Organising for Popular Power

(This article was included in our submission to TWT 2025 alongside 5 practical proposals for party organising, focused on workers and trade unions, renters and tenant unions, social infrastructure & culture, anti-imperialism and party branches.)

Why do we need branches committed to building popular power?

The year is 2030. A Reform UK-led government is in power. The Labour Party has been displaced by Your Party and the Greens in constituencies across the country. The Faragist administration is in one crisis after another, confronted with mass social movements opposing its far right agenda. At the heart of these movement eruptions – and the struggles of workers, tenants, left electoral campaigns and community infrastructure initiatives – is the work done by people who have spent the five years since Your Party’s inception turning branches into nerve centres for building popular power in their local communities. It is these efforts that have put us in a stronger position to combat an insurgent far right inside and outside of power.

The scenario outlined is an optimistic one. The existence of a meaningful opposition against the bad things to come, is contingent on developing popular power initiatives from below, where we live, making our branches the centre of those efforts. The spread of Your Party proto-branches in places across Birmingham, Liverpool, Edinburgh, Glasgow, Stoke-on-Trent, Cardiff, London and beyond, each involving hundreds of people, connecting with thousands more, is an incredible opportunity. Some of these local centres are already planning listening exercises, solidarity work and outreach. 

In the face of a political and economic system that has been designed to maximise profit, prioritise the interests of the wealthy few and keep power in the hands of corporate elites, it won’t be enough to elect left-wing representatives to government. To win real change, Your Party branches must enable people to act together and leverage working class power to bring about better living conditions and transform power relations in society.

What will be possible if we have branches that build popular power?

If Your Party branches build strong democratic cultures; work towards rebuilding the social fabric of our communities; organise to improve people’s material conditions; and create infrastructure that supports more and more people to find their agency and step into political struggle.

Then Your Party members and their local communities will build the power needed to transform their living conditions; push back against the rise of the far right; and hold the elected party leadership accountable to its socialist agenda.

Because building relationships across difference and taking collective action develops the trust, solidarity, and political agency people need to improve their lives, resist far-right narratives and power, and hold leaders accountable. Without that, our elected politicians will not deliver real change.

What does a branch that builds popular power look like?

Core principles: 

• Active membership that is outward-facing, within our communities, engaging non-members. We get shit done in our communities (not just spending ages in meetings);
• Politics isn’t something that should happen to us, it’s something that we should all have a part in realising;
• Get out of the left bubble and welcome people who don’t already think like us — shift from ‘what we already agree on’ to ‘what we can win together’;
• Branches that are accountable to people and social movements locally, and are capable of holding our leaders accountable, including having a role in recallability and mandatory reselection;
• Accessible spaces where everyone is welcome in their wholeness;
• Member-led and democratic;
• Reflective, always making time to assess what we have done, what has gone right or wrong, and why.

❌ Branches for politician power	✅ Branches for popular power
– Starts with the leader – Elected representatives dominate the agenda – Is inward-facing – Focuses on the party – Develops people as door knockers for elections who follow instructions – Endless internal meetings – A few people feel ‘smart’ and most people feel ‘dumb’ – A few people have the ‘right politics’ and many people have the ‘wrong’ politics	– Starts with you and each member – Popular power strategy prioritised over electoral inclinations – Is outward-facing – Develops people as organisers who help to build/shape struggles – Focuses on life and social change – Public meetings and outreach – People know each other well and have meaningful connections – People construct a new radical politics together over time

How can YP branches build popular power? (strategy)

We need a clear strategic direction, whilst supporting autonomy and decentralisation. Key ways to do this include: having a clear purpose and goals, whilst giving autonomy over how those will be met; offering a clear rationale for the strategic direction and acknowledging some of the resistance to the approach (eg: not all branches need to organise around a local campaign and develop social infrastructure and run political education events and have an electoral strategy); and supporting people to develop the competencies needed to meet the goals. 

What are the goals of YP branches? How are they supported & held accountable towards meeting them? What are the minimum expectations that we might have of branches? 

• Mapping, supporting and embedding themselves in working class struggles, and facilitating connections between social struggles around them;
• Initiating campaigns and struggles based on concerns raised through listener exercises and deeper immersion in working class communities;
• Running accessible, anticapitalist political education;
• Democratically run;
• Supporting the development of local social infrastructure.

What could some of the branches do?

• Mapping: Who are the groups in your area (foodbanks, community centres, groups organised around an issue)? Are they potential supporters we need to activate? Are they already actively involved in community struggle? Who are the power holders in the area?
• Listening: What do people in your area care about? What issues are people motivated to take action on? What are people’s needs that aren’t currently being met? (eg childcare, access to food, access to healthcare)
  • Door-knocking
  • Chat with local orgs / local leaders
  • Regular stalls
• Assemblies: organising meetings with different campaigns, social movement groups and community members.
• Organising to improve people’s material conditions: moving that listening into action. Is there an easy win as a way to build momentum and develop people’s skills and political consciousness? What social infrastructure can we build locally to meet the needs we’ve identified? What local campaigns can the branch give capacity, platforms and resources to? On the latter, it is key to be supporting, not substituting, these local campaigns. If they don’t exist, branches should be supporting members and non-members to create them, but without subordinating these campaigns (or e.g tenants unions) to the party, but supporting people to build them up as independent organisations.
• Political education: branches should run political education for members and non-members. Our education system does not equip people to think critically about the world around them, and limits theoretical understanding to those who have the time, resources, and backgrounds. With this in mind, branches should be aiming to run political education that might include elements like:
  • Introductory political education about why things are the way they are, e.g. why is the housing market fucked? Why does politics not serve ordinary people? How have people resisted gentrification and war before? Why you should join your trade union. Where possible, this should be participatory and co-created by the members and periphery of the branch, and we should avoid excessive use of top-down formats – these do not empower people and often create an alienating division between teacher and student.
  • Education oriented around local struggles, understanding the specific local context (political, economic and social), linking to the needs of those struggles and demands around them.
  • Deeper/more complex political education, e.g what is capitalism? What is imperialism? Socialism 101. These will need to be fleshed out, but ideally have some kind of systematic political education programme that all branches can use, with support from the national party to resource it. 
  • With all of this, local branches should be aiming to help bring people’s thinking and confidence in their thinking, in a non-dogmatic, non-puritan, non-alienating way.
• Identifying organic leaders: within the branch and in its periphery, more experienced activists should be looking to identify and empower those who have passion, who inspire people around them and bring people together, who have sharp minds, etc., especially from backgrounds underrepresented traditionally on the left or within a particular branch.
• Digital work: having a comprehensive digital infrastructure that cultivates organising habits, outreach, one-to-one organising, and mapping; engage in local online infrastructure (e.g. participate in local community Facebook groups); build video-making into events; give space for artists to design local branding; help shape local narratives by putting out content with members, local leaders and other trusted local people; and find online to off-line pathways.
• Social infrastructure/spaces for cultural reproduction: there is more of this in the O4PP proposal around social infrastructure, but at a basic level, branches should be aiming to cultivate the kinds of infrastructure and spaces that have been eroded from our lives: places where people can go to have political meetings or just chill for free, events where people can create, learn, eat, and enjoy culture, art and more. This should not just be for members, but for the whole community – this way, the branch can become part of the fabric of the local community.

How could branches be structured to support a basebuilding culture?

Finding the structure that serves our purpose of building power will take some experimenting. While some groups are organising themselves based on the old style (e.g. Labour Party), many others are trying different approaches (e.g. assembly-based and hub/spoke model). Orienting towards building popular power means that we need to build structures that support mass participation and activate more and more people into taking responsibility for the life and work of the branch.

How could it work?

• Sortition for branches organising committees (to avoid take-over by pre-existing groups in the initial months of branch formation) and rotating roles;
• Building units like working groups within the branches around key activities and issues (to avoid everyone sitting in boring meetings or only focusing on the electoral fight);
• In cities, strategising for a 6-8 month process of having time set aside at each event for local area units to get together, catch up, get to know one another, and develop a local area culture before splitting off into local/neighbourhood branches. It’s challenging doing everything on a city-wide basis, but also throwing new branches in at the deep end immediately could go badly, so trying to balance the two is crucial;
• In our dreams, there would be a physical space for local branches to be rooted in, where meetings could happen, and where mutual aid/social infrastructure efforts could be based;
• Setting a rhythm of regular outward-looking activity that creates a basebuilding culture, e.g a weekly stall, door-knocking session, or monthly phone banking session.

Open questions:

• What do strong democratic structures look like at a local level of the party?
• How can a branch pivot to basebuilding and support mass participation in political struggle?
• What structures support active participation and leadership development in all areas of branch life?
• How can we invite people into a radical, shared politics?
• Is there a role for a militant cadre structure?

What movement culture do we need to build mass power?

• What can branches do intentionally to develop strong relationships between members and build trust?;
• How are meetings & organising spaces run? Facilitation style, experimenting with activities to ensure everyone can speak, such as breakout groups of different sizes, with food, childcare, space for collective joy and socials, regularly reflecting on culture and dynamics; 
• How are people supported into roles and to develop their leadership?;
• How can branches feel like a space that everyone has a stake in and ownership of, where people across different backgrounds and levels of confidence and experience all feel empowered to speak?;
• How do we navigate our basebuilding ambitions in political cultures that are either deeply incentivised towards mobilisational work, or overbearingly electoralist?

What do we need from Your Party leadership to make this a reality?

• Money: Building popular power takes money! A proportion of our party dues should come back to the branches and the party should provide additional financial support to branches in areas where there is lower density/people have less money. Branches should also be encouraged to have their own money-raising facilities and practices, such as having a local membership structure and fundraising for projects;
• Resources for training & skills development: e.g facilitation, conflict resolution, sexual violence/domestic abuse frameworks, relational and coalition-building and organising 101, and leadership development programmes;
• Resourcing branch political education: ideally a comprehensive political education programme, oriented around what is helpful for building power, class consciousness and confidence, that all branches can roll-out that critically also has flexibility to amend and restructure according to local needs and local struggles;
• A two-way relationship between local branches and the party: with resourcing and enough direction given from national that the party is politically and strategically coherent, but enough autonomy for local branches to be able to adapt effectively to their local context. Local branches should be able to feed in meaningfully to what the party is doing – what this looks like needs to be expanded on. 

Open questions:

• How can branches and the base exert power over the leadership?

Next steps: how can we make this happen

• Joining O4PP when we officially form;
• Building support for this approach among existing proto-branches: developing this proposal and popularising it, hosting open meetings with branches, sending O4PP members to branches to speak about the basebuilding/popular power orientation, forming ongoing relationships with members and committee members in proto-branches;
• Intervening in the founding process, e.g interventions at regional assemblies and conference motions to institute this kind of orientation into the party.