Democracy, democracy, democracy
We have good reason to be optimistic about the left. The UK’s especially sharp experience of neoliberalism, and our political class’s inability to adapt to its evident failures, has produced a sharp shift to the left among the under-40s. But that very same process has degraded the left’s organisations. From the anti-austerity movement, to Corbynism, to the cost of living crisis, the left’s base resembles a disorganised soup much more than a coherent set of tendencies.
In previous decades, things would have been simpler – activists would have been drawn into social struggle while the Labour left maintained a toe-hold and awaited the next inward tide. Corbynism broke this cycle. On the one hand, it created a mass expectation of political representation, unlikely to be satiated by the prospect of a soft left Labour leader some time in the 2030s. On the other hand, it taught the Labour right that we could not be kept as pets – that it must seal us out permanently.
The organic interest in building a new left organisation is therefore heartening, because renewal is essential. At the very least, even talk of regroupment – if our sectarianism can be restrained – will mean forcing activists to mix outside of the siloes that have increasingly enclosed the left since 2020.
To make use of this interest, we must guard against ‘next-big-thingism’ – the charismatic presentation of whichever European left project is doing well at the time (right now La France Insoumise or the Belgian Workers’ Party; a few years ago Podemos or Syriza or Corbyn’s Labour) without much detailed discussion of what its model represents politically. International speakers and celebrities are useful to draw a crowd, but they can also be used to gloss over controversy and create false consensus. That’s fine if all you want is a nice event; it’s useless if you want to start an organisation.
First and foremost, any new project must be grounded in our own reality. Theoretical frameworks can be useful, but we must be willing to openly debate the lessons of the recent past of the left in Britain What went wrong, and why?
And when you look at our projects over the past 15 years, one lesson stares you in the face: a lack of democracy in our own organisations has severely limited our ability to take advantage of the conditions around us.
Ground Zero
Unless you are in the Green Party, organising on the left in 2025 feels a bit like starting at ground zero – and that is bizarre. 2022-2024 saw the biggest wave of industrial action since the 1980s, surpassing the pensions strikes of 2011. It came hot on the heels of an electoral project that brought hundreds of thousands of people into direct political activity. Sure, the pandemic was not helpful and the come-down from Corbynism was harsh – but not enough to justify where we are.
So why are we in this situation? Because the organisational vehicles of the Corbyn and cost of living eras – Momentum and Enough is Enough – both suffered from the same problem.
Various attempts at coordination took place following the TUC’s We Demand Better protest in June 2022. (Don’t Pay was an audacious attempt to recreate the spirit of the poll tax rebellion in the form of a non-payment campaign over utility bills – though its deliberate separation from the organised left meant that it could not play a central role in wider coordination).
Enough is Enough was launched on social media 8th August 2022, with an array of high quality, sparky content. Its first rally at the Clapham Grand just over a week later was electric, with queues round the block. During its initial launch, and in the subsequent months, the campaign amassed 600,000 email addresses – probably the largest database of any organisation in the history of the left in Britain.
Then it vanished. After 1st October 2022, Enough is Enough called no further days of action and by early 2023 it had basically gone into hiatus. In order to develop into an effective coordination centre for a wider social movement, it needed to move beyond top-table rallies and develop an activist base. This would mean local groups and supporters’ networks in the unions. Inevitably, the question of structures would be raised, and the people who founded it would have to accept the idea of not permanently being in charge. They evidently did not want to risk it, and so the moment was squandered.
Momentum
Centralisation and suspicion of internal democracy were instincts that Enough is Enough learned from the Corbyn period, when the leadership of Momentum decided that a messy activist democracy was simply not compatible with the aims of the project. I had a front-row seat to this process as Momentum’s national treasurer during its first year. Following Corbyn’s second leadership campaign in the summer of 2016, the majority of the Momentum steering committee became hostile to the idea of organisation’s democratic structures meeting again.
When the National Committee, representing Momentum’s local activist groups, was finally reconvened, it reaffirmed a decision to hold a conference in early 2017 to establish permanent structures. The reaction of the Momentum leadership, with the backing of the Labour leadership, was to impose a new constitution that would allow it to run the show without any meaningful democratic input (the promised digital democracy predictably never materialised). The opposition on the Steering Committee, which included me, was outnumbered. And so, on 10th January 2017, Momentum’s democratic structures were abolished by an email vote of 12 people in the space of just over an hour.
The result was that Momentum gave up on its claim to be a bridge between social movements and the Labour Party, and became a top-down mobilising vehicle. It was an effective one, winning the Labour Party NEC elections and turning out large numbers of activists onto the Labour doorstep.
But this came at a cost. No democracy meant a lack of discussion and debate, with exception of the annual interlude of The World Transformed, and the political level remained low. Momentum’s local groups, which numbered well over a hundred in late 2016, died off. Without basic units of local organisation, the strategy often amounted to bussing in city-dwellers to small-town Britain whenever an election was on.
The Labour Party changed the left much more than the left changed the Labour Party. Corbynism became a conventional Labourist project, directed from above. In December 2019, its head was cut off and it died. Without grassroots democracy, it lacked resilience – either to fight a guerilla war in Labour or to establish something new. Morale plummeted and, after years of looking upwards for direction, its foot soldiers melted away. Some went to the Greens, but most went nowhere.
Enough is Enough – from its mass meetings to its rhetoric – was self-consciously reminiscent of Corbyn’s Labour. That was precisely the problem with it. Led by icons of the left, the crowd was invited to spectate and cheer rather than to take ownership and show initiative. The agency remained on the stage. Social media, rather than being seen as a tool, became a replacement for real-world activity. To be a supporter was to be a consumer of digital content. When people needed to hear a message of ‘do it here, do it now, do it yourself’, they got ‘click like and subscribe’.
The new Fabians
The idea that democracy and effectiveness are counterposed is drilled into us by bourgeois politicians and pundits. They are right only to the extent that the political project in question is an elitist one. If you think you can introduce socialism from above for the grateful masses, then keeping power in the hands of the professional experts is crucial.
The original Fabian Society was instinctively suspicious of the Bolshevik revolution, with all its chaos and bottom-up energy. But once Stalin got hold of the situation and imposed some order, Fabians like George Bernard Shaw and Sidney and Beatrice Webb became some of the Soviet Union’s most avid cheerleaders. As American Marxist Hal Draper once put it, ‘the swing of Fabianism from middle-class permeation to Stalinism was the swing of a door that was hinged on Socialism-from-Above’.
The lack of democracy in the recent major projects of the left in Britain, such as Corbynism and Enough is Enough, is not an accident. It is a product of the political tendencies – formal or informal – who have ended up in charge, largely because of their institutional backing. Elitist machine politics is second nature to the Labour Right – for whom members are too radical and a liability – but the political DNA that runs through Fabianism can be found in abundance on today’s left.
Speaking at Pelican House in December, a speaker from La France Insoumise justified the fact that the party had little in the way of internal democracy with reference to the idea that many of its members were simply not ready to be involved in such matters, and that more self-selecting structures produced better decisions. The audience applauded (they applauded everything) but his argument was not novel. Closing your eyes, you could have been listening to a speech by a Momentum leadership figure in 2017.
This method spreads through the labour movement via networks of patronage, trade union bureaucracies and cliques of insiders. It turns our organisations into glossy-looking NGOs with impeccable comms and no teeth, and pares back our political ambition. During Corbynism, Momentum’s internal democracy was one of its victims, but so too were Open Selections, wider reform of Labour, and an emphasis on transforming the unions rather than just making allies of their leaderships. As we learned in 2022, in the world of social movements, the method results straightforwardly in failure.
Socialism from below
If we are thinking about a new organisation of the left, we cannot ignore the fundamental dividing line between the project of elite socialism (or indeed social democracy) and the project of working class self-emancipation. I want to be part of building an organisation for the latter. Adherents of the former have quite enough institutions of their own.
Some people will find this article frustrating because it fails to take sides on some key questions. I have not said that those inside Labour should leave immediately because I do not believe it (I remain a member myself) but neither will I tell anyone to join. I am not going to attempt to issue a verdict on the Greens – though I will say that the radical left should be a lot less snooty towards them than it has so far been; and that it is lazy to assume that they are doomed to follow the trajectory of their rightward-drifting European siblings.
Instead, I focus my fire on what is for me the crucial structural aspect of any project, internal democracy. A new organisation must be:
- Open and willing to welcome the vast number of people on the radical left looking for a political home, and uniting them in action.
- The genuine property of all its members, who decide its policies, strategies and structures. Not run by a clique, not dominated by minor celebrities.
- Non-sectarian, with an internal culture that is kind and curious, not demagogic.
- Multipolar and pluralist, with open internal tendencies and platforms. Where significant differences exist, these should be debated deliberately in the open.
- Geared towards developing thinking, critical activists. This means having a proper system of mutual education.
- Deliberative, with proper room for discussion of ideas. This means requiring people to read, write and argue about things – and having structures where these discussions actually mean something.
