Since 2008, the left outside Parliament has tried a range of strategies to substantiate a post-crisis politics in the UK. Drawing on a mix of occupations, marches, assemblies, and electoral projects, this effort reached its peak in 2017 with the surprising success of a left-aligned Labour Party in the General Election. None of these efforts, from UK Uncut and Occupy to the People’s Assembly and the Corbyn-led attempt to revive social democracy in the Labour Party, have succeeded in initiating a break with Thatcher’s political and economic settlement. A highly concentrated and homogeneous elite in politics and media have united against efforts to frame the 2007-8 collapse of the UK’s financial sector as grounds to revisit that settlement. The British state remains committed to private control of vital infrastructure: housing and transport, energy and water, most obviously, but also the credit-money system. In foreign affairs, the UK remains committed to an unconditional alliance with an increasingly erratic and dangerous US.

As it stands, two Thatcherite tendencies — managerialist neoliberals and a nativist and recklessly inflammatory right — will seek to establish themselves at the next Westminster election as the only two viable options. The exact form the right’s coalition takes is not clear. The Conservative Party, under a new leader, might recover enough to impose some sort of coalition on Reform. But in any event, the Labour Party will offer a half-hearted defence of the status quo at the next election. They will be challenged by a right that presents itself to the electorate as a thrilling roll of the dice. A still-powerful print-broadcast media apparatus, combined with pay-to-play digital platforms, might well be able to head off an election structured as a contest between Thatcherism and a post-Thatcherite alternative. Such a contest will only become inevitable if we succeed in making a post-Thatcherite alternative vivid in the minds of the electorate..

Meanwhile, anarchists and communists now look to the Green Party much as they looked to the Labour Party in 2015: agency is being individualised and channelled towards a leadership campaign in a party that isn’t socialist or anarchist, but does at least have some from both traditions in its ranks. There is no vehicle for collective agency that might assert itself independently, either to develop and promote a post-Thatcherite programme, or to intervene at scale in electoral politics to impose it on a reluctant state. The left still cannot present the public with a plausible alternative to a political and economic settlement everyone knows is finished. 

There are plenty of reasons for this. Here I will focus on one. Let me put it as simply as I can: there will be no unifying institution on the left until we dispense with our fixation on elected officials and representatives and adopt a much broader repertoire of democratic mechanisms. By this, I do not mean that we should dispense with elections. But we urgently need to change the context in which elected officials operate. The left does not need another party organised around an elected elite, who will, all but inevitably, hoard information and agency to maximise their own freedom of action. ‘The few’, as Machiavelli says, ‘always act in the interests of the few.’ (Machiavelli, 2008, p.40) The left needs a membership organisation that constantly pushes against the tendency towards oligarchic takeover, and does so by moving beyond the institutional apparatus of bourgeois-capitalist parties.

At present, we hand a monopoly on both knowledge creation and effective agency to those who want it the most, exactly like the capitalists. We don’t have to do this, but we do. And the results are all around: parties created to pursue universal emancipation degenerate into playgrounds for would-be celebrities and their backroom enablers. Therefore, at the core of a new left organisation must be the extensive use of random selection — drawing first from the membership, and later from the general population — to create bodies that both generate knowledge and exercise power over elected and unelected officials. These bodies will provide relevant knowledge to the membership and thereby inform their occasional, but highly consequential, sovereign decisions. The spectacle of rule by those who do not particularly covet rule will become an important genre of political communication. In addition to this use of political juries, a left organisation must push resources away from the centre by giving each member direct control of collective funds that will be dispersed after regular bouts of collective deliberation. This combination of random selection and universal participation allows us to reinstate two institutional forms that defined classical republican democracy but that have been thoroughly marginalised in the era of capitalist ‘representative democracy’: the political jury and the sovereign assembly. The party’s members need to become an important source of financial support for other organisations, capable of placing significant sums in the hands of those who prove most adept at developing and promoting a post-Thatcherite politics. They also need to be able to provide the broad public with analysis and information that counters Thatcherite propaganda. However, they will only be able to do so if they possess material, social, and communicative power.

Digital technology makes the structured participation we need much easier than it once was. The kinds of collective sense-making that required physical proximity in early democracies — political juries and voting assemblies — can now be managed virtually. Platform mutualism can provide us with the technological means, should we choose to use them, to create a collective understanding of our conditions and devise a policy response to them. The party in this model becomes a kind of res publica in miniature, a public possession: power is transparently exercised by as many people as is practical. In another register, the party is communist: collective agency becomes a common pool resource, husbanded by all, and harvested by all. The members can rely on the structured participation of their non-elite peers to warn them of threats and inform them of opportunities. Each member will take part in regular exercises of power, for which they, not a leadership committee, will be responsible. They will be, and will understand themselves to be, individually effective and collectively significant. As the notorious Italian politician Giulio Andreotti once said, ‘il potere logora chi non lo la’ – power wears out those who don’t have it.¹ Through the exercise of power, the membership will gain energy and confidence, as well as political sophistication and cunning. Thousands, perhaps millions, will be able to experience something of what it is to shape the structures of social reality, to rule, in other words.

Such a collective body will be a useful ally to all those seeking an end to the Thatcherite consensus in Britain. At scale, it will be able to build an account of the political that meets and outmatches the Westminster version in the minds of our fellow citizens. It will be able to make that account operational by sharing politically relevant data of the kind that the capitalist media and the capitalist parties currently keep a closely guarded secret. (What do people in my constituency want? Who would they vote for, if they thought other people would vote for what they wanted, and if those other people wanted the same thing as I?) 

A party structured on these line will be able to draft experienced and trained campaigners into tactically important constituencies in local and national elections, to help ensure that the left’s allies in the Green Party, small party groupings, as well as independents, are more likely to reach councils, mayoralties, assemblies and Parliament. It will also be able to discipline elected representatives in other parties more effectively, by remaining at arm’s length, and by reserving the right to stand candidates against backsliders. As it grows in size and power, it will be able to hold open primaries in tactically important spaces, and provide the means for social majorities to find and assert themselves in the political process. It might be true that the height of the left’s practicable ambition in this electoral cycle is to displace Labour in as much of the country as possible with a Green-led coalition. But a collective agent of the kind I am describing will also be able to shore up the Greens in office. Without it, the pressure on them to conform to the capitalist common sense might become irresistible.

This party could also be the means through which the institutional apparatus of a post-Thatcherite political economy can be discovered. We are going to have to replace planning by, and for, the owners of capital with democratic planning if we are to stand a chance of meeting the demands that environmental collapse and geopolitical instability will make of us. At present, we cannot credibly tell anyone that we know what that looks like. Our inability to build and sustain collective agency at scale does not inspire confidence in the undecided. Actually democratic socialism will require actually democratic institutional forms, based on equality-of-voice, random selection and the constant suppression of the tendency towards oligarchy. I don’t propose to set out the terms of this post-Thatcherite settlement here. But it would be surprising if it didn’t itself adopt the republican-democratic structures of the assembly and the political jury. If we no longer trust Keynesian public service and have lost our faith in market forces, we have only ourselves and the work of self-government.

By all means, use elections in both the party and the state. But bear in mind that the quality of representation is directly indexed to the quality of participation that surrounds it. If we continue to rely exclusively on elected representatives (or delegates, or whatever else we call them) and the vagaries of the liberal public sphere, we will continue to be corralled back into capitalist patterns of thought and action. Rapid growth in our numbers and our capacity to shape outcomes in defiance of capitalist imperatives will only be possible if we adopt the methods of republican democracy. By this I mean that elected representatives and salaried bureaucrats must always be surrounded by, and accountable to, ordinary members, who have the resources of time and money needed to exercise their oversight functions. Similarly, the settled views of the elected and salaried elite must always be put to the test by a properly resourced and completely independent culture of criticism and debate. We have to operate on the assumption that the permanent, paid staff of the party will keep the membership ill-informed if they stand to benefit from doing so. As Machiavelli warned, humans ‘will always act according to the wickedness of their nature whenever they have the opportunity.’² It is difficult to say exactly how much universal participation and random selection will be needed to balance and constrain the power of elected and salaried officials. But it should be sufficient to instil a lively fear in those entrusted with executive and administrative power. At a minimum, randomly selected bodies of members should have the power to initiate recall procedures against elected officers and to take the lead in key policy areas.
Regardless of our political aspirations, we on the left are capitalist subjects, every bit as much as everyone else. Much as we might admire the industrial working class, most of us do so from a distance. Few of us are content to take our places as anonymous foot soldiers in history’s forward progress. We want a piece of the action, to be on the inside, to understand what is happening, and to have an effective say in what happens next. I am not saying that the few thousand committed socialists and anarchists in the UK will make common cause to build a party based on the democratic-republican principles outlined above. I understand the temptation to cling to familiar organisational forms. But if we do break with elective oligarchy as our institutional default, we will have something to offer that no other tradition does: real power, for all, in the here and now. On that basis, something titanic can be built that might even be a match for the monstrous powers of the established order. We have spent too long in an ecstasy of pride, trying to bring light to the world. Perhaps it is time we made fire the shared possession of us all.

1. Rupert Cornwell, “Giulio Andreotti: Politician who dominated the Italian scene for more than half century”, Independent, May 6, 2023 https://www.independent.co.uk/news/obituaries/giulio-andreotti-politician-who-dominated-the-italian-scene-for-more-than-half-century-8605139.html  ↩︎
2. Niccolo Machiavelli, Discourses on Livy (OUP Oxford, 2008), 28
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