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 Tilly from Eco-Socialist Horizon. You can read their submission to The World Transformed assemblies here and join them here. This interview was conducted on the 15th of October.
HH – Could you briefly summarise what Eco-Socialist Horizon argues for?
T – We are arguing that the climate crisis should be seen as the primary lens through which a new left wing party makes political and strategic decisions. This is because the climate crisis is an urgent and existential threat to the basic conditions of social life and therefore the long-term possibility of a socialist future.
In our proposal for TWT we presented a minimum and maximum programme on the basis of that analysis. There is a need for really urgent climate action and we need a minimum programme to address some of the temporal elements of the climate crisis. There are a bunch of climate tipping points which means that there may be a point after which it will be really difficult to return to a stable climate. That basically means that we need to take mitigation and adaptation action really urgently. But we also present a maximum programme that is orienting us towards a much longer eco-socialist horizon. This reflects our understanding that the climate and ecological crises have been produced by capitalism, and so the only way of solving them or addressing them is through an end to capitalism and a transition to an eco-socialist society. That is unlikely to happen on the timeline necessary to deal with some of these tipping points. So our platform is trying to bridge this gap, draw these two things together and also really emphasise the importance of the climate crisis in the political programme of the New Left Party.
HH – How did you come together as a group?
T – We were all members of Labour for a Green New Deal, which was an organisation that launched in 2019 and was oriented towards organising for a Green New Deal in the Labour party manifesto. About a year ago, we basically drew that campaign to an end. Though, what’s emerged out of it is another project called the Worker-Climate Project, which is doing really great work. But I guess the four of us all share this analysis that the time for a Green New Deal is basically over. The Green New Deal represented a kind of compromise with capital but what we need now, both in terms of the urgency with which things need to happen, and I guess a bit of an evolution of our political understanding, is a much more overt confrontation with capital. And so that means that a broad Green New Deal style politics is no longer appropriate. So we’ve taken this shared analysis and then worked together over the last year to try and figure out what do we actually do with that? That corresponded really nicely with, the launch of the new party, and we saw that as a really important strategic opportunity and place where this analysis could go.
HH – In the coming weeks, there’s going to be these regional assemblies, and then in November, there’s going to be the founding conference. How would you describe the approach of Eco-Socialist Horizon to that?
T – There is a lot of uncertainty about what any of these things are going to look like, which obviously is a big failure from the leadership, and it makes it quite difficult to plan exactly how we’re going to intervene. At TWT, we were involved in this joint statement of unity from all of the factions that really focused on the importance of democratic foundational principles. We feel that those should be the priority over the next six week period leading up to the founding conference, because, at a minimum, we’re going to need that level of democracy to then engage in a struggle within the party to make climate the important issue that we think it is. We’re going to be working closely with the network of other factions, to think about how we can engage with those sortitioned for the national founding conference. We might go along to the founding conference ourselves, just to be there to support sortitioned delegates. I think the focus is really uniting behind these demands focused on democracy, on conditions for local branches, and some of these broad principles around the political programme like anti-capitalism, anti-imperialism, etc. These are all core parts of our climate plan and analysis anyway.
HH – Then when we know what the basic structures might look like you’re trying to cohere eco-socialists around some of the demands that you’re putting forward, particularly around the programme of the party, right?
T –Yeah exactly. We have a plan to continue to exist as a faction beyond the founding conference, and we have started thinking through what the structure of our organisation might be.. We’ve been particularly inspired by the way that factions operate within the DSA – in particular their Marxist Unity Group. We want to bring together different groups of people, who are Your Party members who are interested in climate and have this eco socialist analysis to make interventions within the party. We want to do a bunch of political education and development within the faction, to think about how we can organise nationally but also within local party branches. So we’ve got the beginnings of a plan for that, but we’re hoping to bring some more people into the organisation to flesh all of that out.
HH – In your TWT submission, you argue for combining electoral interventions with building popular power. And I think, you know, coming from the climate movement myself, I totally understand why you’re trying to walk on that line. Because I think sometimes we end up doing one of either. But what do you see as the key ways you’d want people to be doing that? What do you see as some of the priorities there?
T – Yeah, that’s a really good question. One of the things that we put in our proposal was the necessity of repealing anti-trade union and anti-protest laws. We see that as being a really, really, key part, allowing us to liberate the popular forces in the struggle for the minimum programme. But I think what it really reflects is an understanding that part of the reason it has been so difficult for the climate movement to succeed and grow in the last, say, five years, is because they face really intense levels of political repression and really heavy duty policing. I think that has left us without an obvious answer to the question of what tactics should climate activists and organisers be using to secure demands related to climate.
We think that there’s a lot of experimentation that is probably necessary that will involve thinking about how do we work through, say, electoral methods? But also how can we also think about, direct action approaches or mass mobilisations, etc? I think we need to throw everything at the wall and see what sticks. The thing that the party allows us to do is to do that in a way that is quite planned, coordinated and strategic.
So, for example, I know that Organising for Popular Power, one of the other factions, has got all of these proposals for how branches can be used, and the role that branches in Your Party should play as a kind of hub for strengthening community organisation and social movement organisation. So it feels like there’s a lot of alignment between that proposal and our commitment to doing both the electoral organising, but also power building more broadly.
HH – This proposal you brought to TWT, you say it has a minimum-maximum structure to it. Could you explain a bit more about that, especially because people might not be used to that kind of structure and what you mean by that?
T – The purpose of the minimum-maximum structure is to deal with this contradiction within climate: There is a need for urgent action in the immediate term, but a much longer term struggle is also needed to address capitalism’s dual exploitation of nature and labour which is what has created the climate crisis in the first place. In the immediate term we know the climate is already changing, we’ve already had one year where average global temperatures were one and a half degrees above pre industrial level, we’re already seeing extreme weather around the world, and we have to acknowledge the existence of tipping points within the climate system that could make things much worse. That’s the message that came out of a lot of the climate movement in the last like five or so years – even longer when you think about Extinction Rebellion’s messaging around ‘the time to act’. So we think there is this important, urgent argument to be made, but we also need the maximum programme to complete or cohere the analysis that it is not going to be possible to take the climate action that is actually necessary to totally mitigate and adapt to climate change under capitalism.
This is why our maximum programme is focused on this eco-socialist horizon. We hope that, in securing these minimum demands and by struggling and fighting for them, we will build up a broader eco-socialist mass consciousness. Building a mass Socialist Party, for example, building our power so that we like lay the foundations for a much broader transformation of socio-ecological relations. So it’s basically trying to say we can’t ignore what happens in the next five years, but also we can’t only focus on the next five years, because that totally misunderstands the causes of the climate crisis itself.
HH – There’s quite a few different elements of the proposals, both in the minimum and maximum parts. Are there any of those that you see as presenting the greatest opportunity or as the most pressing for a competent Your Party to champion?
T – There are two key things. The first one is nationalisation of the entire energy system, crucially, without compensation, in order to facilitate the rapid dismantling of the fossil fuel industry. And I think not only does that speak, obviously, very directly to the need to confront capital and the need to decarbonize very rapidly, I think it also presents some opportunities for building a kind of anti-imperialist politics. We had some really good conversations and feedback from comrades in Energy Embargo for Palestine, and they wrote their submission about nationalising BP, in particular, without compensation, and the role that that could play in facilitating energy embargoes on the genocidal state of Israel. We think that’s a really interesting piece of the analysis and something that we want to explore further. Nationalisation, almost counter intuitively, feels like it might enable some of those kinds of anti-imperialist politics.
And then the second thing I’ll just touch on, because I think it’s an example of us focusing on mitigation, but also adaptation elements of the minimum programme, is price controls on food, energy, water and other affected commodities. We see this as an adaptation measure to deal with the potential effects of climate on, for example, food prices and supply chains. But it is also something that meets very material needs right now and so in terms of building mass support for Your Party, it feels really important.
HH – I guess, one of the things that has come up a lot because of the shenanigans at the top and because of how things have been going following the election in Polanski, is this turn to the Greens. That does raise a quite legit question to people trying to cohere eco-socialists and fight for eco-socialist politics around Your Party, which is why still give Your Party a go? How do you see that relationship with the Greens developing?
T – One of the key features of our organising is doing conjunctural analysis to guide our strategy. This means thinking about what are the current political, social, economic, environmental conditions, and asking how they have changed? What does that tell us about where it’s strategic to make interventions? So I think based on that analysis, and based on our understanding of the potential in terms of membership base and the type of politics that might be possible, we have focused on Your Party. I think it has basically been a shit show so far and so again, because of our commitment to, carrying out conjunctural analysis, rather than being, totally wedded to one particular party vehicle I think we would be very willing to pivot to another party or organisation that we think has the greatest potential to be a successful socialist party in Britain.
I think we are giving ourselves six months unless something truly terrible happens in the intervening period. A kind of six month window in which to really see what happens once the new party is founded, and then to take stock again.
What I would say is that we think that the existence of a party, a socialist party, is really, really important, particularly for organising around climate, because we think we need to have a vehicle for orienting towards the state. And we think a party is the ideal form for bridging this gap between the minimum and the maximum, between the immediate term and the longer term. But, yeah, we were going to be guided by our analysis in terms of where we focus our attention, rather than being super wedded to either Your Party or the Greens in the long term.
HH – Okay, is there anything else about your proposal you’d like to highlight?
T – Just the final part of our proposal, which is that we want this to be a unifying position on climate. I think we’ve seen some amazing work on unifying the position of the factions over the weekend at TWT. But I guess that’s within TWT and Your Party members represent a much, much broader coalition – one that is, I suspect, going to be filled with pre-existing divisions that exist on the left. I guess we would hope that having this focus on climate is something that a whole range of different tendencies and groups could agree on and sign up to. So, yeah, I think that’s also an important part of what we’re trying to achieve.
