Frequently, ‘left-wing’ unity is presented surrounding the support of social democratic projects, which often masquerade themselves as anti-capitalist endeavours. In Britain, this has found its most recent expression with the launching of Your Party (YP), that has been upheld as a potential vehicle for social change.
Conversely, we don’t see the task at hand being to rescue or radicalise social democracy from within, but instead, insist on revolution rather than reform; grounding revolutionary politics in independent class organisation and confrontation with the capitalist state. In critiquing Your Party, we focus in particular on the ‘Grassroots Left’ slate – the grouping coalescing around Zarah Sultana and presented as the ‘anti-capitalist’, ‘anti-Zionist’, and at times even ‘socialist’ alternative within the party.
While it is fair to recognise that this slate articulates positions more radical than those of the other factions, we argue that it nonetheless remains firmly within the horizon of social-democratic transformation and cannot constitute a viable force for revolutionary change.
The role of Your Party is to contain working class organisation before it can develop, reorganise petite bourgeois elements, and cooperate with their labour aristocratic allies. While the project has seen an unstable beginning, the emergence of the ‘Grassroots Left’ shows that sections of the Party desperately cling to the idea that a ‘socialist’ movement can be built within this structure.
Jeremy Corbyn, along with former Labour-left figures like Zarah Sultana, Beth Winter and Andrew Feinstein, represent an aristocratic layer of workers and sections of the petite bourgeoisie, whose material position is weakening under deepening crisis. Having abandoned the Labour Party that once embodied their interests, these layers are now reabsorbed under a new organisational banner.
Anchoring itself in the privileged strata represented by union leaders, NGO’s, and ‘left-wing’ professionals, YP plays its part in connecting their reformist interests to that of British imperialism. Even within this structure, the Grassroots Left seeks to mobilise members within the labour movement, advocating for ‘maximum democracy’, and so-called socialist policies. However, these attempts still depend materially on the continued stability of the capitalist state: through direct funding streams afforded by exploitation overseas and at home. They seek unity in political forms that manage crisis without threatening the underlying social order.
‘Left-wing’ unity is as old as the hills, with the reappearance of new titles, ‘friendly’ characters, and rehashed slogans. Yet, while the players change, and slogans are rebranded as ‘grassroots socialism’, the game of managing class struggle within reformist bounds remains the same.
From Keir Hardie, who helped lay the foundations for the reformist path taken by the Labour Party; to the false friend of the working-class in Tony Benn, who had largely supported Britain’s war mongering throughout his various positions within Labour; and to the Green Party, who’s persistence in securing public ownership of energy and transport, or pushing for the ‘rights’ of workers and ‘environmental justice’, falls flat when observing their open support for NATO. The Grassroots Left similarly illustrates that internal currents within YP remain constrained by the party’s structural dependence on bourgeois stability and imperialist alignment.
Although social democratic parties may differ in their policies, they all align succinctly in one area: the allowance of the capitalist system’s inherent exploitative logic to go unchallenged.
Whether it’s the chaotic new beginnings of Jeremy Corbyn and Zarah Sultana, battling over membership portal access and positions on Palestine, or the period around Clement Attlee’s Labour government, which oversaw the stabilisation of British capitalism in the post-war period. The point of their projects is to remove the urgency of class struggle, attempt to reform their way out of crisis, and avoid revolutionary transformation at all costs; for these reasons, sections of capital require their continuation.
In this context, we go further than moral critiques of this new left project; while the Grassroots Left seeks their idea of democratic socialism and grassroots organisation, it too operates within the structural constraints of Your Party. In truth, the potential of such projects is halted before it even begins, as the leadership, social base, and material reproduction depend on managing capitalism, not abolishing it. Their socialism is therefore shamefaced: a project that dampens working-class struggle rather than enabling its independent organisation and revolutionary transformation. Hence, anyone calling themselves communist should reject the project outright.
Additionally, both within the British and international context, there is over a century of historical evidence showing that social democracy should have nothing to do with a strategy of the working class. Yet, the most striking—but unsurprising—feature surrounding the emergence of YP, has been the enthusiastic support it has attracted from various sections of the British left, specifically those communist in name.
Different in their approach, but as equally disturbing in their outcome, is the support from the communists in the Revolutionary Communist Party (RCP), the Revolutionary Communist Group (RCG), and the Communist Party of Britain (CPB).
Now stating that the future of YP ‘has been driven into a ditch’, whether due to Corbyn’s ignorance or Sultana’s reformism, the RCP confuses potential with reality. Their continued logic of convergence within a popular front with the bourgeoisie not only proves that they lack a revolutionary strategy and scientific class analysis; but also, that they idealistically believe working people can make progress through social-democratic projects.
The RCG, who have continuously attacked Corbyn for his Labourite politics, have correctly labelled YP a ‘stinking corpse’. However, their recent denunciation of the new left party masks their ambivalence toward social democracy in general.
On one hand, the RCG identifies areas that appear progressive, such as Sultana’s recent anti-Zionist positioning or her vocal support for trans rights. On the other, they incorrectly—and confusedly—divide the most recent social-democratic project into two camps: a tired Labour-left leadership, represented by Corbyn and his allies; and an ‘anti-imperialist’ or ‘socialist’ alternative embodied by Sultana.
The RCG and RCP exemplify the characteristic attitudes of British Trotskyists, with the former explicitly attempting to draw in ‘the most conscious young working-class people’ who may have initially been mobilised by YP. The result is that both organisations reproduce a neo-Bernsteinian fantasy: hoping to cherry-pick from the spontaneous turns of the left-wing movement, and gradually ‘increase awareness of the role of the British state’, or parasitically gain members.
With the CPB, its consideration on ‘how best it can work with its socialist and progressive allies, whether in the new party or in Labour and others’, continues to reflect its opportunist blueprint mapped out in their ‘British Road to Socialism’. Once more, the CPB’s faith in bourgeois collusion perpetuates their historical errors, indefinitely postponing any hope of overcoming compromise with capital.
History has shown more than enough. Neither moral opposition to imperialism nor episodic radicalisation within social democratic projects can form the basis of a working-class strategy.
What is required instead is a reaffirmation of class independence: the political separation of the working class from all variants of bourgeois and petty-bourgeois reformism. Any strategy that subordinates working-class organisation to reformist leaderships inevitably leads to demobilisation and defeat, however radical their rhetoric. The tragic cost of repeating this historical pattern is not just disappointing, it is decisive.