Your Party’s conference on 29/30 November sealed its fate as a backward, social democratic party. The conference was dominated by a Corbyn-led clique of Labour left has-beens and its fairweather allies among the Independent Alliance of MPs, along with the petit bourgeois left organisations which have flocked to the party in pursuit of their own equally social democratic interests. It will remain, as we wrote at the time of its formation in July, simply the latest iteration of a left-ish electoral vehicle for those who no longer have a political home in the Labour Party.
The reason the Revolutionary Communist Group intervened over the last two months in Your Party rallies and regional assemblies up and down the country was not because we had any illusions that such reformists and opportunists could be won over to socialist politics. It was because the explicit anti-imperialist, anti-Zionist and socialist alternative proposed by Zarah Sultana offered the possibility of mobilising the most conscious young working class people who have been radicalised through their experiences of solidarity with Palestine and an increasing awareness of the role of the British state. Her call for ‘a fundamental transformation of society’ with ‘the means of production controlled by the working class’, for a class struggle with a clear socialist aim, challenged the stultifying political tradition of the Labour left led by Jeremy Corbyn. Corbyn, we must remember, remained a Labour Party member for 50 years despite its numerous crimes, whether against the Irish people, its wars against Yugoslavia, Iraq, Afghanistan, its support for genocide in Gaza, or in Britain, against the miners’ strike or migrant workers and asylum seekers.
Sultana’s unhesitating anti-Zionism, her support for trans rights and, most crucially, her recognition that the working class must take power if it is to build a socialist society, galvanised hundreds of thousands of people to join Your Party in the first period of its existence. Within weeks, those forces had been dissipated. They recognised that Your Party had nothing to offer them, as Corbyn’s leadership worked aggressively to exclude Sultana and ensure that that the party’s founding process was smothered from the outset by a blanket of middle-class reaction. This became evident at regional assemblies when any attempt to discuss the insipid draft Political Statement they had concocted was usually dismissed out of hand: any debate that did take place was often aimed at watering it down even further by seeking the removal of references to socialism and the working class.
Throughout, the left organisations organised around the Socialist Unity Platform pushed their own sectarian pipe-dream of making social democracy more attractive by democratising the draft Constitution and Standing orders. They hung on to Sultana’s coat tails to maintain their radical veneer, but their primary concern was to engineer reconciliation with Corbyn and his pacifist cover for imperialism. This is petit bourgeois socialism: opposition to imperialism in words, submission in deeds. But despite their best efforts, they found themselves jilted by Your Party, with SWP members expelled from the party and banned from Conference at the 11th hour, before being meekly readmitted.
The purpose of Your Party is not to encourage independent action by the working class but to hobble it before it starts. Corbyn and his formerly Labour left allies represent the interests of the labour aristocracy, a privileged minority of the working class whose material conditions are threatened by the deepening capitalist crisis. In the past, the Labour Party represented those interests. Now Labour is extending its attack on the working class to traditionally better-off sections. The labour aristocracy needs a new electoral party to defend its interests. It therefore had to make sure Your Party would not set out to represent the most oppressed sections of the working class, but rather anchor itself in that section that ultimately owes its dwindling privileges to British imperialism, and is organising to defend them.
Any new class conscious movement of the working class must be anti-imperialist and anti-racist; it will be drawn from the most oppressed sections of the working class who have no illusions in the neutrality of the British state. Only out of the struggles of such a movement can a new vanguard party be created. This is the movement the RCG is fighting to build. Meanwhile, Your Party cannot even defend those it puts on its platforms, like the Transport for London workers now threatened with deportation by the rise in the migrant worker salary threshold; Your Party speakers wring their hands over the plight of these ‘good’ and ‘hard-working’ migrants – they should be fighting tooth and nail against the viciously racist migration policies of the Labour government.
More than a century ago, the great Polish revolutionary Rosa Luxemburg described social democracy as a ‘stinking corpse’ and condemned European socialist parties for siding with their own ruling classes who sent millions of workers to die in a war to re-divide the colonies of the world among the major imperialist powers. Lenin concurred: what he called the opportunist trend ‘can neither disappear nor “return” to the revolutionary working class’. It is not possible to resurrect social democracy: it must be exposed and destroyed. That is why the RCG took on the fight with Your Party. We remain committed to building a revolutionary movement of the working class.
