Luke E’s suggestion that the surge of Polanski’s Greens was the determining factor preventing Your Party from being a vehicle for far-left unity is wrong. The argument can be summarised as:
- “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” unity and that
- “There is a genuine mass of currently disorganised, vaguely left-wing people that could have formed the basis for this” but
- “By the time Your Party had launched, Zack Polanski had already emerged as a de facto leader for them”, and therefore they did not join Your Party and did not become the new communists that we needed “to overcome the bureaucratic left”.
Whether they’re fans of Polanski’s or Corbyn’s populism, young people have overwhelmingly formed a disorganised mass, vaguely aligned with the mainstream left, since at least the 1960s.
Regardless, that they are considered “vaguely left-wing” means they would not necessarily form the basis for the “new communists” that we might desire. Luke E recognises that many “are not all temporarily embarrassed socialists”; what they actually are is progressive liberals. This is not to denigrate them; they are considered “vaguely left-wing” because they are on the left wing of liberalism, the hegemonic ideology we face. It is not necessarily true that progressive liberals are more likely to become advocates for Marxist unity than it is for extant sectarian communists to become anti-sectarian.
Many vaguely left-wing people actually did join Your Party, and many do not find Polanski’s offer of rehashing the failures of Corbynism convincing. Many remain unaffiliated to either Your Party or the Greens, and many are still affiliated to the Labour Party – the traditional home of vaguely left-wing people. Furthermore, if we accept the judgement that the existence of populism is preventing communists from ever reaching the critical mass necessary to break with sectarianism, we would be forever doomed. A unified socialist-republican workers’ party would have to compete with liberal populist parties like Polanski’s Greens.
As correctly pointed out in Clara Hill’s recent letter, the primary factor that has shaped the direction of Your Party is the intentions of the people who founded it. It has not become a vehicle for far-left unity because the MPs and political staffers who founded it did not intend for it to be one.
Corbyn and his associates are de facto supporters of the Westminster-monarchy system. They are progressive liberals, not socialist republicans nor communists. This is the reason why Your Party was never intended to be a vehicle for far-left unity. Rather, they intended it to be a politically liberal, loose alliance based on independent MPs and councillors – and it is.
Thomas Donnelly
Liverpool
