Hi Duncan. This is an extremely useful article and although currently aimed at comrades in England could actually help us think about the new party project in Scotland in.particular the Federal framework as our next organisational.step. I also agree thst we would also benefit from input from comrades in Cymru'n Codi who seem to be on the same wavelength as republican socialists in Scotland
You mentioned the proposal that Tony Collins ("Raising the Red Flag") and I put in, relating to forming a Socialist Education and Debate Association. Thanks for noting this.
Before tomorrow's meeting I have tried to flesh out a constitution for the proposed membershiip organization to forward this work:
Your blog is a good example of why I think we need to engage and debate politics much more vigorously. Your Party was like a kind of giant non-aggression pact. But that's not how politics works. What YP did do was provide a space where arguments and debates started, partially, to develop.
I couldn't disagree more with you about Ukraine, but that is a great example of an issue that people try to brush under the carpet to arrive at a "sort of unity". -- and which we ought therefore to debate properly.
See this article to understand better where I am coming from:
I oppose the attempt to magic a "party without a programme" which underlies the various proposals for organizational continuity or even a "democratic centralist" organization. The mass moment has passed, and the programmatic issues in the run-up to world war are not going to go away. China is probably the biggest example of a time-bomb sitting in the corner of the living-room.
SEDA is the most concrete aspect of a slightly broader view I put in a month ago:
Thanks for this, and for the work on the SEDA constitution, which is already more concrete than most of what was submitted on Sunday.
On the core disagreement about sequencing: you are right that Your Party operated as a kind of non-aggression pact, and that political clarity matters. But the FI's argument, and Red Mole's, is not that programme is unimportant. It is that programme is best developed through practice rather than as a precondition for practice. The activists who have built Leith Organises, or Cymru'n Codi, or the CWSA, are developing political understanding through the act of organising: through the concrete encounter with a landlord, a picket line, a hostile councillor. That is not brushing programme under the carpet. It is the transitional method: find people where they are, link them to broader struggle, arm them with the analytical tools they need as those tools become relevant to what they are actually doing. A SEDA that serves that process is invaluable. A SEDA that becomes the primary site of left political life, debating programme between organised tendencies while the organising work waits, reproduces the problem rather than solving it.
On Ukraine: I suspect we agree on more than the framing of your comment suggests. Opposition to the invasion; opposition to the Ukrainian government's attacks on trade union rights and on the linguistic rights of minorities; direct links with independent workers' organisations in both Ukraine and Russia; cancellation of the usurious debt being imposed on the Ukrainian people. These are not controversial positions within the FI tradition. The disagreement is on the right to arms. But I would note: the comrades who most loudly oppose Western military support for Ukraine tend to produce the least actual solidarity with Ukrainian workers' organisations. That asymmetry is worth reflecting on. Opposition to arms supply is not the same as solidarity with the Ukrainian working class, and in practice it has rarely accompanied it.
The 'party without a programme' criticism is fair as a description of some of what was proposed on Sunday. It is not a fair description of the Halaby model, which explicitly sequences organisational consolidation before programmatic unity, precisely because it is honest that the latter cannot be legislated into existence by a founding conference.
Thank you for this Duncan! As one of the current Members Charter admin team I 100% agree, I've argued in previous public meetings that the balance of supporting local action alongside building wider scale structures is vital, as is the balance of acting quickly but not rushing to force a structure that's not ready. I'm aware of the oorparty.scot model, and those kind of listening exercises are precisely what we should be trying to seed right across the network. Not sure if Leith is part of that or independently arrived at a similar approach, but it sounds like they're combining that with a kind of party-as-articulator approach (I recommend the Mohandesi article if you haven't come across it). We need to be supporting the whole ecology of socialist groups and social movements, filling in where there's gaps rather than everyone competing or duplicating work, while leaving whole other areas without socialist presence, all big failures of the current left. Will feed your article to other team members!
Thanks for this, and for the work you and the admin team are putting into a process that could easily have dissolved into recrimination after the YP collapse.
On the oorparty.scot listening model: Leith Organises arrived at a similar approach partly independently and partly through accumulated hard experience, specifically the postscript lesson I described in the ecosocialist.scot piece. The honest reckoning with flag-planting behaviour turned out to be generative rather than demoralising, which is not always how that goes. Leith Organises drew directly on the oorparty.scot listening methodology: largely the same layers of people, carrying forward the organising practice that Your Party Scotland's better moments produced and that The Many's factional interventions tried to foreclose. The approach is not a theoretical preference imported from elsewhere. It is what Scottish socialist organising has learned, through experience, actually works.
The Mohandesi piece on party-as-articulator is useful and I'd recommend it to Red Mole readers too. The articulator model, where the party's role is to make legible the connections between struggles that participants in each struggle cannot see from inside it, is part of what the FI tradition calls the transitional method: you don't arrive with the programme and recruit people to it, you find the struggle, participate in it, and help it develop its own political understanding. The distinction matters because it changes what a socialist organisation is actually for in a given locality. Not the vanguard that leads. The presence that connects.
On the ecology point: this is exactly right, and it is where the Halaby model's affiliation structure does real work. A Federal Council that seats the CWI, ACR, rs21-adjacent groupings, and independent local clusters as themselves creates the organisational precondition for the ecology you are describing: different tendencies and organisations with different strengths and different implantations, coordinating rather than competing, with a shared framework that allows genuine division of labour rather than everyone showing up to the same picket line with different banners and no prior coordination.
The gaps question is the one I'd push hardest on as the admin team shapes Sunday's outcomes into something durable: which towns and cities have no organised socialist presence at all, and what is the minimum viable form for establishing one? Not a branch with a constitution and a treasurer and a programme. A recurring meeting, a couple of committed people, and a decision to show up somewhere specific on a regular basis. The CWSA didn't start at seventy people.
Very useful and informative post. From us in Cymru a couple of key points. First, I may have missed it, but there appears no mention of the national and republican question as it applies to Cymru, North of Ireland and Scotland. The anglo centric narrative seems to be alive and well. This is even more surprising given the elecion of independent supporting governments in Cymru and Scotland indicating rising voter support. As you know, we have argued as Cymru'n Codi that there is an interdependence between the the arguments for a republican independence, ecosocialism and internationalism. It would be interesting to know what comrades thoughts are about these issues at the conference. Secondly, the Leith model is very useful and inspiring, and has similarities to how Cymru'n Codi has come about, which you have described excellently in a recent post. Do you think it is relevant the points you are making in this article? https://redmole.substack.com/p/find-them-link-them-arm-them-transitional?r=1j3a58&utm_campaign=post-expanded-share&utm_medium=web
Thank you for this, and the criticism on the national question is fair. Regular readers of this substack have seen me raise the national question repeatedly. This article's framing is primarily directed at the Members' Charter process, which, in practice, is an English process, but it slides too easily into treating the national question as a contextual note ("Scotland is not a region") rather than a political priority. You are right to name that.
The interdependence argument, that republican independence, ecosocialism, and internationalism are not separable questions but aspects of a single political orientation, is precisely correct, amd shared from a Fourth International perspective. The FI's confederal approach to the British Isles recognises that you cannot build a unitary British socialist organisation that papers over the national question in Scotland, Cymru, and the North of Ireland; what you can build is a fraternal structure of nationally distinct organisations, developed through solidarity, international collaboration and shared programmatic commitments. The Members' Charter process needs to understand that it is building part of that structure, not the whole.
On Cymru'n Codi and the Leith parallel: yes, the 'Find Them, Link Them, Arm Them' piece is directly relevant here. The transitional method applied to community organising, starting from where people actually are rather than from where the left would like them to be, is what connects Leith Organises and Cymru'n Codi as practical expressions of the same strategic orientation. The listening campaign methodology in Leith and the way Cymru'n Codi has developed its community roots are both applications of that framework, adapted to distinct national terrains, and to stages of development (which is why listening is such a key skill).
What would be genuinely useful, if you are willing, is a short piece for Red Mole from Cymru'n Codi's perspective on exactly this question: what do initiatives like the Connections conference and the Members' Charter process look like from Cymru, and what would a genuinely confederal relationship between an English socialist federation and Welsh socialist organisation actually require? That gap in the current debate needs filling, and you are better placed to fill it than I am.
Hi Duncan. This is an extremely useful article and although currently aimed at comrades in England could actually help us think about the new party project in Scotland in.particular the Federal framework as our next organisational.step. I also agree thst we would also benefit from input from comrades in Cymru'n Codi who seem to be on the same wavelength as republican socialists in Scotland
130 have signed up as of Friday morning.
You mentioned the proposal that Tony Collins ("Raising the Red Flag") and I put in, relating to forming a Socialist Education and Debate Association. Thanks for noting this.
Before tomorrow's meeting I have tried to flesh out a constitution for the proposed membershiip organization to forward this work:
http://acap-bsoc.net/seda-const
Your blog is a good example of why I think we need to engage and debate politics much more vigorously. Your Party was like a kind of giant non-aggression pact. But that's not how politics works. What YP did do was provide a space where arguments and debates started, partially, to develop.
I couldn't disagree more with you about Ukraine, but that is a great example of an issue that people try to brush under the carpet to arrive at a "sort of unity". -- and which we ought therefore to debate properly.
See this article to understand better where I am coming from:
https://weeklyworker.co.uk/worker/1557/principle-splits-and-unity/
I oppose the attempt to magic a "party without a programme" which underlies the various proposals for organizational continuity or even a "democratic centralist" organization. The mass moment has passed, and the programmatic issues in the run-up to world war are not going to go away. China is probably the biggest example of a time-bomb sitting in the corner of the living-room.
SEDA is the most concrete aspect of a slightly broader view I put in a month ago:
http://acap-bsoc.net/proposal
Thanks for this, and for the work on the SEDA constitution, which is already more concrete than most of what was submitted on Sunday.
On the core disagreement about sequencing: you are right that Your Party operated as a kind of non-aggression pact, and that political clarity matters. But the FI's argument, and Red Mole's, is not that programme is unimportant. It is that programme is best developed through practice rather than as a precondition for practice. The activists who have built Leith Organises, or Cymru'n Codi, or the CWSA, are developing political understanding through the act of organising: through the concrete encounter with a landlord, a picket line, a hostile councillor. That is not brushing programme under the carpet. It is the transitional method: find people where they are, link them to broader struggle, arm them with the analytical tools they need as those tools become relevant to what they are actually doing. A SEDA that serves that process is invaluable. A SEDA that becomes the primary site of left political life, debating programme between organised tendencies while the organising work waits, reproduces the problem rather than solving it.
On Ukraine: I suspect we agree on more than the framing of your comment suggests. Opposition to the invasion; opposition to the Ukrainian government's attacks on trade union rights and on the linguistic rights of minorities; direct links with independent workers' organisations in both Ukraine and Russia; cancellation of the usurious debt being imposed on the Ukrainian people. These are not controversial positions within the FI tradition. The disagreement is on the right to arms. But I would note: the comrades who most loudly oppose Western military support for Ukraine tend to produce the least actual solidarity with Ukrainian workers' organisations. That asymmetry is worth reflecting on. Opposition to arms supply is not the same as solidarity with the Ukrainian working class, and in practice it has rarely accompanied it.
The 'party without a programme' criticism is fair as a description of some of what was proposed on Sunday. It is not a fair description of the Halaby model, which explicitly sequences organisational consolidation before programmatic unity, precisely because it is honest that the latter cannot be legislated into existence by a founding conference.
Thank you for this Duncan! As one of the current Members Charter admin team I 100% agree, I've argued in previous public meetings that the balance of supporting local action alongside building wider scale structures is vital, as is the balance of acting quickly but not rushing to force a structure that's not ready. I'm aware of the oorparty.scot model, and those kind of listening exercises are precisely what we should be trying to seed right across the network. Not sure if Leith is part of that or independently arrived at a similar approach, but it sounds like they're combining that with a kind of party-as-articulator approach (I recommend the Mohandesi article if you haven't come across it). We need to be supporting the whole ecology of socialist groups and social movements, filling in where there's gaps rather than everyone competing or duplicating work, while leaving whole other areas without socialist presence, all big failures of the current left. Will feed your article to other team members!
Thanks for this, and for the work you and the admin team are putting into a process that could easily have dissolved into recrimination after the YP collapse.
On the oorparty.scot listening model: Leith Organises arrived at a similar approach partly independently and partly through accumulated hard experience, specifically the postscript lesson I described in the ecosocialist.scot piece. The honest reckoning with flag-planting behaviour turned out to be generative rather than demoralising, which is not always how that goes. Leith Organises drew directly on the oorparty.scot listening methodology: largely the same layers of people, carrying forward the organising practice that Your Party Scotland's better moments produced and that The Many's factional interventions tried to foreclose. The approach is not a theoretical preference imported from elsewhere. It is what Scottish socialist organising has learned, through experience, actually works.
The Mohandesi piece on party-as-articulator is useful and I'd recommend it to Red Mole readers too. The articulator model, where the party's role is to make legible the connections between struggles that participants in each struggle cannot see from inside it, is part of what the FI tradition calls the transitional method: you don't arrive with the programme and recruit people to it, you find the struggle, participate in it, and help it develop its own political understanding. The distinction matters because it changes what a socialist organisation is actually for in a given locality. Not the vanguard that leads. The presence that connects.
On the ecology point: this is exactly right, and it is where the Halaby model's affiliation structure does real work. A Federal Council that seats the CWI, ACR, rs21-adjacent groupings, and independent local clusters as themselves creates the organisational precondition for the ecology you are describing: different tendencies and organisations with different strengths and different implantations, coordinating rather than competing, with a shared framework that allows genuine division of labour rather than everyone showing up to the same picket line with different banners and no prior coordination.
The gaps question is the one I'd push hardest on as the admin team shapes Sunday's outcomes into something durable: which towns and cities have no organised socialist presence at all, and what is the minimum viable form for establishing one? Not a branch with a constitution and a treasurer and a programme. A recurring meeting, a couple of committed people, and a decision to show up somewhere specific on a regular basis. The CWSA didn't start at seventy people.
Very useful and informative post. From us in Cymru a couple of key points. First, I may have missed it, but there appears no mention of the national and republican question as it applies to Cymru, North of Ireland and Scotland. The anglo centric narrative seems to be alive and well. This is even more surprising given the elecion of independent supporting governments in Cymru and Scotland indicating rising voter support. As you know, we have argued as Cymru'n Codi that there is an interdependence between the the arguments for a republican independence, ecosocialism and internationalism. It would be interesting to know what comrades thoughts are about these issues at the conference. Secondly, the Leith model is very useful and inspiring, and has similarities to how Cymru'n Codi has come about, which you have described excellently in a recent post. Do you think it is relevant the points you are making in this article? https://redmole.substack.com/p/find-them-link-them-arm-them-transitional?r=1j3a58&utm_campaign=post-expanded-share&utm_medium=web
Thank you for this, and the criticism on the national question is fair. Regular readers of this substack have seen me raise the national question repeatedly. This article's framing is primarily directed at the Members' Charter process, which, in practice, is an English process, but it slides too easily into treating the national question as a contextual note ("Scotland is not a region") rather than a political priority. You are right to name that.
The interdependence argument, that republican independence, ecosocialism, and internationalism are not separable questions but aspects of a single political orientation, is precisely correct, amd shared from a Fourth International perspective. The FI's confederal approach to the British Isles recognises that you cannot build a unitary British socialist organisation that papers over the national question in Scotland, Cymru, and the North of Ireland; what you can build is a fraternal structure of nationally distinct organisations, developed through solidarity, international collaboration and shared programmatic commitments. The Members' Charter process needs to understand that it is building part of that structure, not the whole.
On Cymru'n Codi and the Leith parallel: yes, the 'Find Them, Link Them, Arm Them' piece is directly relevant here. The transitional method applied to community organising, starting from where people actually are rather than from where the left would like them to be, is what connects Leith Organises and Cymru'n Codi as practical expressions of the same strategic orientation. The listening campaign methodology in Leith and the way Cymru'n Codi has developed its community roots are both applications of that framework, adapted to distinct national terrains, and to stages of development (which is why listening is such a key skill).
What would be genuinely useful, if you are willing, is a short piece for Red Mole from Cymru'n Codi's perspective on exactly this question: what do initiatives like the Connections conference and the Members' Charter process look like from Cymru, and what would a genuinely confederal relationship between an English socialist federation and Welsh socialist organisation actually require? That gap in the current debate needs filling, and you are better placed to fill it than I am.
I’m sure we can arrange for that! Will be in touch.