“Rumor doth double, like the voice and echo, the numbers of the feared.”
Earl of Warwick, Henry IV Part 2, Act Three, Scene One.
The rumour mill amongst the British left is in full churn. Every party, someone has an idea about ‘the party’. People argue for a replication of our own ‘New Popular Front’ or for a mass rollout of citizen assemblies as part of an electoral strategy. The formation of the Independent Alliance, behind Jeremy Corbyn, Shockat Adam, Adnan Hussain, Ayoub Khan and Iqbal Mohamed has only accelerated such schemes.
Recognising the need for a new national vehicle, which the left can unite practically within, is a step forward from merely chasing various street movements. There is a real social constituency for such a project, spread amongst the vote for various pro-Palestine independent MPs, Corbyn, and other ‘left’ MPs within formations like the Greens. However, to the right, there is the emerging relationship between the racist riots, the new Right in Parliament, and Starmerism’s commitment to the repressive apparatus of the British state. Jonas Marvin, in responding to the initial election result, argued:
“Above all, the 2024 election affirmed James Kanagasooriam’s hypothesis that we have entered a moment of “political sandcastles” in which political impermanence, electoral volatility and dwindling consent prevail, all to Labour’s potential detriment.”
The risk at this moment is the current attempts to cohere the left builds its own kind of political sandcastle, incapable of being able to build on the possible constituency of a renewed socialist politics, frustrating itself and ceding even further ground to the Right.
What is the Network Left?
The Network Left is a slightly tongue in cheek term, but one that is useful for thinking through the ecology of groups which have emerged from the wreckage of Corbynism, as well as the wider workers movement.
By Network Left, I mean figures who are active on the British left whose organising method is based on using their relationships with a narrow selection of other individuals ‘in key positions’ to initiate campaigns and groups. These networks may have come about by virtue of people’s institutional position in NGOs, left-publications, or campaigning organisations, their social media following, or their previous role in projects around Corbynism. Their outward facing orientation, whether they are intentional about it or not, is to other ‘key figures’ on the left in private to begin projects.
This is not to cry conspiracism, or to suggest that there is a shadowy cabal of people ‘dominating the left’. What we are talking about is a logic of operating which many people have come to see as ‘organising’, often done with the right impulses in mind – a belief that ‘if me and my friends don’t do this, no one will’. People who have come, sometimes rightly, sometimes wrongly, to see themselves as the main movers of the wider left, often with few relationships of accountability behind themselves.
Sometimes, this can be a highly effective way of organising, particularly when such people are capable of mobilising in a ‘ripple effect’ outwards – re-engaging people spread to the winds following 2019. If I get these ‘key people’ involved, they will tap their friends on the shoulder, and so on outwards. There have been several moments since the escalation of the genocide in Palestine where this can be seen to occur. The initiating of campaigns, followed by a blitz of Whatsapps and Signal messages to allies old and new, to get sufficient numbers for a picket, or a demo, or an event.
Other times, it is not effective. Quite regularly, you see the emergence of a new ‘campaign’ or ‘network’ or ‘group’, often on social media, which if you are ‘in the know’ you can immediately name the people behind it. A campaign organisation which is, in fact, four people you already know in an Instagram-based trenchcoat. Demonstrations called by ‘coalitions’ of these groups only end up pulling a marginal number out for the protest, which is at best embarrassing, but at worst, particularly at a time of escalating police repression, poses a real risk to participants.
However, in the moment where the forging of a new national organisation is increasingly discussed, such a mode of organising becomes a barrier. It risks repeating some of the errors of the left under Corbynism and since – namely, it ends up baking-in an anti-democratic bent to organisations, opening up potential for bureaucratic maneuvers that prevent the development of a wider mass base.
The worrying possibility of the coming months is that a slapdash formation emerges around Corbyn and the Independent Alliance; dragged into being by a motley coalition of Parliamentary staffers, people who consider themselves ‘facilitators’ of left conversations due to following or institutional position, and whatever other resources stand behind independent formations like Assemble, We Deserve Better and such1. Whilst everyone involved will be rightly recognising the historic moment to build a mass membership organisation to reinvigorate the left; forming it through a series of back room conversations between staffers and NGOs is a perfect way to frustrate a member-led organisation from the start, as the below will argue.
Who do you work for? And do they make you powerful?
The key thing about the organising model of the Network Left is the absence of something like a base or membership, or even a number of people whom you are accountable to. Sometimes this is unintentional – a significant number of people learned their organising in a context where they initiate campaigns on the basis of small circles of friends, and they continue this practice as if it is the only way. Other times, this is more intentional, as in the cases of the serial NGO figure or the entrenched bureaucrat, who increasingly believe ‘no one but them’ is capable at organising.
This is ironically how a deformed kind of ‘horizontalist’ organising ends up allying itself with the traditional bureaucracies, such as in the trade union movement. We still lack sufficient analyses of what Corbynism even was, nor the failures of elements within it like Momentum, which is a problem for us going into the late 2020s. A series of figures who were involved in the early 2010s’ student movements, often espousing a kind of autonomist or anarchistic politics, ended up active as key ‘organisers’, ‘commentators’ and participants in Corbynist spaces, often to the point of taking full time jobs with MPs, left-adjacent NGOs, and within trade unions – that is, occupying spaces that are ultimately, decidedly ‘hierarchical’. Of course, many did not follow this trajectory, but it represents a real element of the movement which subsists today.
In many cases, a ‘non-hierarchical’ campaign group begins, there is no method establishing membership, nor element of electing a leadership or dealing with political loss (i.e. the possibility of a minority of your group disagreeing but remaining involved and continuing to fight their point), there may be assemblies of sort, but in general, we see the problems identified in Freeman’s Tyranny of Structurelessness.
Soon people emerge as key ‘figures’ in such groups, often due to their organising skill, political analyses, and sometimes for the noise they make. They are soon given a significant amount of social power in wider movement spaces, often mobilised to secure full-time employment or what little funding grants there are available. This in turn, feeds into a self-conception, and in the worst cases a wider understanding, that they are ‘the person’ to engage with on this political problem – political action is not capable without them.
Similarly, there is a class of officers and full time employees for certain workplace unions and ‘community’/renter unions who come to function as a bureaucracy against their membership. This is traditionally analysed in the conception of the rank-and-file versus the bureaucracy. A good summary of this problem was provided to Notes from Below:
“Campaigns for improving workers’ lives can be seen as a way, by us, as building strength and building power in the workplace. However, for officers, campaigning is often seen as a way of building the union as an institution. For example, a senior officer that I know sees organising, recruitment, and the like as a way of creating a bigger fund base, so we can build up the officer cadre. That’s the officer’s approach to organising and that’s how they strategically see it as, as a way forward. Members are often prepared to take real risks, when they’re involved in struggle, struggles to overturn an injustice, to make the workplace bearable, to get better wages and terms and conditions and for this they can be sacked or victimised. Again, officers have none of this.
So, officers are more concerned with the union as an institution, and therefore more conservative. When the employer threatens legal action, the officer is concerned because this type of action can threaten the union as an institution. The great innovation of the Tory anti-union legislation was understanding this difference between officers and rank-and-file militants. What the legislation did, and continues to do, is put pressure on officers to police militant rank-and-file activists. And if rank-and-file activists overstep the mark and move beyond the boundary of anti-trade union legislation, then the union’s assets are threatened, and the institution is then threatened.”
What both the emergent group of ‘movement figures’ and bureaucrats end up sharing, what is united in those cadreised in ‘horizontalist’ campaigns, NGO employees and in union bureaucracies, is their antipathy or discomfort with membership-led organisation. This is for different reasons, but over time it can act as a unifying element.
The zenith of this tendency was Enough is Enough, which in retrospect saw an alliance of ‘personalities’ with elements of the trade and renters union bureaucracy to monopolise the growing cost of living movement. Unable or unwilling to then convert the mass attendance at their events into member-led groups, despite willingness in various locations from attendees, the energy dissipated. All we were left with was a mailing list and wider confusion.
Socialists should be clearer that recent attempts to set up projects like We Deserve Better – which might talk exceptionally ambitiously, but have so far amounted to calling for donations and for joining a mailing list – represent that same logic albeit initiated by potentially better faith actors. Whilst it claims “we’re going to be targeting a huge raft of seats at the next election”, so far there is no way for people to be involved beyond being passive consumers to emails or throwing money – the idea that supporters might want to contribute to something deeper, are in fact political agents in their own right and should have some say over this project, is excluded from the start.
This is a problem because the real power of any radical institution is the collective power of those involved in it. Ironically, for all the political radicalism of the professed figures involved in these projects, they find themselves far to the right of figures like Kautsky, caricatured as the zenith of reformist politics. In his brief analysis of parliamentary work from 1908, he states explicitly:
“It is only by having an extra-parliamentary force to fall back on that the proletariat can make full use, of its parliamentary power. We can accomplish in legislative halls what can be accomplished there only on condition that we are ready to defend our right to representation. We must be prepared at any moment to fight for the ballot with all the means at our command.”
The strength of any political project will only come from its membership and mass of support – a point explicitly made in Steven Ribble’s recent analysis of the New Popular Front. To build such mass support, we must at least give clear methods for people to get involved, take on responsibilities, and ultimately grow as their own leaders within the project. By organising through a narrow cadre of contacts, personalities, or bureaucrats, we may mobilise resources quite quickly, but we also immediately create a layer of distinction between such founders and the new recruits. That is to say, there must be membership and the sooner a sufficiently rooted mass of members can engage in democratic deliberation about movement direction the better.
The emblematic organisation here, which has had varying analyses of its history, was Momentum2. Whilst cohering a membership, it conceded so much in response to the ‘red-scare’ of entryism from other far-left groups and voices around the PLP. This led to anti-democratic maneuvers, exemplified in the ‘2017 email coup’ imposition of new constitutional mechanisms and removal of electeds’ powers. This meant Momentum had more in common with a traditional NGO by the end of the Corbyn project. The result, of course, was that when serious strategic debate was needed, in the final years of the project and particularly following the loss in 2019, the ship had somewhat sailed.
If Momentum was tragic, then there is a risk that any new organisation would be a farce. Again, if set up by back room deals, a new national organisation would be faced with the immediate prospect of those joining from the ‘institutional left’, that is other Marxist groups. Given these are individuals cadreised to engage in membership organisations in a ‘disciplined manner’, they would pose a challenge to the leadership of the figures who initiated the organisation, or at least represent a disrupting element to their preferred strategies. This is doubly likely in a context where the dominant politics of the ‘Independent Alliance’ is not just their opposition to the genocide, but political discourses of their ‘independence’, their ‘non-party’ politics, and so on (represented at their peak in Assemble’s attempts to sidestep political disagreement with ‘community assemblies’)3. Such anti-political politics will naturally line up with bureaucratic attempts to exclude those arguing for explicitly socialist politics. However, this is precisely what you have to do if you treat the mass of society as actual potential participants in your political project.
It would obviously be foolish for people to be writing and arguing for mass democratic organisations, whilst their practice in reality is tapping ‘key figures’ on the left to have dinners discussing proposals. Yet we are in such a bizarre situation. Whilst those in the Network Left profess a radical democracy, the practice of operating through private deliberation between individuals always frustrates this in reality.
Within the Fragments
It would be easy to wax lyrical about the many day to day symptoms of this kind of organising. The forming of ‘movement assemblies’ where proposals, working-groups, and areas of activity have already been agreed; the assembly merely a series of sheepgates for activists to be funneled into activity. The proliferation of ‘movement rituals’ like excessively long template legal rights announcements to open demos, irrespective of the actual risk assessment of the protest – because ‘that is what you do’. The fear of open polemic between groups, for risk of alienating someone in your network, even if such disagreement really is generative. The emergence of a bizarre series of movement support function groups, who do training on ‘comms’ and ‘facilitation’. And so on. They all reflect a mystification; that organising is a particular thing that ‘we do’ and a skepticism that most people are capable of becoming effective political actors and deserving of dialogue.
Similarly, we could think about the spatialisation of this kind of organising. It is certainly dominant in the larger cities like London and others. But that doesn’t mean that ‘real organising’ is done outside the cities – a common retreat into a kind of sub-Narodnik politics where we must leave our ‘cushy’ cities to return to the towns. Areas with a smaller organised Left can be just as susceptible to a comforting politics of hobnobbing between ‘key figures’ as opposed to the construction of mass organising – it merely is expressed in different forms. Ultimately, the regional town trades council busybody and the post-Corbynite think-tank ‘operator’ share more than their different appearances would let on.
Rather than labour these elements, I want to stress that there is an alternative. Whatever new formation does arise in the coming years, it should be initiated as soon as possible with open membership, elected leaderships, and mechanisms for the flourishing of a mass base. It should recognise the reality that its membership will likely see existing groups in the British left orienting into it and those entering the organisation should oppose attempts to fight this. Only by uniting Marxist forces from the existing far-left and those spread to the winds by Corbynism behind a socialist programme will we be able to whip such an organisation into shape – to make it provide the functions we mean when we say ‘the party’.
There will naturally be a fight for the necessity of building links between this formation and what exists of the ‘extra-parliamentary struggle’, and maintaining this link in real terms. To do so, we need to recognise quite early on the existence of a trade union bureaucracy and recognise their often anti-democratic role in recent projects. However, given this bureaucracy’s desire to secure concessions from the Labour government, we should prepare for a likelihood that a significant section of union institutions refuse to engage with a new project. The result will be a formation whose base is mainly ‘movementist’, particularly the Palestine solidarity movement. As a result we should be skeptical of the role of a series of movement ‘figureheads’ and NGOs around them who will attempt to relate to the project, for they will not secure the social change we need. It is only in the empowerment of the social constituency we received flashes of in the election that victory lies. Such a thinking is integral to the entire socialist political project.
In Lars Lih’s Lenin Rediscovered, he argues that the Marxist organisational project, reflected in What is to be Done? and Lenin’s wider life work, can be summarised as the ‘good news’ interpretation:
“Lenin believed that Social Democracy had a mission to carry to the workers the good news of their own world-historical mission and that, furthermore, this message would be on the whole enthusiastically received and acted upon4.
This meant, against readings of Lenin as a dictatorial leader interested in a revolution led by a small minority of society, that he retained a belief in the possibility of workers to mobilise as political actors. Relatedly, in his analysis of the ‘Modern Prince’, Gramsci argued:
“The modern prince … cannot be a real person, a concrete individual. It can only be an organism, a complex element of society in which a collective will which has already been recognised and has to some extent asserted itself in action, begins to take concrete form. History has already provided this organism, and it is the political party – the first cell in which there come together germs of a collective will tending to become universal and total5.
Which is to say, the formation of a political body capable of intervening in this time of strategic uncertainty is one wherein at the minimum the membership of the body is able to collectively strategise and exert its will – both Lenin and Gramsci shared a belief in the political possibility of the masses to work collectively.
More simply, this has been expressed by anti-colonial revolutionary Amilcar Cabral:
“We must practice revolutionary democracy in every aspect of our Party life. Every responsible member must have the courage of his responsibilities, exacting from others a proper respect for his work and properly respecting the work of others. Hide nothing from the masses of our people. Tell no lies. Expose lies whenever they are told. Mask no difficulties, mistakes, failures. Claim no easy victories.”
All this requires a kind of political operation where open discussion, membership, and accountability are the terms of the day – not private conversations, taps on shoulders, and the machinations of staffers, full-timers, and others. To prevent this being baked into a project, it requires certain figures to look in the mirror and say ‘you’re not that guy pal, trust me, you’re not that guy.’ In the absence of such self-awareness, it requires everyone else championing the demand for openness and structured democracy as a priority. This requires an almost messianic trust in the possibility of the oppressed and exploited to become the collective masters of their own destiny.
- Of course, the even more worrying result is that nothing of the sort forms, not even this cursed delivery of a national organisation occurs, and instead everyone stands shielding themselves waiting for the kicking coming in future electoral work. ↩︎
- For example, in Max Shanly (2020) Where Momentum went wrong: https://tribunemag.co.uk/2020/05/where-momentum-went-wrong and in Ronan Burtenshaw and Marcus Barnett (2020) Rebuilding the Labour Left: https://tribunemag.co.uk/2020/04/rebuilding-the-labour-left ↩︎
- Assemblies can be great and important. However, more must be done to understand how such assemblies are different from the ones originally emerging from the XR movement. Primarily because ‘communities’ are already cut-through with differences of class, race, gender and ultimately power – we are trying to politicise and organise the subaltern element of ‘communities’ not provide a mechanism for everyone to engage. Otherwise, naturally, these spaces become dominated by elements who have the time and resources, they either reflect the sort of beige compromise scene in the few council-backed climate assemblies, or the predominance of the most powerful element. ↩︎
- Lars T. Lih. (2005) Lenin Rediscovered: ‘What is to be Done?’ in Context. Haymarket Books, p. 22. ↩︎
- Antonio Gramsci. (1971) Selections from the Prison Notebooks. Lawrence and Wishart, p. 129. This insight has been most forcefully reasserted in the pathbreaking work of Peter Thomas. (2009) The Gramscian Moment. Haymarket Books. ↩︎
