New Party, Old Problems #1: Base Building vs Elections

A new series on the four big issues any Polanski-led Green Party or New Left Party will face, adapted from a longer essay I wrote for Prometheus.

Over the last 50 years the institutions that gave working class people hope, meaning and connection have been undermined and destroyed. Trade unions, working men’s clubs and pubs are the classic examples associated with the socialist movement, but we can also talk about community centres, sports halls and libraries, squats and social centres, historic town centres flattened into car parks and out-of-town shopping centres built on the sites of heavy industry.

The attack came from all sides. Neoliberalism defunded community institutions and pushed up rents in cities, making space hard to come-by. Thatcher suppressed rave culture and pushed squatters into renting. Collective workplaces with strong unions gave way to a huge rise in self-employment. Smartphones tempt us into spending more time at home and alone. The pandemic only made widespread loneliness worse.

My friend Heather Kennedy organises on an estate in Maltby, an ex-mining town half an hour from where I grew up. Apart from the food bank run by the wives and daughters of ex-miners, there isn’t much else. Maltby Miners Welfare now sits empty, sold off to a developer. The pubs have mostly shut, the unions are nowhere to be seen. As one ex-miners wife put it, “we used to know how to party in this town. It brought everyone together. We’d all keep an eye on each other’s kids. Now young people don’t go out anymore. The Silver Dollar is gone. The Shute is gone. It’s the end of an era.”

We’re operating in “the void” as Peter Mair writes, where communal institutions of every kind have been destroyed and we live increasingly atomised, lonely lives.

This reduction in collective experience is fertile ground for the populist right. They use traditional and social media to stoke fears about migrants, muslims and Just Stop Oil, with little risk that their fabrications will be found out. Hyper-online identity politics has also prospered in the void, distorting our view of each other and encouraging us to see a collection of fixed identity traits, rather than the complex human beings we really are.

When people don’t spend time together, hope is in short supply. For a democratic socialist party - either a new formation or the Greens - to succeed, we need to ensure that social organisation thrives.

Winning elections will not be enough

We should state this really clearly. Winning an election and forming a government will not be enough. Implementing a socialist programme – controls on capital, widespread nationalisation, a fundamental transfer of wealth to the working class – will kick off huge opposition from business, foreign governments and the repressive arms of the state.

There’s no point winning an election if we aren’t powerful enough to actually govern. And our power base will be with the people. In militant rank and file trade unions, tenants and community unions, politicised community institutions and explosive social movements. While the only thing people vote for on Heather’s estate is Brexit, older generations remember what it was like to fight. We have to build a base so numerous, rooted and radicalised that millions will go on strike and flood the streets in defence of a socialist government.

This is a big job, and there are so many things to do. Collective childcare for struggling parents; community meals for the isolated and lonely; support with immigration papers for migrant workers; advice clinics to help people save money on their bills; socialist gyms so we can get fit (and fight the fascists when they come).

I think it’s useful to distinguish between social programmes that provide the immediate support that people need, and the active struggle of strikes, non-payment and anti-gentrification campaigns. Both are essential, but each has a different character.

With social programmes there’s always a danger they’ll lapse into charity, comfortably existing as an addition to the state that would have been celebrated as part of David Cameron’s Big Society. They can also end up helping individuals solve their problems rather than organising collectives to realise their power. At their best, however, they are the wide end of our funnel, engaging working class people in a subtly political environment that meets their material needs without demanding the sacrifice and risk that comes with struggle.

Strikes, non-payment campaigns and active struggle are obviously the bar for which we reach, building leadership and increasing the confidence and capacities of those involved, but they are high risk, high commitment actions that not everybody we meet is ready to engage in. Much of this work is already happening in renters and trade unions, although most of it is in cities and little in towns like Maltby, where there is no ready supply of graduates ready to start an ACORN branch.

Building the base as the Party

The party shouldn’t try to replace renters unions, trade unions or existing left wing social programmes, but there are a few specific reasons why the party should help with this work. It will:

1. Build trust in the party. Deep apathy and mistrust of politicians make it hard to cultivate active and enthusiastic support, even for insurgent parties of the left. People will vote, often reluctantly. Many switch off from politics entirely. Most just won’t believe a thing you say. While pointing out the corruption of political elites, we have to build a deep and abiding trust in our own party. We do this by making a concrete difference in people’s lives now, instead of promising to represent them later.

   The Belgian Workers Party runs 11 medical centres across the country and provides free primary healthcare for anyone who needs it. Germany’s Die Linke goes door-to-door helping those in government housing apply for rent reductions. Nigel Farage’s Reform are exploring buyers clubs to help their supporters save on basics.
   
   Doing some of these things as the party, recruiting residents to run them and dissolving the line between party and the people – always providing with, never for – will build trust and support in ways a charismatic leader or a well-written manifesto never could. It’ll provide a way for those deeply sceptical of electoral politics to become active members of the party and build a depth in communities that we’ll surely need.
   
   

2. Recompose the party membership. It’s inevitable that, at least at first, the party will be dominated by the most politicised and active parts of its base: urban graduates, retired professionals, public sector workers and muslims radicalised by Palestine. All of these people are important, but there are other overlapping groups we must bring in: the multi-racial working class, the rural working class, lifelong renters, migrants without visa status and the precariously employed.

   
   Many of these groups will be less inclined to get involved in party politics, more sceptical of politicians and have more immediate material needs. Talking to them about voting at election time is not going to recruit them to the party. Running social programmes that directly address their day-to-day needs, while organising them to realise their collective power, stands a far better chance of success.

   
   This recomposition cuts both ways. Without an explicit focus on base building, party members can become insular and cut-off from the rest of the class. If we spend most of our time in meetings with other members debating ideas or policy, only talking to the people during elections, we’ll develop strange views and ultimately become a barrier to popular support.

   
   This happened during Corbynism, where a membership out-of-sync with the country on Brexit was used by the establishment to drive a bulldozer – or more precisely a JCB – through the entire project.

   
   

3. Energise local organising by connecting it to a national project. After the fall of Corbynism there was a call to go back to communities and organise. This pendulum swing was an understandable reaction to failure, but it resulted in mass inactivity rather than a surge in community organising.

   
   Even for the politically motivated, running local social programmes can be really hard. Your efforts feel like a lone sail in a perfect storm. The disengaged are hard to organise. To cope, you reduce your horizons and focus on the next wave, feeling a sense of shame at your retreat. Sometimes you try to take it all in, but you end up feeling overwhelmed and hopeless. It takes so much effort just to stay afloat.

   
   But when the same social programme is part of a national or international project, it can take on a different meaning. Running a local childcare group feels different when it’s part of a long-term plan to transform society. We gain incredible agency and power through being part of a collective, and contributing towards something greater than ourselves.

   
   This is the sickness we all suffered after the fall of Corbynism. We mourned the loss of a project greater than ourselves, and the feeling of being in community with thousands of others. My bet is that tens of thousands of community oriented socialists, who are currently inactive and perhaps did little during Corbynism, would jump at the chance to run local initiatives as part of the party, linking their community organising to a project of socialist transformation.

   
   It won’t be easy. Party-run social programmes could still fall prey to paternalistic dynamics, where members see themselves as saviours, perhaps driven by their middle class guilt to find redemption in helping the needy. Instead we need the solidarity of old, where the people do the work of providing for the people. This means dissolving any division between provider and user, getting used to recognising difference without shame and organising together in our self interest.

4. Bring unique resources to base building. Deep organising work on estates, in workplaces and in communities with people who aren’t already politicised is very resource intensive. Any union organiser will tell you that relationships and trust take time, meetings are often small, and nothing happens overnight. No volunteer can offer the time and attention deep organising requires. It’s a grind, and you can’t do it in your spare time.

   
   Across the left, we need more money to hire organisers, specifically in communities that are under-represented in our coalition. The party has many roles, and fighting elections is obviously expensive. But there are particular ways that only a party fighting elections can commit time and resources to base building.

   
   My housemate has just been elected as a socialist councillor and plans to spend his time organising. He’ll go to council meetings when he has to, but he’ll spend most of his paid time and new legitimacy base building in the ward. Ideas include organising estate residents around service charges, running buyers clubs to help residents with the cost of living and organising inter-community BBQs in the park.

   
   There are 20,000 council positions across the UK. You get paid anything between £5,000 to £18,000 per year, depending on where you are. This is a huge amount of resources we could move towards organising. There are thousands of part time organiser roles out there, we all just need to apply.