Last night I participated in a Zoom call for the South West of England region about setting up local groups for an attempt to build a new Left wing party in the UK called Transform.
This is their website: https://transformpolitics.uk/
So far it has only a list of 10 principles, a brief FAQ and various statements from people who have set up the organisation.
There are many unanswered questions rattling around my head about this so I am writing them here in the hopes it will stimulate thoughtful discussion.
The Morning Star has also written an article worth reading as an introduction.
- What is the aim of Transform?
In the 10 points listed on the website, it says the the main aim is:
“to redistribute wealth and power from the elite to the people”
The Morning Star article points out that this is not actually a call to abolish capitalism, although it could just about be interpreted as such. However, on the face of it, this implies merely some mild reforms to the exiting British State such as redistributive taxes to better fund the welfare state and public services.
Is redistribution here seen as the ultimate goal, or merely a stepping stone to a fully socialist society in which there is no ‘elite’ any longer?
Is this wording deliberately vague so as to paper over differences between revolutionaries and reformists in their understandings of capitalism and the state, or is it actually an explicitly reformist party?
If it is a reformist party, it can expect a lot of criticism from the rest of the Left, including the Morning Star, which is the largest socialist newspaper and therefore a significant factor in the success of any new socialist party.
If it does hope to include both revolutionaries and reformists, perhaps this needs to be made clearer.
2. Does Transform aim to win governmental power under the existing UK political system?
Points 8 and 9 of the 10 points say that the (hypothetical future) party…
“Contests elections in order to offer voters a socialist alternative and build power locally and nationally, without promoting the idea that voting alone can solve the present crises.”
and…
“Seeks to build power in communities, workplaces and on the streets.”
The language here is very interesting. It doesn’t say that the party contests elections in order to win them!
Again, one possible interpretation of these two points is a revolutionary socialist one while it is also possible to interpret them as compatible with reformist politics.
The revolutionary interpretation is that the party aims to ‘build power’ by creating new organisations such as workplace and neighbourhood “councils” which act as a kind of parallel government of the working class, and which aim to eventually replace the existing state as a new form of government which is radically democratic and socialist. This is roughly what happened in Paris in 1871, Russia in 1905 and 1917, Spain in 1936, Hungary in 1956, Prague in 1968, Chiapas in 1994 and Rojava in 2012 (among others).
In this conception the aim of standing in elections is not to hope to win them but merely to use the public profile that doing so brings to the party in order to denounce the present system and advocate for more working class people to join in the efforts to ‘build power’.
However, a reformist could interpret these points merely as saying that the party wants to attract left wing votes in order to demonstrate how popular left wing ideas are, which will cause the Labour leadership to realise they have drifted too far to the right and start shifting left again to chase these votes.
Or of course, they could just assume they are contesting elections in order to become the government but recognise that ‘voting alone’ won’t achieve it, as they would also need more people to join unions so that they can fund election campaigns for the new party.
Reformists could interpret the phrase about ‘building power’ in the workplaces as simply meaning telling people to join the existing bureaucratised trades unions. Likewise they could interpret ‘building power in communities’ as being about the party aiming to win seats in local councils.
This difference in conception of the role of standing in elections could have very real practical implications. Standing in elections costs a lot of money, time and energy.
If we don’t really aim to win then we may just spend a little bit of our resources on it: turning up to hustings to spread ideas, doing a few media appearances etc – whilst spending most of our energy on our concrete activism in communities and workplaces.
However, if we really want to win elections, this will require almost the entire focus of the organisation and the vast bulk of it’s resources. So which is it?
3. What is the structure of Transform going to be?
At present Transform is run by a steering committee mainly made up of the leadership of the different parties who came up with the idea: Left Unity, PAL, the Breakthrough party, and Liverpool Community Independents, along with some other individuals who presumably were added due to personal connections.
It says on the FAQ of the website that at some point when this steering group will be replaced with one elected in accordance with a constitution voted for by the members, and also mentions a ‘founding conference’.
This raises many more questions than it answers. What form will the conference take? Who will decide on the agenda? How will the constitution be written? Will members have a say in writing it or merely voting to approve it?
In the time between now and when the constitution is created, what is the nature of the relationship between the steering committee and the local groups?
Related to that last question is the long term question of whether the party will be a federation, a centralised hierarchical organisation or some hybrid combination of the two?
The first point of the 10 points describes the party as being “of and for the working class in all its diversity”. To truly be a party of the whole class means being a mass party which is extremely democratic and free of unelected bureaucracy so that no-one is able to ‘sell out’ the membership.
It also means being rooted in the struggles of the working class: getting involved in working class community issues and workplace disputes, and letting anyone who joins the party as a result feel welcome and like their voices are heard from day one.
For both these reasons I favour a high degree of autonomy for local groups. It is people living in local areas who are best placed know what activities to prioritise, based on whatever the local issues are and whatever the local level of working class political consciousness and organisation is. Thus, groups must be quite autonomous in order to genuinely merge themselves into the struggles of the working classes in their areas.
A system in which local groups have a high degree of autonomy is also a very democratic system. It presupposes a federal system in which the local groups elect instantly-recallable delegates to regional bodies, who might then elect delegates to a national body, for example (there may be more layers in practice).
This creates an unbroken bottom-up ‘chain of command’ from the individual member right the way up to the highest bodies of the organisation. This means an individual can propose an idea to their local group, and if they agree they can have the same idea raised by a delegate to a regional body, who can then vote to have it raised by the national leadership.
This means good ideas can float to the top. But it also means that bad ideas don’t have to trickle down from the top to the bottom.
If a party leadership is elected once every few years and is only accountable to a yearly conference, this is not democracy. It is bollocks
For individual members to only have a chance to vote on policy once a year by passively voting Yes or No to a set of motions, is almost as disempowering as only being able to vote for your MP once every 5 years by first-past-the-post.
If the actually day to day running of a national organisation is left to a committee of people who are not instantly recallable by the membership, then in the worst case scenario they can become corrupted. But even in the best case scenario they are likely to come up with ideas that not all members agree with or think are relevant to their local situation, and impose them on members, causing alienation and resentment.
Conclusion
None of this is written in order to attack anyone on the steering committee, rather to simply point out issues which need to be resolved.
Even if the party turns out to be quite centralised and reformist with an aim mainly to do with winning elections rather than anything else, I may still decide to be a member of it.
After all, I was a member of the Labour Party under Corbyn, which was certainly not the kind of decentralised, revolutionary activist organisation which I believe needs to exist.
I believe that revolutionaries should be members of mass working class parties where they exist, so if transform become a mass working class party, I will be part of it, arguing for revolution from within. But I would prefer to know in advance.
More importantly, Transform is not going to become a mass working class party if the structure and strategy are inadequate, so even if my ideas on both turn out to be incorrect I hope at least to contribute to a constructive debate on them.
Raz O'Connor 