This is an edited version of the introductory talk that Stephen Owen gave at the Talking About Socialism Zoom discussion on Monday 11 August 2025. The title of the meeting was ‘How can we make YourParty democratic and socialist?’
Barry Biddulph gave a second introduction to that meeting.
A summary of the discussion can be read here. A video of the full meeting can be viewed here.
My only experience so far of local meetings for “Your Party” is in Stockport, where I live. Whilst there was a broad consensus on the necessity of democracy within the party, it was notable just how many people spoke about the need for a socialist party and socialism, from a huge variety of different perspectives. Now of course there are many types of socialism, but the fact that there is little shame or concern about the word anymore, reflects the increasing plausibility of a radical break with the existing political order to a growing and not insignificant section of the population.
Democracy and Socialism
In this context there is a major opportunity here to argue for socialism. While I would argue that democratic issues should take on greater emphasis so that we all have the room in the new party to argue freely and openly for what sort of party we want, the demand for a socialist, or communist, programme goes hand in hand with this.
Socialism, to my mind, means a society in which the working class, collectively as a class, democratically holds political, economic and social power. The result – a society which is controlled by the vast majority – clearly goes hand in hand with the demands for democracy, which are not just about giving us the ability to organise and argue for our politics, but for the party to have the same highly democratic foundations as the future society we look to fight for.
How do we put this politics forward?
A fundamentally different society is being cried out for in Britain today, so in that sense there are many inroads for socialist/communist ideas both within the likely hundreds of thousands in the new party, and those who will not be members. The first step in doing this is fighting for a party programme that applies to every facet of the organisation’s activity, and can be amended by the membership as frequently as is practically possible.
This should differ from the typical manifestos of political parties, which are written by a staff of party officials and wheeled out just before an election. Instead, this and democratically agreed motions on issues outside the programme, should be a guide to action, whether intervening in a trade union or social movement, how parliamentary representatives should vote and what we would stand for in an election.
When we consider the form of state that is required for the working class to rule as a class, the arguments for a vastly more democratic society obviously will have a lot of appeal in a society where the police are cracking down on peaceful protest against the Gaza genocide and where the vast majority of the population have watched our political class consistently go against their will for years.
Similarly, the genocide in Gaza and our state’s response to it has the potential to expose the nature of the British state, and its “armed bodies of men” in the police and military. A society where governmental power is properly accountable through the right of recall, where the police and military are drawn from the population and are democratically accountable as citizens’ militias, where democracy is not a case of ticking a box once every few years, and where our political representatives are not elevated above the rest of society with a huge range of privileges seems, to my mind, to be not highly difficult to argue for.
When it comes to the task of the working class taking up the ownership of the means of production, the left social democratic programme that will likely be adopted by the new party will probably fail to raise the issue of workers actually controlling the industries they call to be nationalised. Rather than having the exact same undemocratic corporate structure and many of the same people who were in the pre-nationalised industry, we want workers, both those who work in the industry and those who use these key utilities, to control the industry through elected representatives.
Additionally, if we look at the campaign of Zohran Mamdani for New York Mayor in the United States, he won the Democratic Primary with policies such as the creation of publicly owned supermarkets as part of a generally left social democratic programme. Why not argue for the public ownership of the existing Supermarket chains in this country, under democratic control?
From this, it is then possible to argue for the general principle that production should not be organised around the drive for greater profits into the hands of a small capitalist class but instead organised and planned collectively around the needs of the society as a whole.
And finally, the idea that these policies will require a break with capitalism as a whole is something which can easily be evidenced by the experience of the Corbyn years. Alongside a relentless media campaign, we saw the very open intervention of other capitalist powers, be it the United States, Israel and others, in denouncing a potential Corbyn government, and the intervention of a British military general to say that Corbyn was unfit for high office.
The idea that all of this would have stopped, let alone not worsened, in the event of a victory for the Labour party in 2017 or 2019 seems completely bizarre to think. And this was for a programme which was in reality much more limited in its scope than the proposals of the Labour left in the 1970s and 80s, let alone of a genuinely communist political programme.
Challenges
This is not to say that there aren’t serious uphill challenges. The first is in stressing the need for internationalism. We live in a country where a huge majority of the population currently argues for greater immigration controls, something inherently impedes the ability for the working class to organise and struggle collectively across borders. Similarly, we will have to fight against the pressure for the party to take office as soon as possible, on any basis, which in a context of many severe, intersecting crises of British capitalism is an understandable impulse for most of those who will join this party.
The communist response on both of these questions will not likely be popular within the party, let alone the rest of British society initially. But nonetheless we have to be open in stating that we do not oppose only the latest round of immigration restrictions, but all immigration restrictions and legal inequalities between British and migrant workers. Along with this we must strive to fight for greater links to the working class outside of Britain, and stress the general interests of the class, which are of far greater consequence than any national difference.
And when we argue for political power, we do not support it on any basis. The most fatal error the new party could make is to end up in coalition or even being forced to preside over the capitalist state. The new party must seek to build its support among the working class on the basis of an eventual struggle with the capitalist class for political, social and economic power.
In doing this, it will actually win far more reforms for the working class through forcing capitalist parties into concessions in the hope of preserving their power, than a party which enters government as soon as it can and is forced to carry out the interests of the capitalist class. This can be well evidenced by the experiences of Syriza in Greece and Podemos in Spain in recent years.
For us to have significant purchase within the new party, it is going to be necessary for communists to coordinate and work together, ideally as an open faction which is not divided along the old organisational lines that I imagine all of us are beyond sick of.
This has to be done in a principled fashion, of course, rather than on us all pretending we don’t have differences. But a situation in which we all go into our own initiatives and argue for and propose very similar things will weaken the collective argument most of us will be making within this new party.
If we can succeed in putting forward alternatives to the programme of social democracy, winning key votes at the parties’ conferences and marking ourselves out as the people who have ideas which can change society fundamentally, what is currently a social democratic party could become something very different.