Chris Nineham assess the need for a new party and the role of the Left as Labour pushes to the right

Big questions of political organisation are being raised by spreading war, austerity and a spectacularly failing Labour Party. The first point to make is that there is a big left in this country, whatever its weaknesses. It formed the activist base for Corbynism, it coalesced again around the short-lived 2022 strike wave, and it has been at the heart of today’s unprecedented Palestine movement. 

It also proved its worth in last year’s general election by helping to turn out the biggest ever left-of-Labour vote and getting five pro-Palestine independents elected, with others narrowly missing. The problem is that apart from these moments of obvious focus, the left is fragmented and lacking direction.

There is also a wider radicalisation amongst working people, a deep-seated sense that things have gone very wrong. A glance at the opinion polls shows millions believe schools and the NHS need massive refunding, that there is too much inequality and that the rich should pay much more taxes. About Palestine, partly because of the strength of the movement, over 70% of people in Britain believe there should be a ceasefire.  

Starmer’s Labour Party is utterly remote from working people and their concerns. Labour has never adequately represented working people, but at least at various points, it has responded to pressure from below to bring in reforms that improved working-class life. Corbyn’s leadership of Labour threatened to unleash popular opposition to the priorities of the ruling class, which is why the neoliberal right wing of the party teamed up with the establishment to defeat Corbyn and his supporters and drove them out. Starmer may have talked about change, but his priority has been to root out every remnant of Corbynism in the party. This effort has been focused on foreign policy but has changed party policy across the board. 

Labour’s mantra about growth is a reheating of the neoliberal idea that the state needs to encourage private investment to deal with economic problems. Starmer is abandoning the basic commitment of social democracy to intervene to make working-class lives better. Blair’s tune ‘things can only get better’ has been replaced by ‘things have to get worse’. An estimated quarter of a million people have left Labour as a result.

Starmer won the election on a reduced turnout because of hatred of the Tories and the split in the right-wing vote. One danger now – and, of course, an important argument for a new left party – is that the radical right can end up channelling the anger people feel against the rich, austerity, war and an entitled Westminster elite. Nigel Farage’s Reform Party, in particular, is very effectively building on disenchantment with Westminster politics. It can gain support because Labour is delivering nothing for working people while being associated with empty, elite identity politics. Labour simultaneously promotes supposed ‘diversity’, panders to the right’s anti-immigrant politics and presides over policies that erode workers’ living standards. You couldn’t create better conditions for the growth of a hard right if you wanted to. 

Getting organised

For Marxists, the response must come in two registers. Faced with an establishment pretty much united in support of Israeli genocide, authorities criminalising protestors and a government wining and dining with the rich as they impose austerity and the world burns, significant numbers of people are drawing the conclusion that there is something wrong with the system itself. One recent poll, for example, found socialism is more popular (38% in favour and 36% against) than capitalism (only 30% in favour and 45% against).

The radicalisation is particularly strong amongst people involved in the protests and demonstrations. As Marx wrote, ‘it is the process of changing the world that people change themselves.’ Some of these people will be open to joining a revolutionary organisation. This is important. All history tells us that even in a deep crisis, workers don’t move evenly to revolutionary politics and uniformly embrace the idea that they themselves are the key to change.  

Capitalism drives people to resist, but it also makes people feel powerless most of the time, reinforcing the idea that change can only come from above, through parliament, or that it isn’t possible. Even in a revolutionary crisis there are debates between those who believe a revolution is necessary and those who maintain some faith in the old parliamentary system, however broken. Therefore, it’s important for revolutionaries to organise in the here and now and seek to extend their influence in all circumstances. 

But what type of revolutionary organisation do we need? It must be an organisation that puts class at its centre. That means being rooted in the day-to-day struggles of working people. It must be based on action. If action is central to winning people to revolution, then it must be central to what revolutionaries do. Marxism, as developed by Marx, is not about emphasising differences with other people on the left or proposing socialist ideas from the sidelines.  

While Marxists have a distinctive set of ideas, Marx’s practical starting point was building the widest possible unity against our enemies. As he and Engels wrote in the Communist Manifesto, ‘Communists have no interests separate and apart from the proletariat as a whole’.  The left stands for the fight against every form of oppression and exploitation. Its politics are informed by the great liberation struggles of the 1960s and 70s, which are now labelled by much of the right as ‘woke’. We must, however, be able to distinguish between the genuine fight for liberation and falling in behind the token calls for diversity which are preached by our rulers while they do nothing to foster real equality in practice. 

So we have to stand against all forms of racism, sexism and homophobia while making clear that our agenda has little to do with the tokenism about rights or identities, which is easily accommodated by a ruling class that likes to promote diversity while hammering working people. The Tories, for example, use diversity in their leadership to oppose policies which would genuinely benefit black people, women and LGBT people. The role of a revolutionary party should be to show in theory and in practice how oppressions are linked, that the liberation of one depends on the liberation of all, and with the ending of a system based on divide and rule. 

The question is, how to overcome the inevitable unevenness in working-class consciousness that impedes such militant unity? A revolutionary party is the first part of the solution and the essential prerequisite for any effective struggle against the system. But as the Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky argued: 

‘There is no basis whatever for the expectation that in any single country – in countries with an old capitalist culture even less than backward ones – the Communist party can succeed in occupying such an undisputed and absolutely commanding position in the workers’ ranks, prior to the revolutionary overturn’.

This is why, at the time of the Russian Revolution, the united front became central to revolutionaries’ strategic thinking. The united front is the idea of revolutionaries joining forces with non-revolutionaries to fight over particular issues. Its importance holds right up to the seizure of power itself. As Trotsky argues, the Soviets or workers’ councils, which organised the insurrection in Russia in October 1917, were ‘the highest form of the united front’.  

The revolutionary organisation then has two main tasks: First to initiate, support and develop actions with other forces to its right. Secondly, to argue for the most militant tactics within the movement and to explain to workers the significance of their actions. In the process, links can be made between struggles and the wider task of dismantling the system. In this process, both effective mass movements and a revolutionary core can grow in strength. Hopefully, too, in these struggles, the fragmentation of the revolutionary left can begin to be overcome. 

A new mass party? 

The demand for a new broad party of the left goes way beyond people who currently see themselves as revolutionaries. A new anti-neoliberal and anti-war party would help popularise basic socialist arguments, organise the left and return more left-wing MPs to parliament, people who could use their voices to build opposition to austerity and war. 

In supporting the idea of a new party, socialists need to insist that it must be radical. First and foremost, this is because Britain is utterly broken, and change is only possible with an assault on neoliberal policies and militarism. But there is also an electoral point here. Corbyn generated popular enthusiasm and a big leap in Labour’s vote in 2017 because he looked like he was going to do things differently. Starmer is a dismally uninspiring individual, but Labour’s polls are plummeting mainly because it stands for continuity with the Tories rather than any real change.

At the same time, the Corbyn experience is a warning. If it’s true that a new centre-left party would be a waste of time and effort, it is also the case that the British state will move against any elected politicians that challenge its interests. 

A new party must not simply focus on elections, it must play its part in mobilising in the streets and the workplaces. One of the mistakes of the European radical left has been to vacate the streets in the first flush of electoral success. As a result, the promise of last decade’s great anti-austerity movements was frittered away.

Instead of sustaining links with the movements that often propelled them into office, too often, left politicians and parties have made deals with centrists and kowtowed to big business. The result has been electoral stagnation and, in Greece, the ignominious collapse of Syriza in 2016 in the face of the demands of the EU and the European Central Bank.

A new organisation would also have to take internationalism seriously. Especially in a country with a colonial history like Britain’s, foreign and domestic policy are intertwined. It is impossible to take on the power of the British establishment without challenging their militarism and addiction to foreign adventures.

At least since Tony Blair, foreign wars have been at the heart of British political debate. And the subsequent decades should have put to bed the idea that the mass of the population doesn’t care about foreign policy. Anti-war arguments were a defining feature of Jeremy Corbyn’s rise and the two biggest demonstrations in living memory, the 2003 Iraq War demo and last year’s November 11 Palestine march, have both been about foreign policy.  

If the revolutionary left should be encouraging the formation of a broader party, this is in addition to building a revolutionary party, not as a substitute for building one.  The rightward pressures of electoralism are always strong and grow in proportion to parliamentary success. It will take a firm, principled socialist organisation on the ground to ensure that any new formation doesn’t give in to pressure and disappoint its base. Independent Marxist organisations would also be necessary to relate to wider struggles and fight for clarity on key political questions of the day. 

We have seen all too clearly from a generation of experience across Europe what a left electoral project without an active and confident revolutionary component looks like. It looks like the current state of Syriza, Die Linke, Podemos, and the Italian left. It looks like failure and demoralisation. In the next round, new parties need to be more radical in themselves and contain an explicitly revolutionary wing.

Difficulties and dangers

The conditions for a new left party are in place, and the need is urgent, but there are serious difficulties. The left is divided and diffuse, and none of the different electoral initiatives appear to have enough support to lead the way. 

The left’s effort at the last election was marred in many places by multiple candidates competing. In my constituency in East London, there were five ‘Palestine plus’ candidates, none of whom did very well. At the very minimum, we need to follow the best practice of holding movement assemblies to select the best candidate democratically.  

There is also a strong localism in some quarters and an accompanying belief in waiting and seeing what emerges from below. Clearly, we need to gather together candidates with a real local base, and local conditions need to be taken into account. But politics is primarily a national business and any real challenge to Labour demands a national structure with an accessible, clear political programme. 

The fact that the five independents already in parliament are working together is a hopeful sign. If anyone is able to give an effective lead, it is them.  The next general election is a way off, and given this fragmentation, the minimum we can do is to get good left-wing pro-Palestine councillors and, if possible, MPs elected wherever we can and take any unity initiatives that seem possible. 

In the meantime, the left needs to work together to build the movements of resistance. It was the massive Palestine demonstrations that created the impetus for the ‘Palestine-plus’ electoral successes. Jeremy Corbyn would not have been the leader of the Labour Party without the great anti-war and anti-austerity protests in the years before. We must continue to confront the drive of the war, to take on the far right and to work towards rebuilding the anti-austerity movement in new conditions. Showing our strength in the streets and the unions is crucial. It’s also the quickest route to forcing through a political reorganisation. 

Reposted from Prometheus