On Sunday, around 160 people, at various points through a 5 hour conference, attended the first conference of the Members' Charter online, which along with voting on the 32 proposals put forward for the structure, politics and activity of a new post-Your Party organisation, voted to rename itself to the Socialist Federation.
It should be said first of all that in a post-Your Party environment where mobilising comrades towards a way forward is very difficult amid substantial demoralisation, the new Federation seems to be at the moment by far the largest initiative of this type that seeks to construct an explicit political and organisational alternative to Your Party. In a conference that set itself a frankly enormous undertaking, conference business generally ran very smoothly and given the very real practical limitations upon any event like this, that is no minor feat. This was also a conference in which, through a huge array of proposals, covered tremendous ground, from what type of organisation could convene the left of Your Party, through to the various conceptions of political education, common work in movements of the working class and oppressed, and much more besides that.
There do remain concerns and doubts however, along with very real challenges, regarding the very politically broad segment of Your Party and ex-Your Party members the initiative has convened that the conference certainly reflected. The ability for the conference to debate the future direction of the Your Party left was hampered by first the sheer number of different proposals and second of all the significant length and scope of many of them, in some cases extending far beyond the reach of what a likely fairly small organisation could do. The result was, first, 2 sessions of nearly an hour devoted purely to the moving of each proposal, with the structure proposals in the morning, and the policy and programme proposals in the afternoon.
After each came sessions to discuss the various proposals which, unsurprisingly given the sheer amount to discuss, generally resulted in quite unfocused, general contributions or very specific criticisms of individual proposals. This did unsurprisingly limit the ability for the conference to discuss the way forward for the left of Your Party significantly, leading to generally those proposals that were most effectively moved from the floor or by those already prominent within the process (or in most cases both) winning out. Another concern was the composition of the conference itself, which skewed heavily older, male and white. This is in part a reflection of the fact many younger layers have long receded away from Your Party, though is something the organisers should seek to directly challenge.
The results were clear in voting for a federation as the organisational model, with the top 3 proposals from the structure category including two proposals by Raz O’Connor and our own DS EC member James Kulmer for the structure and underlying principles of a federation (though a temporary one explicitly understood to be a pre-party structure), alongside a proposal by Olivia Presland emphasising a hybrid approach in which there are parallel structures set up to incorporate both a broader section of the population, and a tighter activist core along a similar line to the Worker’s Party of Belgium, though again with the aim being a unitary party in the future.
Politically the two leading programmatic proposals explicitly advocated socialist politics, with Raz O’Connor’s proposal acting more as a means to define key Marxist concepts and Richard Gerrard’s Interim Platform for a Socialist Federation being a shorter action programme in the mould of the transitional demands often advocated by Trotskyist organisations. Finally Tom Lennard’s proposal for “Building Solidarity and Trust Within and Without the Left” also won out, emphasising the need to build a comradely culture for organising and expressing our ideas without the use of alienating jargon.
In the case of the structure proposals, each of the 3 that won out were highly detailed and somewhat schematic, in some cases slightly excessively so, but did reflect many of the broad issues that any left organisation will have to grapple with in the next period. Politically, there was also greater coherence than we had expected in terms of offering up quite clear political bottom lines to a future organisation. What was not resolved is the question of what a programme’s purpose and structure should be, with Raz O’Connor’s proposal for instance appearing to endorse the idea that a programme is essentially a series of theoretical interpretations of Marxism, while Gerrard’s proposal, though clearly indicating the need for socialism, largely emphasising more immediate agitational demands over a longer-term strategic horizon for working class power. In this regard, we would hope that a programme of a future organisation would define itself primarily in terms of outlining this strategic horizon, rather than in terms of creating organisations formed around rigid theoretical agreement or a series of demands with no clear connection to the underlying goal of a socialist world.
With regards to whether we should engage, and if so how, it should be stressed that whatever exact organisational form is agreed at the next conference on the 28th of June, the central issue is what politics will be a minimum basis for involvement within the new organisation. With the conference having agreed decisively to construct a federation, invariably there will be an acceptance of a certain degree of flexibility in the programme and perspectives of different constituent parts of the organisation. The question is how broad this federation will be, and from that whether it could feasibly become a pre-party structure, or remain a looser federation of organisations, proto-branches etc. In this regard, we should also look at prior federal organisations on the British left which have either failed to grow significantly, such as the Socialist Party’s Trade Union and Socialist Coalition, or have folded in the event of significant political or strategic disagreements, such as in the previous Socialist Federation of the mid 1980s or the Socialist Alliance of the early 2000s.
In this regard, it is our view that continued engagement should be with the aim of winning a stronger minimum basis for participation in the federation, based clearly around socialist and radically democratic politics. There is also a more general concern which currently affects all post-Your Party or Your Party-adjacent initiatives, namely that we are working within an environment in which demoralisation or disinterest is common, with many shifting away from the struggle for new forms of political organisation towards the social movements. On this point, it is still very much in question whether the Socialist Federation will have the political coherence, unity and strategic vision required to break through the current gloom surrounding disaffected Your Party and ex-Your Party members, but the conference on Sunday did certainly reflect some progress in this regard.
Report by Stephen O.
You can find more information about the Socialist Federation here: https://linktr.ee/socialistfederation