New Party, Old Problems #2: Making Party Democracy Good Again
The second in a series on the four big issues any Polanski-led Green Party or New Left Party will face.
If you’ll allow me the predictable joke, a democratic socialist party should be in some way democratic. How much, what form it takes and for what purpose is the terrain of debate.
At a minimum, members need to be able to hold leaders to account. In our age of celebrity and social media, leaders will build a following and power base that is independent of the party, an inevitable consequence of successful populist leadership. But they will also be subject to intense pressure and corrupting influences from elites. They are the person to do deals with. They will be the focal point of pressure when in government. They can sell us out.
Alex Tsipras, the former leader of the Greek left party Syriza, was elected prime minister at the tender age of 40, riding a wave of resentment at the EU’s attempt to impose austerity on Greece after the financial crash. In the first half of 2015 Tsipras and his leather clad, Marxist finance minister Yanis Varoufakis went to war with the Troika, refusing the austerity that creditors demanded.
In true populist style, Tsipras went back to the people in June, calling a referendum on the EU’s terms. The Greek people voted “Oxi” (No) emphatically. A few days later, Tsipras capitulates and agrees to every single austerity measure proposed by the EU. Why he did this matters less than how it could have been prevented. If Tsipras had been mandated by his party to put any agreement with the Troika to Syriza’s membership, he would have had no opportunity to renege.
Sahra Wagenknecht, a founder of the German left party Die Linke, caused chaos for years by using her considerable public profile to wage war with her internal opponents. She undermined the party by consistently ignoring democratic resolutions and the persistent public infighting nearly destroyed Die Linke in the Bundestag. Eventually, Wagenknecht broke away and founded her own party – the Sahra Wagenknecht Party, of course – which tried and failed to capture Die Linke’s heartlands in the East.
Calming the tensions between populist leadership and a strong party is crucial, and we need firm mechanisms of accountability that can propel leaders forward or reel them back in, especially during moments of crisis and opportunity.
More than this, giving members the opportunity to realise themselves as political actors and sharpen their strategic capacities through the day-to-day practice of democracy is part of forging educated and committed socialists, as opposed to the fragile and often confused positions of Corbynists, Pabloists and Mélenchonists.
All of this said, I offer my case for party democracy with some nervousness. The actually existing democracy I’ve been a part of – in Labour, Momentum and horizontalist groups – has felt precisely engineered to crush my soul. Endless motions, marathon meetings and shared feelings of strain and frustration. Zoom calls full of people whipped by their faction, clueless as to what is being debated, already primed to vote with or for their people, and with no intention of listening to arguments or changing their minds.
It’s all so mechanical and brute force. A game for factional operators to see who can best stuff a room. In essence, it’s bad organising: no one learns anything, no one builds relationships, no one realises their collective power. Is this the magical energy and life-force of the party that people talk about? I hope not, as I’d opt for the cold efficiency of a powerful but capable leader – such as Jean-Luc Mélenchon of La France Insoumise – over this form of democracy any day.
From those who advocate for democracy without caveat, I want to see an ambitious project to make party democracy good again. No more pointless meetings. Let’s build the Agora and the Forum instead. Let’s encourage raucous, spectacular and freewheeling debate. Let’s try to change minds and be open to changing our own.
A final caveat, and a crucial one, is the usually glossed over tension between member democracy and democracy of the people. I only need three words to express this: Corbyn’s Brexit fudge.
After Corbyn nearly secured a majority in 2017, the establishment went into crisis. An anti-imperialist nearly became the Prime Minister, and they needed to make sure this never happened again. Enter Brexit. In the 2017 election Brexit was a settled issue, with all parties accepting the result. But with negotiations dragging on and Theresa May without a majority to force through a deal, the establishment spotted its opportunity.
They split our coalition down the middle. Squeezing us between hard Remain and hard Leave, both the centrist and right-wing parts of the establishment realised they could build their own power and demolish Corbyn through mutually assured Brexit destruction.
Both sides conspired to make everything about Brexit, and polarise the nation on their terms. We tried to unite the working class in opposition to the billionaires, they sought to divide them based on their vote in the referendum. Farage organised ERG members in the Tory Party to hold Theresa May hostage. Cummings and Johnson prorogued Parliament. Millions of pounds of liberal money poured into the People’s Vote and Another Europe is Possible, the Labour facing parts of hard Remain.
And what was the main thrust of their argument? Why did remainers have such leverage? Jeremy Corbyn was the champion of member democracy, and the Labour members overwhelmingly backed Remain.
They drove a blue and yellow stake through the heart of Corbynism, and all we could do was watch. Starmer rode this wave of hard Remainism. Sky News dubbed 2019 “the Brexit election” on the first day of the campaign. And member democracy, supposedly our greatest strength, was identified by the establishment as a fundamental weakness. We became the anti-democrats. Fundamentally out of step with a country that had voted to Leave.
I say this not to argue away democracy, but to point to its downsides. More democracy is not always the answer, as some on the left would have it, and it needs to be balanced with other concerns. In this light, a few proposals we should consider.
Members and the people formulate the programme
The current model of policy wonks crossing the Thames and writing manifestos for MPs obviously needs to be replaced. As does the sad theatre of Labour conference, where members fight over policy motions that have zero power to bind the leadership. But I am wary of the membership having sole power over policy. While members are more representative of the people than the leadership, they are still made up of the most ideological and advanced sections of the class.
A better idea is to have a dual process where the politics of the membership comes into contact with the people’s needs. Before their last election Die Linke, in an effort to turn the party outwards after years of infighting, went to the people and asked them about their concerns in a mass door knocking exercise. The results of this were fed into a member conference which produced a short manifesto mostly on the cost of living crisis. The party achieved a historic result. The Belgian Workers Party (PTB) did the same, surveying more than 100,000 people to formulate their latest manifesto and shape party strategy.
Different levels of membership
Being thrown into a Labour branch meeting where you’re debating the wording of a motion that’s going to national conference is, for anybody new to politics, a strange and likely alienating experience. Why are we all sitting in a room debating words on paper, rather than organising the people out there? At the same time, long standing members who have dedicated huge amounts of their lives to the party may well resent new members, showing up for the first time and having an equal say.
The internal life of the party is more complex than this, but I think the simplification illustrates how different levels of membership can be useful. We can again raid the congress documents of the PTB, who in 2008 moved from a small organisation of highly committed cadre to a broader party with three layers of membership: militants, the base and consultative members.
The latter are asked about the party’s direction and may get involved but are under no obligation. The base are active in the party and can be delegates to congress. Militants are the ideological and operational core, party lifers who commit huge amounts of time, money and energy. It’s true that under this system the leadership has more power, and some friends talk of the PTB leadership controlling who becomes a militant, but with clear criteria for progression, this may well be overcome.
For the PTB it has been transformative, expanding from 2800 members and less than 1% of the vote in 2008 to 26,000 members and nearly 10% of the vote in 2024.
In-person meetings over digital platforms
If developing our collective capacities and building relationships with other people is important, we should leave behind the techno-utopian fad of digital voting platforms and direct democracy. Popular in both the Five Star Party of Italy and Podemos in Spain, they were also used during Momentum’s more anti-democratic moments, in an effort to force members into narrow choices defined by the leadership. Nobody learns or grows by logging onto a platform and clicking. It’s voting rather than democracy, and a neat expression of the more authoritarian, anti-member tendencies of 2010s left populism.
Hierarchy over horizontalism
Cultures of consensus, flat structure and distributed leadership were forged in the alter-globalisation movement that smashed through Seattle in 1999. And while the rediscovery of the “Tyranny of Structurelessness” prompted a reassessment, horizontalism still persists in soft and hard forms, evincing a strange half-life, for want of something better.
Vincent Bevin’s account of failed 2010s protest movements could be the final nail. He convincingly argues that horizontalist groups can blaze bright and create powerful moments of eruption, but after the volcanic tremors cease and the smoke clears it’s those with robust organisation that reap the political rewards.
In the Green Party you can still see its subtle inflection – an emphasis on local autonomy, no leaders until 2008 and no whip for MPs. As a friend said to me the other day, this is convenient for socialists who want to take over the party, but something that must be changed if we want an effective organisation in the long-term.
You can read the first in the series on base building vs elections here.