When Jeremy Corbyn and Zarah Sultana announced Your Party’s establishment in July, virtually the entire left agreed that 1) it had to be set up quickly 2) it was vital that Corbyn be in the leadership and 3) that it would be a huge step forward for the working class in Britain. We said, however, that it could only be a dead end, ‘the embodiment of reactionary Labour left politics of the past’. We knew it would be committed first and foremost to electoral politics. Even if, therefore, it won a parliamentary majority, the ruling class would ensure it was unable to enforce even the mildest of radical economic programmes.
Governmental office versus state power
The party remains wedded to the old Labour left fantasy that governmental office is the same as possessing state power. It never is and never has been. State power is in the hands of the capitalist class – the owners of the means of production and distribution. This allows the ruling class to control the legal system, the courts, the police, the prisons, the army and so on. The suppression of Palestine Action is an object lesson in the exercise of that state power, of that corporate pressure on government. The only way the working class can achieve any progress is if it is able to seize state power from the hands of the capitalist class. Socialism is in the first instance an issue of working class political power, not a matter of economic management as the left Labour clique pretends.
While Your Party’s Political Statement expressed the standpoint of the social democrats setting it up, Sultana’s call for a fundamental transformation of society appeared quite different in the run-up to the conference. When she said ‘let’s embrace class war because it’s about time we won’, it begged the question as to what she thought a victory would look like. In one or two of her speeches she referred to Marx without being clear as to why. However, in the Communist Manifesto, Marx and Engels spoke of how ‘the proletariat will use its political supremacy to wrest, by degree, all capital from the bourgeoisie, to centralise all instruments of production in the hands of the state, ie of the proletariat organised as the ruling class’.
They were explaining that a fundamental transformation of society requires the working class to seize state power first, not at some distant point down the line. That is what distinguishes the communist from the social democratic standpoint. Sultana seemed to agree with the communist standpoint but then never spelled out the practical consequences for the political organisation of Your Party. Instead she opted to support amendments to the draft foundation documents rather than argue for the complete rejection that would be essential to moving forward. As it is, the Political Statement is now incorporated into Your Party’s Constitution and requires a two-thirds majority to effect any changes. Without a commitment to confront state power, its feel-good aspirations to change ‘the balance of power’ and undertake the ‘transfer of wealth and power, now concentrated in the hands of the few, to the overwhelming majority in a democratic, socialist society’ are an empty deceit.
A vanguard party
Any party aimed at the seizure of state power would require a completely different structure from that set out in Your Party’s foundation documents. The aim requires the means to achieve it, and that would require a party made up of the most politically conscious sections of the working class capable of organising the mass of the working class in a struggle for state power. Politically conscious, because there is a constant requirement for the party to demonstrate that the struggle to defend let alone improve working class conditions under capitalism has very definite limits set by the accumulation of capital. In today’s conditions that really means an ever more determined resistance against a ruling class itself pressed to savagely reduce working class living standards to force forward capital accumulation. The capitalist state is the machine that enforces the will of the ruling class, and it is in the battle against the state that the working class under the guidance of a true vanguard party will learn why socialism is the only answer to its problems.
Your Party is certainly not a vanguard party, and has no wish to be. It says so in its Political Statement when it states that it will be a ‘mass party for the many, rooted in the broadest possible social alliance, with the working class at its heart.’ A mass party will have a membership whose consciousness would be defined by the lowest possible denominator, especially when the Statement refers to Your Party being the ‘broadest possible’ social alliance. Anti-imperialists will coexist with pro-imperialists, anti-Zionists with those who support a two-state solution for Palestine, anti-racists with those who support migration controls. Such a party is incapable of unified action.
Only he is a Marxist who extends the recognition of the class struggle to the recognition of the dictatorship of the proletariat.
Vladimir Lenin, The State and Revolution
That Your Party is not interested in providing the real leadership the working class needs today is borne out by its membership requirements. The only obligation on a member is to pay monthly dues. There is no precondition for party membership in terms of political understanding, level of class consciousness, requirement to participate in party activities, to commit to any discipline. All members have to do is ‘affirm their adherence’ to the policies of the party, and avoid breaking any rules – and that is it. It is a recipe for inactivity, backwardness and privilege.
Historically, the issue of members’ obligations in a socialist party was central to the split between the Bolsheviks and Mensheviks in 1903: Lenin regarded the issue of membership requirements as defining the class character of the organisation. Any party which had as its goal the overthrow of capitalism had to have a vanguard character. It is no different today. Members in such an organisation have obligations, not rights. It is an obligation to fight for democracy, to work in a disciplined relationship as part of the collective, constantly to self-develop politically and to develop, defend and advance the political positions of the organisation.
Imperialism and the split in socialism
In this new FRFI pamphlet, Lenin’s Imperialism and the Split in the Socialism (1916) is reproduced, with additional articles by David Yaffe applying Lenin’s theory to the struggle for socialism in Britain.
The establishment of Your Party could have been the start of a serious debate about these questions. The petit bourgeois socialists in the left organisations wanted none of it. For them, now is not the time, workers don’t understand it, they are not at the level of consciousness needed to create one. So they have set about creating an organisation which would absolutely prevent the development of such a consciousness, enforcing unity with the remnants of the Labour left, a trend which destroys every possible sign of political movement in the British working class. As we said those months ago, Your Party is a dead end.
A vanguard party cannot be simply declared, it has to be fought for against the forces of opportunism. It will be borne out of the struggle against imperialism and racism, and it will be based therefore on the most oppressed sections of the working class which will form its leadership. We have already seen the leading role played by working class people of colour in the campaigns of solidarity outside of the official movement on Palestine, those who are rejecting the middle class liberalism of campaigns such as Stand Up To Racism. It was Asian people who first demonstrated contempt for the Labour government’s defence of the Israeli genocide when they demonstrated outside Labour Party offices in November 2023. The official movement is tied to the Labour Party and to Your Party and has refused to take any stance against the interests of British imperialism. A new vanguard party will be established only through a struggle against these reactionary forces, for, as Lenin said, without a struggle against opportunism, ‘there can be no question of a struggle against imperialism, or of Marxism, or of a socialist labour movement.’ The RCG is committed to building the anti-imperialist trend out of which a real vanguard party will be created.
Robert Clough
