Why partyism in Britain today means building an electoral alliance
Partyism is a trend amongst Marxists who are influenced by publications including Cosmonaut in the US and Prometheus and Weekly Worker in Britain.
Partyists believe that a necessary prerequisite for the overthrow of capitalism is the regroupment of Marxists into a mass communist party as the vehicle for class-conscious workers to organise and achieve the political rule of the working class via a democratic republic. They therefore view the development of such a party as an urgent strategic priority for the left. The working class cannot build a party which is capable of taking power just on charismatic leaders or skilled theoreticians – though both will be needed – but only on a programme for achieving power.
Support for the programme has to be tested through political action, not just intervention in strikes and street protests: the party must stand candidates in elections and carry out a strategy of patience, holding back elected representatives and only forming a government if the minimum programme can be implemented and the existing capitalist state can be replaced with a democratic republic.
My argument is that the political conditions and structures in Britain mean that what partyists have in mind – unity of the Marxists snowballing into a mass party – is more likely to emerge from an electoral alliance of the broader left.
One barrier to effective political action is that the trade union leaderships will not break with the Labour Party to any significant extent because no alternative exists with which to influence legislation. The most significant barrier, however, is Britain’s first-past-the-post electoral system, which makes the development of any new party extremely difficult and forces political parties to act as broad coalitions.
The left is split between a long list of small competing groups because these barriers prevent any purely Marxist formation from achieving the snowball effect necessary to win wider layers to its politics. Given our current numbers and resources, a regroupment of Marxists outside of a wider electoral coalition would not be able even to reach a size or influence comparable to that of the old Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB). This would still be a welcome development, but it is not enough.
A broader electoral alliance might only lead to the formation of a kind of ‘Labour Party Mark II’ in the course of the next decade but it could overcome these structural barriers and put us on path towards building a mass communist party. Without the development of an electoral alliance and/or the introduction of proportional representation, Marxists in Britain are probably going to be stuck orbiting Labour, going in and out over time.
Party games
The problem for partyists is that our view is not how ‘the party’ is practically understood among much of the already-organised British left. And right now, comrades with a partyist understanding of what is to be done are lacking a plan to reach the left and the rest of the class.
The easiest to reach for partyists are those comrades we already know on the left who are in parties. But organisations in Britain which style themselves as parties and adhere to various forms of Marxism-Leninism, Trotskyism, Maoism, etc., are in reality propaganda groups which also undertake agitational work.
This is not a criticism made for the purpose of arguing for the exclusion of these tendencies from the party of the future, or to denounce their adherents as dupes. To be a partyist is not to cease to be a Marxist-Leninist, a Maoist, a Trotskyist, etc. It is merely a statement of fact that if you build a political organisation around a theorist or theorists, and make membership conditional upon agreement with a specific theoretical outlook – rather than acceptance of a programme for achieving working class rule – then what results has more in common with a religious sect than a mass party.
We don’t want people to lose faith, however. A party worthy of the name will contain within it the adherents of various theorists of the past and contain platforms based around the theoreticians and charismatic leaders of the present, but it cannot be defined by them and at the same time establish a mass base.
Many comrades who are currently members of a small party are not only conscious of the limitations of their groups, they are willing to concede that something more is required. They remain where they are because they expect that great events will transform the fortunes of their group, and because they find membership to be the best practical means of developing their politics. And some small parties have a healthier attitude to building a mass base, conceding that yes, cooperation is needed.
Getting ‘out there’ to the masses is what every significant group aspires to do in order to advance its particular ‘-ism’. There is not currently in Britain a mass party of any ‘-ism’ within the working class capable of affecting the politics of the state other than Labourism – and the Labour Party is not and has sadly never been committed to the political rule of the working class in a democratic republic.
We know that a party capable of taking power must achieve mass membership. Before we can talk of having a decisive impact on the politics of the state in Britain it means a membership not of hundreds or thousands, but hundreds of thousands.
At present, no single party on the British left can claim these numbers, nor undertake consistent and effective mass work other than by entering into alliances with contending ‘parties’. This is evident in our unions, where slates of candidates for elections usually involve cooperation between comrades who are in different parties. ‘Rank and file’ work has to be conducted on a cross-party basis if it is to be effective.
In these conditions, a mass communist party can probably only come about as the result of an electoral alliance of the left and a rupture in the Labour Party. We need a strategy of patience, yes, but hurried patience. Immediate demands have to be raised and the best way to do this is in alliance with others.
The divided Marxist left will not unite into a single yet multi-tendency party for the sake of putting together the resources of individual organisations and becoming instead open factions unless there seems to be a guarantee of growth. And the bulk of class-conscious workers will not break from Labourism until it is safe to do so and either ‘stop the Tories’ or ‘get the Tories out’.
The cycle of Labourism
Labourism stands as the current height of mass working-class politics across Britain but a barrier to the continued growth in power of the organised working class. Although the Labour Party declares in its constitution that it is a “democratic socialist party”, its right wing is funded and supported by the ruling class and its media as the natural faction of government within the party. Labour is consequently unable to lead the working class to power.
The Labour Right is loyal to the capitalist state in Britain and its alliance with the US in the form of NATO. In the past it was also loyal to the alliance with France and Germany in the form of the European Union. This loyalty by the Labour Right to British capitalism and imperialism is a barrier to working class advancement because even when the Labour Left is in control of the party, its alliance with the Right will lead it to bow to pressure rather than risk a debilitating split.
The reforms which Labour has achieved in office can be reversed with counter-reforms because the working class has not become the ruling class. This means that legislative power is important and can’t be dismissed. A Tory government could reverse whatever concessions are extracted by the organised working class under a Labour majority in parliament. No amount of working class organisation at the point of production in trade unions can overcome the power of the state.
Electoral strategy cannot be an after-thought – the political rule of the working class cannot come about through the institutions thrown together in the course of a strike wave. This is because the ruling class in Britain has the mechanism of calling a general election to ‘cool off’ a strike wave, preventing insurrection by offering easier paths to change.
It is necessary, though not sufficient, to have a party which can organise big street protests and participate in mass strike action by mobilising its members in solidarity with workers taking action. But the working class in Britain cannot do without a party capable of consistent electoral work, able to elect delegations of representatives to the parliaments and councils of the capitalist state.
It cannot be left to the Labour Left to fulfill this function on behalf of the workers’ movement At the same time, we can’t bypass Labourism and pretend it doesn’t exist. Reformist consciousness arises from a political stability which is determined by economic conditions. We can’t challenge and change these conditions without ending this political stability, yet there’s no short-term action by which a small group of people can revolutionise mass consciousness.
A mass communist party, with an enduring parliamentary delegation and fighting successive elections on the basis of a minimum programme, is therefore a necessity for raising the consciousness of the broad masses of workers and shifting the balance of power within the state towards the working class
To build up a parliamentary delegation, a mass communist party would need a geographically concentrated vote and significant resources to win and maintain that vote – resources currently invested in influencing Labour.
Knowing our limits
Without a change in the electoral system for the British parliament, we will struggle to escape from the following dynamic:
- Conservative government introduces counter-reforms aimed at reducing the power of the organised working class, provoking resistance and the radicalisation of workers’ organisations and thus mass consciousness.
- Class-conscious young and working people look to Labour to provide an alternative. The party experiences an influx of membership and an increase in expectations which are opposed and resisted by the Right.
- The Labour Right seeks to manage the system rather than break with the ruling class and – both in opposition and then in office – seeks to purge and sideline internal opponents to allow it to abandon policy commitments to take on corporate power, to break with deference to US foreign policy, and so on.
- A generation of young class-conscious workers exit the party, boosting extra-parliamentary campaigns at the expense of the Labour Left’s ability to retain a stable base of support.
What’s required, in spite of the limits, is consistent political work of an electoral character by the left, independent of the ebbs and flows of labourism.
For partyists, one essential purpose of the mass communist party is to train and educate class-conscious working people to become tribunes of the oppressed and to stand some of these comrades as candidates in elections in the hope that they can perform this function. The party’s candidates will have to be bound by manifestos that advance the programme, disciplined by competitive selections. The party must have the strong sense among its members that it will come to power on the basis of implementing its minimum programme in full – the working class ruling through a democratic republic and allying with workers across the world.
But there’s a problem. We are unlikely to arrive at a mass communist party in Britain without first passing through a broader left-of-labour electoral alliance.
This means that today, being a partyist means being an alliancist.
Alliancism?
Partyism will not grow without agitation. It will be in alliance with the existing parties of the left that partyism rubs off on allies and reaches a wider audience.
Without an alliance including the Marxists, notionally ‘left’ electoral challenges to labourism will come from nationalism, environmentalism, and even social-liberalism. But these are notional challenges because labourism exerts a pull when pushed by the Tory party under this electoral system. Masses of class-conscious workers can, when faced with the prospect that their vote could be wasted, be pulled back to Labour in order to ‘stop the Tories’.
What’s within reach however is a ‘pre-party’ alliance. We know this because small leftwing parties have formed alliances under the last Labour government – and with the active involvement of partyists. The aim of the partyists in these alliances was to argue for their politics – to continually fight for the adoption of a Marxist programme as the programme of the alliance.
The Socialist Alliance involved the Communist Party of Great Britain, the Socialist Party of England and Wales, the Socialist Workers Party, the Alliance for Workers Liberty, Workers Power, and a forerunner of what is now Anti*Capitalist Resistance.
But this nascent party collapsed as a significant national force once its biggest components fell out over its structures and decided to pursue opportunities elsewhere. Perhaps without the ability to contain within it defecting leftwing Labour MPs, and elect members of the parties within the alliance to parliament, this disintegration is unsurprising.
Winning defectors from Labour would have raised its profile and given the component parties a reason to continue cooperation. At the time, there was no urgency on the part of the Labour government to purge its leftwing MPs and consequently no necessity for those MPs to join an alliance of socialists outside the party.
The actions of partyists at the time were correct. They did not stand aside from what were initially local alliances, they intervened in the debates and contributed to the building of what became a national alliance of parties.
The Socialist Alliance was marred by the instinct of its major players – the Socialist Party and the Socialist Workers Party – to put up a broad front in which revolutionary socialists perform as reformist social democrats instead of arguing for their own programme to be adopted by an electoral front. But its 2001 general election manifesto did contain democratic-republican demands such as the abolition of the monarchy, absent from the manifestos of later electoral coalitions such as Respect and TUSC.
If this level of cooperation was possible then, why not now? This is a question for the left as a whole, but there’s also a question for partyists – if initiating an electoral alliance was possible then, why not now?
An alliance today would have to contend with the rise of the Greens as an apparent alternative who stand to capture the bulk of leftwing protest votes against the government. It might operate with the idea that both leftwing Greens and the Labour Left MPs constitute an undeclared part of the alliance, seeking to avoid direct clashes and lending critical support.
But it should not be interested in winning seats for the purpose of participating in the government as a junior partner, its representatives becoming ministers and being bound by the collective discipline of a pro-capitalist administration.
This is an argument which partyists would have to win, of course, but there would be no question for us of coalition without the guarantee of being able to, within a short space of time, transform the institutions of the state and create in place of the old constitutional order a new democratic republic in which the working class rules.
It is here that a tension would exist between reformists and revolutionaries if an electoral alliance were successful in electing a coherent bloc of parliamentary delegates.
A way out of the fragmentation of the alliance could be for it to seek electoral reform as one of its conditions for any external legislative ‘supply’ to a Labour government in the event of a hung parliament. A ‘confidence and supply’ arrangement of external legislative support would allow elected representatives of the alliance to show they can stop the Tories (and Reform) from governing while at the same time being free to vote against reactionary legislative measures.
In any case, there’s no excuse for partyists who were involved in the formation of the Socialist Alliance to sit out efforts at a similar initiative today. And there’s no excuse for those of us too young to have been involved, or not even born. Then, the partyists took the fight against the broad-frontism of the left to the left’s parties, getting as much partyism as possible into the form and content of that alliance.
Instead of standing aside as the left drifts towards reheated broad-front electoral projects which try to tail Labourism, we should think ‘let’s get it right this time’ and try to win as much as we can.
Forming the alliance
As it stands, at the next UK general election most left-of-Labour votes are likely to be picked up by the Greens given their current social-democratic policy offer and their distance from government.
An alliance could speak the language of class far more directly than the Green Party, which will prefer to hint at but not make explicit calls to the working class, and an alliance could better take into account the need to give critical support to the Labour Left as opposed to the Right. It would not face an initial pressure to act as a purely electoral party and stand everywhere, at all times.
An alliance could afford to step down candidates and call for tactical votes at this stage – it could more directly speak to and coordinate a section of public opinion which is against the Right in the form of the Tories and Reform, but also the Labour Right.
So the alliance could therefore most immediately form out of those individuals and organisations who may see the need to put forward an independent and class-based line: the existing socialist and communist parties, various unaffiliated comrades who have been in one or other group in the past, some of the smaller unaffiliated unions like the RMT, and perhaps those sitting MPs who may break from Labour having lost the whip – just as Corbyn did in the 2024 election.
An alliance would have to move as fast as possible and as slow as necessary to become a party. It might mean five to ten years of consistent work. It’s not an inspiring proposition, there’s no guarantee of quick success. But the constraints, imposed on us by the capitalist state and its institutions, aren’t going to disappear by waiting.
Partyists can push for the alliance to be founded and maintained on the basis of decision-making by individual members in constituency-based branches as well as by the nationally-affiliated organisations. We should expect, though, to be in a minority arguing for a single party structure with open factions – at this point, the majority at a founding conference (or perhaps those groups choosing to initiate an alliance in advance of its launch) will opt for a federal model of governance in imitation of the Labour Party.
Here, some may bristle. Is this not a ‘Labour Party Mark II’? It could be, but if we can’t make our arguments for the party which our class needs within Labour itself – and we had no qualms about trying to do that in the past, and can’t yet rule it out doing so again future – then we’ll have to make the case within the broad-front structures favoured by much of the left.
Where we may be on stronger ground is in making the case for the alliance being bound by the acceptance of a common programmatic statement, though again we should expect this to be determined in advance by the majority players with amendments being overruled. What matters is that there is internal democracy – the ability to revisit these decisions, and to fight for as much of the approach of the minimum-maximum programme to be delineated in the alliance manifesto for the general election.
Forming the party
The alliance eventually developing into a mass communist party is the ideal. Having fought alongside each other in a general election, having elected candidates to parliament, the ideal outcome would then be for the alliance to transform into one big party.
But partyists should expect resistance to proposals for transforming an alliance into a multi-tendency party – from the MPs elected as part of the alliance, unwilling to submit to the discipline of a party programme and be held to account by its members; from the trade union leaderships, unwilling to surrender the influence they would hold in a federal structure; and from the bigger Marxist groups attracted to the alliance by the prospect of winning recruits to their own ranks, unwilling to concede that they are factions of a party and may not dominate its leadership.
I cannot predict exactly how the party would be formed out of the alliance. It could be that the argument for a united party is won from below, by members of the alliance outside of parliament beginning the process of fusion. It could be that partyist MPs, elected as part of the alliance, use their profile to call for transformation into a party.
This uncertainty about the future did not stop partyists being central to the creation of the Socialist Alliance a generation ago. It should not stop us now.
