Gan Nora Rhiannon
Welsh legends tell of a mighty king: a great defender of the innocent, credited with many heroic deeds. He surrounded himself with an honour guard of the finest and most virtuous knights in the kingdom, and made war upon the enemies of the people. When he was defeated by an army of traitors and cowards, he retreated to his hidden mountain tomb to recover strength. Prophecy states that one day, when the nation is in mortal danger and cries out for help, he will wake from his magical slumber and return to drive out all evil. That man’s name is Jeremy Corbyn. Or is it Zack Polanski? Or maybe Rhun ap Iorwerth? Whoever it is, he should be arriving any minute now.
Everyone knows what happened in 2019. Reliving the highs and lows of the Corbyn years is such a common pastime on the left that it’s become a cliché, and it would be retreading tired old ground to begin this article with another account of the history. Instead let’s ask the important question: we’ve told and retold the story, but have we learned anything from it?
We have spent the past seven years in a state of total shock. On the one hand we have a highly disorganised majority whose main political activities are sharing social media posts, attending marches and voting. On the other hand we have a small minority burning themselves out inside ossified Eurocommunist and Trotskyite parties, whose main political activities are writing social media posts, organising marches, and conducting entryist adventures. Such parties have traditionally functioned somewhat like bloodsucking mosquitos, but they have been trapped in amber and preserved as fossils. Questioning established tactics like A-to-B marches and rallies in London has become a sacrilege: do so in the wrong place and you will be decried as a traitor to the movement by people who only half-recall why they use these methods in the first place. In such an environment, where criticism is an attack and introspection is heresy, genuine strategic analysis is near-impossible. The overall picture, therefore, is a movement running on autopilot. Repeating an old route was inevitable.
What new ideas have entered the movement? Well nobody talks about Zohran Mamdani more than a British leftist, even people from New York itself. Chasing a “Mamdani moment” has become a key element of the discourse and a goal for pretty much every progressive organisation in the country. Being far removed from the actual campaign, our understanding of it is a highly simplified one. Because we did not see the “ground game” of door-to-door campaigning, we forget that such efforts even took place. Policy proposals that resonated with New Yorkers seem abstract and randomly chosen to us. What remains is the impression left by Mamdani’s social media output, which was popular enough that it reached us daily from across the Atlantic ocean. What we saw from Mamdani was a charismatic, passionate man who sold us his campaign with witty remarks and a dramatic flair. It’s no wonder that a country saddled with Keir Starmer was so enamoured with the idea of an honest politician with backbone and commitment. Unfortunately, what many British leftists took from this campaign is that socialist victories come when you find the right man and give him a large enough audience.
Our nostalgia for the Corbyn years, our paralysed state, our misunderstanding of how successes like Mamdani’s are achieved… mix these all together and what do they produce? Your Party, a party whose support base was so broad and shallow it was totally invisible to the naked eye. Eight hundred thousand people declared interest, yet local parties could barely scrape together a dozen to organise a meeting. This was a bold new experiment which tested, for the first time in history, whether a series of instagram accounts can form a political party.
Finally barred for good from the Labour Party, Britain’s many Trotskyite sects had found themselves without a place to engage in factional wars. Seeing the announcement of Your Party, they said to each other “comrades, let us build up this party so we might have something to infiltrate”. Proving once and for all that history repeats itself first as tragedy second as farce, they now find themselves expelled from this party too.
The core of the Your Party project was an attempt to resurrect, rather than move forward from, Corbynism. Most of its leading figures have been former Corbynites too, as if Jeremy were “bringing the team back together for one last heist”. It has functioned under a kind of magical thinking, an assumption that a party with the same leader, methods and aesthetics as Corbyn’s Labour will automatically recreate its success. If you set up social media accounts and email lists, gather endorsements from as many former MPs as possible, vote on party rules at a conference and elect a leadership team, choose the right name… then surely people will flock to your banner. The motto has been “build it and they will come”. What we have seen, in short, is an attempt to utilise the social media spiritual concept of “manifesting” for political ends. Wishing a dead movement back into existence did not prove to be effective.
With the ever-deepening collapse of Your Party, the Green Party seems to be winner-by-default of the competition to find a new progressive electoral vehicle – for the English left at least. Here in Wales there is a more diverse electoral landscape, but as ever our place in the union shackles us to decisions made in England. Plaid Cymru victories in Wales are unlikely to translate into Plaid Cymru victories in Hereford or Shrewsbury, but Green Party victories in England will likely give the Green Party momentum in Cardiff and Newport. Thus it seems the UK left’s replacement for Corbyn is Zack Polanski, who is probably an upgrade when it comes to the “Mamdani strategy”. Where Corbyn was holding allies back from defending him, Polanski has learned to immediately and aggressively respond to any right wing media smears that are levelled against him. As a result, he has become tremendously popular almost overnight. British left-wingers, who have spent nearly a half-century on the back foot, find this strange new concept of “winning” rather compelling.
While branches of Your Party had no “ground game” whatsoever, the Greens have at least remembered that the Corbyn years involved doorknocking. Similarly the Greens show some understanding of the fact that it was policy that drew people to Corbyn, not some animal magnetism of the man himself. Corbyn is a good constituency MP and a dedicated campaigner, but the idea that people were chanting “oh Jeremy Corbyn” because of his innate charisma is ridiculous. Forming a party around the man rather than around the platform was perhaps Your Party’s most fatal mistake.
If it’s obvious that the Green Party have learned to “Corbyn better than Corbyn” then it’s also obvious that they are using the same underlying strategy. Why is this a problem? Let’s seriously consider the gameplan.
Find a leader, make some instagram reels, start campaigning, win local elections, campaign more, win national elections, reverse austerity, implement socialism: sounds straightforward enough, right? What’s absent from this is any analysis of where the power lies in British society, and of how to wield that power. Corbyn did not have the killer instinct required to lead a socialist political party, but that’s not why he lost; Corbyn lost because the property-owning classes were prepared to use their full power to defeat him, but the working class were not prepared to use their full power to defend him. Imagine for a second that he had won an election, what would have happened next? If there had not been a coup within the Labour Party, there would have been a coup in the civil service and administration. If there had not been a coup within the civil service there would have been a military coup. Remember that soldiers were using pictures of Corbyn as target practice! The capitalist class will resist socialism by any means at its disposal: through the media, through Parliament, through the police & courts, through the army. Allende learned this the hard way. Now the threat of Soviet-backed armed uprising is long gone, they will not even accept the possibility of the kind of Social Democracy Corbyn and Atlee both offered. And what would have the left done in response if Corbyn’s attempts at reform were frustrated? We would have held a rally in London. We are still not even in a state where we could launch a general strike to defend a left-wing government.
We have not yet done enough to put down permanent roots in our communities, roots that generate real power, though the efforts to do this by unions like ACORN and groups like the Welsh Underground Network are one of our few post-Corbyn success stories. This critique has gained enough traction that it’s been incorporated into the messaging of the opportunists themselves: you have people now publicly stating that canvassing for the greens or attending marches in London count as community organising. But with the threat of Reform and the far right, everyone is searching for shortcuts in a state of understandable desperation. The resulting idea that all we need to turn the tide against the far right is putting someone charismatic and dynamic in front of a camera is convenient, but rooted in a fundamentally liberal politics. Convincing social media and snappy takedowns of conservative pundits only work well as part of a wider strategy that educates and organises people for the long term. I do not yet see that strategy emerging.
What’s at the root of this attitude? I’m going to do what every op-ed writer loves to do, and blame the screens. Or rather not the screens themselves, but the way the broad left use them to engage in politics. How are we politicised now? Through instagram infographics, youtube video essays, twitch streams, twitter arguments, substack posts and spotify podcasts. Older methods like reading groups have been derided as useless wastes of time, and “reading theory” itself has been reduced to the status of meme by many. People float through the “discourse” as isolated individuals, with no organisational affiliation to teach them discipline or encourage them to pursue deeper understanding. The result is a total mess.
Think also of the influence our “left” politicians have on this process of politicisation. Many of us first began to identify with the movement when the posts of Labour Left politicians reached us on social media. Look at the posts of those same politicians today and you will see the comments filled with people begging them to defect to the Green Party. Similarly when factional drama erupted in Your Party, people on social media were treating Corbyn and Sultana, people they had never met, like friends whose falling out they needed to help reconcile. These one-sided “parasocial” relationships are the sign of a movement’s refusal to recognise that it is time to grow beyond what it used to be. Hero worship and the resulting feelings of betrayal that occurs when bourgeois politicians act like bourgeois politicians, are the natural outcome. People need to internalise the fact that seeming down-to-earth and relatable and friendly is the job of a politician, and stop falling for the act.
So what we have is a fan club and not a movement, and thus we produce fan-fiction rather than a theory of change. We watch the heroic Zack Polanski defeat the demonic Reform in the marketplace of ideas and we forget that working class politics are our responsibility, not his. Sure we vote and post and attend rallies and maybe even canvas, but all to support Zack Polanski. We look to him as a saviour, as our knight in shining armour, as our King Arthur. This is an abdication of responsibility.
This is why we need organisations like the Welsh Underground Network, organisations which aim to connect, educate and direct leftists and develop them into Marxist organisers. We are fallible, we make mistakes, but we learn from them. We’re small, but we’re here for the long haul. We understand that this won’t end with an election victory. We have as much right (and as much responsibility) as any of the appointed “Sons of Prophecy” to take up the task of organising our working class communities.
Our goal is to help those communities recognise their own strength, help them flex their muscles, help them take power for themselves. Strikes, blockades, eviction resistances, anti-deportation actions, confrontational direct action… these are all expressions of working class power. Independent working class organisations wielding genuine class power are our best weapons in the struggle against the capitalist class and their imperialist system. Our task is to support and encourage the re-emergence of such organisations, and to raise the consciousness of participants. Too long have these weapons lain rusting on the ground as our appointed leaders refuse to pick them up. Eventually you have to recognise that no hero is coming to save you. We ourselves must band together, push each other to learn and take action, spread our ideas by all means at our disposal, and thoroughly professionalise our movement.
So grasp your hand around the hilt of the sword. Feel its weight. Pull it free from the stone. Excalibur is yours. Don’t wait for King Arthur, his weapon belongs to you.
