In recent months, a number of groups on Britain’s organised left have discussed the formation of a new national vehicle: either a political party or an electoral alliance. The case for such an institution could not be clearer. The incumbent Labour government is defined by deference to corporate interests, complicity in genocide and repression of dissent. While the Conservative opposition remains fixated on culture wars and tarnished by its long record of misrule, the far-right Reform UK appears to be on track to win a plurality of the popular vote, presenting its Powellite vision as the only viable alternative. 

Polling suggests that a left-wing party could win as many votes as the governing one, with both on 15%. That number could rise further were it to root itself in key constituencies and mount a forceful attack on the Westminster consensus: an event that would mark a major advance for a socialist bloc historically bound by the constraints of Labourism. While the politicians and operators who are centrally involved in this new organisation have not yet developed a clear outline for it, the prominent socialist MP Zarah Sultana and the former Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn have announced an inaugural conference, to be held this autumn, at which policies and leadership models can be democratically decided. An astonishing 200,000 people have signed up in less than 24 hours.

One of the organisers who has been working on this project is James Schneider. Born in 1987, Schneider was radicalised by the war on Iraq and the global financial crisis. He co-founded the campaign group Momentum to build popular support for Corbyn’s leadership in 2015, and was recruited as the party’s Director of Strategic Communications a year later: a role in which he advocated an unapologetic form of left-populism, trying – ultimately in vain – to resist pressure to capitulate to the Labour right on key issues such as Brexit. Since then he has published Our Bloc (2022), his blueprint for the future of the British left, and he now works as Communications Director for the Progressive International. 

Schneider spoke to Oliver Eagleton about some of the crucial considerations involved in the process of building a party: how it can mediate between popular and electoral power, the organisational structures it must establish, the factors that previously prevented its launch and the international examples from which it can learn. This is the first in a series of reflections on the outlook for the post-Corbynite left that will appear on Sidecar.

*

Oliver Eagleton: Let’s start with your general account of what a hypothetical left party should hope to achieve in the political landscape of the 2020s – especially in countries like Britain, where it would face a number of major obstacles, from the grip of the establishment media to the antidemocratic Westminster system to the division of left-of-Labour forces.

James Schneider: The task of this party should be to undertake different forms of ‘political construction’. First there is the construction of popular unity: taking the constituencies that currently form a sociological majority and translating them into a political majority. In Britain these are the asset-poor working class, downwardly mobile graduates and racialised communities. Most people think about constituencies in purely electoral terms: ‘How can we win a few more seats?’, and so on. But it doesn’t fundamentally matter whether you have fifty or a hundred or two hundred MPs unless your electoral strategy is linked to this wider social project. 

Then there is the construction of popular power: building structured organisations that people can use to democratically control different parts of their lives, either by winning concessions from capital and the state, or by partially transcending them – decommodifying certain resources or carving out autonomous spaces. This allows people to collectively legislate from below while at the same time creating the conditions for their party to legislate from above. Britain’s labour movement and cooperatives have traditionally served this purpose. Other countries have more varied traditions of creating popular power, through tenants groups, agricultural collectives, debtors unions, land occupations, to name just a few.   

That brings us to the final form of political construction: that of a popular alternative. Popular unity and popular power demonstrate that there are alternative ways to organise society as a whole, while also building a majoritarian programme for government that is capable of meeting people’s needs in the short to medium term. If we pursue this tripartite strategy, then we will begin to see the emergence of new forms of popular protagonism that diffuse struggle and control throughout society.  

Let me give you two examples from Colombia. This was historically one of the continent’s main outposts of imperialism, dominated by a conservative comprador elite. Yet for more than seventy years, the country’s oil has been publicly owned, because oil workers launched an indefinite strike in 1948 that forced the state to establish a nationalised company, and persistent mass pressure means that no government since has been able to reverse the decision. More recently, in 2010, an institution called the People’s Congress was formed to bring together various social movements and territorial struggles: urban, peasant, indigenous. One of their initiatives was to set up peasant-controlled food-producing territories that linked small farmers with the urban poor, and they eventually forced the government to recognise and support these expanding territories – which are conceived by the movement as ‘trenches of popular power’. This strategy of legislating from below fed into the election of Colombia’s first ever left-wing government in 2022, led by Gustavo Petro. 

To summarise, our party needs to be a vehicle for establishing unity, a catalyst for popular organising and a lever for popular mobilisation towards a social alternative. Our long-term aim, far beyond what can be achieved in the 2020s, should be to establish a society that recognises the essential dignity of every person. While this principle is self-evident to many, the macro-structures of our global system stand firmly against it. The current order is built on a triad of capital, the nation and the state. Our aim should be to replace it with a different one: the social, the international and the democratic – three interlocking logics that open space for new forms of life beyond exploitation, empire and top-down control. That means socialising the economy, transforming our position in the chain of imperial relations and the global division of labour, and democratising the state. There is no path to a sustainable ecological future without these transformations. In this country, we’ve never had a vehicle that has tried to effect this kind of change through mass politics. None of the small left groups has done so. Even under Corbyn’s leadership of the Labour Party we did not conceive of our goal in these terms. What it requires is a people’s party, and a surrounding set of organisations, which can win power in every sense: social, cultural, political, industrial. 

OE: Can you say more about how this strategy would grapple with the practical realities of British politics today?

JS: The social constituencies I outlined above – asset-poor workers, downwardly mobile graduates and racialised people – would benefit most from a movement to abolish the present state of things. Of course, a left party should also seek to win support beyond these groups: there are progressive elements outside them just as there are reactionary elements within them, so it can’t be a rigid or mechanical process. But these are the three main actors through which popular unity can be forged. Some of the reasons why they make up a numerical majority are related to Britain’s global position as an advanced economy in the capitalist core, but others are more specific: for example, the policies pushed through by New Labour in higher-education, housing and industry, which created the category of the downwardly mobile graduate (ironically, since New Labour was in part the project of an upwardly mobile graduate class). Increasingly, the actions of the establishment – especially the present Labour government – are consolidating a common interest among these constituencies. The Westminster parties have immiserated the asset-poor along with younger graduates, and they have tried to place the blame on racialised people, including those who do not fit within these other two social categories, which gives them a shared basis for overturning the status quo. 

So the potential is there. What’s lacking is the capacity. When it comes to popular power, we are starting from a very low level. Civic life in Britain, as in much of the Global North, has been rubbed to a residue. Working-class associational life has been smashed; not just the unions and cooperatives, but the libraries, the pubs, the clubs, the bands, the sports teams. Fewer and fewer people even remember this earlier political culture. Our strongest manifestation of popular power is the labor movement, and the main thing it has experienced over the last fifty years is defeat, which naturally creates a defensive posture. How do we overcome it? Well, popular power is always based on density. There’s a reason why the factory creates political openings for the left; and the same goes for the working-class neighbourhood, as a site where people naturally come together. In Britain this has clear implications for electoral strategy because of the first-past-the-post system. I am no apologist for that system, but it happens to exist and we must work within it for the time being. One thing it forces us to do is pursue a strategy of density: rooting our project in specific areas in which those three social constituencies have a supermajority. 

Let’s look at the election last year, where the five independents running to the left of Labour won seats in parliament: a relatively small gain, but also a historic one, in that there had previously been only three left-of-Labour independents since World War Two. The situation in Islington North, where Corbyn beat the Labour challenger by a crushing margin, was somewhat sui generis in that he was a candidate with a national profile and 100% name recognition. It has wider implications, however, in that every last remaining element of social power was mobilised in support of the campaign, precisely because people saw it as an expression of their own civic life. Every gardening group, every church, every mosque, every trade union branch in the area: they all recognised that Corbyn was their political embodiment, which is why they turned out for him, almost regardless of what they thought about specific policies. 

The four other independents also won largely on account of the real social power in their communities, which is largely based in the mosques – although, of course, many non-Muslims and non-practising Muslims campaigned and voted for them as well. People go to mosque every week. It’s a place of sociality, a place of welfare, a place of moral direction. And so, even though these independent candidates would be the first to admit that they were politically inexperienced – that they didn’t have slick campaigns or cutting-edge communications or a comprehensive policy platform – they were nonetheless carried to victory through this identification with the community’s power centre, which helped to channel their shared revulsion at the genocide in Gaza along with a range of other issues. That’s exactly why the establishment reacted with such horror. It was not just a matter of Islamophobia; it was also a terrified recognition that popular power can bypass the structures that are supposed to neutralise it. 

OE: If your ambition is to create some kind of binding link between a political party and wider forms of associational life, then perhaps there is a distinction to be drawn between movements and institutions. The first can be ephemeral and amorphous, failing to create durable forms of popular power, in the absence of the second. You might say that, when it comes to issues like the Gaza genocide, it is the movement which activates people as political subjects, the institution which translates that politicisation into popular power, and the party which harnesses that power to influence or capture the state. Which leads me to ask: if Britain’s working-class institutional culture has been largely destroyed over the past half-century, leaving behind only isolated enclaves, then aren’t we missing a crucial link in this sequence? How should a new left party address this problem? 

JS: We need to construct more institutions. This, for me, is the most important strategic task for the party and also the one that is most likely to be overlooked. As well as strengthening the manifestations of popular power that have survived in the ruins of neoliberalism, we must create new ones. The number of rented households in the UK is 8.6 million. The number of people in tenants unions is roughly 20,000. Only 38% of tenants voted in the last election. If, under Corbyn’s Labour, we had decided to go out and knock on doors and organise tenants, how many tenant leaders would we now have? How could we have shifted the consciousness of the Labour left, away from cheerleading for a parliamentary party on Twitter and towards building strong institutions of its own? You could ask the same questions about a range of other issues. With 600,000 Labour members, 450,000 of whom were on the left, we could have decided that it was a political priority to organise around issue X or Y. If we had mobilised even 10% of those left-wing members we could have set up new popular organisations: food cooperatives, bill payers’ unions, mental health groups. You could have had campaigns building for a climate strike or trying to bring utilities into public ownership through mass boycotts. There’s no shortage of possibilities, and it’s not my place to be prescriptive about which of them we should prioritise over the coming years. These choices need to be made democratically by a national political party.  

If the new party spends all its time working out the perfect social care policy for our imaginary left-technocratic future when we run the state, it will go nowhere. If it views itself as a Labour Party 2.0, with better politics than the current one but with no outlets for real popular participation, it will be destroyed by countervailing powers. During the Corbyn period we were trapped in a position where Labour members were often stuck waiting for a handful of people at the top to make decisions rather than becoming agents and leaders themselves. We cannot repeat that mistake. I think it’s important to remember that outside of Europe and North America, political meetings don’t suck. They aren’t boring. They’re lively, participatory and rooted in popular culture – with music, food, even dancing. Normal people show up because they belong. There are different ways for people to participate. And that’s because their purpose is to strengthen the bonds of solidarity and unity so that people can go out and engage in the construction of popular power. 

OE: How should the new party you’re envisioning go about creating this kind of non-traditionally-British political culture? 

JS: In contemporary Britain, the establishment has no story to tell: it says that everything is basically fine and you should shut up about your problems. The reactionary bloc, meanwhile, says that everything is bad: you can’t get an NHS appointment, housing is unaffordable, your pay has gone down, and the reason for all this is Muslims, migrants and minorities. When these are the only two narratives on offer, then the latter is likely to win, because at least it speaks to some real grievances. But the truth is that attacking minorities is itself a minority position. There might be a certain type of pervasive racism in Britain, but most people really do not spend their time thinking about how much they hate foreigners, so there is a clear opening for a different narrative. What we should be offering instead is ‘class war with a grin’. We should reject all the pieties of the political-media-state class, for they are hated by the public, and rightly so. We should create controversies rather than retreating from them. This communicative style is often called left populism. It involves drawing a big, bold line of antagonism in which there is unity on our side and division on the other. That line of antagonism is extremely simple: the reason for our problems is the bankers and the billionaires. They are at war with us, so we are going to war with them. We should aim to baffle and outrage the media establishment with a political style that is combative but also joyful. We should have meetings like those I’ve been describing, with music and food and discussion groups, and where people can come away with clear actions to carry out. This naturally means that the party should be based mostly outside Westminster; it should not be associated with blokes in suits who spend their time mumbling disingenuously to news cameras. 

My dream is a party that hits with the same impact as ‘Turn the Page’, the opening track on The Streets’ debut album Original Pirate Material. Something you’ve never heard before, yet instantly recognisable; unmistakably British and rooted in everyday life, from the pubs to the pavements. A sound – or in our case, a politics – that effortlessly blends cultures and traditions, anchored in class and community but moving forward with confidence and style. We need to inhabit this sort of national-popular register. To put it in a more theoretical way, the efficacy of this kind of politics stems from unlocking the potential progressive valence of the ‘national’ dimension of the capital-nation-state triad. On Sidecar you ran a short, thought-provoking piece by Dylan Riley the other week titled ‘Lenin in America’, which, following Gramsci, argued that Lenin today would pursue a ‘productive and creative relationship to the specific national-democratic revolutionary political culture in which one operates’. The British left needs to be thinking along these lines. 

OE: You mentioned Colombia as a model, but let’s think for a moment about the historical and contextual differences. There, you had a state dominated by the two main parties, the Liberals and Conservatives, who spent decades collaborating with the US to keep the country in a condition of peripheral dependency while excluding the popular sectors from power. Many of those sectors were therefore largely unintegrated into the processes of economic accumulation and political participation, which helped to forge certain autonomous traditions of struggle: guerrilla movements that controlled large parts of the countryside, campaigns against extractivism, groups defending indigenous territories. Petro was able to unify many of these forces in his electoral project, bringing the outsiders – the ‘nobodies’, as they were affectionately called – into the heart of government. In Britain, by contrast, the long-running problem has been less one of popular exclusion than popular assimilation. The Labour Party has traditionally been a tool to subsume the working class into the state and reconcile it with imperialism, with the upshot that our culture of popular struggle is less active; our left-wing meetings are more boring; the organic basis for this kind of mass politics is much weaker. 

The Corbyn leadership had a sober assessment of these conditions. Your aim was not necessarily to empower ‘the grassroots’ and hope they would carry you to victory. It was, rather, to exploit a situation of political crisis, capture state power, and implement a programme of non-reformist reforms that would in turn galvanise broader swathes of people, by strengthening workers, renters, migrants and so on. This approach, in which politics from above precedes politics from below, was not simply a strategic blunder. It was a reflection of our particular historical situation and the political possibilities it generated. One could argue that those same conditions have also shaped the way in which the plan for a new left party has so far been developed, with decisions being made by a relatively small stratum of political operators who hope – not unreasonably – to use electoral victories to stimulate wider struggles. 

JS: The explanation you lay out is broadly correct, and helps to account for why the predominant consciousness on the British left is highly electoralist. I’m not arguing against winning elections or going into government. I think that is essential. But there are two reasons why it can and must be combined with these other processes of political construction from the outset. First, the assimilation of the British working class – not just via the Labour Party but also the unions during the corporatist period – was never total: there were always popular revolts and sites of resistance. So there are radical traditions on which to build. Second, we are now approaching the end of a decades-long capitalist offensive that aimed to destroy such resistance. This was done partly through assimilation but mainly through brute force: the violent exclusion of the masses in both the Global North and the Global South, with British miners getting their heads smashed in and Argentine leftists being thrown from helicopters. What we are seeing today is this onslaught beginning to stall, not because of external opposition but because of its own internal limitations: the inability of the US to hold down Chinese sovereign development, especially after 2008; and the increasing strain on resources as the ecological crisis gathers pace. This creates a vital opportunity for a left party. 

But we cannot simply replay Corbynism in this context. We are not at the head of a party of government and we have no chance of getting there any time soon. So that particular electoralist-only wager, which was defeated in the first place, is even less feasible now. There number of people who were even conscious of the 2015-19 strategy as you describe it was also extremely limited: only a handful among the shadow cabinet and senior advisors who would have articulated it in that way. The logic of parliamentary socialism remained very much intact. I think we need a fundamental shift in our strategic vision in order to create a consensus on the left that recognises the importance of popular power. 

If you want a negative example then you can look at the Green Party. Its approach is to elect its candidates to public office so that they can use their profile to advocate for progressive policies. On their own terms they have had some success, electing an MP during the 2019 to 2024 period and four since then, plus many local councillors. But what impact have they had on public consciousness? Virtually none. Extinction Rebellion and Fridays for the Future have had a much more tangible effect on mass environmental politics. The Greens’ mathematical approach – the more elected representatives the better – is two hundred years old, dating to the time of the liberal revolutions, when public discourse took place in newly formed parliaments and assemblies in which the numbers really mattered. It is totally unsuited to the 2020s. The party’s most vocal spokesperson isn’t even an MP. We’ve recently been hearing things like ‘Together with the Greens, a left party could hold the balance of power in Westminster’. This is the same kind of self-deluding nonsense that some in the Socialist Campaign Group have been peddling for years: ‘If we just stay in Labour and keep our head down, maybe we’ll hold the balance of power’. How has that worked out?

JS: I’m not in favour of either position, at least not their extreme versions. On the one hand, you risk having a reheated Labourism with better politics but a similar party form, whose first priority is to find candidates to run in local elections. On the other, the danger is that we end up with a loosey-goosey umbrella of independents that offers no governmental perspective for real change. Neither of these is going to build genuine power in society. 

In the book I wrote after the 2019 defeat I argued for a federation of the existing movements, structured organisations and forces on the left that could act as a building block for a more ambitious project. Today, it’s still perfectly plausible that a federated organisation could play this role: laying the foundations for these different kinds of political construction I discussed earlier. But, for one thing, you would still need a unified decision-making structure to be able to set up any kind of larger structure, whether it’s federal, confederal or central. Opting for a coalition over a party would not change the fact that people first need to come together and agree on the basic contours, and so far this has failed to happen. Nor is there any reason why a party can’t respect diverse positions, with different tendencies and internal pluralism. An existing local political brand should be able to continue operating with a high level of autonomy, if it is so wished. These are frankly second-order issues that can be worked out when we’ve established the proper deliberative channels. 

My preferred model would be a structure where we entrust strategy to the membership and tactics to the leadership layer. Major strategic questions – which type of social-power building to prioritise, how to distribute resources to activists across the country, what kind of political education and training to provide, what the content of the political programme should be: all this would be decided collectively. Tactics, meaning how these strategic goals are delivered, can then be determined largely by frontline organisers or politicians. In order for this to work, there would have to be a collective leadership system. It could go something like the following. A leadership slate of twelve or fifteen would run on a strategy proposal and perhaps also political proposal which it would submit to the members, who would cast single-transferrable votes for their preferred strategy and associated candidates. That would produce a national committee composed of leaders from different slates, who would then synthesise the various proposals and put them to the members’ conference, where they could be approved or amended or rejected. The committee would also elect people to different national roles: our lead spokesperson, our lead organiser, our liaison with progressive movements, our party manager and so on. That way you would still have people in identifiable leadership positions, but it wouldn’t just be a popularity contest. It would create a stratum of leaders who are able to make agile, tactical decisions, but it would also cultivate popular protagonism by turning strategy into a collective endeavour.  

OE: Had a left vehicle launched sooner, it could have seized a number of political opportunities. At elite level it could have exploited Starmer’s decision last July to suspend seven MPs, including Sultana, from the parliamentary party, perhaps convincing more of them to jump ship. At mass level it could have mounted a united left response to the rising tide of racist violence incited by both Starmer and Farage. Why in your view has the project taken this long to come into public view?

JS: I’ve been working on this for about a year now, and I think there are structural factors which make it difficult to launch anything: not just the specific type of left party I’ve been advocating, but any type of left party. As I’ve already said, it comes down to the issue of decision-making. What decisions are legitimate? Who can take them and who can implement them? There’s a chicken-and-egg dilemma in which you can’t make decisions until you have a structure, but to have a structure you need to make decisions. In other equivalent situations, this problem is circumvented in one of three ways. 

The first is the intervention of a hyperleader. Jean-Luc Mélenchon says ‘The Parti de Gauche isn’t working, I’m forming La France Insoumise’, and that’s what happens. People follow him. In Britain we don’t have that type of figure. We have a kind of hyperleader in Jeremy, a person whose moral and political authority towers above anyone else’s; but he doesn’t act in that way. It’s not his style. 

The second is a preexisting structured organisation with disciplined decision-making capacity. That could be a trade union or a political campaign. In South Africa, Abahlali baseMjondolo, a movement of people who live in informal shack dwellings, has 180,000 members across 102 housing settlements and is carrying out land occupations in four provinces. I went to their general assembly when I was observing the elections in South Africa last year and witnessed their discussions about building their own electoral vehicle. They can use their existing democratic mechanisms which allow decisions to be made, challenged and overturned as part of an open process where everyone knows where they stand. That, too, is missing in Britain. 

The third solution is a small group of closely aligned, politically advanced people who can make decisions collectively. There have been many communist parties throughout history which have been formed by twelve or so individuals sitting around a table, which in short order became mass vehicles. But here the discussions are taking place among people with very different backgrounds and priorities who lack this collective outlook. 

As a result of these three structural factors you have a further contingent factor that looms very large. It is, in fact, the determining factor, even though it is downstream from the others. That is the issue of personalities. At moments of collective inadequacy such as this one, individual problems come to the fore. This becomes much more decisive in conditions of objective paralysis. But now, thankfully, it looks like progress is being made. A new party is taking shape despite these obstacles, because both the political need and the external pressure for it are overwhelming. You cannot not build a new party when your as yet unnamed party is already tied with the governing party in the polls. It is going to happen in some form.

OE: What plans for the official launch, now that Corbyn and Sultana have announced this conference? 

Unfortunately, the party has already been launched even though it does not exist. We have been deprived of a carefully planned launch, but we can live with that. What we need to do now is to minimise the importance of the contingent human factor by creating a different kind of sovereign authority: a body that has the power to drive the process forward. What that looks like in practice is this democratic conference. It can be responsible for setting up a committee that would then have real legitimacy in its decision-making. Every person who signs up as a member of the party should have the full right to participate. The conference must bring them all together, with hybrid facilities and fully online voting. It could elect a collective leadership team that would be trusted to develop the organisation over the next year or so, and we could then develop structures and cultures that will allow for more meaningful decisions to be made. None of this would be perfect. In fact it would be very suboptimal, as it basically means building the car while driving. All kinds of mistakes could be made which may have ramifications further down the line. But it would at least accelerate the process. It would offer some hope at a political moment when it is in desperately short supply. And that would be a very significant thing. 

Read on: Perry Anderson, ‘Ukania Perpetua?’, NLR 125.