Introduction
This article focuses on the functions of an effective mass left party. We take this approach in order to address the question of what we mean by ‘party’ – the source of much confusion and counterproductive discussion on the left, as noted by other contributors in this series – and to clarify the purpose of such an organisation. By focusing on functions, the shortcomings of the British movement ecosystem and the necessity for a party become clear.
Using the party’s functions as a foundation, we propose four areas of work that jointly fulfil the party’s functions, discuss the organisational structure necessary for carrying out this work, and finally, provide some closing thoughts on the current situational objective: the process of party formation.
Three Functions
These functions have been synthesised based on the role that revolutionary parties have played across time and place (including by contemporary parties).
Unity
The transition from capitalism and imperialism to eco-socialism is, by definition, a majoritarian process1. That is, it fundamentally depends on the masses of oppressed and exploited people coming together, rising up, and collectively transforming society.
Many people are already engaged in resistance against capitalism and imperialism, including through trade unions combatting exploitative bosses, direct action groups targeting big oil, and mass movements pressuring genocidal politicians. This is because the imperatives of capital are in direct contrast with people’s material needs and social aspirations. Much like gravity compels an apple to fall, this class antagonism breeds grassroots resistance.
However, these movements often struggle in isolation from each other, causing weakness and vulnerability to the “divide and conquer” tactics of the ruling classes. So, while capitalism and imperialism give rise to resistance, they do not unify social forces into a coherent front. This is the job of the party.
It overcomes atomisation by forging an “organised collectivity,” or a people’s bloc, of social movements and communities that are united in the common objective to build eco-socialism.
Direction
More than just unifying a people’s bloc, the party provides direction to its struggle.
A new world cannot simply be wished into being. Nor can a transition away from capitalism and imperialism be assumed based on the disjointed struggles of progressive political forces, even if they share a common goal. Eco-socialist transition is a conscious process that must be guided by a strategy to transform the social relations of society at scale.
Such a strategy establishes an analysis of the dominant systems in the world today, an assessment of the current conditions, and a structural vision of eco-socialist transformation. It determines situational objectives that enable the people’s bloc to defeat opposing forces, shift the balance of power, and advance the struggle towards liberation.
In this sense, the party is a compass for the people’s bloc, providing the necessary direction for it to navigate the turbulent, unpredictable path towards an eco-socialist north star.
Endurance
Eco-socialist transition is a process, not an event. It is a protracted struggle to overcome the social relations that have been constructed and maintained by centuries of capitalist domination. As such, the question of endurance becomes an essential part of revolutionary organising.
Anyone who has been part of a mass mobilisation feels the burning necessity of this question. How can the collective power conjured up during these moments be sustained? How can the people’s capacity to express their will be extended? How can the effervescent energy be carried forward?
The party provides the infrastructure for this necessary endurance. Like lightning in a bottle, it absorbs the energy of demonstrations, nurtures it through sustained mass organising work, and redeploys it at decisive moments2.
What’s more, the party enables collective political memory. It acts as a forum through which knowledge and experience can be passed down to new generations of organisers, who can pick up and extend the struggle for liberation.
Activities
Unity, direction, and endurance are borne out in the party’s activities. Here, we name four potential activities relevant to our current context.
Campaign Coordination
The party must engage in popular campaigns that align with its strategy and programme. This can take many forms.
In times of crisis (e.g. the genocide of Palestinians in the wake of October 7th), the party could devise a coordinated response that triangulates and directs diverse social forces in a common trajectory. Campaign coordination could also be as simple as the party providing a physical meeting space where social movements can meet each other, cross-pollinate strategies and tactics, and commune in a shared atmosphere of possibility.
Effective coordination means respecting social movement autonomy. All attempts at domination and manipulation must be avoided. The party is not trying to claim ownership over every struggle but to help social movements synthesise and concentrate complementary efforts on decisive leverage points3.
People’s Infrastructure
In the revolutionary process, the party must work to further the self-development of every person, i.e. their ability to reach their full potential4. This is achieved by building a people’s infrastructure that both meets immediate material needs and stimulates cultural horizons.
For example, the party could create survival programmes like a free food programme or mental health programme, as well as crisis response programmes, like spaces for survivors of gendered violence or rehabilitation initiatives for climate disaster-affected areas. It could also create people’s theatres, music festivals, athletic associations, running clubs, cooking collectives, and drinking establishments, bringing diverse people together around shared cultural interests and passions.
By forging spaces for popular participation and human development, the eco-socialist party weakens the mental stranglehold of capitalism, raising the political consciousness of the people and igniting their desire to construct a world in their own image, not in that of their oppressors.
Political Education
To become protagonists of liberation, people require clarity about the systems driving their oppression and confidence in a new eco-socialist world. This is only possible through political education that combines theory with practice.
On this basis, the party creates campaigns based on people’s motivations and needs, whether it be reducing the power of a racist police force, improving access to nutritious food, or seeking funding for an ailing local library.
In the process of advancing a specific campaign, people encounter the obstacles imposed on them by capitalism and imperialism. These experiences are political education in their own right, but they are also complemented and enriched by more formal methods offered by the party, whether it be a public seminar, a reading circle, a video, or a podcast. This is especially critical in the imperial core where many people are unlikely to develop anti-imperialist consciousness due to their privileged location within the world-system.
Political education awakens people to the possibilities of another world and the generations of struggle to bring it to life.
Electoral Leverage
The party must run in, and win, elections5. The electoral arena is not the party’s definitive organising focus but rather a critical terrain of struggle that cannot be ceded to the opposition.
By running in elections, the party can agitate against capitalism and imperialism and gauge support for eco-socialist ideas. It can continue this within the halls of power while also trying to triangulate campaign, provisioning, and cultural areas of work with legislative concessions.
Organisational Structure
The governance structure of a party has an immense impact on its efficacy. Here we outline two important features:
Mass Membership
To unify and coordinate a people’s bloc, the party must forge a mass membership structure adapted to varying capacity levels. Three general tiers can be identified.
First, those with the most capacity form the stable core of the party. Cadre membership is for advanced organisers who receive training from the party and are responsible for orchestrating and implementing the party’s activities. They often hail from popular organisations (e.g. social movements, trade unions, etc.), an experience that furnished them with critical organising skills but also an understanding of the clear limits of disjointed political work. It is this consciousness that leads them to devote their energies to a party dedicated to “permanent and positive changes”6.
Cadre membership should also be complemented by less intensive forms, such as campaign membership, which is designed for people who feel more attracted to a specific community or area of work (e.g. healthcare, education, or culture). Campaign members are not full-time organisers, and as such, their level of political activity may fluctuate depending on their other life commitments. But members of this tier are regularly engaged in some aspect of party work.
Finally, those who only show up for big mobilisations, party-led events, or during election cycles can be designated as support membership. This accounts for the broadest set of people who support the party but only have limited capacity to make active contributions.
Democratic Leadership
Internal democracy is foundational to the party. Details on how to infuse democracy into the party’s structure have been offered by others in this series. But this democratic structure must also include leadership.
This requires the party membership to regularly elect a leadership, who are equally subordinated and empowered to execute the majoritarian strategic direction. Members, including those who hold a minority position, are then expected to follow the line of the leadership to the extent that it fulfils its democratic mandate. More concretely, this resembles members at lower levels of the party creatively applying guidelines from the leadership in a way that fits their local context.
Democratic leadership avoids the pitfalls of both “ultra-democracy,” in which every course of action is scrutinised by the entire membership to the point of political paralysis, and “bureaucratic centralism,” in which leadership disregards democratic input to the point of authoritarian degeneration7.
It’s important to recognise the historical tendency for mass parties to become stale and devolve into bureaucratic centralism. This history does not invalidate the necessity of the party form, nor should it deter us from working to revitalise it. Instead, we must learn the lessons of this history as we move forward, implementing checks and balances that enable the mitigation of such risks (e.g. rotating responsibilities, term limits, mechanisms for recall, capping salaries at the average national income level, etc.).
Party Formation
The above review of the party’s functions, activities, and structure provides a sense of direction on the question of party formation.
Three general approaches can be identified on the question of party formation in Britain. The first suggests that the party already exists. It’s the Green Party, and we just need to reform it to become the party we need (see Magowan). The second advocates for some type of regroupment or alliance creation among existing communist parties (see Woodrow, Why Marx?). The third proposes to establish a whole new organisation that is built by some novel constellation of forces, often including some combination of organisers with past experience in the party Left, organisers from the movement Left, and the millions of people from the disorganised Left (see Todd, Eade).
The Greens?
To become a revolutionary party, the Green Party would need to become an explicit vehicle for class struggle, rid itself of the liberalism that underpins it (and its sister parties across the world), and transition from being an electoral machine to an organisation that considers electoral engagement one tool among many in the process of building social power. In other words, the DNA of the organisation would have to be fundamentally transformed.
This is not to say that the Greens aren’t doing important work or to deny attempts to shift the Green Party towards eco-socialist politics and community organising. But, as James Schneider recently warned on Novara FM, it seems unjustifiably risky to pin all of our hopes on the revolutionary rebirth of a bourgeois party (a lesson we should remember from Corbynism, which was far more moderate than what’s proposed here).
Regroupment?
It seems misplaced to suggest that the many socialist organisations in Britain, which individually don’t display the key features of the party we need (e.g. the capacity to unify, internal democratic mechanisms, effective electoral strategies, etc.), would produce a different outcome if they were joined together. We believe that those advocating for this approach have not provided a convincing answer to this problem.
In addition, as reviewed by Lawrence Parker, the trend of communist parties in Britain towards greater fragmentation, rather than unity, casts doubt about the feasibility of such a strategy in the first place.
Something new!
And so we are left with option three. Within this approach, many strategies can be imagined for reaching and crowding in the non-partyist Left, from a listening campaign based on open dinner clubs (see Todd), to running cadrefication programmes for movement Left organisers (something we are doing at Climate Vanguard through our programme, Comet). Regardless of the specific method, this seems to be the most promising approach towards which we should be directing our energies, testing new initiatives, and coordinating efforts.
- We identify eco-socialism as the political orientation of liberatory politics because it carries the “double objective” of transforming society to enable human flourishing within planetary boundaries (Hickel, 2023). ↩︎
- Jodi Dean, Crowds and Party (Verso, 2016). ↩︎
- Marta Harnecker, Rebuilding the Left (Zed Books, 2007) ↩︎
- Ibid ↩︎
- This being said, the electoral question must be approached from a position of social strength. In other words, the preceding activities should be developed to the point of maturity, before a serious electoral strategy is pursued. ↩︎
- Huey P Newton, Revolutionary Suicide (Penguin Books, 2009). ↩︎
- Marta Harnecker, Rebuilding the Left (Zed Books, 2007) ↩︎
