How to make Your Party work

The creation of a new left party in Britain represents a major opportunity for the British left. However, as anyone involved knows, it has been mired in crisis and controversy. Since the beginning, we in the Spartacist League have sought to intervene actively in the debates within Your Party to provide key political answers to the problems it faces. This pamphlet consists of leaflets we produced towards this aim.

Our earlier articles lay out our broad political perspective in Your Party, which is to cohere revolutionaries around a fight against the dominance of liberalism (see "No NATO, no Greens, no Zionism" and "Ditch the liberals, win the workers"). It is on this foundation that we produced multiple pieces reacting to developments, from seeking to resolve the polarisation on the trans question, to bringing home how Tommy Robinson’s mass reactionary rally was an indictment of the liberal strategy of the left, to unveiling the political causes behind the fallout between Corbyn and Sultana, to motivating the need for sharply attacking and distinguishing ourselves from the Green Party.

Our leaflet “Let’s build a revolutionary caucus in Your Party” seeks to offer a draft platform for the purpose of uniting revolutionaries in Your Party around a set of programmatic points.

As Zarah Sultana made a left turn in October, we changed tack and called on socialists to fight within Your Party so that her sharp points would be adopted as party policy (see "Make Sultana’s speech party policy" and "Why liberals hate Zarah Sultana").

In the lead-up to the founding conference, where discussions are too often dominated by organisational matters and petty frustrations, our leaflet “Politics first!” lays out our outlook for the conference, and warns against multiple pitfalls.

We have titled this pamphlet “How to make Your Party work” precisely to highlight the goal behind all our interventions: build Your Party and make it successful by showing how the intervention of revolutionary Marxists is key. In this way, we aim to advance the struggle against liberals and reformists, who want Your Party to be nothing more than a toothless alliance for the careers of middle-class elements. But we also aim to combat the sectarianism and sterility which too often characterise the British far left.

We urge those who are serious about fighting for a socialist, working-class party to study this pamphlet, and to work with us to cohere a revolutionary tendency in Your Party.