Base building, democracy, populism and socialist strategy

While there have been many rumours about a new left party, we are still waiting for something to emerge. Haunted by the spectre of failed parties past, potential founders around Jeremy Corbyn and left Labour MPs have moved carefully, viewing the launch as a make or break moment. At the same time, Nigel Farage’s Reform has captured the anti-establishment mood and surged to more than 200k members and 25% of the vote. The Greens are slowly growing in membership and vote share but they’re far behind Reform, and many on the left are reluctant to throw in with a liberal membership and technocratic leadership.

It’s clear there is demand for a party. Anarchist and syndicalist tendencies in the UK are marginal, and most of the left agrees that we need to contest elections and win some form of state power. Transitioning to a planned economy, democratising the state and seriously redistributing wealth aren’t possible without the state, and even Britain’s revolutionary Marxist organisations are mostly oriented towards electoral politics, at least for now.

For better or worse, elections equal politics for the vast majority of people. We need to broaden that horizon, without ceding the terrain. Whether a new left party or a Zack Polanski-led Green Party become this vehicle, and I believe one of them will, we need a clear and current understanding of just what it’ll take to achieve socialist transformation.

This essay outlines four fundamental elements of a successful socialist party in the 2020s, that we: 

1. Prioritise base building as much as elections
2. Build some form of member democracy
3. Seek out conflict and embrace anti-system, populist communications
4. Draw a clear, bright line between a socialist and social democratic approach

This plan follows many conversations with comrades and friends, and I offer it as an incomplete starting point. Hopefully it’s useful for anyone joining a new left party or the Green Party, although there’ll be different routes to implementation. A new left party could be founded according to this plan, whereas the Green Party would need to undergo some form of refounding process, probably culminating with an all-member conference, to definitively swing in a socialist direction. For ease, I’ll use ‘the party’ to refer to both throughout.

Prioritise base-building as much as elections

Over the last 50 years the institutions that gave working class people hope, meaning and connection have been undermined and destroyed. Trade unions, working mens clubs and pubs are the classic examples associated with the socialist movement, but we can also talk about community centres, sports halls and libraries, squats and social centres, historic town centres flattened into car parks and out-of-town shopping centres built on the sites of heavy industry.

The attack came from all sides. Neoliberalism defunded community institutions and pushed up rents in cities, making space hard to come-by. Thatcher suppressed rave culture and pushed squatters into renting. Collective workplaces with strong unions gave way to a huge rise in self-employment. Smartphones tempt us into spending more time at home and alone. The pandemic only made widespread loneliness worse. 

My friend Heather Kennedy organises on an estate in Maltby, an ex-mining town half an hour from where I grew up. Apart from the food bank run by the wives and daughters of ex-miners, there isn’t much else. Maltby Miners Welfare now sits empty, sold off to a developer. The pubs have mostly shut, the unions are nowhere to be seen. As one ex-miners wife put it, “we used to know how to party in this town. It brought everyone together. We’d all keep an eye on each others’ kids. Now young people don’t go out anymore. The Silver Dollar is gone. The Shute is gone. It’s the end of an era.”

We’re operating in “the void” as Peter Mair puts it, where communal institutions of every kind have been destroyed and we live increasingly atomised, lonely lives.

This reduction in collective experience is fertile ground for the populist right. They use traditional and social media to stoke fears about migrants, muslims and Just Stop Oil, with little risk that their fabrications will be found out. Hyper-online identity politics has also prospered in the void, distorting our view of each other and encouraging us to see a collection of fixed identity traits, rather than the complex human beings we really are.

When people don’t spend time together, hope is in short supply. For a socialist party to succeed, we need to ensure that social organisation thrives. 

We should state this really clearly. Winning an election and forming a government will not be enough. Implementing a socialist programme – controls on capital, widespread nationalisation, a fundamental transfer of wealth to the working class – will kick off huge opposition from business, foreign governments and the repressive arms of the state.

There’s no point winning an election if we aren’t powerful enough to fight back. And our power base will be with the people. In militant rank and file trade unions, tenants and community unions, politicised community institutions and explosive social movements. While the only thing people vote for on Heather’s estate is Brexit, older generations remember what it was like to fight. We have to build a base so numerous, rooted and radicalised that millions will go on strike and flood the streets in defence of a socialist government.

There are so many things we could do. Collective childcare for struggling parents; community meals for the isolated and lonely; support with immigration papers for migrant workers; advice clinics to help people save money on their bills; socialist gyms so we can get fit (and fight the fascists when they come).

I think it’s useful to distinguish between social programmes that provide the immediate support that people need, and the active struggle of strikes, non-payment and anti-gentrification campaigns. Both are essential, but each has a different character.

With social programmes there’s always a danger they’ll lapse into charity, comfortably existing as an addition to the state that would have been celebrated as part of David Cameron’s Big Society. They can also end up helping individuals solve their problems rather than organising collectives to realise their power. At their best, however, they are the wide end of our funnel, engaging working class people in a subtly political environment that meets their material needs without demanding the sacrifice and risk that comes with struggle.

Strikes, non-payment campaigns and active struggle are obviously the bar for which we reach,  building leadership and increasing the confidence and capacities of those involved, but they are high risk, high commitment actions that not everybody we meet is ready to engage in.

Clearly this work is already happening, although most of it is in cities and little in towns like Maltby, where there is no ready supply of graduates ready to start an ACORN branch. The party shouldn’t try to replace renters unions, trade unions or existing left wing social programmes, but there are a few specific reasons why the party should help with this work. It will: 

1. Build trust in the party. Deep apathy and mistrust of politicians make it hard to cultivate active and enthusiastic support, even for insurgent parties of the left. People will vote, often reluctantly. Many switch off from politics entirely. Most just won’t believe a thing you say. While pointing out the corruption of political elites, we have to build a deep and abiding trust in our own party. We do this by making a concrete difference in people’s lives now, instead of promising to represent them later.
   The Belgian Workers Party runs 11 medical centres across the country and provides free primary healthcare for anyone who needs it. Germany’s Die Linke goes door-to-door helping those in government housing apply for rent reductions. Nigel Farage’s Reform are exploring buyers clubs to help their supporters save on basics.
   Doing some of these things as the party, recruiting residents to run them and dissolving the line between party and the people – always providing with, never for – will build trust and support in ways a charismatic leader or a well-written manifesto never could. It’ll provide a way for those deeply sceptical of electoral politics to become active members of the party and build a depth in communities that we’ll surely need.
   
   
2. Recompose the party membership. It’s inevitable that, at least at first, the party will be dominated by the most politicised and active parts of its base: urban graduates, retired professionals, public sector workers and muslims radicalised by Palestine. All of these people are important, but there are other overlapping groups we must bring in: the multi-racial working class, the rural working class, lifelong renters, migrants without visa status and the precariously employed. Many of these groups will be less inclined to get involved in party politics, more sceptical of politicians and have more immediate material needs. Talking to them about voting at election time is not going to recruit them to the party. Running social programmes that directly address their day-to-day needs, while organising them to realise their collective power, stands a far better chance of success.
   This recomposition cuts both ways. Without an explicit focus on base building, party members can become insular and cut-off from the rest of the class. If we spend most of our time in meetings with other members debating ideas or policy, only talking to the people during elections, we’ll develop strange views and ultimately become a barrier to popular support. This happened during Corbynism, where a membership out-of-sync with the country on Brexit was used by the establishment to drive a bulldozer – or more precisely a JCB – through the entire project.
   
   
3. Energise local organising by connecting it to a national project. After the fall of Corbynism there was a call to go back to communities and organise. This pendulum swing was an understandable reaction to failure, but it resulted in mass inactivity rather than a surge in community organising.
   Even for the politically motivated, running local social programmes can be really hard. Your efforts feel like a lone sail in a perfect storm. The disengaged are hard to organise. To cope, you reduce your horizons and focus on the next wave, feeling a sense of shame at your retreat. Sometimes you try to take it all in, but you end up feeling overwhelmed and hopeless. It takes so much effort just to stay afloat.
   But when the same social programme is part of a national or international project, it can take on a different meaning. Running a local childcare group feels different when it’s part of a long-term plan to transform society. We gain incredible agency and power through being part of a collective, and contributing towards something greater than ourselves.
   This is the sickness we all suffered after the fall of Corbynism. We mourned the loss of a project greater than ourselves, and the feeling of being in community with thousands of others. My bet is that tens of thousands of community oriented socialists, who are currently inactive and perhaps did little during Corbynism, would jump at the chance to run local initiatives as part of the party, linking their community organising to a project of socialist transformation.
   It won’t be easy. Party-run social programmes could still fall prey to paternalistic dynamics, where members see themselves as saviours, perhaps driven by their middle class guilt to find redemption in helping the needy. Instead we need the solidarity of old, where the people do the work of providing for the people. This means dissolving any division between provider and user, getting used to recognising difference without shame and organising together in our self interest.
   
   4) Bring unique resources to base building. Deep organising work on estates, in workplaces and in communities with people who aren’t already politicised is very resource intensive. Any union organiser will tell you that relationships and trust take time, meetings are often small, and nothing happens overnight. No volunteer can offer the time and attention deep organising requires. It’s a grind, and you can’t do it in your spare time.
   Across the left, we need more money to hire organisers, specifically in communities that are under-represented in our coalition. The party has many roles, and fighting elections is obviously expensive. But there are particular ways that only a party fighting elections can commit time and resources to base building.
   My housemate has just been elected as a socialist councillor and plans to spend his time organising. He’ll go to council meetings when he has to, but he’ll spend most of his paid time and new legitimacy base building in the ward. Ideas include organising estate residents around service charges, running buyers clubs to help residents with the cost of living and organising inter-community BBQs in the park.
   There are 20,000 council positions across the UK. You get paid anything between £5,000 to £18,000 per year, depending on where you are. This is a huge amount of resources we could move towards organising. There are thousands of part time organiser roles out there, we all just need to apply. 

Make party democracy good again

The clue is in the name, if you’ll allow me the predictable joke. If we’re arguing for a democratisation of the state and society, we need to start practicing democracy in our party too. How much, what form it takes and for what purpose is the terrain of debate.

At a basic level, members need to be able to hold leaders to account. In our age of celebrity and social media, leaders will build a following and power base that is independent of the party, an inevitable consequence of successful populist leadership. But they will also be subject to intense pressure and corrupting influences from elites. They are the person to do deals with. They will be the focal point of pressure when in government. They can sell us out. 

Alex Tsipras, the former leader of the Greek left party Syriza, was elected prime minister at the tender age of 40, riding a wave of resentment at the EU’s attempt to impose austerity on Greece after the financial crash. From January to July in 2015, Tsipras and his leather clad, Marxist finance minister Yanis Varoufakis went to war with the Troika, refusing the austerity that creditors demanded. In true populist style, Tsipras went back to the people in June and called a referendum on the EU’s terms. The Greek people voted “Oxi” (No) emphatically. A few days later, Tispras capitulated and agreed to impose every single austerity measure on the Greek people. Why he did this matters less than how it could have been prevented. If Tsipras had been mandated by his party to put any agreement with the Troika to Syriza’s membership, he would have had no opportunity to renege.

Sahra Wagenknecht, a founder of the German left party Die Linke, caused chaos for years by using her considerable public profile to wage war with her internal opponents. She undermined the party by consistently ignoring democratic resolutions and the persistent public infighting nearly destroyed Die Linke in the Bundestag. Eventually, Wegeneckt broke away and founded her own party – the Sahra Wagenknecht Party, of course – which tried (and failed) to capture Die Linke’s heartlands in the West.

Calming the tensions between populist leadership and a strong party is crucial, and we need firm mechanisms of accountability that can propel leaders forward or reel them back in, especially during moments of crisis and opportunity.

More than this, giving members the opportunity to realise themselves as political actors and sharpen their strategic capacities through the day-to-day practice of democracy is how you forge resilient and committed socialists, as opposed to the fragile and often confused positions of Corbynists, Pabloists and Mélenchonists.

All of this said, I offer my case for party democracy with some trepidation. The actually existing democracy I’ve been a part of – in Labour, Momentum and horizontalist groups – has felt precisely engineered to crush my soul. Endless motions, marathon meetings and shared feelings of strain and frustration. Zoom calls full of people whipped by their faction, clueless as to what is being debated, already primed to vote with or for their people, and with no intention of listening to arguments or changing their minds.

It’s all so mechanical and brute force. A game for factional operators to see who can best stuff a room. In essence, it’s bad organising: no one learns anything, builds relationships or realises their collective power. Is this the magical energy and life-force of the party that people talk about? I hope not, as I’d opt for the cold efficiency of a powerful but capable leader – such as Jean-Luc Mélenchon of La France Insoumise – over this form of democracy any day.

From those who advocate for democracy without caveat, I want to see an ambitious project to make party democracy good again. No more pointless meetings. Let’s build the Agora and the Forum instead. Let’s encourage raucous, spectacular and freewheeling debate. Let’s try to change minds and be open to changing our own.

A final caveat, and a crucial one, is the usually glossed over tension between member democracy and democracy of the people. I only need three words to express this: Corbyn’s Brexit fudge.

After Corbyn nearly secured a majority in 2017, the establishment went into crisis. An anti-imperialist nearly became the Prime Minister, and they needed a plan to make sure this never happened again. Enter Brexit. In the 2017 election Brexit was a settled issue, with all parties accepting the result. But with negotiations dragging on and Theresa May without a majority to force through a deal, the establishment spotted its opportunity.

They split our coalition down the middle. Squeezing us between hard Remain and hard Leave, both the centrist and right-wing parts of the establishment realised they could build their own power and demolish Corbyn through mutually assured Brexit destruction.

Both sides conspired to make everything about Brexit, and polarise the nation on their terms. We tried to unite the working class in opposition to the billionaires, they sought to divide them based on their vote in the referendum. Farage organised ERG members in the Tory Party to hold Theresa May hostage. Cummings and Johnson prorogued Parliament. Millions of pounds of liberal money poured into the People’s Vote and Another Europe is Possible, the Labour facing parts of hard Remain.

And what was the main thrust of their argument? Why did they have such leverage? Jeremy Corbyn was the champion of member democracy, and the Labour members overwhelmingly backed Remain.

They drove a blue and yellow stake through the heart of Corbynism, and all we could do was watch. Starmer rode this wave of hard Remainism. Sky News dubbed 2019 “the Brexit election” on the first day of the campaign. And member democracy, supposedly our greatest strength, was identified by the establishment as a fundamental weakness. We became the anti-democrats. Fundamentally out of step with a country that had voted to Leave.

I say this not to argue away democracy, but to point to its downsides. More democracy is not always the answer, as some on the left would have it, and it needs to be balanced with other concerns. In this light, a few proposals we should consider include:

• The members and the people formulate the programme. The current model of policy wonks crossing the Thames and writing manifestos with MPs obviously needs to be replaced. As does the sad theatre of Labour conference, where members fight over policy motions that have zero power to bind the leadership. But I am wary of the membership having sole power over policy. While members are more representative of the people than the leadership, they are still made up of the most ideological and advanced sections of the class. A better idea is to have a dual process where the politics of the membership comes into contact with the people’s needs. Before their last election Die Linke, in an effort to turn the party outwards after years of infighting, went to the people and asked them about their concerns in a mass door knocking exercise. The results of this were fed into a member conference which produced a short manifesto mostly on the cost of living crisis and the party achieved a historic result. The Belgian Workers Party did the same, surveying more than 100,000 people to formulate their latest manifesto and shape party strategy.
  
  
• Different levels of membership where decisions are taken by the core, and new members can thrive. Being thrown into a Labour branch meeting where you’re debating the wording of a motion that’s going to national conference is, for anybody new to politics, a strange and likely alienating experience. Why are we all sitting in a room debating words on paper, rather than organising the people out there? At the same time, long standing members who have dedicated huge amounts of their lives to the party may well resent these new members, showing up for the first time and demanding an equal say.
  The internal life of the party is more complex than this, but I think the simplification illustrates how different levels of membership can be useful. We can again raid the congress documents of the Belgian Workers Party (PTB), who in 2008 moved from a small organisation of highly committed cadre to a broader party with three layers of membership: militants, the base and consultative members.
  The latter are asked about the party’s direction and may get involved but are under no obligation. The base are active in the party and can be delegates to congress. Militants are the ideological and operational core, party lifers who commit huge amounts of time, money and energy. It’s true that under this system the leadership has more power, and some friends talk of the PTB leadership controlling who becomes a militant, but with clear criteria for progression, this may well be overcome
  For the Belgian Workers Party it has been transformative, expanding from 2800 members and less than 1% of the vote in 2008 to 26,000 members and nearly 10% of the vote in 2024.
  
  
• In-person meetings over digital platforms. If developing our collective capacities and building relationships with other people is important, we should leave behind the techno-utopian fad of digital voting platforms and direct democracy. Popular in both the Five Star Party of Italy and Podemos in Spain, they were also used during Momentum’s more anti-democratic moments, in an effort to force members into narrow choices defined by the leadership. Nobody learns or grows by logging onto a platform and clicking. It’s voting rather than democracy, and a neat expression of the more authoritarian, anti-member tendencies of 2010s left populism.
  
  
• Hierarchy over horizontalism. Cultures of consensus, flat structure and distributed leadership were forged in the alter-globalisation movement that smashed through Seattle in 1999. And while the rediscovery of the “Tyranny of Structurelessness” prompted a reassessment, horizontalism still persists in soft and hard forms, evincing a strange half-life, for want of something better.
  Vincent Bevin’s account of failed 2010s protest movements could be the final nail. He convincingly argues that horizontalist groups can blaze bright and create powerful moments of eruption, but after the tremors cease and the smoke clears it’s those with robust organisation that reap the political rewards.
  But in the Green Party you can still see its subtle inflection – an emphasis on local autonomy, no leaders until 2008 and no whip for MPs. As a friend said to me the other day, this is convenient for socialists who want to take over the party, but something that must be changed if we want to be able to act in concert in the long-term.

Seek out conflict and embrace anti-system, populist communications

Left populism is an old idea, and has been well practised by Bernie Sanders in the USA, Jean-Luc Mélenchon in France, Pablo Iglesias in Spain and Andrés Manuel López Obrador (AMLO) in Mexico. 

Theorised by Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe in the 1970s and 80s, left populism was one part of the New Left’s response to the exhaustion of orthodox Marxism. A move away from identifying a revolutionary class, based on workers as workers, and an attempt to construct a broad coalition behind left electoral projects instead. Out went the proletariat and in came the people, always juxtaposed against a corrupt elite rather than the capitalist class per se.

To achieve this, Mouffe backgrounded socialist politics and foregrounded “floating signifiers” – concepts such as democracy or freedom that are widely understood but mean different things to different people – in an effort to cohere divergent social groups, interests and struggles not through a shared ideology or programme but through their opposition to a specific set of elites. 

Bernie Sanders’ Oligarchy Tour is a case in point. Leveraging the lack of leadership by establishment Democrats and the nakedly oligarchical nature of Trump’s presidency, Sanders is attracting huge crowds in red states, many far larger than when he ran for president and including lots of normie, liberal democrats. This is an example, Laclau and Mouffe would argue, of populism’s ability to create overwhelming coalitions through its flexibility and comfort with difference, in stark contrast to the minoritarian purism of the revolutionary sect. This breadth gives it power, and makes it a tempting strategy for socialists contesting elections.

However, there are many good criticisms of Laclau and Mouffe. Their re-interpretation of Gramsci and emphasis on hegemony means battles of words and framing take precedence over material conditions and how they shape us. Constructing broad coalitions can lead to triangulation, taking people as they are rather than trying to change them. There is also a fundamental instability to populist coalitions. In their diversity they have many contradictions, often easily exploited by opponents. They have a tendency to burn bright and then explode.

Most of all, populism’s emphasis on elites can disappear under capitalism and discourage systemic thinking. Of course, Elon Musk is our enemy, but the real agency remains with capital, and one of the most powerful things a socialist can do is shine a bright white light on the systems that really govern us.

Nevertheless, I think Slavoj Zizek is right when he says that while populism is not good enough in theory, it may be good enough in practice. It’s clear that anti-elite anger rages on after briefly subsiding during the pandemic. Just knock on any door across the country and you’ll hear a version of the same story – politicians are corrupt, they don’t care about me, the system is broken and needs to change. Even Starmerites acknowledge this now, and you only have to look at the surging populist right to see its potential. 

A populist approach, while primarily a communications strategy, should be leveraged by socialist parties in specific, targeted ways. We must preserve class politics and our analysis of capitalism, while adapting our messaging to connect with people’s complex, sometimes contradictory identities, addressing them as more than just workers.

If our project is to rebuild class identity, populism can be a well-set stepping stone that helps newcomers, who might otherwise recoil at the red flag, dip their toes in the torrents of the left.

With this in mind, some tactics a new party should use include: 

• Invoke the people and name elites. For Podemos in Spain this was la caste, for Sanders the 99% vs 1% and Corbyn tried the many vs the few. The aim is to unite a broad coalition of different class fractions against a well defined elite of billionaires, establishment politicians and Whitehall mandarins, always naming names. This is the fundamental battle of political discourse. While Farage tries to draw dividing lines between the people and muslims, migrants and woke graduates, we must draw clear and bright lines between the people and the billionaires, big corporations and their corrupt politicians. It’s worth noting that the theory bears out in practice. Studies by progressive communications experts in the US and UK also come to very populist conclusions.
  
  
• Embrace conflict and fight the attention war. Liberal, technocratic politics tries to suppress conflict through rational argument and management. If consensus is ever ‘achieved’ it is only through the managing of and distracting from class conflict. We must openly acknowledge that society is divided between the people and the elite and embrace the conflict that ensues.
  This is far more credible to many voters than putting on a suit and talking like a politician. Leaders at every level, but especially at the top of the party, must have an appetite for conflict and be on the hunt for spectacular fights that position the people against the elites.
  For left media fatalists who argue we can never reach the people on billionaire owned platforms and in the mainstream press, the popularity of Ocasio-Cortez, Mick Lynch, Bernie Sanders, Jeremy Corbyn and Die Linke’s Heidi Reichinnek, the most popular politician in Germany who spurred Die Linke on to a recent historic result, are strong evidence to the contrary.
  Any left party that only fights the attention war, relying on media spectacle instead of base building, will be frail and fleeting. But in an increasingly mediatised world where we spend more time on our own and with our screens than ever before – ignoring the attention war completely will also condemn us to failure.
  
  
• Embrace emotion and feel with people. People feel angry, frustrated and uncared for, and our leaders need to acknowledge these emotions and give them voice. Correct policy positions aren’t enough and facts don’t resonate. People need to feel that you feel it too. Politics has a deep irrationality and Marxists in particular can forget that. We’re building a coalition of flawed, chaotic human beings, not robots who add up and subtract policy positions. Leaders need to offer opportunities for catharsis. Trump is the master at this and Farage isn’t bad either.
  Melenchon’s phrasing of ‘furious but not fascists’ is interesting, and hints at the question of which emotions and passions are productive for a left project. Overcoming apathy and nihilism is our primary task, and perhaps anger, rage and a desire for vengeance are our best tools. Hope simply spoken can seem impossibly naive, even though we must try to rekindle its small, sputtering flames in moments of local solidarity and occasional national wins. If we want to both tear down and build, we need to harness passions that will fuel this creative destruction.
  
  
• Create a chain of demands centered on popular economics. Downwardly mobile graduates stuck in the service sector and unable to get a mortgage, working class people suffering high rents, high prices and bad pay, migrant workers whose precarious visa status enables exploitation at work. All suffer the effects of wealth hoarding billionaires. Rent controls, price controls, lower bills and freezing taxes for the working class alongside widespread nationalisation and wealth taxes are very popular, and all other demands can and should be linked to them.
  This creates in Mouffe’s language a “chain of equivalence” where demands for climate action, trans-rights and feminism are bundled with popular, economic demands in the hope they become mutually reinforcing. The climate movement has succeeded in this over the last decade, moving from moralising about polar bears to linking green energy with lower gas and electricity bills.
  You can do this for nearly any issue. Trans people need funding for specialised medical care, women need good schools, childcare and domestic violence shelters, black people need police to stop criminalising their kids and investigate elite tax avoidance instead. All of us need a secure home and dignified work. Bernie Sanders is the master at this. I can hear it so clearly: transgender workers need to buy eggs too. Consistently and relentlessly, we must link issues with economic demands that everyone can relate to.
  
  
• Pay leaders a workers wage, reject billionaire money and show we’re with the people. Good populist messaging is important, but we also have to demonstrate in the here and now that we’re on the side of the people. Rejecting billionaire money is an obvious start, but we should also be good trotskyists and restrict our leaders to a workers wage, a clear dividing line with establishment politicians that can really resonate.
  We can even promise to impose this on all members of Parliament when in government. Labour MP Nadia Whittome already takes a workers wage at £35k a year. Angela Egan, the left candidate for Unison General Secretary, has pledged to do the same. Both of them were carers before entering politics.We should also prioritise candidates from working class backgrounds, and ban all commercial lobbyists, property developers or landlords from standing.  

This advice isn’t only for leaders and candidates. All of us should be trained in populist communications so we can talk to residents, workers and new recruits using language that works.

However, we should also be wary of how seductive populist leaders can be. The desire for someone to fight on behalf of us is strong, and it’s so easy to fantasize about a ‘Mick Lynch Party’ being one simple trick to solve all our problems, as I have in the past.

Leaders like Lynch are important for fighting the attention wars, but we cannot make the mistake of the 2010s and rely on them to cohere our coalition. Corbynism made Corbynites instead of socialists, and this was a big problem. That our entire project rested on the reputation of one man was an even bigger problem. This time around, serious base building and political education work is needed to cover off these weaknesses.

Draw a clear bright line between a Socialist and Social Democratic approach

The biggest danger the party will face is the pressure to compromise for power. We begin with the aim of overthrowing capitalism, but end up settling for a handful of reforms. The closer we get to government, the greater the pressure grows and accommodation becomes so tempting. Inch by inch, the party becomes indistinguishable from the establishment we fought so hard to oppose.  

Member democracy and a deep social base, as we’ve discussed above, are important bulwarks against this. But conceptual clarity is important too. We can only build socialism if we know what it is, and how it differs from social democracy. Drawing a clear bright line between the two means we can pick a side.

Social democratic parties such as Labour aim to ameliorate the worst excesses of capitalism. Through gradual reforms and negotiation between capital and labour, they stabilize the system and manage conflict between classes. They view the state as a neutral actor that can be wielded for social change by the party in power. Elections are an end unto themselves, the natural mode of politics, and the goal is always to win elections and enter government.

A socialist party is different. It aims to replace capitalism with a democratically run economy, where collective ownership trumps the market and the state is democratised too. There are many strategies for achieving socialism,  but I believe the most plausible is the Democratic Socialist approach, advocated by the most radical elements of the Corbyn and Sanders projects and outlined brilliantly by Callum F in his piece for Prometheus.

Democratic socialists aim to secure legitimacy by winning a national election. Our goal isn’t to make capitalism more humane, but to implement what André Gorz called “non-reformist reforms” – fundamental changes to the system that capitalism cannot stomach. This strategy deliberately kicks off battles with capital, but from a position of greater strength. Socialists occupy at least part of the state and have a democratic mandate from the people.

In spectacular fashion, these battles reveal the fundamental division in society – between the people and capitalism – and mobilise our base in the unions, communities and movements in defence of the democratically elected government.

Clearly the differences are stark. The social democratic desire for consensus and management is the opposite of the democratic socialist push for conflict and rupture. For our purposes, it’s worth discussing a few of the practical considerations that arise from these differences: 

1. No coalitions with social democrats. The default orientation for small left and Green parties, unclear as to whether they’re social democrats or democratic socialists, is to win enough seats to affect the balance of power. This usually means becoming a junior partner in coalition with an establishment party, compromising on most of the platform and enjoying a few years of ministerial cars for some measly reforms. Inevitably, these parties are punished by voters in following elections, struggling to tell the difference between them and the establishment party they helped prop up. This has been the drift of socialist, communist and left populist projects across Europe, and we must look again to the Belgian Workers Party for a corrective. They have a minimum programme and refuse to go into government until they have the power, both inside and outside of parliament, to enact it. Both our democratic socialist and populist orientation push us to remain distinct. We must reject power until we are ready to exercise it. No false victories. This is especially true in the UK’s centralised political system, where it is possible to exercise real power by winning a majority at Westminster. .
   
2. Winning elections isn’t necessarily the goal. Local councils are an interesting example here. They have little power in the UK and are forced to impose austerity budgets on residents. This was a key strategy of Tory governments in the 2000s – defund Labour councils across the north and make them take the blame for cuts.
   It’s also a live issue for us. A new left or Green party could win control of many councils in the UK, but to what end? Councillors could set illegal budgets, barricade themselves in their offices and kick off a big fight with central government, but it’s unlikely they’d have the power to see it through and the consequences would be severe. Maybe the rupture would be worth it, eliciting widespread support and creating new possibilities. But it seems equally likely that its failure would create demoralisation, reinforce apathy and take some of our most committed people out of action.
   The democratic socialist approach of trying to fight from a position of legitimacy and strength means you might not want to win every election. This subtle shift, from elections as an end unto themselves to elections as a tactic that could be useful, helps dissolve the resource tension between base building and elections.     
   
3. Political education for party members is key. As you can imagine, explaining to the average party member that we shouldn’t always try to win elections or that we should reject government when the opportunity comes is a tough sell. Levels of political education across all the major parties is low, and members often default to social democracy even when they self-describe as socialists or communists. This drift must be fought with rigorous political education for party members and a clear focus on what we’re up against. This is especially important if, as I’ve argued above, the party is going to use a populist communications strategy as a stepping stone towards a socialist, class-based analysis. 

As I said at the beginning, this is not a comprehensive plan for the party, just my attempt at sketching out a few of the fundamentals. Each section here could be an entire book. There are also some important omissions. For example, we’ll need far more detailed strategies for dealing with capital’s assault on a socialist government when the time comes. The specifics of navigating capital strikes, trade strikes and opposition from the military and police need to be war-gamed. Which battles we prioritise, how we manoeuvre and position.

Hopefully though, this gives us a foundation to work from. And we should get started now. There is so much work to do in the Greens: electing socialists to every leadership position, running to be councillors and using your time to organise, political education on socialist strategy, connecting the party with trade union struggles, finding candidates from working class communities, setting up social programmes explicitly connected to the party. And if you’re holding out for the new party, there’s no reason you can’t start building the base building now, connecting your organising efforts to the party when it launches. There’s plenty of work to do, it’s time we got going.