Nobody who believes in the cause of socialism can fail to have been disappointed by Your Party. Having once tasted hope, as some 800,000 people expressed interest in this new project, the fading of Your Party into irrelevance is all the more bitter. Whatever place may have existed for a populist left organisation has been taken by the Greens, yet the Corbynites, who now dominate Your Party, have chosen to exclude dedicated socialist activists in Marxist groups, who might have been the party’s one significant advantage. (I say this, of course, in full knowledge of the political limitations of communist sects.)
Your Party, it is evident, cannot now become a mass, pluralist party of the radical left. To carry such a plan into effect would have required a thorough commitment to members’ democracy. It would have required delicacy and tact in dealing with existing left groups and it would have required political creativity and the courage, or force of insight, to abandon the stale and impotent politics of the Labour left. These conditions, however, were never fulfilled and it follows that our expectations of Your Party must change. From the dreams we entertained at the time of the 800,000 sign-ups, we must descend to a critical and objective view of the political situation.
The grand problem of socialists in this country, for many years, has been the absence of any party which can be said to represent the independent politics of the working class. There is no socialist party which takes the overthrow of capitalism as its objective and which can lay claim to any social weight.
It is true that there are a great many pretenders to the name of socialist party – the Marxist sects and sectlets – but not one has the necessary strength to be called a party. Not one, by itself, can grow into a real party and most are tightly-controlled bureaucratic organisations. They do not practise the democracy upon which the working-class movement depends for its survival. If socialism is to grow in strength in this country, it is indispensably necessary that our socialists co-operate in a democratic organisation. It is necessary that we regroup and bring an end to obviously futile sect strategies.
Your Party might once have played an important part in this regrouping, but that now appears most improbable. What, then, can be done with it?
It is clear that Your Party, despite its undemocratic structure, still has many well-intentioned and earnest members. So long as it is politically possible for socialists to intervene in Your Party, so long as there is some reasonable room for manoeuvre, I consider it the duty of at least part of the socialist movement to stay in the organisation and argue warmly for socialism and democracy. To shirk that responsibility would be to leave thousands or tens of thousands of potential socialists, who might help form the basis of a mass socialist organisation, in the incompetent hands of a bureaucratic populist leadership whose politics do not really differ from that of the Labour left Socialist Campaign Group, except for the fact that they no longer vote or campaign for Labour.
So, for now, at any rate, it is the call of duty which should keep at least some of us in Your Party. It is still early in the day and we do not know what the future of the party holds. I therefore intend to remain a member until it becomes plain that dissent is useless and that nothing can be gained at an acceptable cost.
