In the run up to the founding conference of Your Party, several groupings and campaigns have developed and emerged. At The World Transformed, seven of these groupings came together to present a minimum unity declaration. At Prometheus we have interviewed these groups to provide a guide for people to understand them and their political differences more.
These groups are The Democratic Bloc, Democratic Socialists, Eco-Socialist Horizon, Greater Manchester Left Caucus, Organising for Popular Power, Trans Liberation Group and People’s Front.
In this interview, we talk to Barney from the Democratic Socialists. You can read their full proposals here. This interview was conducted on the 18th October.
HH – So could you briefly summarise what the democratic socialists argue for?
B – We want a party republic. We have a maximalist view of democracy for a new socialist party. We’re concerned that the British left keeps going in circles, and we are dealing with perpetual stop gaps, mainly concerned with electoralism. We want to ensure that we have the foundations that last more than an electoral term, that can survive a generation and more, because this party needs to work and be a sustainable force, and we are committed to robust democratic mechanisms within that. We’ve been working for what is necessary to ensure that can exist in perpetuity,
HH – how did you come together?
B – Democratic Socialists formed in mid-August. It was a collection of people who had been reading agitation for robust structures in the new party, and decided to get together and go out and reach as many local, engaged activists as possible with the intention of getting a coherent membership before the founding of Your Party.
Parallel to that another group, which was at the time, called For a Party Republic, which I was involved in, formed, primarily concerned about constitutional matters.
Then at the very beginning of September, we had mutual members of the two and we realised that we were two hands of the same body as it were, so we merged. The result of that has been a group that is continuously reaching out to organise and network local organisers, and parallel and at the same time getting people together to discuss in detail how we want the shape of things to be.
HH – Could you briefly summarise what the Democratic Socialists are arguing members should do around the regional assemblies?
B – This is a fraught question, because we were told some time back that there would be regional assemblies and that these would be an essential step before the conference to discuss constitutional documents. These constitutional documents have only just landed, and they are pretty thin on the ground. We are also being told that there are no categorical mechanisms on how the assemblies should influence these documents. We are encouraging everybody who can to get to these assemblies and try to advocate for more robust documentation and to make points of intervention for essential democratic mechanisms.
Because there has been no formal organisation of proto branches in their relation to these assemblies, the membership as such has not had the mechanisms to organise and engage. We’re trying to draw together as many people as possible to say, you know, who are you with locally? Do you have comrades of various tendencies that you can talk to in the meantime and engage together and in strength and essentially ask for a better constitution?
HH – We’re about five weeks out from the founding conference now. How would you summarise your approach to that?
B –Yes, it is five weeks, isn’t it? Not six anymore. Thanks for reminding me. We don’t think that this is an adequate amount of time for members to be scrutinising a founding constitution. The constitution drafts that have dropped as such reflect this urgency in as much as they are very non-specific. They are phrased more like a survey than anything else. We absolutely need to ensure that there is another conference soon where these things are deliberated on, the conference needs to be sovereign. This needs to be the place where we decide what our party looks like because there is such little time for us to organise and scrutinise as a coherent membership, we need to have another one as soon as possible, and that needs to be one where we have had the time to engage with each other and figure out our differences and agitate for a more robustly democratic constitution.
HH – At TWT you put forward sort of 10 demands in your leaflet. One of them is, this idea, and you sort of touched on it already, about a supreme conference. What does that mean?
B – This means that the conference determines elected officials, and it determines the direction of the party. A better way to phrase this might be to say what a non-sovereign conference would look like, which is what we’re at risk of getting. If we say that there are reserved official positions for MPs and councillors, then that invalidates the notion of a supreme conference. We demand that all official positions be elected and that this happens at national conferences.
Subsidiary to that we demand that branches have their own sovereignty. That might seem like a contradiction, but branches need to have autonomy. They determine how things work locally. The national conference is where we hammer out the party lines and points of unity, but a local branch determines how it acts. It elects its own officials, it has no impositions on that from above. But for all that is not locally concerned, the conference has the final say.
HH – Sort of related to that you have this proposal around branches being given adequate funding, right? I’m presuming that also means access to data?
B – We want 50% of funds proportionally to be given to local branches to do as they see fit with. And data access cannot be retained. This must be something that the party branches as such, have access to and are not beholden to higher ups to disseminate their information, to contact their own members. That’s something that effectively leads to arbitrary power in the agency and coherence of local branches.
HH – You also have this proposal around the protection of factions and minority positions. Obviously factions on the British left are not necessarily seen in the best light. Why have this codified protection of factions and groupings?
B – Factions have a bad name because they are not open. Effectively, everybody has different opinions. People have different attitudes and different understandings of the world, and here along those lines, that’s just the way the world works. If these things are held to be illegitimate reasons to group together, then they operate in the shadows. People who happen to be in positions of power, who agree with certain things, will do favours to them. You get a system of patronage. Let me phrase that better. You end up in this situation where there are power groupings in various official institutions using social capital and other mechanisms to seek its expression through those positions. That’s why we end up with situations where you get acrimony and zero sum fighting between institutions that happen to represent, with varying degrees of power, the effective outlet of certain ideas.
What we’re saying is that factions must be open and are a fact of life, and they will continue to exist, and do not need that patronage. Members should be free to associate with any given tendency, and that these tendencies should be able to organise according to their own concerns.
The way factions have tended to operate historically in this country is that there is this zero-sum thing – you’re a member of one or the other or none. These people are at loggerheads because they are vying for institutional power which is codified in the wrong ways. The way we see it is that the members should be free to associate with any of these factions and they should develop their contradictions in such a way which favours unity by resolving our contradictions openly and in an engaged format. That’s not mutually exclusive. We strengthen the working class and the external contradictions are easier for us to fight as a result.
HH – One of the other things you propose, as well as the factions aspect, is actually probably more understandable to people on the British left, which is around mandatory reselection and a much tighter sort of control of MPs from the membership. This has been a pretty big fight right since all the way going back to the experiences of Corbynism, right?
B – The membership needs to have total control over its representatives in the state and without and, there should be no privileges within the party. Everybody in an official position, is there to do their job, no more, no less. So, yes we demand mandatory reselections, we have no consecutive terms beyond two consecutive terms and again conference is sovereign on this.
We’re not talking exclusively about MPs and councillors. We’re talking about positions within the party. So there is a continuous and open mechanism for membership to be sovereign over all roles.
HH – Are there any other proposals that you want to highlight from the Democratic Socialists?
B – You picked up some of the key ones. We’ve also got a full constitution which is much more robust and detailed than what Your Party is currently proposing.
HH – How do you understand the difference between yourself and the other democracy-focused grouping The Democratic Bloc? What’s the difference between them and you as you understand it?
B – Oh, I think we have not had the opportunity or the time to to interrogate our differences. When Democratic Socialists tried to get these factions together, it was on the basis of points of commonality. On many of these The Democratic Bloc are broadly in alignment with us – as the statement shows.
In as much as there are differences, these are things that we will be looking to explore post launch and that ties into our commitment to open factions. We believe that there are differences there, as there are with the other factions, and that these things need to be properly interrogated, not through systems of patronage, but through open debate. That’s something that we are looking forward to exploring.
At the present moment, I don’t think there is any significant point of difference.
HH – It seems we’ve reached this quite intense five week window where it’s like, listen, we’ve got to win these things. I was quite impressed by the move towards some like basic unity at TWT, right? Like that felt. You know, people understood the stakes, right?
B – Initially the cross-caucus conversation had this momentary confusion. Should we all present our extremely explicit demands, see whether we can mutually ratify them? Then we realised, no, that’s not going to work. But we realise that actually, there is far more in common than that which divides us, and that is the basis that we are intervening around this party conference on. We are all still in touch, and we are networking our members, because this is how open factionalism should work, and has worked for us in this short time. From that we go, okay, yeah, we have differences. These are things that we need to be continuously talking about to figure out how we resolve them and then out of what would traditionally be seen as oppositional forces, we end up with just a groundswell of mutual strength that enables us to insist upon the things we do have in common against the powers that be.
