Since the election in July there have been many meetings, conversations, rumours and twitter threads about electoral opportunities for the left. The election of five pro-Palestine independents and four Green MPs has created a sense of renewed possibility, and many groups are kicking into action. Those around Karie Murphy, Corbyn’s ex-chief of staff, have met in London and Birmingham to discuss a new political party (I was at the first meeting with 150 others, the room was very split on the question). Pelican House, the left social centre in east London, has been holding public Party Time events. A new journal Prometheus has made interesting contributions about who shouldn’t found a new party and how to understand the Corbyn years. Potentially thousands of socialists have joined the Green Party and launched Greens Organise, a Momentum-style grouping to keep the Greens left. The ex-mayor of North Tyne Jamie Driscoll has launched Majority, an effort to train 500 leaders across the north east and run them for office.
A new electoral party?
Lot’s of groups are taking the 2029 election seriously, and the appeal of a new electoral party is strong. Voters are pissed off with politicians and traditional party loyalties are done. In the past, our electoral system disciplined people into voting Labour or Tory, but with Reform now polling between 15 – 20% we may be in a moment of realignment. For those of us who cut our teeth in Corbyn’s Labour, is it time to put our skills to use in a new left party? Should we get back on the doors and build for an electoral breakthrough?
I’m not so sure. As I floated after the election, the Greens are seriously well organised – with four MPs, nearly 1000 councillors, a turnover of £3.1 million per year in 2022 and a proven machine for winning elections. They’re also open to the left. They have porous, democratic structures; a collegiate, pluralist culture and a leadership that gave their quiet blessing to Greens Organise. If you’re interested in electing socialists in 2029 and live in the 48 multi-racial, graduate heavy seats in London, Manchester, Bristol and Sheffield where the Greens came second – it’s pretty clear what you should do. Organise in the Greens, get socialist candidates selected and then campaign for their election.
But the Greens have a ceiling. In a broader context of polarisation between urban graduates and small town/rural non-graduates (see Trump’s re-election or the collapse of the German left party into a new ‘left conservative alliance’) it’s unlikely that they’ll consistently win outside of urban centres anytime soon. Being coded as vegan, charity workers doesn’t go down well in Clacton, Ashfield and Skegness. Can a new left party do any better in these places? Do we need an anti-fascist electoral project to stop Reform?
If we do, I’d agree with Dan Evans that it has to be led and shaped by the experiences of people who actually live there. Any party that is dominated by urban graduates will come to over-represent their interests. This might sound obvious, but it was a critical and still under-discussed failure of Corbynism. Led by three London MPs, urban graduates like myself wielded far too much power. It was all too easy to forget we were part of a national project, an attempt to build a coalition between ourselves, the multi-racial working class and non-graduates outside of cities. Our downfall, in many ways, was the conflict in interests and ideology between graduates in cities and non-graduates in the rest of the country.
Hating on landlords made sense for those of us who rented in cities, but missed the fact that a mortgage on a cheap second home is a route to retirement for many. The four day week rubbed up badly against the widely held ideology of hard work. It led to Johnson battering Corbyn in the debates with a “four day week for the NHS”. Remaining in the EU wasn’t the cause celebre it was for Oxford home owners, but was assumed and rarely interrogated (we all voted with David Cameron, and thought that was obviously better than voting with Farage). This bit us hard when Sky News billed 2019 as the ‘Brexit election’.
Put simply, the experiences of white collar graduates weren’t and aren’t universal. Our sprawling and multi-racial friendship groups, default social liberalism, everybody owning a bike, clubbing into your 30s and 40s, rent being the main barrier to happiness, top class public services. These aren’t shared with a family in the suburbs or a delivery driver in a small town. We live in compatible but nonetheless different worlds. Building genuine coalition requires recognising difference rather than pretending we are all the same. Nobody should feel guilty for who they are, but neither should we kid ourselves that everyone lives or thinks like us, or that they should.
If a new left party wants to win seats in Hull and Hackney – Hull needs to come first. The party will need leaders and candidates who actually live there and get it. Corbynism stacked up votes in the big cities. If we’re really going to try it again – urban graduates must be along for the ride, but firmly in the backseat.
Sadly, this is only the first in a huge list of difficult questions. Would a new left party run against the Greens in urban seats? If so, how would they justify it? Where does the money come from? If you rely on big donors, how do you square that with democracy? If you don’t, how do you scale fast enough to win seats in 2029? How do you leave behind the baggage of Corbyn when there is no obvious successor? If the short term fix of a Mick Lynch party is off the table, and all his public statements suggest he’s wedded to Labour for now, how do you cut through in a hostile media environment without a charismatic leader leveraging their existing platform?
And all this without grappling with more existential questions about electoralism: did Corbynism suck the life out of social movements and union organising? Can we really move beyond capitalism by building electoral parties that, in the best case medium-term scenario, end up doing deals with Labour? How does the urgent tempo of the climate crisis fit with a patient build of a party over decades? Are we attracted to elections because they’re clear and declarative moments of political expression in an increasingly chaotic, indeterminate world? What does it mean for socialists and communists to campaign for social democracy in the context of falling growth, crumbling institutions and fragile supply chains? Did the dream of the Green New Deal die with Corbyn 2019 and Sanders 2020? These questions leave me, and I think many others, feeling just a little lost and hopeless.
Millions of socialists
But maybe there are simpler, more foundational questions to ask. It’s hard to know how many self-identifying socialists there are in the UK. One poll estimates more than 3.2 million. The same poll has another 4.4 million people identifying as left-wing. Another by YouGov suggests roughly 10.4 million are socialists1. Whatever the number, there are a lot. Many more than are paper members of existing left organisations. Thousands of times more than those who attend political meetings or engage in organising. What are we doing wrong? Why do so few of us turn up? What would it take to build an organisation that we actually want to be in?
Being politically homeless is usually associated with the Alaister Campbells and Rory Stewarts of this world – alienated from their parties during the Corbyn and Johnson years, now performing to 13,000 capacity crowds for their podcast liveshow. But we are politically homeless too. We don’t have an obvious and natural organisation to join. We are members of single issue groups or social democratic parties, supporters of left media projects, part of loose milieus and networks. We are members of unions of varying degrees of militancy and politicisation. All of these are sites of important political work. But are they sufficient? Often we have difficult relationships with our organisations. They’re battlegrounds – your local Labour party, for example – where we contest space with our political opponents, or narrowly defined around a single issue and fail to capture the full spectrum of our politics. Rarely, if ever, do they feel like home.
Take this thought experiment. Your friend has started watching Novara and asks you what they should do to get active. What do you say? If there’s a union at their work you’d probably suggest getting involved, if they were interested in elections and lived in a city, maybe the Green Party. If they were a renter, a renters union makes sense. But all these suggestions would come with caveats and reticence. They’d come with a caution that these organisations might be difficult to be in, that they are spaces of contestation with people who don’t share our politics and where being open and honest about your politics may come at a cost. Each would be a valuable site of struggle, an example of good and useful organising work. But none would feel like home. None would be a place of practical and emotional support that could bolster their organising work, where they could be open about their politics and situate their organising in a broader left strategy.
In an increasingly atomised, lonely world where degraded community institutions leave us binge watching atrocities on Tiktok, the need for communion and a place to be with our people has never been so strong. We all feel it, and it’s a feeling we should take seriously. It would be a mistake, however, to project these feelings onto a new electoral party. There is an opportunity to win more seats from the left in 2029, but that doesn’t mean the organisation(s) set up to do so should become our political home. They are valuable spaces of contestation, for sure, and places to organise and struggle with people who don’t yet share our politics. But they’re not our home. Here we risk making another Corbyn-era mistake: viewing all our problems through the electoral and expecting an electoral party – with all the triangulation, compromise and realpolitik that comes with contesting elections and state power – to also be our place of mutual support, relationship building and solidarity.
A new political home
Electoral parties are not the only form of organisation, and you can be in more than one organisation at once. Alongside all the important work we do in our unions, campaigns and parties, we also need something else.
An explicitly anti-capitalist organisation open to every socialist, leftist, anarchist, communist and marxist in the country. A place of mutual support, deep relationships and trust that replenishes us and gives us the energy to continue. Where we can meet others who share our politics but often little else; living across the country, in different workplaces, with different histories of struggle. It’ll be a recruiting ground for the already active, a place to meet people and get involved for the inactive, an opportunity to learn and build relationships for all of us. It’ll break down the cliques and silos that inevitably emerge, democratising and opening up the left in a very day-to-day way – where anyone can meet anyone through the organisation.
If we do it right, it could be an organisation we actually want to be in. With a shared desire to move beyond capitalism and the spaces of contestation being primarily out there, we can prioritise culture as well as output, building a place of generosity, honesty and vulnerability. We can ask searching questions, reflect honestly on our mistakes, push each other to raise our levels and make genuine political commitments. Instead of the mechanical, brittle relationships that are sometimes built through intense action in fleeting campaigns, we can build deeper and nourishing relationships – knowing that they will sustain us in struggles to come.
I’ve been lucky enough to be part of this in miniature for the last year: a group of leftist friends who get together for dinner every month where we support each other, read together and talk honestly about some of the things we got wrong. It’s become a really important part of my life, and my relationships with those involved have taken on a whole new dimension (Jodie Dean would say beyond a friend, acquaintance or colleague – now as a comrade). It’s reoriented me when I’ve felt politically lost. It’s kept me accountable when I’ve wanted to drop out. It’s taken the weight of the world from my shoulders, and collectivised it instead.
Mutual support is only part of it though, and an organisation would also mean the opportunity to create strategies of consequence too. Instead of relentless, rapid-fire debates on Twitter and WhatsApp where nobody ever wins and nothing ever turns into action, a permanent organisation would enable us to debate and argue in a sustained and considered way, over time and on our own terms. More than this, we can commit to collectively resourcing these strategies so they move from conversation to action.
Action takes resources. This is an obvious but rarely spoken about fact . Everyone agrees we need more deep organising in communities, but nobody talks seriously about resourcing it. Citizens UK, the UK’s largest community organising group, has an annual turnover of £10 million. Together, the renters unions are probably £1 – 2 million. Voluntarism just doesn’t cut it when organising the non-political. It takes the deep and sustained engagement only a paid organiser can provide. If we’re serious about community organising, we need to collectively resource it. We’ve lost the culture of high dues and legacies that socialist and communists used to rely on. In part this is because many of our organisations have turned to liberal foundations, but it’s also because there is no organisation that is truly ours and we’d be willing to give to.
If you’re really serious about overthrowing capitalism, dedicating 5% of your after-tax income to the cause (£110 per month on an average UK wage) is a small ask. And yet I don’t do it, and you probably don’t either. Why is that? Maybe I’m a selfish individualist born of a neo-liberal era, or maybe I don’t belong to an organisation I deeply identify with and can dedicate myself to. An organisation I believe in and have power over. Where as a member, rather than a fan or a supporter, I get a say in how the money is spent.
If just 10,000 of the millions of UK leftists committed 5% of their income, we’d have £13.5 million to spend every single year. More than the budget of every UK renters union, independent trade union and left media organisation combined. We already have the resources, we just haven’t organised them yet.
This is the prize. An organisation of seriousness and consequence, where debates over strategy actually mean something. Where we can build relationships of trust, generosity and mutual support. An organisation we actually want to be in. Now, how to build it?
Focus on the disorganised left
Building this organisation will be a messy, collective endeavour. There’ll be false starts and different groups of people doing different things at different times. No central committee will do it for you. We all need to take responsibility and work out how we can contribute. Below is a proposal that clarifies one possible focus and moves us to action. It’s an imperfect attempt to go from zero to something, and build our capacity to act along the way.
A quick summary. We need to build an organisation that we actually want to be in. The organisation will increase our capacity to act by directing people into struggle; increase our resilience, political education and strategic capacities; and collectively organise our resources to turn strategy into action. There is an opportunity: millions of leftists are inactive, feel politically isolated and (I think) have a desire to meet others like them. There are barriers: deep cynicism, past negative experiences with left organisations and a generalised fear of hope.
How do we move forward? I propose a guiding principle: a relentless focus on the disorganised left. The millions of leftists who aren’t active in a union or campaign. The overwhelming majority of leftists in this country. People who are not like you or me. People like my dad. He lives in a small town in South Yorkshire, was involved in the local Momentum group during the Corbyn years but now is disengaged and avoids the news because it makes him frustrated. He’s at an inflection point. He’s about to retire and could either turn off politics completely or, if there were the right opportunity, dedicate a serious amount of time and resources to the cause. We all know these people, I’m sure you could list ten friends or family members right now who are on the left but completely disengaged.
We should obsess over these people. They are precisely the people our new organisation must attract. The already organised left is tiny, maybe ten thousand people at best. The already organised left – me and probably you – are also really weird. Not only in comparison to the general population, but compared to the disorganised left. We’re the ones who still turn up despite everything. The bad meetings, continual defeats, the grind of organising work, infighting, the daily reckoning with existential crisis. We think about politics all the time and structure our lives around it. We spend our free time in so many long and boring meetings! We probably have an optimism bias, maybe a hyper inflated sense of agency. Something is just different in our heads. We shouldn’t feel guilty about this. We’re doing brave and important work, and without us the left wouldn’t exist. We’re an important but minority constituency. But if any new organisation is going to break out of our bubble – it must have a hard-coded, deeply intentional and almost maniacal focus on leftists not like us.
This will be really hard. Inevitably we – the organised left – will found the organisation, and it’ll be so easy and natural to shape it around our desires. In business this would be a basic failure of market research. Shaping a product around the founder and staff, rather than the consumers they’re trying to sell to. For Mao in 1927, it was the Chinese Communist Party’s insistence they follow Marxist orthodoxy and organise the urban proletariat. Mao could see this wasn’t working, with thousands of workers being killed in urban uprisingsl. His solution? Relentlessly focus on the mass of militant peasants. Go to them and learn about the “many strange things” they were saying. Ignore the politburo when they order you back to the city. Realise the peasants thought the “exact opposite” of the urban cadres. Prioritise land reform and shape the party in the interests of the peasants, over the smaller urban working class.
For us this is even more important. We are so few, and the disorganised leftists are so many. We must prioritise them, even when it makes us uncomfortable. We can’t assume we already know what they want. This is where other approaches to party formation fall down, including Karie Murphy’s attempt to coordinate stakeholders from the post-Corbyn left and the arguments of some in rs21 for regroupment amongst the existing revolutionary socialist organisations. Both focus on regrouping existing political activists and founding a lowest common denominator organisation they can all join. They assume there’s little difference between the organised and disorganised left. They’re not so interested in the desires, needs or ideas of the millions of leftists who don’t show up to the meetings. Left Unity wasn’t big enough, and neither was Corbynism. We need a new approach.
Organisation over strategy
A slight side note: I’m emphasising organisation over strategy for good reason. Usually we do the opposite. If we only have the right strategy we can recruit new people and win things. This isn’t crazy, during the Corbyn years huge numbers of people were energised by the strategic opportunity – getting a socialist into Downing Street. Momentum grew to 30,000 members, the Labour Party to half a million. But after that strategy failed, a clear majority of those people fell out of action. We failed to consolidate gains, in part because we didn’t take good organisation seriously. We never focussed on the experience of the rank and file Corbynite. We never built structures that increased people’s strategic capabilities and relationships. We never made local groups and meetings good places to be.
The Labour Party was always a turgid, bureaucratic and cruel organisation to be in. A battleground. War by standing orders. Some people could hack it, a few even enjoyed playing the factional warrior, getting out the Labour Party rulebook on their Ipads at dinner. But for most of us it was an obligation. We went to local meetings because we had to. To win the selection, to win the exec. More frustrating was Momentum, which for most rank and file members was also a crap organisation to be in. You’d join and have no idea how to get involved. Local meetings replicated the toxic cultures of Labour. Outside of elections it wasn’t clear how you could get involved unless you lived in London and happened to know a staff member (such as me). There was no focus on absorbing new members. We never tried to learn about why they joined, their motivations, whether they’d been politically active before or what skills they might have to offer. And any notion of democracy was spectacularly switched off and then gradually eroded. We were carried by the grand strategy of getting Corbyn elected. Members dealt with or tolerated being in Momentum because they could see the historic opportunity.
There are many reasons why this happened. We were in a hectic moment of whirlwind and there were many things to do. Those of us from social movements had much horizontalism to unlearn. Those from Labour had lots of baggage (to put it mildly). But we’re not in that moment anymore, and now we have the opportunity to take the time and do it right.
Ideas for next steps
Let’s focus on a proximate objective. Something inspiring, ambitious and a little uncomfortable. An objective that sits at the edge of the possible. How about: recruiting 10,000 people into a new left organisation over the next 3 – 5 years. If we really took this seriously, what would we need to do to make it happen? How could our relentless focus on the disorganised left help us get there? This process will be messy, non-linear and be driven forwards by lots of different people at different times. But here are a few ideas that could move us closer:
– Interview 500 disorganised leftists. In leftist parlance an inquiry, with direction from the DSA or Notes From Below. Go out and really get to know and understand the people we’re trying to recruit. Ask them why they’re not active, whether they’ve been in an organisation before, what was it like, why did they stop going? Build a small core team to drive it forward. Recruit 50 or so people to conduct 10 interviews each. Each interview follows a list of questions and format. All are done on Zoom, recorded and auto transcribed. Set an ambitious deadline of March 2025 to finish. Publish the findings publicly so everyone interested in founding a new party can learn.
– Run 100 left dinners across the country. A more communal, informal version of the above. Recruit a network of people across the country who cook dinners for 5 – 10 of their friends or friends of friends who are on the left but inactive. Use the dinner as an informal focus group. Focus the conversation on why people aren’t active and what might change that. A small group should run a couple themselves and put a template together for good note taking, how to structure the evening etc. After each dinner the host submits notes and (with consent) the contact details of those who attended. Through this you’d build networks and learn lots about those we want to recruit.
– Study successful left organisations. Obviously there are lots of failed experiments and we should learn from them, but maybe more interesting and manageable would be to focus on more successful case studies, especially those in roughly comparable geographies and time periods. The Belgian Workers Party could be one example. They relaunched in 2004 and opened up their structures to non-cadrised members. Since then, they’ve grown to 24,000 members and have won 15 seats in Parliament (although they began as a non-electoral force). I’m sure there’s more, and we should understand their qualities and key inflection points. Again, we publish so others can take learnings and run with them.
– Build a concept party. Based on the findings above you could build the bare bones of a party and then test it with the disorganised left, hack it apart and put it back together again. This could take many different forms – experimenting with meeting structure; a website, branding, comms and founding documentation; different membership structures etc. Through this process you’d start building something, build deeper relationships with those we’re trying to recruit and a deeper understanding of what they want and need. You’d emerge with the bare bones of a party they might want to join.
– Run a national tour. Run a public meeting anywhere there is a group of people that will host you (small towns and villages might be the most interesting). Get there a few days early and go flyering and door knocking with the organisers. Get to know them and the area. At the meeting run through the moment, the plan to organise the millions of disorganised socialists, your concept party (if you have one), invite feedback and make a concrete ask of them. You’ll learn loads. Get them to sign up and have them take an initial action – maybe running a left dinner like the one above, maybe something else. Emphasise this isn’t all worked out yet and that it’s only going to happen if we build a network across the country of people helping build it together.
– Launch a conditional pledge. Online that anyone can sign. It runs through the opportunity and the plan, and emphasises that nothing will be launched until a certain number of people are committed. This will function as an early structure test – how much desire is there for such an organisation? It’s a guarantee to anyone signing up that they won’t be joining something small and marginal.
These are just ideas. All are imperfect and half of them probably won’t work. I’m sure you can think of more. The point is that we can get started with minimal agreement around an approach (to focus on disorganised leftists) rather than a fully fleshed out plan determined by the desires of the already organised. It’s so easy to get stuck in planning. It’s safe, you can’t mess up as you’re not doing anything real yet and you get to spend more time with people you’re comfortable with. But it’s often a waste of time, humans are really bad at it and really we should just learn through designing some imperfect prototypes and seeing what happens. If this sounds interesting to you, get in touch and let’s see what happens…
