Elections as Organising Tools: What the International Left Told Your Party Scotland

Four speakers from four countries came to Dundee with four different answers to the same question. Only one of them had it right.

The fringe meeting at Your Party Scotland’s founding conference on 8 February was, in some ways, more politically substantial than the conference itself. While the main hall voted on constitutional architecture: sibling party or autonomous nation, SEC composition, leadership models; the international panel grappled with the question that those constitutional votes will have to answer in practice. What is a socialist party actually for?

Fred Bayer from Your Party Aberdeen chaired. Paul Murphy TD from People Before Profit sat in the room. Three screens flickered with international guests beaming in online: Lara Alonso from Anticapitalistas in the Spanish state, Erik Uden from Die Linke in Germany, and Marko Crnobrnja from Partija radikalne levice, the Party of the Radical Left in Serbia. The tech wobbled. People arrived late. The panel ran over and ate into lunch. It was, in other words, a perfectly normal left meeting.

But the political content was exceptional. Each speaker represented a distinct strategic orientation toward the central dilemma facing Your Party Scotland: the relationship between elections, social movements, and the building of a serious socialist organisation. The conference had just voted to stand candidates in the May 2026 Holyrood elections, three months away, with no policy platform, no campaign infrastructure, and no name recognition outside the existing left. The international speakers, without coordinating, offered four different frameworks for understanding whether that decision was brave or suicidal.

Murphy’s Dublin model

Paul Murphy’s contribution was the most politically substantial on the panel, and it deserves careful attention because it directly addresses the strategic gamble Your Party Scotland has just taken.

Murphy was careful not to claim People Before Profit as a universal model. “I’m not here to say that People Before Profit is the model because I don’t think it is the model. I don’t think there is one model.” What he offered instead was a worked example. PBP is not a mass force, he explained, but a national point of reference: at the heart of social movements on Palestine, on neutrality, on the cost of living crisis, with important electoral roots in key working-class communities, particularly in Dublin.

The crucial insight was his framing of elections as organising tools, not as rewards for prior organising. Murphy was first elected to the Dáil almost twelve years ago in a by-election focused on water charges. The slogan was stark: don’t pay, organise, protest, and vote. He won against all expectations on the same day that 100,000 people were on the streets. Then PBP used that parliamentary position to make the case for non-payment, for mass mobilisation. They won because 73% of people refused to pay. They won because hundreds of thousands marched. But the election victory and the public position, Murphy insisted, absolutely assisted in that.

This is the model Your Party Scotland needs to hear, and it cuts against both the voluntarist delusion that standing candidates magically builds a party and the abstentionist comfort that you should wait until conditions are perfect. Elections work when they are embedded in campaigns. The campaign came first; the election amplified it. PBP didn’t stand in Dublin South-West because they had deep community roots there. They stood to build them, alongside a mass campaign that gave people something concrete to do: refuse to pay.

Murphy’s second contribution was equally important: a three-pronged strategy against the far right. Confront the arguments and mobilisation directly. Build broad united fronts against their ideas. And crucially, go and organise working-class people on the issues that affect them day to day. This last point matters most. “These ideas take hold when people feel powerless,” Murphy argued. “When they don’t feel confident to look up at the people who are responsible for the housing crisis, the health crisis and all the rest, and instead these snake oil salesmen can come and say, ‘No, no, the reason for your problems is this poor person living over here in a tent, who has nothing.’”

The uncomfortable part of Murphy’s analysis came when he discussed the Irish presidential election, where Catherine Connolly won 63% for the left in a historic victory. But 13% of voters spoiled their ballots, driven by a campaign from far-right, populist-right, and reactionary Catholic forces. Among young men, 35% spoiled their vote. And in the most hard-pressed working-class communities; PBP’s historic base; spoiled votes outnumbered Connolly’s in several boxes.

This is the gap that Your Party Scotland must confront. Murphy noted that the Palestine movement in Ireland, enormous and radicalising, has not penetrated the hardest-pressed working-class communities where the far right has its toehold. The conference room in Dundee was, as Jim Monaghan admitted from the floor, “almost entirely white people.” Yet thousands of young Asian Glaswegians march for Palestine weekly. The left and the actually radicalising layers of the class are not in the same room. Elections alone won’t bridge that gap. But elections fought alongside campaigns on housing, on council cuts, on the cost of living; Murphy’s Dublin model suggests they can be part of the bridge.

Anticapitalistas and the social movement turn

Lara Alonso from Anticapitalistas, the section of the Fourth International in the Spanish state, presented a strikingly different orientation. Anticapitalistas has existed since 1995 through several incarnations, shaped decisively by the 15M movement in 2011. But here is the critical fact: they went from being a founding component of Podemos, the most significant left electoral irruption in recent European history, to being a small extra-parliamentary organisation focused on social movement intervention. Is this strategic clarity or a rationalisation of weakness?

Alonso was direct about their current orientation: “Right now we are focusing on social movements rather than electoral strategy.” Anticapitalistas’ priorities are Palestine solidarity, ecosocialism, feminism, queer liberation, and anti-militarism. Their strategic framework is based on the self-organisation of the working class through unions, social movements, and local cooperatives, maintaining what Alonso called “a clear and committed internationalist stance.”

Her critique of the Sánchez government was sharp and directly relevant to Britain under Starmer. Spain, she argued, is seen internationally as a left-wing beacon because of Sánchez’s rhetoric on Palestine. The reality is cosmetic measures on Gaza while violently suppressing solidarity at home. Police infiltration of social movements. A worsening housing crisis while the government prioritises landlords’ rights. Whatever gains have been made on migrant regularisation came from anti-racist organisations and popular pressure, not from governmental goodwill.

The strategic problem Alonso identified is the one Starmer’s Britain already faces: a supposedly left-wing government creates demobilisation. People feel they don’t have to work so hard to organise. The sense of urgency about building alternatives dissipates. And when the right-wing coalition of PP and Vox eventually takes power, as Alonso expects, the left will not be ready.

This diagnosis is sharp. The prescription is less convincing. Anticapitalistas’ trajectory from Podemos to extra-parliamentary politics deserves the same honest assessment they would give to others. They were part of the most significant left regroupment in recent European history. They provided Podemos with its legal registration, its initial infrastructure, its activist cadre. Then Pablo Iglesias built an apparatus designed to exclude precisely the forces that generated the movement, and Anticapitalistas found themselves outside. The social movement turn followed. Was it a freely chosen strategic reorientation, or was it making a virtue of exclusion?

When asked directly whether parties and social movements could be combined into a total political strategy, Alonso replied that “the electoral horizon is very far, far, far in the horizon” for Anticapitalistas. They are not worrying about electoral mediation between parties and social movements; they are focused on strengthening movements themselves.

There is a real insight here. Social movements do need strengthening. The fragmentation of struggles that Alonso described, where victories in one sector remain atomised from struggles in another, is a genuine problem that requires political organisation to overcome. But the lesson for Your Party Scotland is not to choose between Murphy’s model and Alonso’s. It is to recognise that Anticapitalistas’ retreat from electoral politics was shaped by the specific catastrophe of Podemos, where a populist leadership used electoral success to consolidate bureaucratic control and purge the left. Your Party faces some of the same dynamics. The answer is not to abandon elections but to fight for the kind of party that uses them as Murphy describes: as tools for building power from below, not as substitutes for it.

Uden’s accidental materialism

Erik Uden’s contribution from Die Linke was remarkable for a different reason. He essentially confessed that Die Linke did nothing to earn its dramatic improvement from 2.7% in the 2024 European elections to 8.8% in the 2025 federal elections. The posters were worse. They had less money. The campaign was no better resourced or organised. What changed was everything around them.

“Every other party capitulated to far-right framing on migration,” Uden explained. The Greens, the SPD: they abandoned their own positions and tried to imitate the AfD. Die Linke held the line. And when the contradictions of capitalism sharpened, voters who needed an alternative that hadn’t collapsed into racist scapegoating found that Die Linke was still there.

This is accidental materialism, and it is both vindicating and insufficient. Vindicating because it confirms what revolutionaries have always argued: objective conditions matter more than clever campaigns. The crisis of capitalism generates its own oppositions; the task is to be present and consistent when those oppositions emerge. Uden’s line that “materialism will sooner or later prove you right” is practically a slogan. When asked by Mick Rice from Dunoon whether this dynamic might apply to Scotland, Uden didn’t hesitate: “I would 100% say that it was not our doing. It will happen in Scotland. It will happen in England. It will happen in Wales. It will happen in Ireland. You shouldn’t wait for it to happen, but you can count on it.”

Insufficient because Uden, who is twenty-two and sits on Die Linke’s state executive in Lower Saxony, offered no analysis of what Die Linke should do with its unexpected success. His framing of internationalism as “stopping whatever our countries are doing from oppressing” the Global South is correct but incomplete. Where is the programmatic content? Where is the party-building strategy beyond waiting for circumstances to change? Die Linke itself, as Uden acknowledged, is torn between its “conformist path of going further into parliaments” and a turn toward grassroots activism. The crisis that delivered 8.8% does not automatically produce the organisational capacity to use it.

For Your Party Scotland, Uden’s contribution offers comfort and a warning. Comfort: the objective conditions in Scotland, with Starmer’s betrayals, the housing crisis, the collapse of the SNP’s progressive credentials, will generate opportunities for a credible left alternative. Warning: being present when the wave arrives is not the same as being capable of riding it. Die Linke’s federal result was a gift from the crisis, not a product of organising. Gifts can be squandered. The SSP won Tommy Sheridan a Glasgow seat in the Scottish Parliament in 2003 on the back of years of community organising, anti-poll tax campaigning, and genuine working-class roots; by 2007 the party was destroyed, torn apart by Sheridan’s perjury trial and the factional warfare it unleashed, its six MSPs reduced to zero, its activist base scattered across half a dozen fragments. The objective conditions that produced the breakthrough did not protect the organisation from its own internal crisis. Your Party Scotland needs Murphy’s model, not Uden’s: elections as deliberate organising tools, not as happy accidents of capitalist crisis.

Crnobrnja and the Serbian mirror

Marko Crnobrnja from Partija radikalne levice offered something unexpected: a mirror for Scotland’s national question from an entirely different angle. His party emerged from workers’ struggles during Serbia’s privatisations of the 2000s and was revitalised through the anti-eviction movement. They cannot contest elections because the costs are prohibitive: thousands of signatures, each requiring notarial approval at several dollars per signature, amounting to tens of thousands of dollars before a single vote is cast.

This material reality puts Scottish complaints about Your Party’s democratic deficits into perspective. But Crnobrnja’s most politically significant contribution was on sovereignty. When asked how international solidarity could support the Serbian left, his answer was pointed: the most useful thing western leftists could do is stop their ruling classes from reproducing narratives that keep Serbia constrained under EU rule. “The majority of people in Serbia no longer wish to continue the process of EU integration,” he explained. “I don’t think this fact is recognised enough, because both the government and the opposition parties in Serbia want to continue this neoliberal process.”

This complicates any simplistic framing. The Scottish debate about self-determination from Westminster; which the conference had just voted to pursue, with Option B passing to initiate a process toward organisational independence; parallels Serbia’s debate about sovereignty from Brussels. But the class content is different. Scottish independence, fought on a class programme, opens the possibility of rupture with British imperialism and a new relationship with the Global South. Serbian opposition to EU integration, fought on the terrain of national sovereignty, risks alignment with Russian and Chinese capital unless it is grounded in an independent working-class programme.

Crnobrnja was honest about the difficulties. The legacy of socialism in Serbia is a double-edged sword: people remember relative prosperity under Yugoslavia, but they also associate socialism with the nationalist degeneration of the Milošević era and the elitist detachment of the 1980s Communist Party. “You have communists who take totally opposite positions,” he noted, depending on which strand of Serbian political history they identify with. The party responds by reaching back to earlier traditions: Svetozar Marković, the pre-Marxist Serbian socialist of the 1870s, and the radical movement from which their party takes its name.

The lesson for Your Party Scotland is about the national question itself. Self-determination is not an abstraction. It requires content: a class programme, an internationalist orientation, a refusal to subordinate working-class interests to any ruling class, whether in Westminster, Brussels, or anywhere else. The conference voted for independence. The question is whether that vote will be filled with the kind of programmatic content that distinguishes a socialist independence movement from a petty-bourgeois nationalist one.

What the panel told the conference it had just decided

The Holyrood vote passed. Your Party Scotland will stand candidates in May 2026. The international panel, without intending to, provided the framework for assessing whether that decision will amount to anything.

If Your Party Scotland fights the Holyrood election the way Murphy described his Dublin by-election: as an organising tool embedded in campaigns on housing, on council cuts, on the cost of living; then standing in three months with no infrastructure is not suicidal. It is the beginning of building the infrastructure, through the campaign itself. Don’t pay, organise, protest, and vote. That sequence matters.

If they fight it the way Uden’s Die Linke stumbled into 8.8%: by existing and hoping the crisis does the work; they will get 1-2% and confirm every critic’s prediction that Corbyn’s party would flop in Scotland.

If they absorb Alonso’s warning about demobilisation under supposedly progressive governments, they will understand that Starmer’s Britain is not a reason to wait for better conditions. It is a reason to organise now, because the window before a possible Tory or Reform resurgence is narrower than anyone wants to admit.

And if they take Crnobrnja’s mirror seriously, they will ensure that Scottish independence is not a constitutional hobby but a class project, rooted in the communities where the party does not yet exist and among the people who were not in the room at Dundee.

Four countries. Four strategies. One question. The answer, as always, is in the organising.

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This is the second of three posts on the Your Party Scotland founding conference. The first, “Three White Men and a Broken Lift: Inside Your Party Scotland’s Founding Conference”, appeared straight after the conference. A more reflective podcast was produced after looking at the left group’s assessments.

Duncan is a member of the Fourth Internationalist group, Ecosocialist Scotland.