It is clear that Your Party’s founding conference will not produce the radical party which many of us dreamed of at its launch. The party’s founders are rushing to capitalise off of widespread desperation for a left-wing alternative. The result is a founding process full of flaws and fudges, and socialists need to think carefully about the best ways to organise around it. 

The Democratic Socialists caucus was formed in mid-August, organising a radical socialist tendency within Your Party (YP). We are focused primarily on the struggle for democracy at Your Party’s founding conference. If members can win a democratic party with a mediocre programme, the programme can be replaced later; if we win a perfect programme but have no way for members to hold their leaders accountable, then neither is secure. In the next six weeks, we must push for the greatest achievable level of democracy, allowing the party to be reformed according to the will of its members in future. 

We believe that the strategy of the revolutionary left must revolve around in-depth and active education, where party members learn to debate and argue for what they believe. The majority of YP members are primarily focused on questions of party policy and strategy, or simply the desire to have a socialist party. For many, conference will be the first time that they have considered questions of the party’s structure. Our highest priority must be to spur real debates about how the party is organised in every proto-branch across the country. Before we can win the argument, we need to make sure that the argument is happening at all. 

Here I will lay out the reasons for this strategy: the deep opposition we face from the party’s founders, and the additional challenges which the sortition-based conference poses for member organising. Both only increase the need for widespread political education. 

DemSocs have shared our broad vision for the party, and will soon publish a full model constitution: an alternative to the leadership’s proposal which we hope will give members a clear vision to fight for. In the first half of this journey to Your Party’s founding conference, experience has shown that there is a lot of support amongst lay members for the kind of party we are demanding. When the vision of a democratic, socialist party is put in front of YP supporters, most agree with it – the question is whether enough people can be moved from passive agreement, to actively standing up and arguing for a democratic party. 

At The World Transformed, DemSocs organisers also brought together representatives from a number of grassroots factions and tendencies within Your Party, putting forward a united 10-point proposal: the broadest possible unity for a genuinely member-led party. 

Temptation against democracy 

We must be clear about why the party’s founders will not deliver the democratic party that we need. Firstly, they are victims of a common mentality on the left, that of “we just need to do something!” We just need to get everyone in the room – we just need to start campaigning for local elections – we just need to put forward a basic left-wing programme – and everything else will follow. There is never time to reflect on why the same strategies have failed us in the past. With this in mind, they are rushing towards founding conference with a vague idea of what we have to do urgently, and this combination of urgency and hazy plans is deadly. Without deep and conscious thought about what kind of party structures we need, Your Party will instinctively default to the standard models of organisation that we are used to: in particular, those of the Labour Party. This will happen regardless of the founders’ conscious motivations or stated goals. 

The situation is made far worse by the second problem of elitist, top-down attitudes amongst the founders. This is made clear in the attitudes of some of its MPs – especially Adnan Hussein, who in arguments on social media has been clear that the “independent alliance” MPs, by being elected, deserve more respect than anything organised by lay members. We also see it in the history of several leading YP organisers, whose time in Momentum and Labour featured the centralisation of decision-making power at the top of those organisations, not empowering or trusting lay members. 

The temptation is understandable. The dominant ideas in our society are that the most efficient way to organise anything is through a small group of elite leaders: that democracy is important because it gives everyone a say, but it’s not an effective way to make decisions and build a strong organisation. The problem for socialists is that this is not true. Socialism can only be built by a mass movement of working class people; the skills and knowledge necessary for this can only be developed through experience of collective, democratic leadership. And a strong programme, suited to the conditions we find ourselves in, can only be developed through widespread open debate. A wide range of ideas must be put into practice and tested by members on the ground, who can then argue for their own positions. An elite group of leaders cannot stay in touch with everything that is happening. 

Democracy is not just a fundamental principle. It is also an essential tool for an effective socialist party. Top-down leadership of an obedient party may feel efficient in the short term, but it has never built a party that could stand the tests of time. This is why the core democratic demands of the Democratic Socialists include significant power to party branches, a collective leadership, and the freedom for members to debate and form factions. 

The risks of sortition 

Organising around a sortition-based conference brings obvious practical difficulties: it’s hard to know who is at the conference. New caucuses within the party are simultaneously developing a programme, building their own structures from nothing, and trying to build public support. When it comes to putting forward a coherent programme at conference, they are at a big disadvantage compared to established groups – be those leadership cliques within Your Party, or existing sects on the left – which can rely on connections within the party, and well-developed organising structures. 

This difficulty applies equally in the other direction: most members attending the conference will not have established ideas of who to speak to, when trying to prepare for the event. People don’t make decisions as isolated individuals. We are influenced by external pressures, be that groups that we are members of, figures that we see as leaders, or the general consensus of voices in the room around us. In the absence of any established networks within or between branches, or of any major party factions, there are no obvious sources of guidance other than the party leadership.  

This is the greatest danger we face: a conference of people who lack the experience and confidence to question the agenda, and to resist the lure of the established leadership. The average person has little to no experience taking part in party conferences, or making decisions about party structures. The risk is that a few loud, confident voices will dominate the entire discussion. By default, most of those voices will belong to the party’s founders and the people they choose to run the conference. 

Some other groupings will likely be able to command inordinate amounts of attention through having an organised base, past experience of speaking in such environments, and a clearly defined programme. Simply having a few people repeat the same points in a coordinated way can give the impression of a general consensus in the room, and can go a long way towards winning people over. Through this, destructive sectarian groups like the Socialist Workers Party will probably push for structures which will benefit themselves, such as models which give a “bloc vote” to affiliated unions. (Many sects already hold disproportionate influence within trade unions due to their ability to reliably mobilise a chunk of votes within mostly inactive union memberships.) 

Your Party’s current plan is to deliver a facade of democracy through numbers and numbers alone, relying on the idea that the more people who take part in a conference, the more democratic it is. From what we have seen, it is unclear whether the average conference attendee will have any significant role to play. They may get to vote on amendments. But the final vote will be taken online, by all members. A minority will be able to speak. But a conference with 13,000 attendees, where only 200 people speak, is not meaningfully more democratic than a conference of 200 attendees. 

By prioritising numbers, the format tries to hide that many important decisions have already been made. The documents that are being voted on were written up by a few unaccountable people. Many decisions have already been implicitly made – e.g. that the party will of course have a single leader rather than a collective leadership committee. It is easy for anyone – let alone inexperienced members – to miss the fact that such decisions have already been made without them. 

How to counter those problems 

These are the two main problems we face: the conference agenda being set without our control, and isolated attendees who lack the confidence or knowledge to go against the grain. The former is not something we can fully solve, but we can find ways to pressure the leadership in the right direction. The latter problem is one that can be solved – and must be, if we are to build a socialist party – but will be challenging in the short time that we have. For anyone who wants a democratic and socialist party, our task is to raise the political level of the party’s membership. 

In local meetings, the process is just as important as the end decision. We do not just need to educate people by telling them what we believe – we need to educate them by engaging in real political debate at all levels. If people come out of the debate agreeing with all of DSYP’s positions, so much the better – but widespread grassroots debate will prepare members to confidently engage with the fundamental questions of party structures and make it easier to fight for democracy at the founding conference, regardless of whether every debate ends with support for DSYP’s positions. Every argument at conference will be easier if the room is filled with people ready to stand up and speak for what they believe, to contradict the decisions being made for us from above, and to resist the pressure to rubber-stamp whatever the party’s founders have decided. 

For those who do already support our democratic programme, it is not enough to agree with the points in theory. We must also practice arguing for them, responding to common objections or misunderstandings. We will only develop this by taking part in exactly those discussions. 

1. Presenting a clear alternative 

In order to make convincing arguments, we first need a clearly defined position to argue for. Vague demands of democracy are not effective, not least because every group believes that they are proposing the best model of party democracy. To this end, our caucus will publish a draft constitution of our own: a vision of a radically democratic socialist party. We hope that many people will support our programme; we also hope that it will spur more groups and individuals to lay out their own positions. Once there are clearly defined proposals, it becomes much easier to develop contrasting ideas. 

2. Setting the agenda 

While the conference’s organisers are not in any way accountable to YP members, they also know that their party will mean nothing without members, and mass dissatisfaction with the founding process would be deeply damaging afterwards. They do not want to face thousands of members at conference chanting to demand a vote (a tactic which has successfully pressured a number of trade union and Labour Party conferences into allowing a vote in the face of leadership stitchups). 

If a clear programme is repeated throughout YP’s Regional Assemblies, and shown to be supported by many members, then members will expect to see it on the table at conference. If we can build that widespread expectation around the DemSocs programme, it will be much more difficult for the party’s leaders to leave these proposals off of the table. 

We strongly encourage all Your Party members to attend the Assemblies. In practical terms, members can: 

• Where there is sufficient support in the room, reject the idea that Assemblies are merely for consultation. Call for votes to show the room’s support for popular proposals. Ensure that the results of these votes are minuted and communicated to the party’s leaders. 
• Speak in favour of the DemSocs programme, or the 10 point unity programme. Prepare to argue in particular for any points that you feel most strongly about! Nobody should expect lay members to understand everything; convincing arguments will be built from the sum of every supporter in the room. 
• Speak to people who aren’t already onside: spread out around the room and try especially to win over new members, or those who aren’t already committed to any particular vision of the party. 
• Engage in “comradely debate”: listen to the arguments that others are making, and reply to them, arguing firmly on a political and not a personal basis. Where we fail to convince people, reconsidering our arguments and presenting better ones next time. 

3. Member education through debate 

While effective organising around Assemblies is likely to push the proposed agenda in a better direction, the only way to ensure that our ideas are heard at conference is by having them raised from the floor. 

Most members will not be formally associated with DemSocs or any other organised faction, regardless of how fast they grow. (At the time of writing our caucus is believed to be the largest YP-related grouping, and has only 550 registered supporters.) But all our experience of taking part in local branch meetings shows that there is widespread agreement with our programme, when people are presented with it. Our task is to take people from that surface-level agreement to a deeper understanding of the programme: not just thinking that it sounds good, but being able to explain why the core demands are so important, and believing that they should be up for debate at conference. 

In practical terms, we can work to build support by: 

• Attending party meetings of all kinds, and putting forward the proposals for a democratic party (as above). 
• Taking on roles within local branches, and using those positions to organise better meetings: ones where every member is encouraged to engage in accessible political discussion, and where the fundamental questions of the party’s structures are up for debate. 
• Where proto-branches do not welcome this kind of activity, organising independent meetings to do the same things. 

Proto-branches vary wildly, from healthy spaces for discussion to hellholes of sectarian beef. There are cases where taking part in these meetings will not be fun. But it will be rewarding, if done right: every step raising the political level of our movement. 

Long term party-building

Whatever the result of Your Party’s founding conference, the struggle for democracy and socialism will not be over. The party which comes out of it will be worth fighting for, and we are in this for the long haul. 

We have to inoculate people against initial disappointment, preparing more of us to continue organising rather than quitting in disbelief. This will be helped by deep discussion based on open, honest assessments of the state of the party. Widespread education, organising on the ground, giving new people a chance to speak in front of a crowd for what they believe: this is all essential to prepare people in the face of a longer political struggle. 

This strategy also lays the groundwork for a healthy democratic culture, based on vibrant debate between members. It was not unreasonable to describe the united proposal developed at The World Transformed as “an unprecedented display of unity” for the modern British left. In the very worst case where the new party is not worth participating in, none of this activity will be wasted. Whether or not it is built through Your Party, a true socialist party will require a new democratic culture. Every person who takes part in these debates over the next six weeks, every person who takes on the spirit of a democratic, mass, socialist party, takes a step towards bringing that party to life.