Open Letter: What Grassroots Left's Advisory Group Must Do This Weekend
Postscript: Socialists should stay and fight
AN OPEN LETTER TO THE GRASSROOTS LEFT ADVISORY GROUP
Comrades, This weekend, three meetings will determine whether Your Party has a democratic left worth the name. On Saturday, Grassroots Left advisory group members meet. On Sunday, the Interim Scottish Executive Committee has called an online meeting for Scottish members to discuss the crisis directly. Also on Sunday, the CEC votes on a governance paper that should be read in full before any of those meetings begins.
The Members’ Charter names the problem with precision. An unaccountable secretariat costing £23,000 a month. Not a penny to branches. Six hundred thousand pounds of members’ money held by an Officers’ Group that answers to itself. Candidates handpicked from above while branches shake hats to fund their own meetings. The document reads with the accumulated fury of people who have waited nine months to say what they have known for six.
Then it asks politely for compliance by 10 May.
This is not a criticism of the people who drafted it. The Charter exists because the situation demands a response, and its signatories, now over four hundred, are doing something rather than nothing. But the gap between what the Charter diagnoses and what it proposes is itself a political problem, and the advisory group needs to confront it directly on Saturday.
Because the CEC has already answered the Charter. Not with a rebuttal; with a governance paper. While members were circulating the petition, the Officers’ Group was preparing a framework for mass expulsions of organised left tendencies. The SWP, the AWL, the Socialist Party, the CPGB: organisations named not because they represent a genuine threat to party democracy, but because they are easy targets, carrying enough baggage that defending them requires the left to appear to defend entryism. Behind the named list sits the real mechanism, the Additional Principle on page three of the governance paper:
“Any organisation that operates as a democratic centralist party or organisation, maintains its own national political membership structure, requires political discipline and accountability to an external leadership or programme.”
The named list is the headline. The Additional Principle is the instrument. It can be applied to anything the CEC subsequently finds inconvenient. Any tendency that organises coherently, any network that maintains collective positions. The architecture is in place. The Charter asks the CEC to respect member democracy. The governance paper, circulated to CEC members this week, is its considered response to that request.
There is a bitter irony worth stating. The Grassroots Left platform explicitly proposed an Advisory Committee function, embedded in their governance model, through which elected CEC members would be held to account by grassroots representatives. The CEC’s governance paper, with its catch-all clause targeting any organisation that “requires political discipline and accountability to an external leadership or programme,” threatens the very oversight mechanism the GL slate promised its own supporters. The apparatus is eating its own architecture.
This is Podemos’s Vistalegre II crisis, at an accelerated tempo. The mechanism is identical. At the second Vistalegre congress in 2017, Pablo Iglesias dissolved the círculos, the grassroots structures through which the anticapitalist left had built Podemos from almost nothing, through procedural reorganisation rather than frontal attack. The left defended each manoeuvre separately and therefore defended none of them. Anticapitalistas have since described their own errors without sentimentality: they fought for democratic form and neglected political content, allowing the leadership to adopt a radical aesthetic while the programme was emptied. The círculos were gone before anyone had agreed on the terms for defending them.
The proto-branch structures are the círculos. The governance paper’s due diligence process, its membership declarations, its CEC-appointed appeals body reviewing itself, its careful language of constitutional ineligibility rather than disciplinary expulsion: these are the instruments for their managed dissolution. A Members’ Conference in May, convened in response to the Charter, will meet this apparatus on the apparatus’s own terrain.
What the advisory group can do on Saturday that the Charter cannot is constitute the network as a political subject before the CEC acts on Sunday rather than after. That means three things.
A political document, not a petition. One that names the Additional Principle catch-all for what it is and demands its withdrawal entirely, not its amendment. One that identifies the political content that is non-negotiable: ecosocialism, trans rights, solidarity with Ukraine against Russian imperialism. The Charter says nothing about programme. A leadership that cannot be trusted with branch data cannot be trusted to hold a programme in common.
A delegate conference of proto-branches, announced before the May members’ conference, with or without CEC sanction. Not to precipitate a split; to establish that the branches are a collective political actor, not a list of individuals to be processed one by one under a due diligence framework. The Charter’s conference proposal is a members’ conference. A delegate conference is qualitatively different: it is the branches speaking with a coordinated voice before the governance paper makes that coordination the grounds for expulsion.
One lesson comes from Scotland, where regulatory and disciplinary threats forced the Interim Scottish Executive Committee to stop building its email list. An autonomous communications infrastructure must be built immediately. An independent newsletter. A Signal network. A means of reaching Your Party members that does not pass through the party’s own platforms. When the Podemos apparatus moved against Anticapitalistas, its first practical step was to cut access to mailing lists. The Charter’s petition list currently sits with one man. That is also not infrastructure.
The Charter is right that without the members, there is no party. It is also right that fascism won’t wait, and climate change won’t wait. But a Members’ Conference in May, convened to present a Members’ Budget to a CEC that has already published its answer, will not produce the party the situation requires. In Southwark, a branch that received not one acknowledgment from HQ after following every required procedure has printed ten thousand leaflets and is standing its candidate anyway. That branch has already understood something the Charter has not yet said: the question is no longer whether the CEC will implement the Charter’s demands. The question is what structure the left builds to survive the answer.
The advisory group meets tomorrow. The CEC meets Sunday. Name the catch-all clause. Call the delegate conference. Build the infrastructure. In that order, and before Sunday evening.
Postscript: Socialists should stay and fight
Since this letter was drafted, Counterfire has issued a statement condemning the governance paper and threatening to leave Your Party immediately if Sunday’s motion passes.
The condemnation is welcome. The threat is the problem.
Counterfire’s position, “we will not remain in a party that expels socialists,” is politically coherent as a statement of principle and organisationally revealing as a statement of strategy. It tells you that Counterfire sees no further growth opportunity in Your Party, which is an honest assessment. What it also does, without intending to, is legitimate the logic of The Many’s manoeuvre. If the response to expulsion is orderly withdrawal, then expulsion works. The bureaucracy clears the field, the left disperses into the movements it came from, and Your Party becomes what the Officers’ Group always wanted: a broad electoral vehicle with a compliant membership and no organised internal opposition.
“We will continue to work with YP members, where appropriate, in a range of trade unions and social movements.” No doubt. But that is a description of the situation after defeat, not a strategy for avoiding it.
The point of Saturday’s advisory group meeting, and the ISEC meeting, is precisely to establish that the alternative to leaving is not staying silently. It is building the organisational infrastructure that makes the expulsion strategy too costly to complete. Counterfire’s departure, if it happens, removes one of the forces capable of making that calculation difficult for the CEC. That is not an argument for them to stay on any terms. It is an argument for having the fight before Sunday rather than announcing the terms of exit after it.
Red Mole is an independent socialist publication offering Marxist analysis for activists. Views are those of the editor alone and do not represent any organisation.