Organising for Popular Power

(This is the introduction to our submission to TWT, alongside our five practical proposals for party organising, focused on workers and trade unions, renters and tenant unions, social infrastructure & culture, anti-imperialism and party branches.)

Millions of us in Britain are feeling the indignity of a broken system, from seeing our cost of living rise, while our wages and benefits are kept down, to watching a genocide unfold in Gaza with the backing of our imperialist government. Hundreds of thousands of people looked to Your Party as a source of hope, knowing that those of us who want to fight for a better world need to build a mass organisation. Tens of thousands started to join, before long-running disputes within the leadership blew up in a shameful demonstration of egoism, shuttering the launch, starting legal action, botching the relaunch and almost fatally crushing confidence in the project. Now the promise of Your Party feels fragile: can it still be what we hoped? Will it all collapse within a few months? Should we just give up and do something else?

Whilst we should take seriously the rise of Zack Polanski’s leftwing leadership of the Greens, as well as the impressive work of Greens Organise, ultimately, we say: yes, it is fragile; yes, it might collapse into disappointment, but yes, Your Party can still be the mass left party that we need. Only if we fight for it, though. The risks are higher than ever, and we cannot lie to ourselves about that. But the opportunities are there. This is not the time to give up or wait and see, but to organise.

All of us who want to see Your Party become a mass party that builds, organises and articulates working class power and struggles, not just in election periods but across communities, workplaces, and the streets, need to get organised to make it happen. And we have a proposal for how we do it.

Who are we?

We are a group of around 80 Your Party supporters involved in tenant and community organising, trade unions, Palestine solidarity and antiracist organising, climate, migrant and transfeminist activism, who are against capitalism and for a socialist horizon. Everyone involved is united by their:

1. Commitment to left wing political organising beyond parliament / NGO spheres; 
2. Commitment to building a working class political alternative, rooted in the fabric of working class life, oriented towards nurturing class power, and challenging elections to win.

In September, we attended a two-day weekend event where we discussed how we could use the opportunity of Your Party to advance class struggle, and ensure that practical basebuilding work is written into its DNA. Pooling our diverse political experience, we developed ideas around the following practical questions. In the coming months, we hope to action these ideas at a local branch level and work to get them taken up within the national party (these are detailed at the end of this document):

• How can we develop branches as nerve centres for building popular power?
• How can we use party branches to build social infrastructure that supports working class life and struggle in local communities?
• How can we develop the party and its branches to strengthen the labour movement and advance rank-and-file worker power?
• How can we use party branches to strengthen tenant & community organising? 
• How can we build anti-imperialist politics & organising in the party at all levels?

These are not fixed plans, and we acknowledge our limitations as a relatively small group of people. The intention is that they will evolve as more people join our tendency, contribute their own experience and knowledge, and as the political situation develops. 

Power to the people: What is a basebuilding tendency? 

Firstly, we share an agreement that if we want Your Party to achieve any lasting change, electoral or otherwise, it will need to be meaningfully rooted in our communities. This means building local branches from the ground up and equipping them with the tools needed to advance local organising efforts, not just rehashing the kind of ‘community organising’ attempted by Labour in the past, which had no real grassroots base. We know we cannot rely on the leadership of the party to deliver this, because they don’t have the knowledge or experience. They are Westminster politicians first and foremost. If we want a different kind of party, we’re going to have to build it ourselves. We emerged as a group partly because we saw this knowledge vacuum within the party and felt that we, the organised left and those in local branches, are better placed to transform local branches into nerve centres for class struggle, rather than just appendages to the electoral machine. Equally, without being immersed in a network of social movements and working class struggles, there is nothing holding our elected politicians to account. 

Secondly, we are in agreement that if socialism is our horizon, then elections alone will not be enough to win. We agree that electoral work should be subordinated to class power, and so we are committed to continually asking: how can tenant organisations, rank-and-file trade union networks, antiracist organisations, Palestine solidarity networks, and other institutions benefit from the party? Ideally, we would achieve a synergistic relationship between the party and our grassroots organisations – because we recognise that both are necessary for advancing towards a socialist future. 

Why do we want to form a tendency?

If we want our practical proposals to be adopted by the party, we will need to fight for them within the internal party apparatus. This will require us to grow our numbers and have our own simple democratic and recruitment processes, which requires a degree of formal organisation. This might seem counterintuitive, because we don’t want to take people away from their practical organising work, but we hope to keep any bureaucracy to an absolute minimum. 

We expect members of this tendency to be rooted in their local branch, and involve its members in the practical organising work we’re suggesting. This will be the primary mechanism for disseminating our ideas. This tendency isn’t about advancing our organisational interests or recruiting people to our ranks. It also isn’t primarily about fighting for perfect positions or questions of policy, though it will likely be necessary for us to organise for certain policy positions within the party if we want our ideas to be adopted. But the key goal will always be the advancement of practical organising work that builds class power and moves us towards socialism. Naturally, we do not know how this proposed tendency will evolve in the future, as more people join and the political situation develops, but for now, that is the stated aim.

Next steps

In the period between now and the Your Party founding conference, we will open up for membership, expand the number of people in our grouping, and build a tendency capable of intervening in the party at all levels. The following steps are an outline of how we get there, with flexibility to deal with the unpredictable dynamics we have come to expect from this process:

1. We will have a founding meeting online, before the end of the month, and there we will elect a temporary committee to take responsibility for calling meetings and coordinating our work until the founding conference;
2. The committee, provisionally made up of 9 people, will be tasked with organising all member meetings and ensuring the creation of plans and processes that will allow us to implement the strategy of the tendency, for intervening in branches and the founding conference; 
3. All members should be able to shape strategy and direction, and the committee should not be seeking to replace the work of members driving this work, but merely to help convene this work and make sure things keep ticking along. In the new structure, all-member votes at meetings will be the sovereign form of decision-making, with a simple majority needed to pass resolutions, etc. The elected committee will be recallable by a simple majority. All those putting themselves forward must declare any organisational affiliations, and no more than 3/9 should be from the same organisation;
4. We should continue to use and develop our existing working groups (around each of our proposals), and establish new ones where necessary to implement our strategy and interventions in the party in the short-medium term. Any member should be able to join any working group; 
5. We will use our working groups and all-member meetings to discuss and plan how we will disseminate our ideas through local branches, and prepare our interventions for the regional assemblies and the founding conference, not for the purpose of growing our tendency, but as a way of ensuring that local branches are primarily geared towards basebuilding activities in pursuit of building class power, and fighting for the party to take up this approach too.

Points of unity

These are initial points of unity that should be revisited and developed democratically by the members of the tendency. 

Political principles

1. Power to the people;
   Socialism is only possible through the struggle of the working classes to own and democratically control the means of production and the organisation of society for people, not profit.
2. Freedom for all peoples dominated by empire;
   We deserve a world where all people are able to determine their own lives free from the scourge of imperialism, whether through war, finance or trade. Socialists in Britain have a responsibility to weaken British militarism, NATO, Zionism, and all cogs of the British imperialist machine.
3. Leave no-one behind;
   Solidarity with all oppressed groups, including but not limited to anti-racism and migrant solidarity, queer and trans liberation, and disability justice.

Organising principles

4. They won’t hand us the keys to the castle – we need to organise our people;
   Electoralism without class power is vulnerable to absorption into the state, so it is crucial that we build social struggles against exploitation and oppression from the local to the international level, and popular power across the working class in the process.
5. Radical change comes from working-class people, not the state;
   We will push for the party’s electoral work to always be subordinated to strengthening class power, not about getting into government by any means possible.
6. Build a network of experienced organisers that can imagine, advance and defend socialist transformation;
   The party should build the workers’ movement, tenants’ movement and anti-imperialist movement, but not seek to absorb or control them. It must advance and articulate the demands from every aspect of class struggle. 

Internal principles

7. We are open, democratic and non-sectarian within our group, and commit to struggle for these principles in the party alongside others.
8. We will experiment, make mistakes and reflect openly and collectively.
9. We will be good to each other – interact with respect, take disagreements in good faith and challenge oppression – and we will have a good time.
10. We will dissolve, or if appropriate, merge into another group, if we are no longer doing useful work in line with our objectives, or if there are better ways of doing so.

Submitted by

Tom C, Kavian K, Jonas M, Lotta P, Neel S, Zara D, Siobhan D, Alex WK, Jamie S, Josh V, Charlie M, Ian A, Connor M, Laura H, Katie N, Sita B, Safieh K, Paula D, Elyem C, Tanzil C, Ben B, Tumu J, Tomi A, Jan B, Alessio L, Cat I, Hajera B, Hamza R, Robin T, Rosie CR, Bekah H on behalf of the Organising For Popular Power group

Practical proposals from key streams of work

We want to share some of the breadth and depth of our thinking and discussions about the practical work ahead, so our working groups have put forward five documents covering different areas of work. This doesn’t cover everything, and there are unresolved issues and questions in here, too. This is just the start, and we hope the ideas here are useful and inspiring to many, whether you join us or not:

1. Proposal 1: Your Party, Workers and Unions 7
2. Proposal 2: Tenant Union Organising With A Mass left Party 13
3. Proposal 3: Social infrastructure for Popular Power 18
4. Proposal 4: For Anti-Imperialist Politics in the New-Left Party 27
5. Proposal 5: Your Party Branches That Build Popular Power 31