The announcement of a new party led by Jeremy Corbyn and Zarah Sultana has been met with widespread enthusiasm. That the initial shine was knocked off by factional intrigues being leaked to the hostile press underlined the political stupidity of conducting these negotiations behind closed doors and hiding political differences. Nevertheless tens of thousands signed up on Zarah Sultana’s website to support the new party and with the full announcement on 24th July over 750,000 people have signed up on the Your Party website. If all those indicating their support sign up as full members then the new party will be the largest political party in Britain. Dwarfing all previous attempts to forge a new left party in Britain. Communists must get involved.
The appetite for the new party is just one indication of the growing desire among millions of workers and youth who want to fight for a better life and a better world. Hundreds of thousands, if not millions have taken part in demonstrations against the genocide in Palestine. Almost everyone hates Keir Starmer and the Labour Party, they oppose attacks on pensioners, the disabled and the sick. Further discontent over falling living standards will break out as the economy stagnates and the world is buffeted by multiple crises. The necessity of a working class political alternative is clear and the growing anger can be transformed into a serious political bloc that will give the establishment parties and their cronies many sleepless nights. Some early polls suggest a new party led by Corbyn and Sultana would get anywhere between ten and eighteen percent of votes at the next election.
There have been plenty of reports on the factional intrigue and power struggles behind the scenes and they are important because the movement and the working class deserve to know what is being decided behind closed doors. Likewise, discussions and demands1 on future party structures are essential and those fighting for party democracy and control over elected representatives and officers must be supported. We have seen in the United States with the Democratic Socialists of America how elected representatives can go rogue if not truly accountable to the democratic will of members. However, the preponderance over structures and who gets to sit at the top table turns the question of building a party upside down. The need for an independent working class party is clear but what form that party takes is a question of politics which makes the decisive question at present: what is the programme?
There will be many ideas on what a party programme should contain, some good, some awful no doubt. The new party must learn the lessons of the past, must break with the idea that all we can aspire to is a few more crumbs. For example, Corbyn’s 2017 For the Many manifesto contained some reforms that would have given some respite to those struggling to get from one day to the next. Yet it left the root of the social ills it sought to address untouched, moreover it left the British state intact and did not, in fact could not, present a world beyond the capitalist present. Likewise we have seen in Britain with Respect and later Left Unity a tendency to scotch any radical demands to what is acceptable to the trade union bureaucrats, to leaders like George Galloway, to petty bourgeois businessmen, unelected religious and community leaders and those in the social movements. Now it is not that those groups and individuals shouldn’t be heard but in any new party they would likely constitute a minority, as they did in both Respect and Left Unity. Therefore the socialist majority should openly and democratically set out a programme for a world beyond capitalism. That means the revolutionary left must break with methods of diplomacy and self-censorship and simply tell the truth about capitalism, about the British state and its wars and give an honest answer when asked for a solution: working class power through a revolution that would herald the transformation of our society from capitalism towards communism.
What follows are four things we as communists must hold firm to in the new party. On working class power, political independence, the limits of reformism and the necessity of linking today’s struggles to revolution and the realisation of communism.
#1 We Are The Majority
Alison Lewis as Zanias in her latest offering sings that it is “too easy to forget there’s more of us than them”. An echo of Percy Shelley’s Masque of Anarchy that ends with “ye are many – they are few” and the truth Karl Marx and Friederich Engels also laid out in the Communist Manifesto by explaining that the working class is the “immense majority” and that “the bourgeoisie therefore produces, above all, are its own grave-diggers”. Today as Lewis reminds us the working class has never been bigger, we are the majority. Communists do not consider only those in direct employment, let alone only those who work with their hands as being the working class. Nor is the working class defined by a cultural identity or dictated by going to university or not. All those who have no way to live except work, whether that’s deferred wages through workers pensions, support from family or social security or most commonly working for a wage. Engels in a footnote to the 1888 edition of the Communist Manifesto explains that the working class is a “the class of modern wage labourers who, having no means of production of their own, are reduced to selling their labour power in order to live”. In comparison the capitalist class is a minority but exercises power over all of our lives, they own the means of production, pay wages and direct production in order to produce profit. Whilst they are not the only classes or strata in society the working class and the capitalists are the primary contending classes in the world today.
Therefore the conundrum of the present is how can a majority that is exploited, degraded and unfree gain its freedom and assert and fulfil its needs and wants? Power, only by taking power out of the hands of the capitalists, the landlords and their lackeys and placing it in the hands of the working class majority can we transform society. Therefore any programme that wants to solve the crises that torment humanity must boldly make the case for the seizure of power by the working class.
#2 We Can Do It Ourselves
The interests of the majority, the working class, are not the same as those who hold the levers of power here in Britain or across the world. For example, we all know that taking money from pensioners during winter, in a country where housing is poorly built and maintained whilst allowing the energy companies to jack up prices leads to pensioners becoming more ill, more isolated and depressed and ultimately at a higher risk of dying prematurely. Last year the cancer charity Marie Curie found that 128,000 people were dying in fuel poverty a year. Of that, 110,000 were pensioners. Robbing pensioners of an allowance for heating and allowing the energy companies to then extort them is undeniably against the interests of the majority but the faceless machine of the City of London, the cabals of oil executives and the capitalist class gets to extract massive profits whilst the balance sheet for the British government can be looked upon a bit more favourably by the big international finance houses.
We have had many lessons from attempts to reconcile the interests of the working class majority and the interests of capitalism. Ten years ago the Greek working class fought a bitter struggle to stop the European Union and the IMF from pushing millions into poverty, from stripping the Greek state of nationalised assets and from riding roughshod over their democratic wishes. Syriza, a broad left party rose to take office in these circumstances, spurred on by the struggles on the street and in workplaces, yet it was a party that when it came to the crunch on the questions of class independence, on austerity and democracy it was defeated and capitulated. A government headed by Jeremy Corbyn would have, maybe still will, face similar dilemmas because if we threaten the interests of the capitalist class they will ruthlessly fight back. To help avoid repeating Syriza’s defeat the new party must be independent from capitalists, landlords, the British state and their parties.
We would need to build a party that is involved in all areas of life, we would need our own press, our own sports clubs and associations, our own cooperatives and our party would need to be an example of real democracy with mass participation in party life. Flowing from this we would need to reject alliances with parties that represent other class interests, be they openly antagonistic like the Conservatives, Reform and the Scottish nationalists or where there is on occassion the appearance of commonality with Labour and the Greens. For example the Green Party is committed to NATO which is currently involved in throwing hundreds, sometimes thousands, of Ukrainian workers to die and to kill hundreds of Russian workers in turn every week. Is that in the interests of the working class majority here in Britain where fuel and food prices have jumped whilst services cut to fund growing militarism? No. Is it in the interests of the working class majority in Ukraine, Russia and across the world having a war that could spiral towards a nuclear confrontation? No. It is being fought in the interests of the ruling classes in Russia, the West and Ukraine, for imperialism, for the control of resources and political domination. We should be wary of charming grifters who speak with a radical tongue to further their careers, Momentum in Britain, the DSA in the United States and Podemos in the Spanish state are all organisations who have suffered by being used by careerists. Kwame Ture once remarked that what “a liberal really wants is to bring about change that will not in any way endanger his position.” Much the same can be said for Green, Labour and trade union tops and their bag carriers who seek the support of the movement. Whilst individual Greens may have something useful to say every now and again, the new party needs to stand apart from them and express the interests, struggles and political life of the working class.
#3 We Fight Together, We Fight To Win
Every step Jeremy Corbyn and the new party takes to challenge the power of the capitalists, their wars and their destruction of the planet communists must support. Every concession to the capitalists and warmongers, communists must criticise openly and comradely. The workers movement is and always has been a hotbed of ideas, different tendencies and competing programmes. Right now the communists are in a minority in both the movement and society at large. Our task is to win through deed and argument a majority therefore we fight together with other socialists, peace campaigners, trade unionists and a cacophony of other tendencies to win gains or stave off reaction. However, we must not hide or liquidate communist politics in order to appease or to opportunistically gain a seat at the top table. No, we repeat what Marx and Engels wrote in the Communist Manifesto:
“The Communists disdain to conceal their views and aims. They openly declare that their ends can be attained only by the forcible overthrow of all existing social conditions”
We do this not out of blind faith in what was written 176 years ago but because it still makes sense when agitating among and fighting alongside others who are not communists. On a basic level nobody likes or is convinced when being deceived or misled, it is perfectly reasonable to defend small reformist steps and little wins so long as we’re clear that we should be going further. Moreover we are in a profound period of crises, the crumbs that were won in Europe after 1945 can’t be repeated today. The capitalists can see their system is in crisis so they have unleashed austerity, wars, authoritarian crack downs, attempted to push the crisis from the capitalist centre to the global south and push the cost of their crises on to workers and the poor at home and abroad. Moreover the reforms that were won during the post-war period have slowly been reversed, take for example the fortune being made from the sick and the infirm in Britain today, over £70 billion since 2013. Reforms are temporary, Tony Benn used to say “every generation must fight the same battles again and again” and that “there’s no final victory and there’s no final defeat.” A miserable outlook that underpins all reformism that is thankfully completely untrue. The history of humanity is one of revolutions and struggles, leaps forwards and victories of one class to the ruin of others. The communist outlook is different to the reformists, the ideas developed by Marx and enriched by our movement explain how we arrived at the capitalist present and how we can actually win a final victory against capitalism. One Vladimir Ilyich Lenin put it much better than me when he wrote in 1913 the following:
“The supporters of reforms and improvements will always be fooled by the defenders of the old order until they realize that every old institution, however barbarous and rotten it may appear to be, is maintained by the forces of some ruling classes. And there is only one way of smashing the resistance of these classes, and that is to find, in the very society which surrounds us, and to enlighten and organize for the struggle, the forces which can — and, owing to their social position, must — constitute a power capable of sweeping away the old and creating the new.”
#4 We Want It All
The big task before communists in the new party will be to fight for a revolutionary outlook, to furnish the party with a political programme that seeks the overthrow of capitalism and its replacement with communism. Winning the argument for a revolutionary programme will require audacity and patience, understanding that we may not win immediately. However, so long as the masses see the new party as a vehicle for struggle, that there is space for communists to agitate freely and crucially the party does not take unprincipled steps with regards to the war, militarism, the British state, the bosses and so on communists should play a full and active part in the life of the new party.
In the statement launching the new party, Corbyn and Sultana write that “the system is rigged” and that fixing the problems in our society requires the “mass redistribution of wealth and power”. They go on to write:
“They are caused by an economic system that protects the interests of corporations and billionaires. It is ordinary people who create the wealth – and it is ordinary people who have the power to put it back where it belongs.”
Our response to that has to be yes but let’s go further and let’s name names. The economic system that is the source of the crises and ill in our world is called capitalism. Nobody will lose any sleep over taxing the rich a bit more apart from the capitalists, landlords and their lackeys but that will not change the balance of forces and who holds the power in society. Only by ending the capitalist system can real permanent change be made. The programme of the new party that the majority in society, the working class, is a social and democratic force that can transform the world for the betterment of all. A revolutionary programme should be clear that we want to expropriate the exploiters, take the banks, the big industries, the railways, land and construction companies out of private hands and place them firmly in the hands of the community. Parallel to this we must have no illusions in the British state and its parliamentary system. The standing army, the secret police, the monarchy, state secrets, the House of Lords and the rest must go and be replaced by genuinely democratic institutions controlled from the get go by the working class. Further, any advance in Britain is contingent on the advance of the world revolution, the new party must be programmatically committed to internationalism, that means halting the barbaric wars in Ukraine and Sudan whilst demanding an end to the slaughter of the Palestinian people, stopping arms, intelligence and political cover for Netanyahu and his government of butchers in Tel Aviv is an immediate task.
What we want to express in a revolutionary programme for the new party can be summed up by paraphrasing Freddie Mercury that “We want it all, and We want it now”. We do not want reformist crumbs, we want the entire bakery. Our programme should make communism the final goal. A society that will do away with classes, private ownership and institute a world where the instruments of production are collectively owned and democratically directed to meet the needs and wants of all. A society that uproots the causes of exploitation and domination, that means a society where women are truly free, where racism has been consigned to history books, a society where humans live in balance and as stewards of our planet and a society where every backwards prejudice has been overcome.
- See for example the email circular sent by the Network of Independent Socialists which outlines three democratic principles or the position of the Socialist Party of England and Wales for a federal structure. ↩︎
