Your Party: Grasping the Enormity of the Moment
By Roger Hallam
Published by Hard Rain Books, 2025, £8.99
Reviewed by Iain Dalton
Even before Your Party was founded, sections of its potential leadership looked high and low for any other basis for a new party than the traditions of the workers’ movement. This includes the horizontalist methods of new left formations from Europe – such as Podemos and La France Insoumise – with online editing tools provided by Yanis Varoufakis’ DiEM25.
But another major source is from some of the recent climate movements, particularly those associated with Roger Hallam, founder of Extinction Rebellion, who has set out his thoughts on the way forward for Your Party in this booklet.
Hallam is clearly enthusiastic about the possibilities in Your Party – suggesting it should be aiming for three million participants, with the goal, in his own words, to “lead to political revolution”. The description on the back says the booklet offers “a map for building the movements that can actually change the world”.
Hallam’s ‘map’ was to a large extent adopted by the Your Party founding organisers, with the adoption of sortition (a lottery) to select who attended the conference in November and in the procedures imposed on the regional assemblies and meetings that preceded it.
Hallam justifies sortition as a way around the inequalities of capitalist society that can advantage some people because of owning greater wealth and having more free time, making the observation that less than 5% of those in UK and French parliaments and the US congress, are working class. He cites the example of a “Mrs Jones, on a housing estate in Bolton, with three grandkids to look after”, as someone who would not have time to attend meetings locally, that sortition could possibly enable to be a delegate at a conference.
He mixes two things up in these comments, the nature of the capitalist state’s democratic institutions and those of the workers’ movement. Capitalist institutions such as parliament are not meant to be vehicles for the working class – things such as universal suffrage, payment of MPs etc had to be fought for by workers to allow them any say at all. Parliament’s fundamental role is to allow the formation of a government that can be, in Marx’s immortal words, “a committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie”.
Hallam makes reference to sortition’s usage in ancient Athens, to select magistrates and juries. However, this was open only to the thin layer of citizens in society – only males, and with the vast majority of the population, the slaves, excluded. A census of Attica, the region including Athens between 317 to 307 BCE, suggests there were 21,000 citizens to 400,000 slaves. Sortition, in other words, was part of the Athenian state machine that helped to maintain this unequal society, rather than overthrow it.
For the organisations of the workers’ movement, however, including its political parties, their purpose is not to maintain the status quo – but to fight to improve the lot of workers. For socialists, that ultimately means transforming society through wresting the commanding heights of the economy from their current capitalist owners into becoming the common property of all, under democratic workers’ control and management and planned to meet the needs of all. This means ending the rule of a minority class – the capitalists.
The organisational forms flow from these tasks. Conferences, rather than being just celebrations of the diverse make-up of an organisation, have the crucial task of bringing together the struggles and experience of members and discussing based on that the key struggles to concentrate on in the coming period. That’s why ahead of a trade union conference, branches will discuss their own motions as well as material submitted by the union’s leadership on the way ahead, and elect delegates to represent their opinions on those issues to the conference. After conference has taken decisions on those issues, branches will discuss how they can enact the agreed upon policies.
But the use of sortition atomises ‘delegates’ – instead of being able to discuss with others ahead of the conference, they are instead left to their own devices. And after the conference they are left with no means to attempt to discuss and carry out its decisions.
Similarly with Your Party’s use of ‘confirmatory’ One-Member, One-Vote (OMOV) online balloting, with those participating not even having the benefit of attending a conference to hear different arguments about issues before casting a vote.
Another method which Hallam’s booklet recommends, borrowed from climate movements, is that of convening a spiral of ‘Assemblies’: of zoom regional assemblies, with small breakout groups; to be followed by city/town zoom assemblies; before getting people out to door-knock to invite people to a local community ‘assembly’ within 15 minutes of where they live.
But crucially, rather than being democratically shaped by their participants, Hallam instead wants these assemblies (and the small breakout groups within them he advocates), to be led by pre-selected ‘co-ordinators’ given specific ‘training’ as to what is to be discussed. This in reality is incredibly top-down with, like OMOV online ballots, huge power being placed in the hands of those deciding in advance what topics are to be discussed and which individuals are appointed as organisers.
All this begs the question of how much of a guide is Hallam anyway on the question of organising political struggles and organisations?
In the booklet, Hallam makes much of his experience as an academic researcher, working with campaigns like rent strikes and his involvement in founding Extinction Rebellion, Insulate Britain, and Just Stop Oil. He makes bold claims such as “I have done the design work for some of the biggest social movements and campaigns in this country and around the Western world”.
Hallam’s chosen personal highlight was mobilising 10,000 participants to Extinction Rebellion’s occupations of Central London in 2019 – but what did that actually achieve? Hallam lauds the UK government’s declaration of a climate emergency but that was a symbolic gesture and successive governments have backslid on climate pledges ever since.
This is paired with his dismissive attitude to actual mass movements that took place in the twentieth century. The mass anti-poll tax movement which brought down Margaret Thatcher – which the Socialist Party’s predecessor organisation, Militant, was centrally involved in organising – the 1984-85 miners’ strike, and even the French general strike of 1968, are all supposedly less significant developments than Corbyn and Sultana’s announcement of Your Party, while “‘revolutions’ such as the Tahrir Square events in Egypt” in 2011 are dismissed as resulting in “very little political change”.
Another significant fact is that the movements that Hallam counterposes to such examples have not based themselves on funding solely from the workers and oppressed layers he claims to champion in the booklet. As well as raising some funds through crowdfunding, organisations such as Extinction Rebellion also accepted donations from millionaires and billionaires, such as hedge fund manager Sir Christopher Hohn, and Labour-backing businessman Dale Vince, who donated over £300,000 to Just Stop Oil.
But most tellingly, Roger Hallam’s methods have been tried in attempting to build a political party before. With so many other anecdotes and examples from campaigns that he had previously been involved in, you can only conclude that leaving out his previous attempt to build a political party is deliberate. The Beyond Politics/Burning Pink Party contested six elections in 2021, receiving between 0.2 and 2.1% of the vote. The party was dissolved the following year, a one-time effort rather than something making a conscious attempt to prepare the way for a development such as that which Your Party potentially offered.
Whilst Hallam’s methods may build campaigns that can grab the media headlines for a period, they are ones that lend themselves to what are ultimately relatively short-lived projects. They are not the methods that can build the new mass workers’ party that is so desperately needed to bring about the ‘political revolution’ that Hallam claims to desire.