The Rocky Road to Power: Notes on a New Left

What does socialist practice mean in the event of a new leftwing party?

Zarah Sultana’s resignation from the Labour Party has brought the burning question of a new leftwing political formation right to the very centre stage of everyone’s minds. Last year’s election of five independents and four Greens made it clear that there is a substantive electoral space to the left of a disintegrating and dwindling Labour government, and a space not just in the country’s urban, proletarian citadels, but also in postindustrial towns and cities with multicultural working classes.

I am not as hostile to the Greens as some on the radical left. As the interview Shanice and I conducted with Zack Polanski - and the discussion between the two of us afterwards - exhibited, I think he’s a good communicator of radical politics. I like his idea of The Good Life as well, frankly. But the Greens are too beholden to the institutional architecture of the EU and NATO; their record in local government leaves a lot to be desired; the Greens do not meaningfully exist in a place like the one I call home; and, most of all perhaps, when one compares the number of people who have joined the Greens since Polanski’s leadership bid with the over 70,000 signed up to Zarah Sultana’s Action Network in the wake of her resignation, there is a fundamental question about the mass character of each project. None of this is to denigrate the great work that Greens Organise do, and it would be an absolute disaster if the left did not recognise the importance of a Red-Green electoral alliance as a conduit for building the left’s future political supremacy over the next five years.

Ultimately, though, I am an enthusiast for a new leftwing party. I know all too well that this new formation will not share every nook and cranny of my politics. It will, partly, be a site of struggle between people like me, who think we have to break with capitalism in its entirety, abolish class relations all together and forge new forms of life, love and sovereignty, and people who want to improve the society we currently live in for the better, make the state fit for reproducing healthier, happier populations, and put more money in everyone’s pockets. In many ways, these two pathways could be contiguous, but in other scenarios - where the proximity to power determines one’s approach to policing, transphobia or migration, for example - there’s a significant chance that they might not be. But okay, that’s a struggle we’ll have, and the fact that there’s a new party around the corner that will likely attract tens of thousands of people to it, maybe hundreds, is a fantastic opportunity to demonstrate those disagreements. But that isn’t the only opportunity. It isn’t even the primary one.

Our people, the working class in all its stripes, are being put through hell. We are in desperate need of change and the means to make that change. The old Trotskyist refrain that there is a “historical crisis of leadership” is being reproduced by different quarters of the left, and the past year of disorganisation, as Archie Woodrow has convincingly demonstrated, makes it difficult to disagree with such a claim. However, I would argue that there is a much more profound crisis of class subject formation at play. Despite the mini-strike wave of 2023 and the mass social movements of the past fifteen years, what Mike Davis described as the “strategic action, organisational capacity and hegemony” of the working class has undergone a devastating process of decomposition since the mid-seventies. The paucity of contemporary leftwing leadership is underscored by the inability of our movements and institutions to create political leaders. Socialist politics today faces the unenviable task of resuscitating anew the cultural, political and social power of working class radicalism.

The experience of Corbynism was, as Barnaby Raine has aptly argued in an N+1 essay, an attempt to “create the conditions of possibility for a new working class” through the levers of governmental power, putting workers on company boards, freeing labourers from labour time and mobilising a green, entrepeneurial state against rentierism. The ultimate problem with this wager, by no means the exclusive ambition of the Corbyn project, was that by 2019, very few sections of the population believed in the promise of Labour’s It’s Time for Real Change manifesto. Corbyn’s muddle over the European Union, supporting a fudged second referendum and being submerged in the constitutionalist wranglings of Brexit, compounded the deep sense most working class people have that politics is bent, politicians are corrupt, we don’t trust what they say, and we haven’t won anything for ourselves for decades. This is the central problem of socialist politics today, and it’s why the likelihood of a new left party should be embraced as an opportunity for class remaking rather than just mere electoralism.

It’s with this challenge that I want to propose a set of key strategic steps I think socialists should take as we embrace this new formation:

1. The Key Links In The Chain - Bring together community organisers, socialists, trade unionists, campaigners and sympathetic locals for collective power-mapping exercises which can start to work out, through co-research and knowledge of power relations in your town or city, what are the weak points of our enemies and where can we apply leverage to either advance the collective interests of working class people or make people’s lives better off;

2. Grievance Gathering - Use the scaled-up capacity of the new leftwing party to emulate one of the tactics mobilised by the successful Ferat Koçak campaign in Berlin’s Neukölln district, whereby hundreds of party activists knocked on doors in a few target areas, asking people what makes their lives a misery. The Koçak campaign used this as an opportunity to inform tenants in particular housing tenures that they were entitled to compensation from their landlords for overpaid heating bills, turning this issue into a route for tenants organising. It won’t be the same where you live, your power-mapping exercise may not reveal a quick issue that puts money in people’s pockets so easily, but talking to working class people at the doorstep and building up a sense of what ruins their lives and pisses them off is still absolutely crucial and provides you the opportunity to work through the contours of a local socialist organising and electoral platform. It also provides the basis for building trust and relationships with people whilst challenging the influence of reactionary politics in our communities;

3. Class struggle organising - With this knowledge of structural relations and local ruling class weakness in your area, combined with a sense of what drives people up the wall, you can then bring those insights together to assess what would be the best way to shatter the “capitalist realism” so predominant in Britain’s ailing, abandoned working class communities. Start a campaign, use your new datasets to reach a wider audience of people, call public meetings, and initiate deep class struggle organising oriented towards raising the confidence and power of working class people, getting the goods, and opening up the possibility of feasible electoral campaigns which can heighten class consciousness and organising capacity;

4. Everyone a Legislator - The left needs to set its sights on a generational process of class remaking which doesn’t confuse holding elected office with power; refuses to enter into government unless it has a majority that will enable the implementation of its policy agenda; and has as clear a sense as possible of how the social, cultural and political power of the broader working class can hold elected officials’ feet to the fire. This new leftwing party must grasp, internally and externally, that the power of the popular classes could be greater than the hostile power of elites and state apparatchiks, and for this we do not need just leftwing politicians, we also need to create a generation of working class organisers and leaders inside and outside of official politics in which, in the words of Marxist cultural theorist Michael Denning, “everyone [is] a legislator”. A political party of the left must resist the social division of labour between thinkers and doers, or decision-makers and decision-takers. The principle that our people can determine the course of their own lives has to be the watchword of radical politics over the next decade.

5. Organise for anticapitalist democracy - To ensure these practices inform the structure and strategic orientation of a new leftwing party, we will need self-organised anticapitalists and democratic socialists from different theoretical traditions, social movements and organising backgrounds to stake out a clear set of principles which secures this party’s future as a democratic institution, in which decision-making and elected representatives are beholden to the wishes and demands of the mass membership. The worst possible route for a new leftwing party would be to reproduce the Labour Party’s culture, politics and structure, and the best way to countenance this would be to have a strong anticapitalist left prepared to make the case for democracy in the party, against efforts to sideline key pillars of a transformative agenda.

6. The Lighthouse - Radical politics needs laboratories, experiments that take advantage of favourable conditions, to experiment in advancing an anticapitalist agenda in practice, making an example for others to learn and generalise from. A good comrade introduced me to the concept of lighthouses a while ago, and since then, I haven’t been able to get it out of my head. At its purest, the development of the Soviet, the democratic form of the Russian revolution, was a lighthouse for revolutionary forces across the globe after 1917. The Tredegar Workmen’s Medical Aid Society, which provided healthcare to miners and steelworkers in South Wales, was a lighthouse which eventually set the example for the National Health Service. Zohran Mamdani’s mayoralty campaign in New York, with its huge ground game and its deep understanding of the complex ways in which class is realised through race, gender, spatial injustice and consumption, feels like a lighthouse. The question beckons, where are the lighthouses that we can take inspiration from in Britain? Could a national party campaign take advantage of the price wars between supermarkets and turn the division between producers and consumers into a strength, occupying supermarkets, building links with workers and demanding price controls from the state against “climateflation”? Could party organisers in postindustrial towns and cities marshal campaigns which transform abandoned buildings into social centres for our class that prioritise health, leisure, culture, education and organising, true Houses of the People? Could a party branch win a majority on a city council and develop novel ways to implement its policy agenda against the centralised and dictatorial prerogatives of British statecraft? I do not know the immediate answers to these questions, but we need lighthouses both so that we can chip away at the cynicism so pervasive amongst our people, but also so we can learn, in practice, the forms of socialist governmentality appropriate for the future we want.

Some may find these steps somewhat prescriptive. They are certainly not intended as counterpositions to the notion, articulated by Joe Todd, that the left needs to grasp the terrain of the parasocial and develop an effective communications strategy that transmits socialist politics through dominant digital means and in ways that create antagonisms and felt communities.

Others might find my proposals too far-sighted. Nigel Farage leads the polls, and Reform will be central to the formation of a government within four years. I’d argue, controversially, that we have to avoid the disastrous temptation to fall in behind a progressive alliance to stop Reform. The left will not win the next general election, and the likelihood is that Farage will be the kingmaker in 2029. As James Meadway has noted, there are upwards of 60 seats up for grabs in 2029. But to damage Reform, we need to experiment with ways a new leftwing party can credibly challenge the rising hegemony of its bleak, revanchist agenda from today. It would be self-destructive to the propagation of radical answers in this crisis moment, if socialists in a new leftwing party - or the Greens for that matter - decided to subordinate our agenda to calls for a progressive alliance behind an austerian, authoritarian, pro-imperial Labour Party increasingly discredited in the eyes of the people.

The left needs a radical, independent agenda which seeks to confront Faragism not simply in the ballot box, but on the airwaves, in our neighbourhoods and workplaces and crucially, in the culture too. We need a contemporary Rock Against Racism fit for a vastly different culture today, just as we need militant class-based anti-racism on the doorstep and the shopfloor. We have to make antiracism meaningful through our organising efforts and our struggles to rearticulate socialist common-sense.

I’d go one further when thinking about how a new leftwing party might differentiate itself from its rivals as well. Soon, the Greens will likely be led by Zack Polanski, inspired by the radical ideas coming from the Autonomy thinktank, emphasising reduced working time, universal basic services and liberation from the constraints of domestic oppression. The Labour Party might well be led, before the next general election, by a figure like Angela Rayner or Andy Burnham – two individual politicians quite willing to combine cultural conservatism and war-mongering with a more redistributive agenda. In this state of affairs, a new leftwing party cannot retread the orthodoxies of social democracy. Rather, this is an opportunity to birth a truly new left that connects the needs of the working class today, reproduced through multiple vectors of oppression, to a regenerative socialist vision involving reduced working time, collective provisioning over childcare and consumption, green infrastructures of lifemaking, decarcerality, popular democratic autonomy, genuine freedom of movement and global egalitarian peace.

Raymond Williams, writing seven years before 1968, had already acknowledged the “moral decline of socialism” and the existing left’s “failure to sustain and clarify an alternative human order.” Until the 2010s, this marginalisation had spent fifty years deepening. Against the billionaires reconfiguring our minds through the smartphone, the employers stripping us of our time for a pittance, and the state managers modifying our bodies through policy, we need a practice of future-making which learns to listen and breathe alongside the complex, diverse groups of people with whom we share our lives: the neighbour we say hello to, the bossman behind the shop counter, the people in our communities we invisibilise, the everyday dominations driving our people crazy and the latest vibrations in the culture recasting the passions of the young. The steps I have tried to sketch out here are a set of practices which might nurture the popular capacity and initiative of our people to challenge the state, assert freedom over our lives, and, as Sivamohan Valluvan and Amit Singh have compellingly argued in a forthcoming essay, de-burden the collective self. A new leftwing party is a tool for connecting with the people. DIY Socialism, the early steps of which I’ve tried to lay out in this piece, is the means. The goal is to put the people in power.