A lot of words have been written in these pages bemoaning a failure of unity. That Your Party could and should have been the means by which to unify the far left is taken as a point of fact. I think this was fundamentally naive.
Disorganisation is the entropic state of the proletariat under capitalism; it takes work to cohere anti-capitalist politics; this is as true of the “organised” left as it is of the working class. The far left cannot be unified unless around a shared programme; unity is not a quality that can be disciplined into the working class; it is the result of practical organising in pursuit of specific goals. A shared programme that chooses, deliberately, to avoid lines of political division for the sake of unity is a programme that will fail to create that unity precisely because it has overlooked the means by which the enemy will first try to disrupt us. On the other hand, a shared programme that tackles these issues is a programme that will not be capable of unifying the entirety of the left in the manner being discussed for the obvious reason that these are not resolved political debates.
It is only through the genuine political resolution of these issues across the left that this unity can be built. In contrast to a lot of the theorising around regroupment, it is only through a genuine upsurge in new communists that the fractured sections of the existing far left can be dragged kicking and screaming into that resolution. Whilst the masses are not all temporarily embarrassed socialists, there is a genuine mass of currently disorganised, vaguely left-wing people that could have formed the basis for this kind of project. Indeed, they would need to be central to it. Comrades allowed their revolutionary optimism to blind them to the fact that by the time Your Party had launched, Zack Polanski had already emerged as a de facto leader for them. The unfolding of events here meant that the inability to overcome the bureaucratic left, the underhanded domination of local groups by the SWP, and the slow and bitter falling apart were already overdetermined.
Left disunity is clearly a major blockage to revolution in Britain, but I think it is undertheorised how much the working class is a necessity for the process of regroupment to actually take place. Comrades underestimated the Green Party, were dismissive of the risk posed by a “populist” agenda and generally took an overly dismissive tone when discussing the precise people who will be central to the kind of political project we are trying to build. It might be easier to only talk to fellow Marxists, but that’s unfortunately not the game we are playing.
