A few years ago, I heard John McDonnell give a speech at a meeting organised around the Durham Miners’ Gala. At the time, he was the Shadow Chancellor of the Exchequer and Corbynism was at its height having just deprived Theresa May of her parliamentary majority in the 2017 election. McDonnell ended his speech with the claim that what was on offer from a Corbyn government was ‘socialism’. It was a crowd-pleasing finale, although it made me wince. It would have been better, more accurate and certainly more honest to have described the Corbyn programme as a moderate social-democratic one. Indeed, given where we are historically, could it have been anything else?
One of the questions that is on the agenda at the Your Party conference this weekend is the question of whether the party should conceive itself explicitly as a socialist party or whether it should think of itself as a social-democratic party. As with the Corbyn project, programmatically, Your Party or whatever it ends up calling itself, cannot be offering anything else than a social-democratic programme. But the reason it makes sense to identify as a socialist party even when it is offering (in the first instance) a social-democratic programme, is because of what it says about itself in terms of its purpose and mode of operation. Here the new party can be social democratic in its programme content but socialist in its ‘form’, that is how it is structured internally and how it practices politics itself vis-à-vis the rest of society.
In terms of internal structure and stance, the Labour party has never conceived itself as a means of challenging the British state or challenging capitalism. It was always deferential to the existing state apparatus – which did not rule out developing new state organs of a welfare kind – and existing social relations. The Labour party was ‘hegemonic’ as Gramsci would say, that is, a moral and political leadership organ only over the labour movement, so that it could subordinate that movement to the state and capital.
What would a socialist party be?
Were Your Party to identify itself as a socialist party then it is less in terms of a programme, at least at this point, than in terms of seeing itself as a catalyst within the broader social fabric and as a point of reference for all the causes and struggles going on. It would be ‘counter-hegemonic’ in the sense that it would see its project as building up the mass conviction that capitalism itself was the problem. Such a mass conviction can also admit that finding our way out of this dangerous mode of production would be a process of discovery and experimentation. For socialists cannot be as confidant as they once were about what exactly socialism looks like or indeed how to achieve it. But whatever the road and destination look like, such a party would require an internal structure that could hold leaders to account, and that would allow the grassroots members to function as the membrane through which the aspirations of the broader masses find expression.
A socialist party today would, in its messaging, be adopting a paradoxical but honest position. It would have to say to the electoral bloc it seeks to forge, that change cannot come just by putting an X on the ballot box, and then voters returning to their private lives and expecting their representatives to ‘deliver’. A party of a new type would have to open up an honest conversation with the ‘electorate’ that the reason why the hopes they invest in their political representatives are always disappointed is precisely because it is built into that ‘contract’ of vote and retire to private life. Instead, the vote must be the electoral expression of a willingness to become part of building a social bloc that will do the things necessary to acquire change; namely become participants in organised struggles to push for change, at work, in the trade unions, in the community, via specific struggles against state authoritarianism and corporate power. All of this will require a fierce commitment to expanding democratic practices.
A socialist party offering a social-democratic programme should, I think, be saying to people words to the effect: ‘we do not think it will be possible to implement this programme without radicalising it further because even a modest social-democratic programme that seeks to reverse the distribution of wealth from the rest to the rich, will provoke a fierce response from the corporate world, from the media, from finance capitalism and even from the state.’ A socialist party that spoke in such terms would clearly be speaking and positioning itself outside conventional political norms. Some people might think that this invitation to in effect enter a period of turbulence might not be attractive and might, as they say, ‘scare the horses’. But look at Trump, look at Brexit: these were appeals explicitly to overturn the applecart, rupturing sentiments which the right captured rather than the left.
A socialist party offering a social-democratic programme in the contemporary context is very different from the world where social democracy first emerged and consolidated itself. Today capitalism is far sicker, far less able to meet human needs on a mass scale than in the past; just look at how structural the problem of unemployment is or the downward pressure on the rate of profit. This is why today, socialists need not have big arguments about what its first-offer programme should be, because even a modest social-democratic programme would, if electoral victory at a national level was achieved, be the trigger for either a radicalising dynamic or conversely defeat. What is more important than the programme is the political, organisational and ideological preparation of the party cadre and the preparation of the broader social bloc to enter a new era of struggle if we are to begin socialising the economy.