The walk from Canning Town tube towards the London docklands can be quite a miserable experience. The many shiny new high rises, the cable car which now crosses the Thames, and the new City Hall are the culmination of decades of vicious attacks on working-class Newham. Hemmed in by the Docklands redevelopments to their south and the Olympic Park redevelopments to their west, many in the London borough face poverty wages, massive rents, and the likelihood of displacement. Resistance remains pervasive, whether it’s protests targeting the regular arms fairs at the ExCeL Centre or the growth of housing groups, like the local London Renters Union branch, the FocusE15 campaign or PEACH.
It felt somewhat ironic then, that The Cause, a nightclub in the middle of the docklands, would be the location for We Demand Change – the left wing summit on March 29th. Once you had dodged the gladiator gauntlet of paper sellers and leafleters to join the queue to enter, passed through the nightclub bag check and ID scan, you found yourself amongst a few thousand assorted socialists, greens, and motley characters to discuss what is to be done. Perhaps here, hidden amongst some of the worst features of London’s property speculative boom, resistance could emerge.
Where did We Demand Change come from?
The origins of We Demand Change remain somewhat murky. For attendees who had been on the left for a while, it was clear that a significant amount of the legwork for the event came from the Socialist Workers Party (SWP) – who committed to such a summit at their winter 2024 conference. Pushed through the organisation’s work in Stand up to Racism and its members in various unions, they secured signatories to the founding statement from various other organisations. As a result, We Demand Change was broader than the SWP alone – incorporating the Stop the War Coalition and People’s Assembly (which socialist group Counterfire are a key component of), Just Stop Oil and the wider Assemble project, the Palestine Solidarity Campaign, and more. Perhaps most notably, a key supporter of the event was Jeremy Corbyn’s Peace and Justice Project.
Clearly the aim is to address the vacuum of joined-up political organisation for the left in Britain, and our inability to present an effective political opposition to Starmer’s government, as well as the growing dominance of Farage’s Reform. The original statement announcing the event said that it was intended to “begin to construct through debate and discussion a network of activists across sectors”. Subsequent communications were much more vague and seemed ambivalent about whether a new organisation would be built at the summit.
This desire for a more coherent response by the left in Britain, as well as the variety of speakers, ensured that over 2000 people bought tickets to the event. Whilst the existing Marxist groups were clearly visible for competent trainspotters, the conference succeeded in bringing together a diverse mixture of political activists.
Assessment of the day
There were rallies to open and to close the event, but the bulk of the day consisted of 12 ‘workshops’ on different topics – covering everything from resisting Reform to the struggle against the genocide in Palestine. Whilst there was clearly a desire to make many of the sessions more participatory, there was a limit to how well this could be done when attendance is so large – with sessions often defaulting to speakers then contributions from the floor or discussions in larger breakouts. A good problem to have.
The political content of the sessions was varied due to the spread of topics covered. Often the best contributions, in our experience, came not from the usual top-table speakers, but those active in some of the struggles of the previous year and a half. For example, whilst many of the opening plenary contributions were effective, the contribution from a worker in the ongoing bin strike in Birmingham was perhaps the standout – putting effectively the case for a new organisation and a direct call for solidarity to the audience.
One of the better sessions in our view was on the struggle for a people’s arms embargo and a free Palestine. Speakers both effectively highlighted the role of the British state in supporting the genocide and the many ways that people were taking action to disrupt it. Particularly, Arthur, a speaker from Youth Demand, raised their particular strategy of direct action in the face of state repression. This came only days after the British state smashed into a Quaker meeting house and arrested those attending a talk by the group, an egregious attack on civil liberties that must be wholeheartedly resisted. Arthur pointed out that one of those arrested from Youth Demand was in attendance, leading to applause from the crowd. The sheer scale of state repression should clarify the stakes of our current moment for those on the left, as Lenin once wrote in 1903:
‘Without political liberty all forms of workers’ representation will remain a miserable fraud, and the proletariat will remain in prison as hitherto, without light, without air, and without the elbow-room it needs for the struggle to attain its complete emancipation.’
What next?
The spectre of political organisation hung over the entire event. It came up repeatedly, whether from the floor or from the panel, at all of the sessions we attended. But there was only an hour and a half of the day dedicated to discussing it directly – clearly not enough time.
In the opening plenary, Corbyn continued his valiant effort to speak of the general need for a movement to oppose austerity and the genocide, whilst avoiding the mention of any new organisation – this avoidance feels increasingly counterproductive given just how many are clearly in limbo. The British left finds itself in something of a dilemma; a national figure is needed to provide any new organisation more legitimacy than seen in projects like TUSC or Transform, particularly if it will successfully rally the activist base spread to the wings post-Corbynism into its organisation – yet no national figure seems willing to do this. Everyone is waiting for a trigger to be pulled, yet the guns are nowhere to be seen.
In the session on the question of a new party, Ben Beach, one of the organisers of last year’s Party Time events, did an admirable job of trying to chair and to draw out some points of agreement, but the allotted time was insufficient. Noor Begum, newly elected independent councillor in Redbridge, called for a new organisation as did Richard Boyd Barrett (of People Before Profit, and within that the Socialist Workers Network). Andrew Feinstein continues his call for combining both localised movement infrastructure and assemblies with some sort of organisation. Both were insistent about any national organisation being properly democratic. Zoë Garbett spoke from the Greens, making a case for joining and supporting their party.
When Beach asked the crowd if there was a need for a new organisation, there was an immediate and loud cry in favour, reflecting the preference amongst nearly everyone on the left for some kind of new organisation. A bizarre situation, where again, the national figures like Corbyn and the other’s excluded from Labour like Sultana and Begum, who can make the organisation viable, are acting with much greater hesitance than the wider movement. Other points that emerged repeatedly in the session were familiar ones; probably it should be some kind of party, probably it should be engaged in social movement campaigning rather than focusing purely on electoral work, and it should be democratic, and it would at least need some sort of electoral agreement with the Greens (albeit Greens Organise made some spirited arguments for entryism). This really expressed the sum.
Several attendees, including some from the SWP, argued from the floor throughout the day that We Demand Change needed to become the new organisation, and in some cases even expressed their intentions to start local branches or to stand as independent candidates in forthcoming elections under that banner with several local We Demand Change social media pages already been set up (The SWP’s national leadership has sinced pushed back against this approach). There are plans from the organisers for ‘summits’ of a similar style across the country to continue the discussions. So it seems we may have various independent challenges, declaring themselves as part of ‘We Demand Change’, without the other structures needed for a national membership organisation. This leaves us with a network of candidates pending a party.
Perhaps the most useful intervention in the whole day was one comrade arguing from the floor about the necessity of a delegate congress, bringing together different organisations of the left (including the SWP, Greens Organise, and others) to discuss concrete programmes and to start building a pre-party formation. This would probably be an enormous step forward from the current model where public rallies and ‘workshops’ end up talking round in circles with platitudes and generalities, while the practical discussions about programmes and structures and strategy happen in utmost secrecy.
There is an opportunity here for a wider regroupment, but one that will only succeed if those participating in the various summits and spaces are offered some real decision-making power over the direction of the programme and the organisational structures of any new formation. Perhaps the largest risks of the current organising model is that it remains a slapdash between the supporting organisations and various ‘independent’ local campaigners, sans anything like a membership. This risks avoiding the discussion of the actual politics of the various local challenges, a problem which will come back to bite during campaigning and any breakthroughs, and the need to make them actually accountable to a wider membership, rather than the tail wagging the dog. A further risk is that such an amorphous network avoids the question of priorities – we need to hit the ground fast and smart, this means focusing resources, picking effective candidates (i.e. not simply those who have an existing relationship with the sponsoring groups), focusing on areas that allow us to articulate a national base that is not trapped in any particular region, and so on. We cannot simply have a load of independents based on amorphous demands, accountable to no one, with an inadequate base to actually build from.
To prevent this, maximal participation in the local summits from across the Marxist left should be pursued, welcoming this as the opportunity to hammer some kind of unity together based on a shared programme, whilst being clear on the longer term struggle to create a party worthy of the name.
