The Invisible Hand: Socialist Action, Machine Politics, and the Battle for Your Party’s Soul

The most secretive organisation on the British left is running the campaign for ‘openness’. That tells you everything.

Somewhere in a Your Party Scotland Facebook group this week, a supporter of Jeremy Corbyn’s The Many slate posted a lengthy analysis of the party’s crisis. The argument was familiar: Zarah Sultana’s Grassroots Left represents a “narrow alignment of existing groups”; The Many represents a “genuinely mass democratic movement.” The organised left are sectarian gatekeepers. Corbyn is the indispensable leader. Your Party must be bigger than the far left or it will die.

Reasonable enough, on its face. Until someone asked the poster a direct question: should Your Party be an anti-Zionist party?

The response was instructive. The poster called it a “test.” Deflected to Venezuela. Changed the subject to NATO. Refused to answer.

This is not a personality quirk. This is a political method. And it has a name, an address, and a forty-year history on the British left.

The Organisation That Doesn’t Exist

On 11 February, the Socialist Action website published an article by Mark Buckley urging Your Party members to vote for The Many slate. The argument was brief and strategic: YP must occupy “a political space where the mass of voters would normally expect Labour to be”; Corbyn is the party’s “most visible and most valuable asset”; without The Many, YP will become just another small socialist grouping. The Scottish Facebook post reproduced this line almost word for word. Coincidence is, of course, always possible. But Socialist Action has never relied on coincidence.

For readers unfamiliar with the organisation: Socialist Action is a group with Trotskyist roots that, from the mid-1980s, adopted a method of deep entryism so thoroughgoing that its members refused to confirm their affiliation even when asked directly on television. When Channel 4’s Dispatches investigated the group’s role in Ken Livingstone’s Greater London Authority in 2008, SA advisers named on camera would not say whether they were still members. Livingstone’s eventual defence was revealing: “Almost all of my advisers had been involved in Socialist Action,” he said. “It was the only rational left-wing group you could engage with.” Four of his key advisers made the Evening Standard’s top 25 most influential people in London. Nobody outside a small circle of left obsessives knew they existed.

The method transferred seamlessly to Corbyn’s leadership of the Labour Party. Simon Fletcher, whom former SA member Atma Singh identified as having been on the SA central committee, became Corbyn’s Chief of Staff. John Ross, SA’s leading theoretician and Livingstone’s former economic adviser, was linked to Corbyn’s inner circle. Singh described SA as building “a real power base” around Corbyn. Paul Mason, another former Trotskyist who is [almost] nobody’s idea of a sectarian, identified SA members as “highly influential in the leader’s office.”

This is the organisation now campaigning for openness, inclusivity, and mass politics inside Your Party. The irony would be exquisite if the stakes were not so high.

Two Visions, One Election

The CEC elections currently underway will determine the character of Your Party for the next two years. Voting runs until 23 February; results land on the 26th. Two slates dominate the contest. Understanding what each actually represents, rather than what each claims to represent, is essential.

The Many, backed by Corbyn, presents itself as the unity slate: outward-looking, community-focused, determined to build a mass party. Its “Where We Stand” statement is deliberately vague. It takes no position on NATO. No position on Zionism. No position on what socialism actually means in 2026. It opposes dual membership with other socialist organisations, and its unelected HQ apparatus has already barred candidates including Dave Nellist, the former Labour MP and Militant supporter, from standing in the CEC elections. The Many did not endorse Sultana for any leadership position.

Grassroots Left, the England and Wales slate backed by Sultana, published a 15-point platform. It explicitly opposes NATO, Zionism, and the monarchy. It calls for socialist transformation of the economy. It supports dual membership and the right of socialist organisations to operate openly within YP. It endorsed both Corbyn and Sultana for the leadership. Its candidates include community organisers, climate campaigners like Chris Saltmarsh (co-founder of Labour for a Green New Deal), and trade unionists alongside members of Anticapitalist Resistance, Socialist Alternative, and others.

Now: which of these sounds like the “narrow alignment of existing groups,” and which sounds like the basis for a genuinely democratic mass party?

Twentieth-Century Machine Politics in a Twenty-First Century Party

The Many’s supporters present their slate as something fresh: a break from the factional infighting that has plagued YP since its launch. New energy. New direction. This is gaslight. What The Many actually represents is the oldest play in the machine-politics handbook, reheated for a party that was supposed to have left all that behind.

Consider the electoral mechanics. Your Party’s CEC elections use the Single Transferable Vote in multi-member regional constituencies. This is the Imperiali quota system: it structurally advantages organised slates with name recognition and factional discipline over independent candidates and loosely organised groupings. A coordinated slate that can direct its supporters’ lower preferences to slate colleagues will systematically outperform a collection of individuals, however talented, who lack that machinery.

This is not a neutral observation. It is the key to understanding why Socialist Action’s involvement matters. SA has spent forty years perfecting exactly this kind of coordinated factional discipline: invisible, deniable, and devastatingly effective. The method that captured the GLA and the Leader of the Opposition’s office is now being applied to a 55,000-member party whose local branches have barely had time to meet, let alone develop the capacity to scrutinise a nationally coordinated slate operation. The Many’s supporters will tell you this is just good organisation. They are not wrong. But let’s not pretend it’s a grassroots insurgency.

The Corbyn inner circle, drawn heavily from the trade union bureaucracy, brings with it what the SWP’s own pre-conference documents (from a rare moment of lucidity) described as “the secretive and conservative approach associated with this layer.” Karie Murphy, Corbyn’s former chief of staff. The advisers who clustered around Livingstone before him. The method is consistent across decades: build an apparatus, control the levers, present the result as democratic will. No, worse than consistent: it is structurally necessary for a political current that cannot win open programmatic debates because it refuses to state its programme.

The Anti-Zionism Question

The Facebook exchange in the Your Party Scotland group is a microcosm. A supporter asks: should YP be anti-Zionist? The Many’s man calls it a test. But this is not a trick question. Your Party exists because 800,000 people registered interest in a political formation born from the movement against genocide in Gaza. The largest sustained mass mobilisation in Britain in a generation was an anti-Zionist mobilisation, whether or not everyone on those marches would have used that word. The independent candidates who won parliamentary seats in 2024 did so on explicitly pro-Palestinian platforms rooted in communities where the genocide was not an abstraction but a lived catastrophe affecting families, friends, congregations.

Refusing to name the party anti-Zionist is not political breadth. It is a repetition of the evasion that destroyed Corbyn’s Labour leadership, where the refusal to take clear positions on antisemitism and Zionism left the door open for the Labour right to define the terms of debate and weaponise the issue against the left. Corbyn’s supporters will object that the antisemitism crisis was manufactured. They are partly right. But it was manufactured in the space that political evasion created. If you will not state clearly what you stand for, your enemies will state it for you.

The Many’s supporters argue that taking explicit positions on “hot” issues like NATO, Zionism, and the monarchy will alienate the moderate voters YP needs to attract. This is the logic of permanent retreat dressed up as strategic wisdom. The Greens, whom The Many’s own Socialist Action article cites approvingly as a model, have surged in the polls while taking positions on climate, migration, and foreign policy that are considerably sharper than anything The Many is willing to offer. The idea that political clarity repels voters is an article of faith among professional apparatchiks. The evidence does not support it.

The Scottish Question

The original Facebook post noted, correctly, that Scotland’s sizeable Muslim communities were largely absent from the YP Scotland founding conference. Most attendees were already politically active: members of socialist organisations, former Labour members, Greens, long-standing campaigners.

The poster presented this as evidence that YP is too left-wing, too ideologically demanding, too focused on the organised left. The opposite conclusion is more plausible. Muslim communities radicalised by genocide, by Islamophobia, by the experience of watching a Labour government arm the state that is killing their families, did not stay away because the party was too anti-Zionist. They stayed away because the bureaucratic manoeuvres at the top: the expulsions on the eve of the Liverpool conference, the threats of legal action, the shadow membership systems, the refusal to take clear positions on the issues that brought those communities into political life; all of this told them that Your Party was another project run by apparatchiks for apparatchiks. And they were not entirely wrong.

YP Scotland has voted to begin a transitional phase toward separation from the UK party. If that process succeeds, the Scottish party will need to build its own roots in communities that the UK leadership’s manoeuvres have so far repelled. It will not do so by offering those communities a warmed-over social democracy with the hard edges filed off. It will do so by being the party that names the genocide, names the complicity, names the system, and organises to fight it.

What This Election Is Actually About

Let us be precise. The choice in the CEC elections is not between a mass party and a sect. It is between two models of left organisation, both with deep roots in the history of the workers’ movement, and both with extensive track records.

Model one is the Labourist model: an MP-led party with vague politics, a professional apparatus controlling the levers, and a membership whose role is to canvass, donate, and applaud. This model built the Labour Party. It also built the Labour Party’s capacity to betray every movement that invested hope in it, from the General Strike to the Iraq War to the Corbyn project itself. The Many, whatever the intentions of its individual supporters, is a vehicle for this model. The involvement of Socialist Action, with its forty-year record of building invisible power bases inside exactly these kinds of formations, is not incidental to this project. It is constitutive of it.

Model two is the broad democratic party: member-led, with a clear programme, democratic structures, and space for organised political currents to operate openly. This model built Podemos before Iglesias crushed its internal democracy at Vistalegre II. It built the NPA before its internal contradictions tore it apart. It built the SSP before Sheridan’s ego destroyed it. The model has a mixed record, to put it charitably. But its failures have been failures of execution, not of principle. And its successes, where they occurred, produced something that the Labourist model has never produced: genuine working-class self-organisation with political clarity.

Grassroots Left, for all its imperfections, is reaching toward the second model. It is doing so messily, inconsistently, and with all the contradictions you would expect from a slate assembled in weeks inside a party that barely exists. But the direction of travel is clear. Member democracy. Political clarity. Open organisation. The right of socialists to organise as socialists.

The Many is reaching toward the first model with the confidence of people who have done this before and know exactly what they are doing. That confidence should alarm anyone who remembers what happened the last three times.

A Note on Method

I want to be clear about what I am not saying. I am not saying that every supporter of The Many is a Socialist Action member or fellow-traveller. Obviously not. Most are sincere activists who admire Corbyn, distrust the organised far left, and want a party that can win elections. These are legitimate impulses. The tragedy is that those impulses are being channelled, by an apparatus they cannot see, into a project that will reproduce the very failures they are trying to escape.

I am also not saying that Grassroots Left is the answer to every question. It is a coalition of forces with real political differences, assembled under pressure, and it will face its own crises if it wins. The Spartacist League’s Workers Hammer is backing it; so is rs21; so is Socialist Alternative. These organisations disagree on many points. But they converge on something that matters: that internal democracy is not a luxury to be deferred until the party is “ready,” but the precondition for any party worth building. That convergence is what makes the Grassroots Left coalition politically significant rather than a temporary bloc against Corbyn. What happens the morning after victory, when the programmatic debates that democracy enables actually begin, will test whether the commitment is real.

For my own part, I am voting for independent and Grassroots Left candidates above those of The Many. I say this not from factional loyalty; I have none in this contest. I am evaluating the leadership candidates as a team, appreciating that some individuals will have poorer judgement than others on both sides. The STV system allows precisely this kind of discrimination. Use it. Read the candidate statements. Ask who has a record of building in communities and who has a record of building apparatuses. Then rank accordingly.

But I will say this. A party that will not name what it stands for has already lost. A party that bars socialists from its leadership elections while claiming to be open has forfeited its right to lecture anyone about inclusivity. And a party whose strategic direction is being set by an organisation so secretive that its own members will not confirm their membership on camera is not a party that is breaking with the old politics. It is the old politics in a new wrapper.

Your Party deserved better than this. It still could be better than this. But not if the invisible hand wins.

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Postscript: The Ghost in the Machine

A reasonable objection: does any of this matter? Socialist Action is tiny. Nobody knows how many members it has; the organisation’s entire method is designed to make counting impossible. Surely if SA were genuinely influential in the Corbyn operation, the New Statesman would have exposed them. Surely the lobby journalists who made careers out of Corbyn’s “hard left links” would have found the story irresistible: a secret Trotskyist cell running the Leader of the Opposition’s office. Where were the exposés?

The objection answers itself. The lobby journalists did find the story. Channel 4’s Dispatches investigated SA’s role in the GLA in 2008. Andrew Gilligan wrote about them extensively. The Evening Standard tracked their influence. Atma Singh, a former member, went public with detailed allegations. And none of it mattered, because the method is designed to survive exposure. When confronted, SA members deny membership. When named, they produce character references from people who genuinely do not know. When investigated, they point out, correctly, that they hold no formal positions, control no formal structures, exercise no formal authority. They are advisers. Networkers. Friends of friends. The exposé bounces off because there is nothing visible to stick to.

This is not a failure of journalism. It is the success of a political method refined over four decades. The Labourist left’s relationship to investigative scrutiny has always been parasitic: they survive it precisely because their power is relational rather than structural, exercised through placement and influence rather than through mandates and votes. You cannot expose what refuses to exist.

But there is a deeper reason to care, and it has nothing to do with membership numbers or organisational charts. Socialist Action matters because its political method is the distilled essence of everything that destroyed the Corbyn project from within: the substitution of manoeuvre for programme, of placement for politics, of invisible coordination for democratic debate. The question is not whether SA has fifteen members or fifty. The question is whether the method SA represents, a method now being applied to Your Party through The Many slate, will reproduce the same catastrophic pattern that left Corbyn defenceless against the Labour right.

Consider what the method actually does. It operates at the level of geopolitical abstraction rather than concrete organising reality. This is not accidental; it is structurally necessary. John Ross’s intellectual formation in the International Marxist Group produced a genuinely rigorous analysis of the world economy as a totality determining its national parts. Read his IMG pamphlet on Permanent Revolution: it is serious work, dense with Trotsky and Mandel, insisting that any revolutionary analysis must start from world development as a whole. Orthodox Trotskyism, impeccably argued.

But in the IMG, that world-systemic analysis existed in productive tension with other tendencies demanding concrete British intervention: in the women’s movement, on Ireland, in the unions, on the streets. The minority that included Phil Hearse, the current that would eventually unite with others to form the ISG and then Socialist Resistance and then today’s Anticapitalist Resistance, insisted on engagement with messy, contradictory, falsifiable domestic reality.

The road to Beijing

The IMG’s move into the Labour Party was not some dramatic 1983 rupture. The turn had been debated and largely settled by the late 1970s; by 1980 and 1981, IMG members were already active in Labour constituency parties across the country. The organisation renamed itself the Socialist League in 1982, signalling that the entry was now the strategic orientation. Tariq Ali left around this time, partly over the LP turn, partly over tensions around Afghanistan. What Ross’s current did was not win a sudden factional battle. It was more methodical than that. Having initially resisted full entry, Ross’s tendency came to embrace it, then took it further than anyone else had contemplated. By 1983, SA had made the decision that defined everything that followed: it would disappear from public view entirely. Not as the aftermath of a split. Not because it lost a debate. Because it chose invisibility as the optimal method. It closed the bookshop. Assigned code names. Met in pubs. This was not a retreat. It was a strategy, and a far more deliberate one than a post-factional rump licking its wounds.

From that moment, SA ceased to be an organisation whose ideas were tested against the discipline of class struggle. Deep entryism in Labour, then the Livingstone operation, then the Corbyn inner circle: each was a triumph of placement over programme. You don’t get corrected by reality when you’re whispering in the mayor’s ear rather than arguing on a picket line. The world-systemic analysis survived, but stripped of the dialectical partner that once kept it honest. Look at socialistaction.net today: No Cold War briefings, John Ross’s GDP analyses from Renmin University, the “hyper-imperialism” framework. All pitched at a level of abstraction where you’re either inside the analytical framework or you’re not. No Birmingham bin strike to cover where your predictions might be tested. No UNISON general secretary election where your tactical advice could be checked against results. The geopolitical plane is where you go when you don’t want to be wrong, because being wrong requires engagement with a reality that talks back.

And the China question crystallises the betrayal perfectly. Ross’s IMG pamphlet contains a devastating critique of socialism in one country: it leads to empiricism, to bureaucratic degeneration, to the impossibility of grasping that socialism requires an international economy. His current output from Beijing amounts to a sophisticated defence of precisely what his younger self demolished. The framework of starting from the world economy survived; the Trotskyist content was hollowed out and replaced with something much closer to the Stalinist thesis the original pamphlet attacked. But you would never notice the inversion if you stayed at the level of geopolitical abstraction, because at that altitude the Great Wall and the Berlin Wall look equally distant.

The method today

This is the method now being imported into Your Party. Not the rigorous world-systemic analysis of the young John Ross, but the evasion that the method became once it was severed from concrete organising: the refusal to name positions on Zionism, on NATO, on the monarchy. Many things are wrong with the ultraleft RCG, but they have exposed Corbyn’s unjustifiable quiet on Zionism, which others in Your Party follow and extend. The deflection to Venezuela when asked a direct question. The confidence of people who have spent forty years building invisible power bases and have never once had to defend a programme in open democratic debate, because they have never once stated a programme clearly enough to be held to it.

So yes. You should care about Socialist Action. Not because fifteen people in a room in Shoreditch are pulling the strings of a 55,000-member party. That gives them too much credit and Your Party’s members too little. You should care because the political method SA perfected, placement without programme, manoeuvre without mandate, geopolitical abstraction as a substitute for organising reality, is the precise method by which the Corbyn project was left intellectually defenceless against enemies who knew exactly what they stood for. The Labour right had a programme: destroy the left. They stated it clearly and pursued it ruthlessly. Corbyn’s inner circle had a method: triangulate, evade, place allies in key positions, and hope that organisational control could substitute for political clarity.

It could not. It cannot. It will not.

The Many slate is that method’s latest vehicle. Most of its supporters do not know this. They will find out, as Corbyn’s supporters found out, when the crisis comes and the apparatus that was supposed to protect them turns out to have no programme with which to fight.

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Duncan Chapel writes Red Mole Substack, providing revolutionary intelligence for activists. He is a member of the Fourth Internationalist group, Ecosocialist Scotland. CEC election results are expected on 26 February; Red Mole Substack will publish a full analysis of the outcome.