Your Party: The Language of Democracy, the Logic of Control

We Don’t Need Another Podemos

The left inside Your Party faces a familiar choice: fight for democratic forms, or fight for political content. Anticapitalistas fought for the first. They have written honestly about what it cost them.

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TL;DR  The Grassroots Left’s Advisory Committee has broken down. The CEC faction calling itself The Many is applying pressure on elected GL representatives to distance themselves from the constituent groups that mandated them. The left groups now meeting informally need to learn from the Spanish experience: defending democratic procedures without naming the political project those procedures are protecting is not a strategy. Anticapitalistas said so themselves, in Viento Sur, after six years of finding out the hard way.

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The Advisory Committee of the Grassroots Left slate has not been able to meet. Not because the logistics are difficult. Not because everyone is busy. Because some of the GL members elected to Your Party’s Central Executive Council are refusing to sit with the full committee that gave them their mandate. Write it plainly: elected representatives are declining accountability to the bodies that elected them.

This is how bureaucratic consolidation begins. Not with a coup. With an administrative refusal, dressed as a practical necessity, repeated until it becomes normal.

The CEC faction calling itself The Many is applying pressure. The GL CEC members are responding by distancing themselves from their own constituent groups. The Advisory Committee, written into the GL platform precisely to prevent this, is becoming a dead letter. Across the British left, anyone who has watched a broad party decompose before will recognise the pattern.

The question is whether the groups now meeting informally, Your Party Democratic Socialists, Sheffield Left, the Platform for a Democratic Party current, Socialist Alternative, the CPGB, and others, will draw the right lesson from comparable experiences. Because there is a wrong lesson available, and it is tempting.

The lesson Anticapitalistas learned too late

Izquierda Anticapitalista provided the organisational muscle that launched Podemos in 2014: the cadre, the networks, the experienced militants who knew how to run a meeting and build a structure. When Pablo Iglesias’s faction consolidated control through Vistalegre I, IA fought back on the democratic terrain. They demanded pluralism. They demanded accountability. They demanded that the circles, the grassroots democratic units of Podemos, be defended against centralisation.

They won several of those arguments. They lost the political war entirely. Manuel Garí, a founding member of Anticapitalistas, wrote the retrospective that the organisation deserved: honest, precise, and damning about their own choices. On Vistalegre I he was blunt:

Anticapitalistas made a mistake at Vistalegre I. Given that the framework of dispute was centred on the organisational model, it focused its efforts almost exclusively on responding to the internal democratic question, a truly important matter, but without putting forward with sufficient energy the battle for a political project that could have drawn the existing currents of radicalisation into Anticapitalistas’ orbit. The lesson from then and for the future: establishing the relationship between the political project and the aspiration for an ecosocialist and feminist society is the sine qua non for building the strategic political groupings that must have a post-capitalist social horizon. — Manuel Garí, ‘Fulgor y ocaso de Podemos. Razones de un adiós’, Viento Sur No. 171, September 2020. Translation the author’s own.

Every congress became a battle over voting thresholds and delegate selection. Meanwhile, Iglesias’s faction adopted a radical aesthetic: the language of transformation, hollowed of substance, deployed to justify one accommodation after another with the PSOE and the constitutional order. When Anticapitalistas finally left in 2020, Podemos was entering government as a junior partner to the PSOE: the destination that six years of programmatic erosion had been preparing. Not socialism. Coalition management, with the EU fiscal framework as the ceiling and Nadia Calviño as its enforcer. The democratic structures IA had defended so ferociously were being used to legitimise exactly that.

There is a second failure that Garí names with equal precision. When the Iglesias leadership blocked Anticapitalistas’ access to internal party platforms, the organisation discovered it had built no independent means of reaching the membership:

Anticapitalistas—given that access to the shared channels of Podemos was vetoed by the bureaucratic clique—did not organise, even in an embryonic form, a communication system, however modest, that would allow it to express its positions in the media and networks autonomously. For a long time, this constituted one of the heaviest slabs weighing down its activity. — Garí, ibid. Translation the author’s own.

Six years. That is how long they stayed. By the time they left, the energy that had created the party had largely dissipated and the apparatus had already marginalised them.

The mistake they had already theorised

Here is what makes the Spanish experience genuinely instructive rather than merely cautionary. Anticapitalistas did not walk into Podemos ignorant of these dangers. As Izquierda Anticapitalista, they had already lived through a version of the same sequence inside Izquierda Unida a decade earlier, in the period following the PSOE-IU pact of 2000: the programmatic dilution, the subordination to a centrist leadership, the substitution of unity-as-form for politics-as-content. They identified the failure of IU’s adaptation to the PSOE as a moment when, in their words, the important thing had become the unity reached and the dynamic opened, while the signed document—the programme, the political content—had become the least important thing.

They theorised the communication trap before they fell into it. They identified programmatic dilution as the primary error before they repeated it at Vistalegre. The lesson of the Spanish experience is not simply that these mistakes are possible. It is that structural pressures reproduce errors across different conjunctures regardless of accumulated theoretical clarity. An organisation can write the correct retrospective, teach it to its cadre, and still walk into the next broad formation and make the same choices, because the immediate pressures of maintaining influence, preserving relationships, and avoiding the accusation of sectarianism are stronger in the room than the historical memory in the documents.

The groups meeting inside Your Party this week have the Spanish analysis available to them. Whether that availability changes anything is the question Saturday needs to answer.

What’s in a name

The For the Many network launched at the legendary Casa bar in Liverpool, bringing together grassroots activists from across the post-Corbyn left. Naomi Wimborne-Idrissi spoke at that launch. Ken Loach. Ian Hodson of the BFAWU. Audrey White of the Merseyside Pensioners Association. The network predates Your Party. Its name carried the accumulated political capital of the Corbyn years: the movement over the machine, the members over the MPs.

The CEC faction adopted the name The Many after that network already existed. In left politics, names carry political capital. A faction that appropriates the name of an existing democratic tendency makes criticism harder to articulate and allows its supporters to respond to attacks by invoking a legitimacy they have borrowed rather than earned. It is a manoeuvre. Small, but the small manoeuvres tell you something about the larger intent.

The founding commitments

The Platform for a Democratic Party document, signed by Wimborne-Idrissi and others before YP had a formal structure, demanded founding conference primacy for grassroots members, branch sovereignty, accountability of representatives, right of recall. The Your Party Democratic Socialists’ points of unity go considerably further: a democratic republic, non-partisan staff accountable to members, explicit rejection of federal structures with block votes, the party as a vehicle for class power rather than electoral management.

These documents represent successive crystallisations of the same democratic current. The Imperiali quota question, the reduction of Scottish CEC representation, the pre-conference expulsions, the Advisory Committee breakdown: each episode looks like an administrative decision. Together they form a pattern. The bureaucratisation is in service of a political project: producing a party that can be managed electorally, that will not embarrass its parliamentary representatives, that will accommodate itself to the constitutional order rather than challenge it.

That is the political argument the left inside YP needs to make. Not only ‘the CEC is breaking the democratic rules.’ That is true, and worth saying. But it is not sufficient. Garí’s lesson from Vistalegre I is precise: establishing the relationship between the democratic question and the political project is the sine qua non. Without it, the network becomes what Anticapitalistas became: a pressure group for better governance inside a party whose direction it cannot name.

What these groups can actually agree on

The groups meeting informally this week are considering building a coordinating structure for left YP members that could help branches survive the CEC’s reorganisation tactics. The instinct is sound. Branch-level work, embedding experienced cadre in local structures, building connections across regions, is more durable than factional manoeuvring at leadership level.

But a network needs a political mandate, not just a practical one. ‘Defend branch democracy’ is a service. A service can be discontinued. A political argument gives members in branches a reason to stay, to organise, to understand what they are defending democracy against rather than simply that they are defending it.

What can these groups actually agree on? Rather less than their separate documents might suggest. The DSYP platform commits to overturning the constitutional order as a minimum programme; the For the Many milieu will not sign that. The CPGB’s tradition of organised tendencies sits uneasily with DSYP’s explicit rejection of federal structures with block votes. These are not trivial differences.

The realistic common ground is narrower and more powerful for being honest about its limits: the CEC is building a party that betrays the founding commitments. Name it plainly. Document the reorganisation tactics systematically. Share the analysis with members in branches who are watching their local organisations being reshaped from above and have no framework for understanding why. That shared political analysis is enough to sustain a coordinating structure. Extracting more agreement than that from this combination of groups will produce either a lowest-common-denominator statement that satisfies nobody or a split before the network has done anything useful.

Scotland offers the proof of concept, and the warning. The Interim Scottish Executive Committee and the Scottish conference were not conceded by the London apparatus: they were built, wisely and quickly, in the space that existed before central control had consolidated. That window was narrow. In England and Wales it has largely closed. The network now being discussed is therefore a different kind of project: not institution-building in open ground, but organised resistance in territory the CEC is already claiming.

That resistance requires the communication infrastructure Garí identifies. The CEC will move against the network: its record on the Advisory Committee, on Scottish representation, on the electoral quota, tells you what it does when organised minorities become inconvenient. An autonomous newsletter, a Signal group, a means of reaching YP members that does not depend on party platforms: these are not precautions. They are the condition of the network’s survival.

What Anticapitalistas says now

This is not only historical retrospect. In April 2026, Julia Cámara and Raúl Camargo published ‘The Left at the Crossroads: Notes for a New Construction’ in Viento Sur No. 200. They are members of Anticapitalistas. They are writing now, in the same weeks that the GL Advisory Committee is breaking down inside Your Party. Their analysis of what must be built differently is not addressed to the Spanish left alone.

On what the left network inside a broad party needs to be, they are precise: it must build ‘a relationship of embeddedness with social movements and concrete struggles, based on territorial rootedness and respectful but firm work within them, aspiring to establish organic relations with the institutions of the working class.’ Being of the movement rather than adjacent to it. Not a coordinating committee that meets on Saturday evenings to discuss the democratic deficit and goes home, but a political tendency with roots in the same struggles its members are already in.

They also identify a trap that has a direct British equivalent. Movements whose budgets depend primarily on state funding, they argue, become bureaucratic and lose their rupturist agenda: ‘the self-reproduction of the movement and its salaried layers becomes an ultimate end.’ In the YP context, substitute state funding with trade union bureaucracy. The layer of advisers and fixers around the Corbyn leadership has the same structural interest in managing the party rather than transforming it. That is not a personal failing. It is a positional logic. The left network needs to be independent of it from the start, financially and organisationally, not after the bureaucracy has already moved.

The question Saturday cannot answer

Your Party is less than two years old as an idea and less than one year old as a formal structure. The CEC’s consolidation is happening now, while the proto branches are still forming, while the founding commitments are fresh enough that members can be reminded of them. If there is a moment to fight, politically rather than procedurally, it is this one.

Anticapitalistas had experienced cadre, programmatic clarity, a network of connections in the movement, and the correct analysis from their IU years. They also met regularly. They also wrote honest retrospectives, eventually. What they did not do, until it was too late, was name plainly what the bureaucratisation was for.

The groups inside Your Party have that analysis available. Garí wrote it for them, at the cost of six years. Cámara and Camargo are refining it this month, in the same publication, with the same hard-won honesty. Whether the British left can read that experience and act differently is a question this article cannot answer.

Perhaps the construction of a revolutionary organisation is as necessary as it is impossible, like absolute love in Marguerite Duras. This has never prevented anyone from falling in love. — Daniel Bensaïd, cited in Julia Cámara and Raúl Camargo, ‘The Left at the Crossroads: Notes for a New Construction’, Viento Sur No. 200, April 2026

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Red Mole will continue to track developments inside Your Party. If you have information about branch reorganisation tactics or CEC manoeuvres in your area, contact us securely.