Your Party is a fragile creation right now. The infant party founded by Zarah Sultana when she resigned from Labour in July and effectively demanded that Jeremy Corbyn act to do what he had been hinting and threatening to do for over a year – create such a party – has both shown signs of some real development, and at the same time been rent by proto-factional divisions. Corbyn is acting as de-facto leader right now, of what both he and Zarah Sultana say will be a member-led socialist party animated by ‘grassroots democracy’.
Corbyn was the left social-democratic leader of Labour from 2015 to 2020 when he was forced out with systematic sabotage of his leadership by a bloc of the Labour Party’s Blairite neoliberal mainstream bureaucracy and its powerful Israel lobby. Corbyn’s leadership was the product of resistance from the base of the working-class movement, or at least its class-conscious section, that had been almost completely excluded for 30 years from any say over the political direction of Labour, the bourgeois workers party that had been the partial political expression of organised labour in Britain since the early 20th Century.
Neoliberalism on the attack
From the mid-1970s the ruling classes of the US and Britain prepared the so-called “Reagan/Thatcher revolutions”, a war that was not merely against trade unions in terms of repressive laws. It aimed to seriously weaken the traditional working class of the advanced capitalist-imperialist countries through the destruction of strategic extractive and manufacturing industries such as mining and steel, with the jobs exported to lower wage countries such as India and China. They did this in Britain with the cooperation of the core of the Labour Party and trade union bureaucracy, who as an index of their own servility to imperialism, perversely saw Thatcher’s attacks on the core of the working class as a way for sections of the class to enrich themselves at others’ expense. That was totally delusional, in fact they laid the basis for the current impoverishment and lumpenisation of large sections of the population in key parts of the UK, which is currently fuelling far right despair.
The international counterpart of Reagan and Thatcher’s pioneering neoliberal crusade to weaken the industrial proletariat in these imperialist countries was the war drive against the USSR in the 1980s, which led the USSR’s Stalinist regime to a capitulationist ‘liberalisation’ under Gorbachev and then allowed outright counterrevolution to emerge and take power under Yelstin in the 1990s. Thatcher’s anti-Soviet drive also had the support of the pro-imperialist labour bureaucracy in Britain, with only sporadic resistance from the Bennite left.
Imperialist rampage, the working class on the retreat
Today that seems almost like a different world. Imperialism consolidated itself after the collapse of the USSR around the project of the neocons and the cult of Jewish-Zionism. Such were the ideologues – the likes of Friedman, Joseph, Sherman, Kissinger, etc – of neoliberalism’s attack on the proletariat beginning in the US and Britain. This later spread to the European Union imperialist countries while it produced catastrophic mayhem in the East. This was also true in Britain as the Labour Party bureaucracy consolidated itself about the projects of the neocons.
Kinnock gave way to Blair, and then you had the central involvement of the Blair government in Bush’s 2003 invasion of Iraq. This was one of a series of imperialist invasions and regime-change operations in the Middle East region since the 1990s that not coincidentally removed every nearby Arab regime that was not servile to Israel as a regional imperialist would-be hegemon. Iraq, Libya, Syria all fell to either outright invasions or proxy wars waged either by the imperialists themselves, as with Bush/Blair’s 2003 Iraq invasion or Obama/Cameron/ Sarkozy’s 2011 Libya invasion, or the Syrian proxy war – with sporadic imperialist bombing – from 2011 onwards — using Western funded ISIS/Al Qaeda jihadists. This was like the imperialist-inspired jihad against the USSR in Afghanistan in the 1980s, where Al Qaeda was created by the CIA. The Syrian jihad was thwarted by Russian military support for Assad and then armed intervention from 2015.
This thwarted imperialist regime-change in Syria for around a decade, but it finally succeeded in overthrowing Assad in 2024, during the Gaza genocide. It does even appear that the imperialist drive to provoke a proxy war with Russia in Ukraine at that time was initially intended to put pressure on Russia’s operation in Syria and thereby help the pro-Israel regime-change operation there. But it acquired a life of its own, and became a major conflict, in which the US and Europe are close to outright defeat by a Russia under Putin that has partially retreated from/negated the counterrevolution that occurred under Yelstin. The attacks on Iran and Lebanon, and now the war in Sudan, were all part of the neocon regime- change agenda revealed by former NATO head General Wesley Clark in 2007, as the Bush era ended – the hit list for regime-change has continued since unabated.
The Zionist-led witchhunts in Labour under Corbyn, with the IHRA pseudo-definition of anti-Semitism playing a pivotal role, forced out Corbyn and led to a massive purge of the Corbynite left, hundreds of thousands of militants, from Labour membership. This prepared the Labour Party to support the outright Zionist genocide in Gaza, with Starmer publicly supporting (on LBC) the deprivation of food, water and fuel from the Gaza population as Israel’s genocidal Defence Minister, Yoav Gallant announced it. The Starmer government, elected in 2024, has a politically far-right character in that it openly supported the genocide in Gaza and both continued and intensified the previous Tory government’s supply of arms and intelligence to Israel’s genocidal armed forces, including British air-reconnaissance aircraft directly aiding the Israelis in looking for targets for carpet bombing of the Gaza strip.
In fact, the crypto far-right politics of Starmer had found expression on other issues. Such as when Starmer notoriously pronounced that Britain was becoming an ‘Island of Strangers’ echoing the rhetoric of racist arch-Tory Enoch Powell’s 1968 ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech about immigration, which inspired the fascist National Front in the 1970s and 1980s. The genocidal, pro-Israeli nature of Starmer’s leadership of Labour was evident from the very beginning and totally precluded any support for pro-Starmer Labour candidates in the General Election. Only his outright opponents on the Labour left merited any support, and even that with considerable caution.
Your Party: A project of resistance
This crypto far-right government has attacked the Palestine anti-genocide movement to an extent that Sunak’s previous reactionary government never dared. Bans on demonstrations and the proscription of Palestine Action show this clearly. They also attacked the working class, particularly pensioners – attacking winter fuel payments, and the disabled, and have ostentatiously kept the two-child benefit cap of David Cameron’s Tories. These attacks led to Zarah Sultana not only leaving Labour but effectively becoming the left-wing leading force in what has become Your Party, as yet officially unnamed, with Jeremy Corbyn in the centre, and on the right flank four independent Muslim MPs, who creditably defeated the Labour Party over the single issue of the Gaza genocide in the General Election, but unlike Corbyn, don’t know the basics of working class politics.
Like Adnan Hussain, MP for Blackburn, who made clear in a debate on tenants’ rights that he is a landlord and considers excessive demands for security of tenure and freedom from arbitrary rent rises etc create a “risk of polarising every landlord as ‘evil’ – we must make sure we don’t fall into that trap”. (New Statesman, 8th September). He also denounced both sides – the fascists and their opponents – in confrontations outside asylum seekers’ accommodation – as “equally absurd”. Ayoub Khan, the Independent MP for Birmingham Perry Barr, meanwhile, demanded that troops be used to break the Birmingham Refuse Collector’s (Dustmen) strike against massive pay cuts. A distinct lack of working-class solidarity is in evidenced by both. This is not surprising, it is a product of the uneven nature of building a left-wing challenge to Labour in a period like this when some of those who were prepared to stand up to New Labour over Gaza – it was obviously obligatory to support them – are not workers and/or leave a lot to be desired in terms of class consciousness.
Hussain appears to have been a right-wing infiltrator who caused the early Your Party a lot of problems, trying to witchhunt Zarah Sultana for her leftist views. Just before she appeared on Question Time on 13 November a statement appeared, signed by five Independent MP’s including Corbyn, denouncing Zarah for supposedly delaying the transfer of money collected for membership dues from the portal she initiated in mid-September. But she only took over the sole directorship of MOU Operations, the temporary repository of those funds, a couple of weeks before that statement, and such legal transfers take time to comply with complex data protection and financial guidelines. Corbyn then let it be known that he did not sign or endorse this statement, despite his name being on it, and Hussain, apparently having been caught red-handed, suddenly resigned from the body overseeing the setting up of Your Party. This throws considerable light on the earlier smear against Zarah Sultana over that portal, which she set up on 19th September because the likes of Hussain were blocking what had already been agreed in principle. This was in effect an anti-left witchhunt against Zarah, who is the real driving force and founder of YP, by Hussein, who has close family and social ties to the Labour Party right-wing and used dishonest tactics to stymie the excellent socialist candidacy of Craig Murray, then in the Workers Party and now in Your Party, in Blackburn in the General Election. It appears he has acted as a crypto New Labour ‘cuckoo in the nest’ and that is the reason for the whole furore around the September membership drive initiated by Zarah, which some on the left just denounced as a shitshow. It was an anti-left witchhunting tactic which principled socialists should have backed up Zarah over. We are proud that we did so and attacked opportunists such as the CPGB/WW and Spartacists for denouncing all involved (including Zarah, the intended victim) as involved in a ‘shitshow’.
The founding conference of Your Party is due to be held on 29th-30th November in Liverpool. There a proper name will be voted on, with People’s Party or The Left most likely to be chosen, it seems. The party has as this article is written, around 72,000 members as the most recent estimate – a couple of weeks earlier there was an official announcement that the membership had reached 50,000. In July when the party was first mooted by Zarah Sultana, again 72,000 signed up for a website, TeamZarah, in three days, and when the Your Party website was publicly announced and endorsed by both Zarah and Jeremy Corbyn in August, over 800,000 expressed and interest and in many cases donated money. There were all kind of reports and controversy about the influence of figures such as the ex-Momentum activist James Scheider and the sometime UNITE official Karie Murphy, around Corbyn, as inimical bureaucratic elements who were resisting any real democratic internal life of the party. This was a product of the secretive operation of the ‘Collective’ organisation that existed on a very hush-hush basis for around a year after Corbyn defeated Labour as an Independent candidate in the 2024 General Election, along with the other Muslim independents.
But this now appears to have been partially transcended and the real factional conflict is between the group of Muslim independents, and Zarah Sultana and others on the left of the proto-party, with Corbyn both planting at least one of his feet in the camp of the Muslim independents, and at the same time trying to keep them away from all out factional conflict. That is how things appear from the outside at least. It appears that the bulk of the independent group was not keen on the rapid development of the party, and this led Zarah Sultana to launch the first membership portal in September, in frustration at a membership sign-up that had been agreed but was not implemented. This led to public allegations of a fake portal, and then threats of legal action from both sides, either for having supposedly broken data protection rules, or for defamation (from Zarah Sultana).
This has moved, painfully towards being resolved, but at a snail’s pace with kicking and screaming from the independent MPs, as before the party could be founded as a legal entity, a temporary holding company, MOU Operations, was set up with three prominent left-wingers as directors to get the project off the ground. When the first membership portal was set up and then denounced by the independent MPs in September, legal threats were made and reports under data protection law. This behaviour was counterproductive, as it led to legal difficulties in transferring membership money to the similar precursor body, Project Peace and Justice, on the other side. In October the three directors of MOU Operations resigned and made way for Zarah Sultana to act as sole director in a bid to speed up the legal difficulties, but some remained and have slowed things down. So, we still see regrettable and foolish Open Letters being issued by the all-male independent MP’s group criticising Zarah Sultana, who appears to be trying hard but struggling to resolve a problem that is in large measure a product of the small-c conservative politics and attitudes of this ‘Independent’ group in the first place. This is an unseemly own goal and looks bad, giving ammunition to the bourgeois media.
These organisational issues are manifestations of political problems, which must be resolved in their own terms. What really does not help is denunciations of Your Party as an undemocratic ‘shitshow’ from far-left groupings like the CPGB/Weekly Worker and the Spartacist League, who pose as the embodiment of democratic and/or programmatic virtue, but have terrible histories of heresy-hunting and anti-democratic means of dealing with political differences themselves. The various democratic devices in use in YP so far – the circulation of the four documents: Constitution, Standing Orders, Political Statement and Year 1 Organisational Plan – with their online editing by members and Regional Assemblies to discuss them, are not perfect examples of developed party democracy, but nor are they a sign of a developing totalitarian-bureaucratic regime. The rhetoric from some on the left is sectarian overkill.
Social Democracy and Sect Politics
The attitude of serious revolutionaries to Your Party must be one of sober engagement, not petty denunciation and point scoring. It is necessary to recognise that many of the political problems of Your Party, as well as those of many of its left oppositional forces, flow from left social-democratic politics. That is not just true of the historic political followers of Jeremy Corbyn but is also true of many of the large sects, such the Socialist Workers Party, the Socialist Party, and the relatively new Revolutionary Communist Party (formerly known as Socialist Appeal).
Both of the latter two currents, as well as Socialist Alternative, have their origins in the Militant Tendency of Ted Grant and Peter Taaffe from the 1950s to the late 1980s. This spent decades in a kind of strategic entryism in the Labour Party, adopting the parliamentary road to socialism as a kind of parody of a ‘Trotskyist’ credo in terms of an Enabling Act, that would supposedly allow capitalism to be abolished through mass pressure on a left Labour government and the nationalisation of the top 100 or so monopolies. The Militant group became quite clearly social chauvinist over the Irish war and then the Malvinas war in 1982, posing the idea that a ‘socialist’ Labour government would also fight to defeat Argentina for Britain and some kind of liberation of the 1,800 or so Falklanders (who are British colons). They also were historically soft on Zionism and often echoed imperialist anti-Sovietism in the 1980s Cold war.
As did the SWP, who in their early incarnation in the 1950s broke away from the Trotskyist movement’s Soviet defencism over the Korean War. To the point that when the USSR collapsed in 1991, they proclaimed that the “collapse of communism” was something that should have “every socialist rejoicing”. But in fact, the counterrevolution was a disaster, that resulted in the death of several million former Soviet workers from starvation and suicidal despair, which is the only way the five-year (!) fall in life-expectancy in the 1990s can be explained. So much so that it provoked parallel revolts both from below and in elements of the state and productive apparatus of the Russian Federation. This leading to the rise of Putin with a high-level of popularity, because he reversed many of Yeltsin’s attacks, giving rise to a new kind of mixed economy, whose capitalist element can be said to be severely ‘deformed’ by elements of the planned economy and apparatus. That being bound up with the beginnings of a superior, socialist mode of production, which the counterrevolution was unable to simply destroy. Which is why this complex “bourgeois state with socialist deformations”, i.e., Russia, is once again hated by the imperialists. It has nothing to do with any alleged despotic tendencies of Putin, a fairly mild and rational centre-right leader of a non-imperialist country.
Against the Stream – fight for Communism
Today we see divisions on crucial international questions among both the ex-Labour left, and the so-called ‘far left’, many of whom are getting on their high-horses and denouncing various elements of Your Party in a one-sided manner for supposed conspiracies against ‘grassroots democracy’. As communists, we take full part in the political struggles of this party, we do not abstain or set ourselves up as a sect opposed to it, but nor do we go along with the illusions that prevail both among the ex-Labour people and the far left. Some ex-Corbynites, for instance, have better positions on the Ukraine war that many on the ‘far left’. Some recognise that the Western imperialist proxy war against Russia and the people of the Donbass/Crimea is a continuation of the old imperialist crusade against the USSR, in changed conditions. Many on the ‘far left’ are on the wrong side in Ukraine, and were on the wrong side in Syria, and even over the imperialist invasion of Libya. On the question of Zionism, getting Corbyn to denounce it in full was like pulling teeth, but recently he did so at a Your Party meeting in Putney. Softness on Zionism is not entirely unknown on the far left, of course, the overtly Zionist Alliance for Workers Liberty hangs around some Your Party events, but softness on Zionism is not confined to them.
There are those on the far left, from parts of the Jewish left to the SWP and CPGB who smear as ‘anti-Semitic’ those Marxists who point out basic material facts about the social base of Zionism as a racist current centred in the Jewish part of the imperialist bourgeoisie. These trends cross class lines in seeking to ‘cancel’ such criticisms of a key part of the ruling class itself, including from us and previously Socialist Fight. The case of David Miller, the sacked anti-Zionist Professor formerly at Bristol University who now co-presents Palestine Declassified with Chris Wiliamson on Press TV, has become a barometer of capitulation to Zionism on the ‘far left’. Some line up to call him ‘anti-Semitic’ even when he is in battle with Zionists over crucial class and democratic questions. This is somewhat reminiscent of the way some on the far left – such as the SWP – bought into the imperialist campaign against Julian Assange earlier. Others on the Corbynite left frequently have better positions, notwithstanding the weakness of Corbyn himself on Zionism. On other ‘controversial’ questions such as trans rights, there is great confusion and diversity among the ex-Corbynite, ex-Labour membership, among newer layers of younger militants, as well as some on the ‘far left’.
Your Party is of great importance. We must fight for a revolutionary programme within it. We must fight against reformist parliamentarism and the belief that the existing state can be captured for the working class and somehow turned into a weapon against oppression. We must popularise the Marxist understanding that the existing state cannot be the means of liberation of the working class, but that instead it must be smashed and replaced with a state where the working class, with its own independent armed forces, is the master of society and the repository of all of society’s productive resources. Instead of elected representatives and state officials being bribed by capitalists who thereby become the masters of society, all such elective positions administering the planned economy we need must be paid the average wage of a skilled worker, and subject to recall from below.
That is a different conception of socialism to the social-democratic left, not only the Corbynites, but also the politics in practice of many of the various large social democratic sects. The dissolution of sects and political development along those lines is the real logic of the creation of a genuine mass party of the socialist-minded working class. We must bear in mind that Your Party exists because social-democratic politics failed and dissolved into neoliberalism. That is itself a product of the dying state of capitalism today. We need workers democracy at the deepest level within Your Party precisely to allow the development of class consciousness to undertake this necessary qualitative leap. That is the real purpose of the struggle for democracy in YP. All else is subordinate to that.
