In this interview, reposted here from Prometheus Journal, Harry Holmes talked to Laura and Safieh from the tendency. You can read their submission to The World Transformed assemblies here and sign up to them here. This interview was conducted on the 21st October.
HH – Could you summarise what Organising for Popular Power (O4PP) argues for?
L – We want Your Party to be a mass party that’s capable not only of winning elections, but of helping build an organised class power that can break the back of capitalism in this country and go some way towards shaping a socialist society. Our arguments start from this premise. Your Party branches need to be sites that provide infrastructure, mobilise and train people, and form beautiful community relationships for our organisations and movements. In the short term, we need to strengthen the capacity of multiracial class power organisations to fight the immediate battles against the bosses, landlords and financiers ripping apart our lives. In the long term, we need to practice running our societies, from food distribution to healthcare, from the ground up.
We have to avoid a rehashing of the kinds of community organising attempted by Labour in the past, which had no real grassroots base and was a superficial add-on to electoral strategy. Realistically, the leadership of Your Party don’t have the sort of knowledge to make that happen, so we emerged as a group partly because we felt there was a vacuum there – a knowledge vacuum. We feel that the organised left and those in local branches are in a better place to start building branches from the ground up and encoding the kinds of organising efforts that genuinely build class power into the DNA of the party.
An example of something we want is for Your Party members to have access to a cross-cutting national training programme to skill up thousands of new organisers in the kinds of activity we’re advocating for. We want branches to be able to deliver that training themselves based on the needs coming up within the branch, and depending on the local ecology of left groups and social infrastructure.
We also feel that without being meaningfully rooted in social movements and working class struggles, there’s nothing holding our elected politicians to account, and nothing building the class power that we actually need to fight for socialism. Our position is that electoral politics should be subordinated to the class struggle, not the other way around. This isn’t to say that we will ignore elections – they will be a crucial terrain on which we organise. But the party’s political programme and strategy should be formulated, applied and revised through cycles of member-led struggle and organising in neighbourhoods and communities. So that means asking: how can tenant organisations, rank-and-file trade union networks, antiracist organisations, Palestine solidarity networks, and other institutions benefit from the party in their own right? Really what we want is to achieve a synergistic relationship between the party and our grassroots organisations – because we recognise that both are necessary for advancing towards a socialist future.
We expect members of our tendency to be rooted in their local branch and to be involved in the practical organising efforts that we’re suggesting. This will be the main mechanism for disseminating our ideas.
We’re not primarily interested in fighting for perfect positions or questions of policy, though we’re aware this will be necessary if we want some of our ideas to be viable within the party, but the key goal will always be the advancement of practical organising work that builds class power and moves us towards socialism.
HH – How did O4PP come together?
S – There were a few groups of people who knew each other through organising. Whether through tenant struggles, rank and file workers organising, anti-racist feminists and anti-imperialist organising, people building social centres and social infrastructure, even community healthcare – things like that.
We were chatting in the heady days of ‘will it, won’t it’. The new party was simultaneously a hopeful possibility on the horizon that could transform what we’d been thinking about and fighting for. At the same time, it was the object of a lot of suspicion, as it is now, but in a slightly different way. It was an object of suspicion partly because of the way that they were operating, but partly because since the heartbreaking defeat of Corbynism, the serious possibility of a party was something that a lot of us weren’t really used to and felt was difficult to trust. A lot of us were experiencing a hanging back vibe, a ‘wait and see’ from a lot of our comrades.
We wanted to create an opportunity for people to start thinking together. To move from a framing of what will the party, that party out there, that object out there, do, and how do we respond to it, to: how do we already start thinking and acting like this is our own party, like this is a party that belongs to its members, whose style and form will be dictated by its members’ actions. How do we build that into the DNA of the organisation from the start?
People were thinking about this in different places around the country. The people involved in O4PP hosted an event in September, which brought together about 80 really amazing comrades from across the party involved in the kinds of organising work I’ve mentioned. It was hosted in London and so the turnout skewed that way, and it was obviously a small group because we didn’t have the capacity to pull off anything bigger, but the intention was always for that to just be the starting point. The agenda was quite practically oriented. Some of the main questions we tried to answer were: How do we use the party to strengthen rank and file worker organising? How do we scale up tenants and community organising? How do we build forms of social infrastructure that don’t just collapse into problems like being a service model? People were invited to bring submissions, analyses, and proposals.
We had a first crack at thinking about those things together. Then from there, based on those discussions, we agreed to continue as a group, and started developing the practical proposals which went into the document we submitted as a tendency at The World Transformed. That was the moment at which we launched and opened up membership. Since then, we’ve had over 100 new sign ups. It is really exciting.
HH – How are you approaching the regional assemblies and founding conference?
S – We’re working on an intermediate plan for up till the conference, which primarily will be focused on seeing if we can put some of these proposals into practice in a few branches where there’s that opening. We’re looking to create a model. It will just be the first experiment, but a model that can demonstrate what this organising approach could look like, and so we can learn from it. These lessons can be built into a longer term strategy.
This is as well as being part of a unity grouping with the other factions who have aligned politics around shaping this as a bottom up members party. So we’ll also have a role to play in terms of that kind of democratic campaign.
L – Crucially, we’re not waiting until after the conference, or until certain demands have been put to the leadership to get started with this work. We’re encouraging immediate outwards facing action in Your Party branches. In the short term, this means things like organising major strike solidarity in Sheffield, a mass door knocking campaign in Stoke and Glasgow, fighting a dodgy housing association in Barnet and supporting Organise Now! in its Gail’s campaign in Oxford.
HH – Before we get into, like, the nitty gritty of the longer submission, a lot of the language and focus is on base building. How do you understand that term?
S – It’s a really important question because it’s a word that’s thrown around with a lot of different meanings. There’s probably more ways to categorise this, but you can look at two different versions that come from two kinds of people or forms of organising.
So, one of the ways that people use base building, which we don’t subscribe to, is as an instrumental process that’s ultimately subordinate to electoral strategy. This is the common usage of talking about the base in party political strategy. Sometimes people talk about ‘delivering the base’ which means galvanising constituencies and voter blocs for your party. That, in a way, can be used almost identically for a left wing or a right wing party, because ultimately, you’re doing the same sort of thing. That isn’t about any transformative model of organising that builds class power.
On the other hand, there’s a concept of an organisational base which stems from tenant, labour and other social movements. Mass forms of organising with a rank and file of members who are committed to working together to build power, fight to win, united by shared class interests, and a common struggle. Instead of looking up to leaders and delivering this passive base for the leaders, it’s the base itself that’s self-organised to make demands and to win through contentious political action.
That’s the tradition which pretty much all of us who are involved in this tendency come from. But in a way, it doesn’t totally answer the question to just say that we subscribe to the latter form of base building, because the scale and the form of the project we’re now involved in is beyond where our previous experiences were. We’re developing experimental practical proposals, which are not about how class-based forms of organising or politicised social infrastructure can serve the party, but about how, when you do have a large scale vehicle capable of building greater strategic coherence across our organising, capable of reaching places where existing organisations don’t have reach, and of tying these together with a real political vision and a path to socialist transformation, how this form of vehicle can serve to advance our real, mass, class-based organising around the country.
This isn’t just a question of flipping the standard relationship between electoral politics and base-building, now saying, ‘how can we have an instrumental relationship to an electoral party to strengthen our organising?’ We’re having to rework that relationship anew. We do want to build this party for real, but we don’t want to build it for real along the lines of any of the existing parties around this country.
So, for example, the standard electoral party door-knocks just to canvass, while the more savvy left-wing electoral party door-knocks with a persuasive conversation structure to canvass in a way that connects to people’s issues. We imagine something different. We do think party branches should be engaging in ‘mass listening’ to deeply connect to and understand what moves our neighbours, and in election-time, this will need to shape how people vote. But just voting in a new party will not break the back of capitalism – we need to be organised at all the key structural pivots of production, and in the numbers, and with the transformative relations and consciousness to take over our workplaces, our housing, our food distribution and so on. So when we door-knock, we’re not just collecting data; we want to bring people into the kind of organising efforts to build class power that we’re proposing, where there’s a symbiotic relationship between local branches and other organisations engaged in struggle.
I don’t think we have all the answers – that’s part of why we’re going to have to work it out through a combination of thinking and action – but, ultimately, we want to be thinking about what it means to be a new mass organisation that can actually contest power. Not a small vanguard. Not also the organisations we’re currently organising with (which are very precious to us and have been incredibly essential for where we’ve got to so far). But, if we’re used to walking into a room and knowing a lot of the other people in the room, how can we transform, even just that way that we think and relate to each other?
That will mean approaching our efforts with a lot of humility as well. We’ll have to change from operating in a context where we feel we know the things we need to do, to being like we know a little bit and we know some people, but really we know nothing like what we need to. Approaching with that humility, and really embedding a transformative warmth in how we relate to people. I think those – as well as the organising proposals – are some of the ways we need to orient ourselves to go from where we are to building class power at a new level.
HH – You put together for the TWT assembly a quite long and detailed submission that includes some proposals about how you think people could maybe orient in particular areas. There’s five of them.
S – To explain what the proposals are: most of them offer a little bit of an analysis of where we’re at in this kind of organising. So, for example, the workplace and labour unions one gives a really strong political analysis of what it is that makes our trade unions operate in the way they do, and then ultimately, what a strategic orientation around rank and file worker organising should look like. Then it gives a series of practical concrete ideas. That’s the same across the different proposals, although because they were these organic things that came out of people’s discussions some of them are very precise, specific ones that we could even start to work on tomorrow, whilst some of them are a little bit more overarching ideas.
HH – The first one is about workplace and trade union work. And there we’re talking about political trade unionism and rank and file organising. What are you advocating here?
(You can read the TWT proposal on workplace and trade union organising here.)
L – Basically we’re advocating for a break from the kind of relationship unions have had with the Labour Party, which empowers those at the top of the union bureaucracy by giving them positions and votes, and obviously these have often been used against working class interests, against unions’ democratically decided policies, and to protect the Labour leadership from the membership when members want to pursue more radical policies. So our proposals are about shifting the focus from gunning for union affiliation (which should be opposed unless it’s structured to empower members) towards workers and their struggles. We’re hoping that by working in our local branches to start actioning some of the work in our proposals, this will go some way towards embedding a rank and file approach into the party from the start.
We’re asking: how can we create the conditions at a branch level for members to be supported to organise at their own workplace, support others trying to do so, build relationships with workplace activists in their area and support workers’ struggles. The Your Party leadership have been saying that members should be organising at work, but most people don’t have the support needed to be able to do this, so if we want to foster and maintain this expectation, we need to provide people with this support from the get go. So practically this could mean creating local workplace organising groups that support people to get 1-2-1 coaching support, either from experienced local organisers, or through Organise Now. These groups should also be trying to implement a wider rank and file strategy, so that means connecting workers organising across similar issues, coordinating solidarity with disputes at a local level, visiting unionised workplaces to seek support for political campaigns, and supporting attempts to unionise unorganised workplaces.
HH – Then there are the proposals around tenant and community organising. What are some of these?
(You can read the TWT proposal on tenant and community organising here.)
S – In the tenants organising proposal, there’s the analysis that the new tenant unions are one of the extremely significant new forms of class-based organising that have emerged over the last decade. They’re going to be essential to our strategic trajectory in general – towards socialist transformation. But ultimately, there’s a few really strong ones. They’re mostly limited to urban centres. There’s some in smaller cities and towns as well. But basically, we have very patchy coverage with tenants unions. So we need proposals for areas in which Your Party members in a branch are really interested in setting up a tenants union from scratch, as well as ways to strengthen the ability of existing tenants unions. This could be through regional hub tenants unions or a national federation to connect with and support members in areas to set up tenants unions. Crucially, these shouldn’t be Party tenants unions, but independent ones, with the overall strategy led by existing tenants unions.
There’s a few different ideas there. For example, resisting housing evictions and resisting immigration raids, in some ways, rely on a similar model. You need a large number of people who are mobilised extremely quickly and you need a certain, limited amount of training and information. Ultimately, if you have that, if you are there on the day, and if there’s some people with an extremely good plan, who are capable of directing how that’s going, then you’ll be able to pull it off. A party branch could really effectively create large community defence teams, doing regular trainings which then tenants unions or anti-raids groups could draw on.
HH – Then you have proposals around the idea of ‘social infrastructure’. What are some of these?
(You can read the TWT proposal on social infrastructure here.)
S – These proposals are arguing for having a first phase of collectively asking, chatting to people, mapping and designing what kinds of infrastructure we need in our communities. Similarly, ensuring we have access to rooms and buildings, even for a bit of time in the week.
They make a strong argument for covering two forms of social infrastructure. So one saying, we do really urgently need to provide more politicised community care and services. These could form advice clinics or coffee mornings – these can be a universal front door for people who are facing problems aiming to transform those experiences into collective action. For example, someone’s experiencing health problems caused by mould. Maybe they come into a health clinic, but then that connects them with the tenants union to deal with their mould problem. At the same time, the proposals are making a really strong argument that we shouldn’t only focus on these services, and one of the things we really need to build is local cultural infrastructure. We need places for people to come together, connect and have fun. So also thinking of cinemas, recording studios, boxing gyms, art spaces, for example.
HH – Then there are some focused proposals around building anti-imperialist organising?
(You can read the TWT proposal on anti-imperialism here.)
S – The anti-imperialist proposal tries to lay out an overall set of positions on what it would mean for the party to be anti-imperialist. It also lays out some practical paths of how Your Party can support the organisations that have been doing this kind of work to move towards a really powerful mass model.
What could support that? For example, setting up infrastructure to support criminalised comrades and communities facing state repression and supporting organising around counterterror and surveillance legislation. Supporting local efforts by workers, rank and file networks, unions and campaign groups who are theorising how to transition socially destructive jobs towards socially useful ones. Then how Britain and other northern states can support southern states and movements fighting for a globally just transition.
HH – Finally, there is the proposal around branches. What are you advocating here?
(You can read the TWT proposal on branches here.)
S – This proposal is almost a little resource that you could use as someone involved in your branch to show people, persuade people, why this model of a local branch would be really powerful.
It also has concrete proposals in it. For example, introductory political education about why things are the way they are. Why is the housing market like this? Why does politics not serve ordinary people? Things like that. Also having know your rights or skills trainings run by local organisations, like the tenant unions or rank and file workers groups that we’ve been talking about in the other sections. Also, having deeper and more complex political education around what capitalism is, what imperialism is.
These are just examples picked up from the different proposals and they’re already so long – so each of them is actually really rich.
There’s, in a way, two kinds of practical proposals. Some are about what local branches can start doing already and some are demands that we’d have to make from the central party that would require much larger levels of resources. We’ll need to be organising on both fronts ultimately. But we’ll probably have to start with this modelling at the local level first.
HH – I think a lot of the demands that activists from the left are making to Your Party are mainly focused on democracy and related things. You mention some of the things needed from the central party, what are these things you’d like to see from Your Party to enable this building of popular power?
S – Some of it will be quite general. So, for example, we need the majority of branch resources to be shifted to branch level, as well as support to those branches to manage these finances. To put this work into action, branches also need control over local data.
We want Your Party to support the cross cutting national training programme that we spoke about to draw in and scale up 1000s of new organisers into base building organising.
We want to establish focused national committees within the party for two things. One is rank and file workers organising in line with the strategy that we described in that proposal. Another is for internationalist relationships with movements, unions and parties struggling against imperialism and with people in justice-oriented programmes in the Global South.
We want resources to set up community and workers centres at the local level. We want national legal support and campaigning against state repression. We want a national programme of support for workers to organise for a globally just green transition.
We want the party to create popular working-class cultural and media content and events in support of struggles that we’re engaged in at the local level. This can draw people towards this kind of organising and build a broader cultural movement. We want semi-regular regional, national events around different elements of worker, tenants and communities, social infrastructure and anti-imperialist organising. This is, of course, interlinked with socialist politics, but also provides a chance to meet each other and just have a great time.
L – Where necessary, we also want funding for organisations that already exist. We’re not interested in trying to build organisations for the party, we want them to exist in their own right, to be able to build class power in their own right, and so we never want to be replicating work if it’s already being done – a level of independence maintained, basically.
S – So an example would be, in the northwest, Greater Manchester Tenants Union has already been working really closely with Sheffield and the Lancaster and Morecambe network of tenants unions. They’ve been working symbiotically for those tenant unions to develop. That’s a really good model that we can try and replicate around the country, but we need resources for that. So if there was a new tenants union that wanted to set up, say in Luton, then funding train tickets, time and more for people involved in the London Renters Union to go and chat to people. To work together across these two places to advance tenants organising generally.
L – I think the leaders of Your Party have paid a lot of lip service to this idea of community organising and base building. We think if they mean that, and they’re serious about that, then they should be directing funding towards those things. Not just in an instrumental way, as appendages to the party, but as organisations in their own right.
HH – On the 10 points at the start of your submission to The World Transformed, your provisional points of unity, it’s not just about base building. You also make clear you have a deeper commitment to socialism, for freedom of people dominated by empire, and for solidarity against all forms of oppression. And so wanted to ask about the deeper politics behind it. What do you see that as?
S – I think a few simple things. One is that everyone who is involved in this tendency isn’t only interested in base building organising just to fight for a bit better pay and conditions in one workplace or sector, or for landlords to do repairs in some shitty housing. We’re tied together by both a commitment to and experience of organising to immediately improve material conditions, but simultaneously we have a deeper desire to direct it towards the real transformation of our society into something in which people can live beautiful, fulfilled and dignified lives. We want to connect with other organisations and movements who are struggling for the same vision around the world. So simply put the tendency is aiming to integrate those two things.
How that ends up happening is something that we’re going to need to experiment in, because the existing forms in which we’ve tried to do that, either through a purely electoral model, or through organisations fighting around specific kinds of demands, or sectoral fights – none of those are exactly what we need.
So we needed to have our points of unity capture all of those dimensions. How we tie those together will have to be something that we work out in the process.
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