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 Sadhbh from the People’s Front. You can read their submission to The World Transformed assemblies here. This interview was conducted on the 16th of October.
HH – Could you briefly summarise what the People’s Front argues for?
S – So we argue that we need to build a new kind of political party that is distinct from existing political parties, but also from existing left organisations in terms of practice and in terms of its culture.
So far, in our proposal, we’ve outlined three areas of practice that we think should be central to the new party; social investigation and class analysis (SICA), meeting people’s material needs and leadership development. We understand these practices as not encompassing everything the party would do, but we also understand them as fitting together into a single revolutionary practice that we think, if it’s taken up broadly by our movement, would allow for the construction of the kind of working-class organisation and power actually adequate to meeting the demands of our time.
So corresponding to these, to this shift in practice, which we really want to get into with other comrades, because we think that it’s a significant shift we’re talking about – we think it’s important to also have a self critical and deliberative culture where we work out what we’re really saying with each other and struggle through our differences. So corresponding to the shift in practice, we also propose what we think is a major shift in political culture on the British left and in the party.
Specifically, we argue that we need to begin from areas of fundamental unity in opposition to the interests of the ruling class, to develop a practical trust between comrades who are sharing in those points of unity to develop a shared and serious commitment to long term struggle towards our collective liberation, and crucially, a willingness from everyone involved in that trust and commitment to transform ourselves politically and personally in ways that we cannot always predict in advance in the process of struggle.
So we think that these two things, the culture and this kind of revolutionary practice that we’ve tried to outline, will provide a sufficiently robust method through which we can build working-class power and unity.
HH – How did you come together?
S – So we all met through organising for Palestine. All of us have been involved for more than just the last two years, but intensely involved over the last two years, although in some cases much, much longer, in building membership organisations, attempting to build and accumulate the kind of experience and power that we think is needed in order to meaningfully strengthen and advance the Palestinian struggle from Britain. So all of the proposals that we’re making in terms of practice and culture are very directly rooted in those experiences which are themselves rooted in a wider study, both at an organisational level, in some cases, but also at the level of, just our group of comrades, of longer revolutionary Marxist struggles in different parts of the world.
This is another thing we want to bring, a serious commitment to a study of revolutionary history and the ideas, practices, concepts that have been forged in those struggles beyond the reference points that have been standard on the British left.
HH – Part of the reason things came together at TWT is this very truncated five week window that we now have with the regional assemblies and founding conference. How would you summarise your approach to the regional assemblies and founding conference?
S – Yeah, we support the efforts of everyone else who’s pushing for maximum membership democracy, and we will, 100% do the same thing. We’ll use these as much as we can to advocate for the kinds of practice and culture that we’ve outlined so far.
On this question we would like to add that we’re really committed to the medium to long term struggle here, and we think that the shifts we’re arguing for are necessary for building any viable working-class vehicle. We want to avoid rushing towards specific political positions that we have not taken the time to adequately investigate or study just for the sake of the conference. We understand the urgency that people are feeling around conference in the assemblies, but we also slightly would push back against, or even reject, in a way, this imposed timeframe from the process that’s out of our collective hands, as it’s been imposed so far. We feel very confident that the collective forces that were apparent at TWT and are apparent elsewhere as well, want to build a truly effective vehicle for working-class politics in Britain. We’re confident that those forces will be able to do so. We think that the methods that we’re putting forward are really key to that, and we think that we’ll be able to find a path forward, no matter what goes down over the next two months.
HH – I guess that brings us neatly to the practices of the party that you propose in your TWT submission. You argue that you want every level of the party to be engaged in SICA work? Social investigation and class analysis – could you explain it?
S – SICA, social investigation and class analysis, this is something that has been handed down, honed and practised by communist parties all over the world. So, in simple terms, SICA is an ongoing practice. It should be diffused throughout party activity. Social investigation basically just means, as Peter Mertens said, listening to people, right? We need to be embedded amongst the people that we’re trying to organise. So a truly revolutionary party engaged in this kind of practice, should consciously seek to embed itself in everyday life.
Why? Well, in order to investigate thoroughly, we must try to understand the concrete experiences and struggles that are making up the lives of people in all of the complexity and messiness that that entails, right? We cannot shy away from that. That’s the investigation part, this listening, engaging and amassing. This is being done by party members all across many different spaces and communities. And we’re bringing all that experience together through concrete practices like reporting. Feeding information into units in the party that are then compiling all of that into a rich picture of the society we’re in as it currently really exists.
So that’s the investigation part. And then the second part of it, the class analysis, is essentially now we have all this information, what we need to do now is understand it. There’s a lot of revolutionary thinking and theory that we can draw from, and also our own experience of how to concretely do these things. But for the sake of brevity, what we’re going to do then is we’re going to have understanding. Who are the different groups of people? Who are the different classes? How do they relate? What are their tensions between each other? What are the contradictions between them? What are the struggles that people in these different classes are engaging in? Who’s oppressing who? Who’s exploiting who? Who owns what? Why is all of this happening? What are the dynamics? What are the forces at play? The social forces, right?
The idea is that a certain kind of investigation and analysis allows us to then build programmes of work that correspond to the realities that people are living, and aim to resolve some of the difficulties facing people, or to unite people collectively towards collective ends. So looking for strategic opportunities, and also, importantly, trying to find ways to resolve tensions that might exist between people that are ultimately in the benefit of the ruling classes. That has to be done at the concrete level. It can’t be done in the abstract from above, using political principles that we think are correct – it has to be done in praxis.
HH – So that leads into the second part. From that you then build programmes of work around meeting people’s material needs?
S – It sounds like a hackneyed sort of idea. But when you start seeing it, when the rubber meets the road and it starts to become real, you see the power of it. Which is theory and practice, right? SICA is about developing what Lenin called a concrete analysis of the concrete situation. That is what allows you to engage in practice effectively. This can be at any scale. This could be at the most local scale. Peter Mertens gave an example of a particular area in a particular city that doesn’t have a bus stop near enough to it. Maybe that’s something which unifies a lot of people in the area to struggle around. So it could be that scale, or it could be a much wider national or even international scale, depending on where you’re at. But you test it in practice, test your analysis in practice and a major part of that practice is meeting people’s material needs.
Through doing that work, first of all, you bring people together around collective struggles which is a very important organisational process, which builds actual class unity. You also actually alleviate some of the difficulties that people are facing. And through alleviating difficulties, you free up space for more people in the working classes to organise and to get involved in organising. You also build trust. You are practicing as a party. You are in fact doing what people need you to do. And so in that sense, you are being a party of the people. You are embedding yourself in working-class life.
There’s a dialectic, a kind of a feedback process between the strengthening of the party in that way, and the strengthening of people’s condition and people’s ability to struggle. And the idea is that those two things will advance together, both getting stronger as time goes on, through these kinds of practices of meeting people’s material needs and ongoing investigation and analysis.
HH – That brings us to the final one, which is you talk about leadership from the base and for the base. Could you explain a bit more about that?
S – Cadreisation has to be a central aspect of any serious attempt to build class power. We cannot take the development of leaders as just a kind of a casual or automatic occurrence, which is to some extent, how it tends to happen or how people assume it happens. Now people get politicised for whatever reason – maybe through interaction with some groups, or through university, or through whatever struggles they happen to come across, or through their own self activity. Basically, we think one of the things that a party should do is have a cadre programme, and it should systematically educate party members.
Ghassan Kanafani talks about the organisation as the tool that mediates the dialectic between theory and practice. So to boil that down, the organisation or the party is a site for accumulation of skills, knowledge, experience and know-how – how to organise, how to analyse what the conditions actually are, how to struggle successfully, including some of the cultural things, like, for example, self criticism. We think this is a big thing that’s lacking across the left, right now. So being able to look critically at why our movements have not been more successful. Why have they not been able to build on their past activity more substantially and struggle? Engaging in principled disagreement, finding our points of unity, but then struggling through our differences. All of these practices are things that should be taught to anyone who is committed to struggle to enable them to be the best organiser that they can be, essentially, and that’s what cadreisation is about.
Cadreising is about having a systematic approach to giving anybody who wants to struggle for their class every tool that we know and have accumulated through experience. So we have to systematise lessons, build them into a programme, learn from other struggles, especially the Palestinian struggle, around those methods that I talked about. Not just hard skills, like research skills, campaign building, but also cultural skills, right? How to struggle, how to be in unity with others, how to be able to open up these processes of self transformation.
We get stronger when we take ourselves and each other seriously, and we take our own learning and education seriously. And the cadreisation programme itself has to be a dynamic and living entity. Because it will grow and develop as the struggle itself develops, as we understand the conditions better, as we develop more working-class leadership who will have a more concrete understanding of the conditions of their people. That programme, the education programme itself, also has to be a growing thing
HH – You’ve mentioned a bit having met in the Palestine movement, you also take a lot, obviously from anti-imperialist movements. How do you see the politics of the People’s Front, relating to the wider anti-imperialist movement in Britain? And why do you see that as an important political basis for this work?
S – I think one of the key things about the way we think strategically, is that, first of all, we are non-sectarian, and the methods that we’re talking about are about finding points of unity – finding lower lower unity and struggling towards higher unity, in practice.
One thing we are united around is that we think that the entire socialist struggle must understand and recognise that anti-imperialism can not and should not be understood as a movement distinct from other movements, or as one particular ‘issue’ amongst many. For us, we have an analysis that says that imperialism is, in fact, central to the functioning of capitalism. This has been said by leaders from Marx, Lenin, James Connolly, Assata Shakur, Thomas Sankara, Ghassan Kanafani, Anuradha Ghandy, Abdulrahman Babu. These are some of the thinkers that I was thinking of when I was reflecting on this question. It’s been said again and again and again that the working classes in the imperial core will never be able to liberate themselves and achieve socialism without supporting the struggles of colonised and neo-colonised peoples for their own liberation. And that’s not a moral claim.
This is a matter of strategy and imperialism. Imperial domination is the key lever through which the most acute forms of class violence are practised by the ruling classes. It is through the use of heavy weaponry and violence, like we see today in Palestine, when people in Palestine resist Zionism. Like we see in Sudan, like we see in the Congo, and like we see in all of these situations of imperial domination.That is where their heaviest violence lands and that is the key. to their power, in fact.
So, James Connolly, said this very clearly in 1914 speaking about the British working class: he said that they need to liberate themselves from the idea (he called it a superstition) that there’s anything threatening to them about the struggles of colonised people. He said that the English working class ‘cannot hope to prosper permanently’ at the expense of others.
Basically what I’m trying to say is that for us, anti-imperialism is a strategy. It is. It has to be the strategy of socialists, because only by breaking the back of imperialism can we weaken the British ruling class enough to be able to then defeat them and achieve socialism. That’s our basic position. From that, we have to elaborate our politics in general, that’s a strategic orientation we think will affect a lot of how we do our politics.
To give one really concrete example, we need to look at those sites in the working class where there is already an organic anti-imperialist consciousness. A lot of migrants, for example, especially from certain parts of the world, have a very clear understanding of the effects of imperialism, and they have a very clear anti-imperialist consciousness for that reason. Now it’s not that simple. And again, the complexities of working class thought is something that we will encounter in investigation. We’ll have to deal with all of its actual complexity.
Anti-imperialism is, for us, a strategy, and the core of socialist strategy, because imperial domination is the key lever of power for our ruling classes. Therefore, to defeat them, we have to weaken them by supporting anti-imperialist struggles. These two struggles, the struggle for socialism in the imperial core and the struggles against imperial domination elsewhere, go hand in hand and reinforce each other. That strategy we think will diffuse throughout our work in ways that are kind of worked out in practice as appropriate in every context.
HH – A question did come to me, and it’s a slightly bigger question just listening to you. There is an intervention here about SICA, meeting people’s material needs and cadre building. And you clearly have some shared politics as a group that allow you to make these interventions. But do you have a shared analysis that you already see is coming through from the SICA that you’ve done as a collective and do you see particular needs that you think could be the priority already? Do you have provisional things that you would say on top of advocating for these methods?
S – In our organisations, there has been social investigation that has been done around the specific kind of areas of work of those specific organisations. We think that to build a formation on the scale, wielding a kind of working-class power, is a long term project. It’s going to involve a depth and breadth of social investigation that is beyond the current capacity of any of the organisations that we are involved in. I would say that as a preliminary thing. So, we think that party branches would be doing investigations in their locale, that they would still have to make decisions about how to conduct that investigation, where to investigate. First, we as a small group of people, have had preliminary discussions about the kinds of investigation we either have already done or are interested in. I mean, I organise with a group called Queers for Palestine, others organise with the Palestinian Youth Movement, with Energy Embargo for Palestine, and with Workers for a Free Palestine.
I think these are methodological questions that we would want to work out in a party with others. So some very initial ideas, but some of the criteria that you might use, that others have used in other contexts, would be looking at ownership and therefore on basic class relations. Maybe you’re looking at how much the degree to which people are engaged in production and what kinds of production. Or social reproduction – what meets needs that are meaningful, and that are necessary to live, and would remain necessary in socialism? As well as that, there’s also just questions of organic militancy. Different groups and classes have, for various reasons, more anti-imperialist, anti-capitalist consciousness. They might have different relations with other groups that would allow for the easy or rapid building of strong alliances. Some of these kinds of questions.
There are particular positions within right wing discourses that might be relevant, insofar as certain people are targets of state violence, or specific targets that are being utilised and attacked in order to cause division, or to stoke reactionary ideas. These are some of the kinds of criteria that you might use to think about where you want to investigate first. I think that’s as far as we’ve gotten. I would say, if I said anything more concrete then I’d kind of be in with my own personal speculation rather than anything collective.
