CHRISTINE THOMAS argues that the experience of the development of the early Labour Party, in particular its federal structure of representative democracy, is a useful contribution to current discussions on the formation of a new party in Britain.
The announcement by Jeremy Corbyn and Zarah Sultana on 24 July that they would be launching a new party, following the decision by delegates at Unite conference to review the union’s relationship with Labour, has placed the question of working-class political representation firmly on the agenda in Britain. In just three days, 500,000 people had added their names to an email list for a new party, while one opinion poll placed a new Corbyn-led party neck and neck with Labour. These developments, at a time when the new party is still only in the concept stage, are a clear indication of the potential that exists for channelling the anger that has exploded against Labour’s pro-austerity, pro-war, pro-big business policies after only one year in office.
Debates are already under way about what kind of new party is needed and how it should be organised. For 30 years the Socialist Party (and its forerunners) has virtually alone argued and campaigned for a new mass workers’ party – with the exception of the brief ‘accident’ of Corbyn becoming leader of the Labour Party from 2015-2019. At that time, had Corbyn taken decisive action to oust the Blairites plotting against him in parliament, local government and the party apparatus, Labour itself potentially could have been transformed into a workers’ party.
Prior to the Corbyn ‘interlude’, the collapse of the Stalinist regimes in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe in 1989-91 had been a tipping point, turning an already rightward drift by the leadership of the Labour Party into a counter-revolution under Tony Blair, symbolically eliminating the party’s ‘socialist’ clause from its constitution in 1995 and wholly embracing the capitalist free market. Most importantly, the democratic avenues that had enabled the trade unions to influence and shape party policy, despite the leaders’ pro-capitalist outlook, were shut off. The working class no longer had a mass party that it could call its own: a new one needed to be built.
Role of the organised working class
Under Keir Starmer the Labour Party has once again returned to the pre-Corbyn Blair era, and the idea that a new, alternative party is necessary is clearly gathering momentum. However, for those that have already drawn that conclusion there is not necessarily agreement over its class character and what form a new party should take. Some have emphasised the need for any new formation to be ‘community based’; Andrew Feinstein, a former ANC MP in South Africa who has been involved in discussions around forming a new party in Britain, has called for a “party of the movements”, while others talk about an ‘independent’ party.
Of course, any new party should be politically ‘independent’ of the mainstream capitalist parties, including the Green Party, which, despite its sometimes radical phraseology, is at root a capitalist party. And it should also seek to involve the widest active participation of representative community-based organisations as well as social movements campaigning, for example, on the environment and against different forms of oppression. But our emphasis on the trade unions – the mass organisations of the working class, with a membership of over six million in Britain – being at the core of any new party is crucial. It flows from the Marxist understanding that the organised working class is the force in society which has, because of its role in economic production, the potential collective power to end capitalist rule – and the exploitation, poverty, oppression, wars and environmental destruction it generates – and to democratically run a socialist society that would replace it.
While a mass workers’ party would allow the working class to have its own independent political voice in parliament and elsewhere – an important lever for fighting to defend its interests against those of the capitalist class – it would also provide a means for workers to become aware of the potential collective power that they have, not just in fighting against specific aspects of capitalist exploitation and oppression but also to overthrow the system as a whole and to democratically control a new society. Vladimir Lenin referred to the early Labour Party as a “parliament of the working class” – essentially a forum where workers could come together, overriding the divisions that capitalism deliberately tries to foster to undermine working-class struggle; a place to collectively discuss and debate how to organise most effectively against the attacks by the capitalist class, and how best to take forward the fight to change society, and to test those ideas in common struggle.
Top down or federal?
It’s very likely that when the new party moves from being a concept to a concrete reality it will attract the support of individual trade union leaders and activists. This has also been the case with previous attempts at building parties whose declared aim was to offer an alternative to Labour, such as the Socialist Labour Party (SLP), launched by miners’ leader Arthur Scargill in 1995 after Blair successfully removed Clause IV from the Labour Party constitution.
But the potential power of the trade unions lies precisely in their ability to organise collectively, and so any new party of the working class would need to be structured in such a way as to accommodate that strength, as well as the diversity of views that are inevitable in the initial founding of a broad party. Given the credibility and authority that Scargill had gained in the labour movement from leading the miners’ strike from 1984-85, with the right approach the SLP could potentially have developed into a mass workers’ party. But the centralised, top-down structure imposed by Scargill on the SLP from its inception, ruled that out, and is a warning of how not to proceed. Although the SLP still exists it has become a political irrelevance, standing just one candidate in the 2025 May elections.
The federative structure adopted by the Labour Party in its early days, however, was able to provide a vehicle for the collective participation of the trade unions, together with socialist organisations. The resolution passed at the 1899 Trades Union Congress, which paved the way for the creation of the Labour Party, called for the convening of a special conference to discuss increasing the number of workers’ representatives in parliament, with invites sent to trade unions, socialist organisations, cooperative societies and other working-class organisations.
When the first conference of the Labour Representation Committee took place one year later it had delegates from 41 national unions (out of a total at the time of 128) – with an affiliated membership of 353,070 – although these were mainly very small unions; only ten had more than 10,000 members. There were also seven trades councils, and socialist organisations with a declared membership of 22,861. The Cooperative Societies didn’t show up, although they did affiliate after the conference. Other organisations that affiliated subsequently included the Jewish Socialist Labour Party (Poale Zion, 1920) and the Cooperative Party (1926).
However, at their inauguration nobody had huge expectations of the conference and the committee that was formed from it, which was comprised of seven trade union representatives, and five from the three main socialist organisations – the Independent Labour Party (ILP), the Social Democratic Federation (SDF), and the Fabians.
The Independent Labour Party had been established in 1893 and was itself expected to become a workers’ party, with trade union support and affiliation. Keir Hardie, its main promoter and only MP at its founding, argued against the party explicitly having ‘socialist’ in its name because he thought that, at that stage, it could be an obstacle to winning trade union backing, which he considered vital (although the ILP’s programme was ‘socialistic’, as Friedrich Engels recognised).
Despite the fact that Hardie and the party’s other leaders hadn’t shed their ‘liberal’ ideology, Engels welcomed the formation of the ILP because, he said, behind them “stand the masses”. This was true in the sense that the ILP was born out of the experience of the ‘new unionism’ strike wave that had exploded in 1889, but it was formed just as the strike wave was declining, and although many of its activists and candidates were trade unionists, and it gained the support of local cotton unions when candidates stood in elections in the north of England (where the ILP’s main base was), no trade unions affiliated to the ILP or took part collectively in its structures and decision making. The hope that the ILP could become a mass workers’ party was dashed.
Towards a working-class party
By 1899, however, the outlook of sections of the trade union movement was changing as workers suffered under the hammer blows of a brutal bosses’ offensive against their jobs and conditions in the workplaces, aimed at reorganising production to compete against growing German manufacturing in particular. The idea that the Liberal Party could speak for both the capitalists and the working class and was a vehicle for workers to be politically represented – which had been shaped by the boom years of the 1860s and 1870s – was being increasingly undermined. The launching of the Labour Representation Committee, which became the Labour Party in 1906, was a reflection of the growing awareness amongst sections of trade unionists, based on their own experiences and the ‘agitation’ of socialists, that they needed their own independent political representatives to defend their specific class interests.
And yet it was not guaranteed that the LRC would develop into a party with a mass working-class base. The socialist weekly newspaper, The Clarion, summed up the mood when it called the LRC “a little cloud no bigger than a man’s hand, which may grow into a United Labour Party”. The union delegates at the launch conference of the LRC represented only a third of the total trade union membership (which in turn encompassed just 10% of the workforce).
The ‘big battalions’ – the cotton unions, the miners’ union, and the engineering union – didn’t affiliate at the beginning. One year later, trade union affiliation to the LRC had actually gone down. It was only after the House of Lords ruled in the Taff Vale judgement in 1901 that unions could be made liable for damages that the bosses incurred during strikes – an existential threat to trade unionism – that the tide turned, with trade union affiliation increasing to 469,000 and reaching 861,000 in 1903. The Miners’ Federation, however, didn’t affiliate nationally until as late as 1909, although individual lodges were affiliated to Labour Representation Committees at a local level.
Disaffiliation and affiliation
While no two situations are ever completely analogous, these historical processes are clearly relevant for the debates taking place today around the building of a new working-class party. It is the concrete experience of struggle, and the Starmer government actively pursuing the class interests of the capitalists by attacking the working class, that is undermining the links between the Labour Party and the unions, just as the class struggle propelled the unions into breaking from the Liberals at the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th century: although the active participation of socialists arguing for independent working-class political representation is also crucial.
Today the Birmingham bin workers are in the eye of the storm, experiencing savage attacks on their pay and conditions at the hands of the Labour council, and the Labour government firmly behind them. This was the catalyst for around 800 Unite conference delegates to almost unanimously pass the emergency resolution, which Socialist Party members in Unite were involved in drawing up, calling for a review of the union’s relationship with Labour should the workers be sacked for refusing to take an up to £8,000 pay cut. The very real prospect of the second biggest union in the country disaffiliating from Labour is already inspiring activists in other unions to step up and concretise their campaigning for independent political representation.
However, disaffiliation is not a precondition of that. Even without breaking from the Labour Party, which at this stage may be harder to achieve in some affiliated unions, workers can still campaign for the unions to stand their own candidates in elections, as they did in the 19th century, and to open up the political funds so that they can support any candidates in elections who align with their union’s policies. These steps could become a staging post towards affiliation to a new party, helping to cut across the mistaken idea, which is voiced by some union leaders, that a strong union campaigning on political issues would on its own be sufficient to promote members interests, and that political representation is not a central issue for union members.
Of course, like with the LRC, a new working-class party would not necessarily attract the affiliation of big national trade unions in its early stages, although local union branches or trades councils or smaller national unions might be involved. But as the formation of the Labour Party shows, as other sections of workers come under attack, which is inevitable given the depth of the capitalist crisis in Britain and internationally, more will draw the conclusion that they need a strong party of their own, and it will become increasingly difficult for union leaders to hold back the tide.
However, any new party would need to be organised on a democratic, federal and inclusive basis which encouraged maximum union participation in shaping the party’s policy. Why would Unite or any other union affiliate to a party and donate members’ money if the democratic channels didn’t exist for it to have a collective say in how that money was spent and in the decision-making process of the party? Such a party would be barely distinguishable from the Greens, who boast a trade union liaison officer but no mechanism in their structures through which trade unions could influence its policies or hold its public representatives to account.
A party organised purely on the basis of one member one vote, as some are promoting in the current discussions over a new party, might on the surface appear democratic but it would exclude the collective participation of the mass organisations of the working class. It’s not accidental that the late John Prescott, a previous Labour deputy leader (the Angela Rayner of his time), said that replacing trade union representation in the candidates selection process by ‘one member one vote’ was “more important than abolishing Clause IV in creating New Labour”.
Of course, participation of the trade unions as class organisations in a workers’ party will need to be organised on the basis of collective democratic accountability of elected delegates by rank-and-file members, very different from the ‘block vote’ which developed later in the Labour Party, when national trade union leaders often wielded votes in conferences over the heads of their members.
Forging unity
The experience of the early Labour Party also gives the lie to the idea that only a tightly-controlled party can achieve the unity necessary to effectively campaign, including electorally. Workers don’t move into struggle all with the same ideas and outlook, and in its early stages a new party will inevitably comprise different political trends and ideologies. There will be those who agree that capitalism is a rotten system that needs to be replaced, although not necessarily how that should happen, while others see no alternative way of organising society to capitalism and hope that it can be made to work better. Others may be wanting to fight against particular effects of capitalism such as austerity and war, but without necessarily making the link between those and the system as a whole.
In the 1880s, as various small socialist organisations were beginning to form, William Morris of the Socialist League commented that, “we cannot agree to what is likely to be the precise social system of the future and we cannot agree as to the best means of attaining it”. This was undoubtedly true, but political differences on aims and strategy didn’t stop socialist groups coming together on a local and national basis to campaign at the time against unemployment and repression in Ireland, and for free speech, the right to protest and the eight-hour day as well as other burning issues facing the working class.
The Labour Representation Committee was organised in a way that would allow groups and organisations to continue to work together, including electorally, without imposing an artificial unity from above that, given the differences of approach, would have been bound to fracture. The Social Democratic Federation – which described itself as Marxist, although Marx would not have recognised its dogmatic and sectarian interpretation of his ideas – participated in the initial negotiations for the LRC. However, it left within a year because the LRC didn’t immediately call for the ‘socialisation of the means of production, distribution and exchange’. This was an error flowing from the SDF’s sectarianism. As a consequence, the good activists in its ranks were not able to influence the future evolution of the LRC and the Labour Party, and act as a counter-pressure to the reformist leaders.
And yet the federal structure which the LRC adopted meant there was nothing preventing the SDF standing candidates in elections, under the umbrella of the LRC, and running a campaign on the ground explicitly as socialists, should they have chosen to do so. Each affiliated organisation, having agreed to a joint programme, could select and stand its own candidates through their local LRC, who would then be endorsed by the national Labour Representation Committee. Organisations were free to maintain their own identity and run their own election campaigns at a local level. Initially they were also responsible for funding their own MPs (there was no state funding) but this changed in 1906 when it was agreed they would be paid a salary from a central LRC fund of up to £200. Once in parliament, MPs formed an LRC parliamentary group, or Labour Party group from 1906, which was expected to maintain organisational independence from both the Conservative and Liberal parties. In 1904, Richard Bell, MP for Derby, was expelled from the group for his refusal to sign the LRCs ‘constitution’ and because of his closeness to the Liberals.
While only two of the 15 LRC-sponsored candidates who stood won their seats in the 1900 ‘kakhi’ election (held during the war with South Africa), 29 were elected in 1906. Forty-two Labour Party candidates were elected in December 1910, 57 in 1918 and by 1924 the first (minority) Labour government was elected. In today’s volatile political situation, in which the main traditional parties are increasingly discredited – reflecting the underlying crisis of capitalism – the process of electoral success for a new workers’ party could potentially be much more compressed.
Ruling class pressure
The ruling capitalist class will inevitably attempt to ideologically influence a new workers’ party. In the Labour Party, the reformist leaders who had not broken politically with liberalism became the conduit through which the ruling class sought to assert its pressure. The mass participation of the working class through the trade unions was able to act as a certain counter-weight and check on the leaders, but because the SDF had walked out, and the Communist Party had been denied affiliation – five times between its founding in 1920 and the election of the Labour government in 1924 – there was no political organisation within the party that potentially could have put forward a programme for a genuine workers’ government.
This, Leon Trotsky argued at the time, would need to include nationalisation of the land, mines, railways, banks, and a decisive break with capitalism. Such a programme, he wrote, would “unleash tremendous enthusiasm”. Instead, under pressure from the capitalist class to control public spending, the first Labour government immediately abandoned its policies on housing, unemployment benefits and nationalisation, and resorted to Tory measures to break workers’ strikes. Within less than a year the government had fallen.
More recently, the experience of Syriza in Greece – a left party propelled to government in 2015 by the euro crisis – has also revealed the negative consequences of coming into government with no programme or strategy to counter the pressures of the ruling class. Rather than resting on and mobilising the working class behind an anti-capitalist programme, the Syriza government capitulated to the demands of the capitalist class in Greece and internationally – in the form of the EU and the IMF – inflicting a policy of brutal austerity. (See Lessons of Syriza, Socialism Today, issue No.287). Had a Corbyn government been elected in 2017, it would have been subject to similar pressures.
It’s therefore vital that socialist organisations, like the Socialist Party – which has a worked out revolutionary programme drawing on the lessons from these and other experiences of working class struggle – have the opportunity to participate in a new party and contribute to the debate around what is politically necessary: not just for the day-to-day struggles of workers and young people – against local government cuts, for example, where we are able to channel our experience of leading Liverpool City Council in the 1980s – but also for a future workers’ government and for the working class to bring an end to the capitalist system.
The question of how a new broad party of the working class is organised and structured is therefore not an unimportant issue, but part of a process of workers becoming aware of their central role in the socialist transformation of society, and of developing the programme, tactics and strategy necessary for achieving it.