Jeremy Corbyn’s and Zara Sultana’s new party, provisionally called “Your Party”, has caused a lot of excitement among the social democratic parts of the left. This new party is being touted as an opportunity for the left to launch a counterattack against a neo-liberal order that is increasingly disintegrating into fascism. But such hope is not justified by the history of left wing political parties. This history is littered with parties that have either rejected left wing principals and objectives or kept true to them but failed to achieve political relevance. It offers precious few examples of left wing parties that could both reliably take and maintain power and use that power for left wing ends. Is Your Party likely to be any different, or will it just be a repeat of the same old trajectory of disappointment and disillusionment that has characterised so many left political parties? Why do left wing parties nearly always fail to live up to their promises?
Gaining Power
The core strategy of all left wing political parties is to take state power and use that power to implement their vision of society. Any left political leader or organisation will always face other political parties or factions competing for state power, so they will be under pressure to be better at taking power than their competitors. This means that politicians and political parties are always locked in an arms race with each other to become more and more focussed on taking power above all else
When this competition for power conflicts with left wing principals, those principals must be abandoned in order to win. For example, the left champions the interests of the poor and disempowered, but the privileged sections of society, like big capitalists or high technocrats, are both more useful as immediate allies and more dangerous as immediate enemies. Left wing parties must often bend to the interests of the rich and powerful instead of the interests of the poor and powerless in order to gain power. For another example, the protection of disempowered minorities is a core plank of any genuine left wing platform, but from the perspective of gaining power many disempowered minorities are expendable by the very fact they are disempowered and minorities; their political support is worth less than that of those powerful groups that oppress and exploit them.
It will always be easier for a party that is willing to cooperate with existing power structures to gain power within them, and those structures are often both the main cause and the main beneficiaries of the injustices the left opposes. The more that Your Party attempts to uphold left wing principals and objectives, the less likely it will be to make the compromises needed to gain power. On the other hand, the more it attempts be become a serious contender in the competition for government power, the more it will find it has to abandon the left in order to out compete other political parties who are willing to abandon their principals, or hold ideologies that are more compatible with the game of power.
Keeping Power
If Your Party does somehow find itself in government before the leftism has been ground out of it, it will face additional systemic pressures that are likely to push it away from left wing ideals. This is because the state is not an abstract nexus of power that can be used towards any purpose, but a specific social structure that requires particular conditions in order to function. Any organisation that sees the state as its main tool to implement social change must put maintaining these conditions above any other principals and objectives.
And what the state needs in order to function is obedience above all else. A state can be kind, rich, and well run, but if it faces subjects who constantly disobey it and agents who ignore its orders, then that state is a failed state headed for collapse. On the other hand, a state can be cruel, poor, and dysfunctional, but as long as it has the obedience of its subjects it will be stable. Even democratic states are based on the obedience of minorities to majorities, and the obedience of citizens to their leaders in-between elections. Such obedience also requires certain structures to enforce and maintain it; systems of surveillance, propaganda, control, and violence to keep dissidents in line and prevent disobedience from spreading.
This is entirely incompatible with left wing principals and objectives. The obedient can not be free. The obedient are not equal to their masters. The obedient can have no solidarity with each other against those above them. The obedient must put aside their own desires, reason, and sense of right and wrong in order to obey. Obedience turns a human being into nothing more than a cog in a machine run by others, a tool be be used and abused by their superiors. The systems of control and violence needed to maintain obedience are also inherently repressive and degrading of those they target and isolating and corrupting of those who wield them.
This is a problem that the left has repeatability faced and has so far failed to overcome; social democratic parties within liberal democracies have always drifted towards becoming just like the liberal or conservative parties they compete with, and revolutionary parties that have attempted to creates a dictatorship of the proletariat have always drifted to becoming just like any other corrupt and exploitative dictatorship. They have failed to reshape the state, and instead have been reshaped by the state. To avoid this, Your Party will need a structure and strategy that radically departs from the failed left parties of the 20th century.
Pressure From Below
In an attempt to avoid these pitfalls, Your Party seems to be looking to bottom up movements to provide countervailing pressure to keep the party loyal to its proclaimed principals, and its provisional name as Your Party at least plays lip service to the idea of an organisation that is of the people and for the people. This bottom up pressure has always been a key element of successful left wing projects, as many leftward reforms implemented by past governments have been put in place only because those at the top came to fear the growing power of those at the bottom. Threats of disruption and even revolution from unions, protest movements, and community organisations have limited the ability of those in power to do whatever they wanted. Just as obedience is the ultimate source of state power and stability, disobedience has long been used by the left as a weapon to threaten the state and force it to compromise with the desires of its subjects.
However, there are very few bottom up organisations in our society right now. For the most part the trade unions are no longer based on workers cooperating with each other from the bottom up, but have become technocratic hierarchies based on member obedience, and are often in opposition to rank and file militancy organised from below. Likewise, most protest groups, advocacy groups, co-operatives, and left wing charities are top down hierarchies and can not provide pressure from below in order to keep the new party in line because the rank and file membership at the bottom is not the real locus of power within the organisation. All they can do is represent the interests of their leaders, securing them positions of power in the event that Your Party gets into government.
This hollowing out of bottom up movements has happened because bottom up organising and top down hierarchies are fundamentally incompatible with each other. The motivation that drives any bottom up movement is either to provide something those at the top of society neglect, or to oppose and resist impositions from the top. This demands an approach that accepts that those at the bottom both can and should cooperate to pursue their mutual desires regardless of what their rulers want, and so embraces disobedience to top down authority. Bottom up movements require disobedience, spread that disobedience, and are further empowered by it.
Left wing movements were founded on this bottom up basis, out of regular people organising together in their workplaces and communities against managers, owners, and politicians. Yet for the last hundred years the majority of the left has ultimately chosen securing state power over building or maintaining bottom up power, and has insisted that any bottom up movement is co-opted into a hierarchical structure or destroyed, suppressing disobedience, systematically demobilising and disempowering its own base, and sabotaging bottom up forms of power in order to maintain the power of the state. Your Party, as an electoral party that ultimately seeks state power, will inevitably be caught in this same contradiction; it may talk a good game about the importance of being member-led and building bottom up power, but it can not truly back up that talk without endangering the top down hierarchies that it seeks to take control of.
A Warning from History
Your Party’s attempt to mix bottom up and top down structures is not a new strategy. It is the same failed strategy that led to the collapse of 20th century social democracy; those parties attempted to base themselves in unions and working class social movements while simultaneously being strike breakers and protest smashers when in power, and even when out of power they have been very cautious in supporting any movement that might go so far as to undermine the power of the state. In Britain, the old Labour Party is often looked back on fondly as really representing the interests of the working class and the downtrodden, but its actual track record is littered of examples of it being at war with the base it built its support form.
During the years after World War Two, often seen as a high point of British social democracy, Labour was busy beating the trade union movement into obedience. Labour kept Order 1305, which restricted the right to strike during the war, for more than five years after the end of the war, only abandoning it in 1951 after a mass strike by dockworkers in support of union leaders who had been arrested under Order 1305. Between 1945 and 1950, two states of emergency were declared to deal with industrial disputes and soldiers were sent in to break strikes 18 times. Later Labour governments have likewise sought to restrain the power of the unions and other social movements, such as the 1964-1970 Labour government’s failed proposals to reduce union power. In return such movements have rarely shown Labour much quarter, with the 1978-1979 strike wave playing a significant role in the fall of the then Labour government.
Even the policies that Labour is lauded for have often had a tendency to undermine the long term bottom up power of the working class that is supposed to make up their base. The welfare state, for example, replaced a bottom up network of worker run mutual aid organisations that provided for things like healthcare or unemployment benefits. These mutual aid organisations were by no means perfect, but many of their problems came from the poverty faced by the working class leading them to be under-resourced instead of the workers being inherently incapable of managing their own institutions. Indeed, along with the early unions and co-operatives, these mutual aid organisations acted as one of the institutions that gave workers a practical education in the administration of their own affairs and cooperating for their own mutual benefit.
However, instead of policies that funnelled resources to these mutual aid organisations and allowed workers to remain in direct control of key welfare services they relied on to live, Labour followed a strategy of state welfare. This brought greater resources to bear, but at the expense of removing bottom up worker control over their own welfare provision, destroying existing institutions that fostered working class cooperation and developed their ability for independent organisation, and leaving the working class entirely at the mercy of whoever controlled the government for the provision of welfare. From the perspective of the workers, it is questionable if this was in their long term best interests. But from the perspective of ensuring obedience to the state, this welfare policy has been a great success. It has given the state another lever to use in order to control its citizens, and destroyed a potential hotbed of organised disobedience.
After the old workers movement of unions and mutual aid organisations had been dismantled or brought into obedience, the 1990 anti-poll tox movement used non-payment and street confrontations with bailiffs, police, and officials to win an important victory; the tax was scrapped and prime minister Margaret Thatcher was forced to resign. But the Labour Party could not support these tactics as they undermined the power of the state and its right to collect taxes, and the power of the state had to come before securing a victory from the bottom up. The Poll Tax movement was, over 35 year ago at time of writing, the last bottom up social movement in Britain that had the capacity to truly hold top down power structures to account, and since that point we have seen an accelerating erosion of the previous gains made by the left; workers get poorer every year, modern Labour have not only given up left wing ideals, but even any attempt at left wing rhetoric, and the mainstream British right are increasingly flirting with open fascism.
On top of all of this, Labour has a poor record on defending women and oppressed minorities. Many of the gains made in the supposed golden age of British social democracy were mainly gains for native white cis men, and the drive for real change on these issues has come from below; from feminist groups, anti-racist groups, and oppressed communities demanding justice. In so far as change has been achieved, it has only been on terms that preserve that state; we may all be treated as equals only as long as we are all equally obedient to the state. Labour’s track record on global justice is even worse, with Labour having always been just a militaristic and imperialistic as any other mainstream British political party. Such attitudes are key to maintaining the power of the British state that Labour is wedded to.
While Labour is the quint-essential British example of the failure of left wing parties to escape the logic of state power and obedience, you will find a similar story behind any left party in the world. From the post World War One German Social Democratic Party murdering revolting workers to stabilise the German state, to the more modern German Green Party’s support for expanding coal mining, to the shockingly fast capitulation of the Greek SYRIZA to demands from the EU it was elected to oppose, to supposedly communist China’s position as one of the main engines of global capitalism, to the old Leninist dictatorships’ complete suppression of any kind of independent worker’s power, this story has repeated over and over again and Your Party is poised to repeat it once more.
An Alternative Strategy
If we accept that top down hierarchies are incompatible with left wing objectives, then the left must focus on bottom up organising instead. Such organising has always been the main basis of left wing power, and the last century of co-option and suppression of bottom up movements in order to keep the state strong is one of the core failures that has led to the sorry state of the left today, having traded strong organic connections within workplaces and communities for a turn at the wheel of a state machine that is inherently incompatible with left wing objectives.
The left needs to rebuild rank and file power in the workplace. It needs to build bottom up renters unions, community organisations, and mutual aid groups. It needs to pour time and resources into anti-raid, cop watch, and anti-fascist groups which directly defend their communities. These groups need to be run on the basis of consensus between their membership instead of hierarchies of obedience. Such groups can fight for better wages, lower rents, and bring people together across lines of division through solidarity in strikes, protests, boycotts, and education that is embedded in workplaces and neighbourhoods. When these groups come into conflict with the state, the left needs to side with them against the state. And such conflict is inevitable; the state needs productive workers and obedient citizens above all else, and it can not allow people to shift the focus of their loyalty and their work to directly serving their own collective interests.
The left also needs to help create networks, alliances, and federations based on bottom up free association to allow local groups to communicate, coordinate, and cooperate on their own terms, instead of destroying their bottom up nature by subordinating them to some kind of top down control or founding a new electoral party off of their backs. These groups need to be nurtured into becoming stronger and better integrated without welding them onto hierarchies of power that have opposing needs and will inevitably demand the demobilisation or co-option of bottom up movements. With such structures in place, the left can push for real change regardless of who is in government. Tactics of mass disobedience and mass disruption can make unpopular laws unenforceable, hold capitalists and politicians to account, and force the government to act in the interests of its subjects out of fear that those subjects will otherwise become ungovernable.
A Future Without The State
When there is a bottom up workers organisation in most workplaces, a community organisation in most neighbourhoods, and they have the infrastructure that allows them to freely cooperate to tackle regional and national problems, then the left will have no use for the state any more; the bottom up organisations of the people will be strong enough to take direct control of society. Workers would have the ability to seize control of their workplaces and neighbours could seize control of their neighbourhoods, they could cooperate to run the infrastructure they jointly rely on, and do away with the current ruling strata of capitalists and technocrats. And when the state resists this, the left must side with workers and communities and abolish that now obsolete institution instead of defending it. Just as the coherent end point of state power is the destruction of all bottom up movements, the coherent end point of accepting bottom up power is a revolution that destroys the state, capitalism, and all other top down hierarchies.
This strategy is compatible with left wing principals and objectives and builds structures that reinforce left wing ideas instead of eroding them. It respects the freedom of all its members. Everyone involved is an equal participant. It is based on building solidarity between those at the bottom of society. It relies on and encourages independent action based on the desires, reason, and sense of right and wrong of everyday people. Its structures are built around enabling discussion, cooperation, and compromise. It develops the organisational capacity of the most oppressed and exploited instead of treating them as tools. Its end state is a society in which workers control the means of production, people control what they need to survive, there is no top down ruling class that exploits those below them, and there is no central power structure capable of imposing systematic oppression on minorities and dissidents.
Building towards a bottom up revolution may be the hard road to the world that the left desires, but it is a road that actually leads towards that world. On the other hand, electing yet another left wing political party into power is an easy shortcut, but it is a shortcut to nowhere that has only led to the near complete destruction of left power everywhere that it has become the focus of the left. Your Party is destined to fail even if it succeeds, as an electoral victory can only result in the party slowly turning into a new New Labour, smothering any bottom up upsurge in enthusiasm for left wing ideas, and a new generation of disillusioned leftists setting up another new left party to repeat this sad cycle over again… assuming we have not all been killed by fascists or climate disaster by then.
We need to break this cycle of building up political parties only for them to inevitably betray us in favour of the demands of the state. We need to put our energy into building bottom up power that can oppose capitalism without needing the support of the state, and can oppose the state itself.