel the power of these lies, not the liberal class- dividing drivel that nowadays is spouted by too many Left Liberals who think they are socialists.
ReplyDeleteAnon 22:12, if responsibility lies with the providers of the narrative rather than its convincees, then you and your predecessors can be no less to blame for Thatcherism than the bosses. Because you/they failed, and continue to fail, to provide a counter-narrative which "deluded working class Tories" can grasp.
DeleteBut this only illustrates that assigning "blame" is a pointless exercise which gets us nowhere. Deluded members of the working class voted for Thatcherites in prior years, and that's a fact. They are continuing to do so today via Reform, and that's a fact. They chose to do so, based on information of negative quality (I e. serving parasites more than them or their communities) received throughout their lives, and that's a fact.
That they will continue to do so in large numbers, based on the fact that nobody like you or I has the resources to reach them with better information, is a prediction. To all present, argue against that prediction if you can! If you can't, then accept that those we cannot reach - because the likes of Farage will always have privileged access to their wayward hearts and minds, by dint of the superior resources provided for that purpose by capitalist parasites - are pointless to chase. Instead, serious socialists should focus on those who are already receptive to their message.
Several anons here - and I think it is probably at least two different anons - seem to be very fond of throwing around the phrase "identity politics" (interchangeably with a derogatory "liberal") and attempting to claim that it is incompatible with socialism. They thereby demonstrate a failure to understand at least one of those things, because not being a member of the ruling class is the most widely shared "identity" of all, and the purpose of socialists is to get those who have that identity to realise that they share it.
ReplyDeleteThose who do understand at least a little of modern "identity politics" (usually under other names such as "progressivism", "social justice", or simply "trying not to be an arsehole") know that it promotes a core concept called privilege, which refers to the existing social power dynamics that perpetuate injustice. On the sharp end of privilege imbalances we find the various -isms of casual bigotry - sexism, racism, favouritism, nepotism, nativism, etc. And of course we also find the divisions of class, containing the greatest imbalance of all, where power and freedom are today concentrated in less than 1 in 10000 of the population, with very little associated social responsibility. Class is therefore a privilege issue. Decades ago, classism used to refer to the prejudicial mechanisms by which the aristocracy excluded the peons from their club! Today, wily capitalists have largely succeeded in changing its meaning to refer to any kind of contempt shown by the educated towards the uneducated, thus directing its focus away from themselves and working to turn two of their most threatening groups of enemies against each other. And they have clearly got a number of gullible would-be socialists singing along with this tune.
It's obvious that the overtly right-wing servants of the capitalist class understand progressivism much better than those who want to claim its incompatibility with socialism. Firstly because those servants hate it with a burning passion, understanding its threat towards the power structure which they serve. And secondly because one of their favourite derogatory names for it is "cultural Marxism".