Last night, over 40 Socialist Party members and supporters met in Birmingham city centre to discuss the emergence of Your Party and what socialists can do to help it become a mass party of the working class.
Below we reproduce the introductory talk given by local Socialist Party member David. For more info on how you can join and get involved with the Socialist Party fighting for revolutionary change and a mass electoral voice as a step towards that, get in touch
The Failures of Labour
I think we all know why we’re here. Life is getting more difficult for working people. We’ve seen nothing but austerity since the 2008 financial crash - a crash caused by the rich that the workers have had to pay for.
The Tory government cut council funding by 60% including 600,000 jobs. University fees have been tripled so that now the average student leaves university with £53,000 of debt. Waiting lists for council houses and NHS appointments are at an all time high.
Many will have hoped that things would improve under a Labour government, but Starmer has shown clearly that he represents the bosses, not the workers, ploughing on with the Tories' austerity agenda. Already we’ve seen:
- A refusal to lift the two-child benefit cap
- Cuts to benefits for the disabled
- Cuts to the winter fuel allowance (although they have been forced back and made a partial U-turn.
- New increases of tuition fees
- Restrictions on protest that have seen pensioners and priests arrested for opposing genocide in Gaza
Here in Birmingham, a Labour council under a Labour government we’ve seen libraries and day care centres closed, cuts to special educational support, increases in council tax, and vicious attacks on the workers. The Birmingham bin workers are currently fighting a cut in their wages of up to £8,000 a year. The council are now threatened to sack the striking workers if they don’t accept this pay cut.
No wonder then there is so much enthusiasm for a new party of the working class.
The role that the Birmingham bin strike has played in getting us here should not be understated. In July, before Corbyn and Sultana launched Your Party, there was an emergency motion passed at the Unite conference. This motion, that our members in Unite helped to draft, was written in response to Labour’s attacks on the Birmingham bin workers. It called for Angela Rayner, John Cotton, and all other Birmingham Labour councillors to be expelled from the union and for Unite to officially review its relationship with the Labour Party.
Unite is one of the biggest trade unions in the UK with over 1.2 million members. The near-unanimous passing of this motion posed a strong signal that the organised working class are stepping away from the Labour Party. And it has already inspired activists in other unions to step up their own campaigning for new political representation.
New Party Announced
This is the context in which Jeremy Corbyn and Zara Sultana announced the formation of their new party that they called “a new kind of political party” based on “a mass redistribution of wealth and power”.
80,000 signed up in the first five hours.
600,000 within the first week.
The count is now over 800,000
9 Councillors have left the Labour party to join; 6 in Hastings, one in Islington, one in Coventry, one in Cambridge, and an expelled Labour councillor in Preston.
Last month, an Ipsos poll estimated that 20% of voters were likely or very likely to back the new party - a party that doesn’t even formally exist yet. This went up to a third of those aged 16 to 34.
A new workers’ party has the potential to unite workers, students, anti-war campaigners, environmental activists, and importantly it can cut across the divisive lies being peddled by the likes of Farage and Robinson.
The work is not done
This all shows what we in the Socialist Party have been saying for years - that there both the need and the appetite for a new party of the working class. But while this enthusiasm is inspiring, enthusiasm alone doesn’t build lasting political change.
Forming a left-wing party is not enough. Many countries have parties that call themselves left-wing, and even successful campaigns such as the first Corbyn era or Syriza in Greece were pushed back. How the party is structured and organised is central to its success. It’s therefore critical that we learn from the past: the mistakes and the successes.
Lessons from the Labour Party
We aren't looking for a Labour Party mark 2, but we can draw important lessons from it's history. Specifically, it was the federal approach of the early Labour Party that enabled it to develop its early programme and build a base in the organised working class.
A Party of the Working Class
The real power of this country, like all countries, is the working class. The working class is the one class that has everything to gain from the fundamental transformation of society from capitalism to socialism. Being left-wing isn’t enough. Any party serious about transforming society must be rooted in the working class - Not just in name but in practice. This means being rooted in the trade unions - the largest organisations of the working class.
This is one of the key lessons from the early Labour Party - itself formed out of the trade union movement. 41 national unions met with trades councils and socialist organisations to discuss the party’s formation. The union delegates at it’s launch represented a third of total trade union membership which was just 10% of the workforce. However, it was the working-class orientation that led to its early success.
Just after the formation of the Labour Party, the House of Lords ruled that unions could be made liable for damages incurred by the bosses due to strike action. This was an existential threat to trade unionism and exposed the need for working class political representation. Trade union affiliation more than doubled in four years.
In 1918 the Labour Party introduced Clause IV - a commitment to the common ownership of the means of production (effectively their commitment to Socialism) and in 1924 the first (minority) Labour Government came to power. It’s worth mentioning that this clause has since been removed by Tony Blair as a way of symbolically moving the party away from its socialist roots.
A Federal Structure
So, we want the new party to be a party of the working class, rooted in trade unions. How do we do that? The power of the trade unions is in their ability to organise collectively. Any new party structure needs to accommodate that strength. The party needs to be organised such that the trade unions have a say in how their members’ money is spent. So that they have a say in the party's decision-making process.
Some, including Sultana, have suggested that the party should be organised on the basis of one-member-one-vote. This may appear democratic, but it excludes the *collective* participation of the mass organisations of the working class. It can often mean that votes are determined by which side happens have more people at a meeting.
Under a federal approach, delegates represent all their members with a voice proportional to the number of members they represent.
John Prescot, Tony Blair’s Deputy Prime Minister, said that replacing trade union representation with “one member one vote” was “more important than abolishing Clause IV in creating New Labour”. It weakened the role of the organised working class, making it easier for Blair to push through cuts, privatisation, and war.
A federal structure also encourages a full debate between groups on the best policies and tactics. This arms members with the full picture of the arguments and information, making them better informed to engage in that democratic process!
Socialist Unity
Although workers all have common class interests, they don’t always have the same ideas and outlook. Forging a new mass workers' party will require compromise between different political trends and ideologies. People often complain that the problem with the left is that its too fractured and there’s certainly a truth in that.
However, the early Labour was organised such that different organisations could work together on a common programme without imposing artificial unity from above. Organisations were allowed to maintain their own identity and run their own election campaigns at a local level. If they forced an artificial unity, it would have likely fallen apart.
We have two choices facing us, can we sit around wishing that things were different, thinking about how nice it would be if we could all unite completely under one banner. Or, we can accept the differences between our organisations, find the common ground, and push forward together. Other attempts to form new left parties in recent years have failed exactly for this reason.
The Trade Union and Socialist Coalition
For us in the Socialist Party, these haven’t just been nice bits of historical theory we’ve been thinking about, but lessons we’ve put into practice. For the last 15 years we have been members of the Trade Union and Socialist Coalition - a socialist electoral alliance founded by the late RMT general secretary Bob Crow.
I won’t go into too many details, and I invite comrades to talk more about TUSC in their contributions. But I just wanted to outline how we have put theory into action through TUSC.
As the name suggests, it’s an organisation of and for the working class. The steering committee includes members from PCS, Unison, NEU, UCU, Napo, and POA. The RMT and its 80,000 members were officially affiliated for 10 of the 15 years TUSC has existed. It has a federal structure, in which member organisations agree a common set of principles and an electoral programme, around which each member group can organise independently.
During this time, hundreds of trade unionists and community fighters have stood as TUSC candidates offering a socialist alternative at the ballot box.
The First Corbyn Era
In 2015, almost by accident, Jeremy Corbyn became leader of the Labour Party. For the first time in many decades, there was an opportunity to transform it into an anti-austerity party. So TUSC stood down in parliamentary elections and enthusiastically campaigned for Corbyn’s anti-austerity programme.
However, we didn’t simply take on a cheerleading role. Much like how we’re here today talking about how Your Party needs to be organised, we put forward clear demands and recommendations to Corbyn and those around him.
Our members in the Socialist Party along with our allies in TUSC were putting forward what was needed to uproot the political and organisational rot that had infected the Labour party under the likes of Tony Blair to transform it into a party for workers’ socialist political representation. These demands largely revolved around kicking out the pro-austerity MPs who were actively campaigning against Corbyn and strengthen the role of the trade unions.
Unfortunately, rather than mobilising to remove he capitalist wing of the Labour Party, the leaders of the Corbyn movement sought to find “common ground” with them. We have seen exactly how Starmer and the Labour-Right have repaid them.
As we forge a new party for workers, these demands are as important as ever.
The Dual Task
We in the Socialist Party have been calling for a new workers' party for over 30 years. We don’t yet know if this new party will truly be a socialist party of the working class. But even if it is, that does not remove our task of building our own revolutionary socialist party.
Building a mass-workers party is a stepping stone to socialism. For raising the level of class consciousness of the working class. Marx and Engels wrote in the Communist Manifesto that “The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles.” Class consciousness is the historical precondition for the successful overthrow of the ruling class. Class consciousness is therefore essential to begin constructing a new socialist society. A mass party of the working class will help workers feel their own united power.
But building a mass workers party able to transforming society in the interest of the working class will require organised militant socialists leading the way.
Back in 2017, we warned that “The hostility Jeremy Corbyn faces in opposition is only a pale shadow of how they would attempt to derail a Jeremy Corbyn-led government.”
A workers party needs militant socialists making sure it never compromises with the capitalists. It needs militant socialists pushing for the rapid transformation the economy to prevent the capitalists from taking back control. This means placing banks, energy companies, and other big corporations into public ownership under democratic workers' control and management. For a socialist planned economy that’s really in the interests “of the many, not the few”.
We cannot just hope that when the time comes like likes of Corbyn or Sultana will take the action necessary to overthrow capitalism. We need to build our own party, take the arguments to the workers, to the rank and file trade unionists, to the community activists, to ultimately lead that transition.
Conclusion
We support Your Party wholeheartedly, but we also know it won’t survive without a strong socialist backbone. That’s why our role remains vital. So if you agree with what you’ve heard tonight - if you want to join the fight against capitalist crisis, against climate breakdown, against war, and the rise of right-right nationalism - if you want to make sure this new party doesn’t just become another Labour but instead, a socialist voice for the working class - join the Socialist Party!