At the end of 2023 I wrote a few posts in which I mentioned going to meetings of a new political party, Transform. In the end I chose not to join Transform, nor any other new socialist party, for the reasons below:
For one thing, I decided quite a while ago that I would be voting Green at the next general and local elections, so I could not in good faith join a party that is going to run against the Greens. I will not join the Green party either, but in the present context in which we are facing a Labour landslide election victory under a right-wing leadership, a massive vote for the Greens is the clearest way for EVERYONE to the left of Starmer to send a clear message that we do not support him.
The only other party big enough to be a contender for this would be George Galloway’s Workers Party. I personally hope that many socially conservative but economically left wing people vote for him rather than for the Tories or Reform. His views on migration alone make it impossible for people genuinely on the Left to vote for him, however, even if we may share some of his opinions on Western Imperialism.
After the dust has settled following the next election there will inevitably be some kind of regrouping on the Left. Some of the socialist parties which have formed will merge with others or split. Some socialists who have joined the Greens or the Workers Party may leave again, or it may become clear that on or the other of them is actually the Left’s best hope, unlikely as that may be. There is also the question of those on the Left who remain in the Labour party and what they choose to do.
It would be foolish of me to nail my colours to the mast about which potential future faction I would have loyalty to, and I would prefer to remain objective until then. In any case, my children are still too young for me to have as much free time to commit to any cause as I would like.
However, I still believe that there is a need for a new mass party of the working class in Britain (not including Northern Ireland, which should be reunited with Ireland). The nucleus of such a party must be built by people within the existing Left who have experience of organisation and serious class politics. A democratic structure, common set of principles and overall strategy must be found which is capable of making such a party grow from being a small organisation of activists to a genuinely mass party in which large sections of the working class is actively involved in decision making.
I hope the conditions for such a project will be more favourable under the Starmer government than they are presently. The prospect of five more years of austerity under a Labour party in which the Left and Unions have no power will surely focus minds. There will always be sectarianism and folly but hopefully wiser heads will prevail.
A mass party must be a broad church including a range of opinion, and that range must be broad enough to include Revolutionary Socialism as its Left Wing without being broad enough to include any explicitly pro-capitalist tendency on its Right. The Right of the party must be a Social Democracy of Gradualist Reformist Socialist sort which seeks to abolish capitalism progressively over hundreds of years rather than the Revisionist Social Democracy which does not seek to abolish capitalism at all.
Of course, at present the majority of working class people do not believe capitalism needs to be abolished at all. This is why a political party needs to be able to clearly argue why it does, and to be able to link this broader analysis with every concrete material issue affecting working class people today. The party can only demonstrating that we have a correct analysis by actually winning concrete material struggles, and publicly advertising that we are doing so due to our correct analysis in ways which cut through the mainstream media propaganda levelled against us. The more we win, and the more we are proved right, the more people will join us.
Only then will the working class stand a chance of becoming conscious of its true interests and capable of fighting for them as a united bloc: to carry out the social revolution which abolishes the bourgeois state and establishes the democratic republic that is the initial form of the Dictatorship of the Proletariat – the transition stage to a post-capitalist society during which the working class democratically controls society and progressively creates the conditions for a classless and stateless future society.
Raz O'Connor 