ACFM - ACFM Trip 55: Parties

Episode Date: October 19, 2025

Amid the bumpy launch of a new left-wing party and the rise of the Greens and Reform, the ACFM crew turn their attention to parties. Do we still need them? Do parties work by drawing people together, or by excluding the uninvited? And should a political party have anything in common with a dance party? […]

Hello and welcome. Hello and welcome to ACFM, the home of the weird left. My name's Kea Milbin and I'm joined as usual by my very good friend Nadia. Idol. Hello. And my other very good friend, Jeremy Gilbert. Hello. And today we're talking about parties.

Woo-hoo. Party. Party. Now, guys, why are we talking about parties at this moment? I really can't think of why. Well, because obviously, for people listening in the far future, listening to this as an archive of radical culture in the, in the 2020, Yes, one of the main preoccupations of people on the British left, and even a finger-waggers are on the American left over the past few weeks in, it's now 2nd of October, 2025, has been the various kind of prevarications and consternations around the difficult formation of a new political party to be led by Jeremy Corbyn, and,

question mark or or or and no one uh so that's the main that and that's the provocation isn't it for thinking about this the idea of the party but also obviously we wanted to think about the relationship between that idea of the party and other ideas of the party so for example my much beloved dance party i've been organizing and hosting and DJing at in london with my friend cyril and tedrick had its 20th anniversary this summer it's now been going for 20 years and that is a very sort of unique type of things

have been doing with oneself. It's absolutely not why I ever thought I would be doing with my life from my 30s into my 50s. So there's obviously interesting things to think about there, given that collective joy is always one of our themes. And in a sort of circular way we might want to

think about, well, can a political party be a site of collective joy and emotional investment? I mean, given that quite often, I mean, we have sort of wagged down fingers at people who sort of overly invested emotionally in the idea of the political party in the form of the Labour Party. So there's a lot to talk about. What about you, Nadia? What do you think? Well, I'm not usually driven by definitions, kind of semantics and etymology, but I have to say

that I was intrigued by this idea of doing an episode that thinks about what is, why do we call a political party, why do we use the same terminology for a party, political party, and a club-type having a good time party. Like, what is the relation between these things and how do we use that term party? And when we were preparing for the show, I was really interested in this idea that a party can be something that brings people together,

but also that delineates these clear exclusionary lines because if you're a member of one party and not another, then you are in or you're out. And that got me thinking about, you know, what kind of fun party would you want to have? struggling, I have to say, and I did when I was, I'm struggling at the moment, but I was when we were preparing of like, what do you call the other party that's not the political party? How do you juxtapose that? Is that a fun party? Is it like, is we talking about

house parties or talking about club parties and dance parties? But of course, as you mentioned, Jeremy, these are things that are really important to us. These are like cultural experiences that we have always pushed from the beginning of the show as the importance of, you know, those experiences as sites of collective joy, but also of ways of bringing people together. and creating kind of a space that drives through and above and beyond and despite capitalism. So those are the kinds of some of the, you know, overriding reasons why interested in this kind of concept of the party. But also I think where we are in history, again, we always point back to the importance of history. And I'm sure we're going to talk about all of this. But just, you know,

in the last kind of 10 years, we've had this moment of Corbinism. We always come back to it. And then we've had a moment where we didn't really feel that terrain was very, was right for a kind of political organizing. Then comes Corbyn's party, you know, this your party, and then, you know, there's all of the stuff that's happening inside the Labour Party and the Green Party as well. So it's become interesting for us to look again about where we are at this point in the historical conjuncture and whether this is the right time to be joining a party or not joining a party. or maybe we should ignore political parties and just keep on, you know, partying in the clubs. Let's talk about all of these things. I think it'll be an interesting one for us to unpack. I agree, I agree. I think part of the spur to do at a podcast, an episode on parties is because the debate around the various things that have been going on in political parties. So yes,

the your party debates around that. The moves within the Labour Party, perhaps to get rid of Kia Starmer and these sorts of things. And Zach Palant, A left-wing leader taking over the English and Welsh Green Party. A lot of the debates around those are really quite confused, where people are using the word party, but talking about completely different things and drawing on completely different traditions of thinking about them. So it might be good to try to get a bit of that in order.

I think our plan over the next few months is actually to go through and find ways to talk about all these different instances of movement on the left or within left political parties. or formation of left political parties. And I think because it's ACFM, I think we are also going to talk about dance parties, house parties, perhaps even dinner parties, etc. And it's not just, you know,

if something shares has a shared etymology, quite often it has so overlaps in terms of like the kind of problems that might occur. Because, of course, a house party or a dance party isn't just the site of collective joy. It can also be, they can also go wrong. And they can be, you know, heavily freighted, with expectation, et cetera, and explode into unpleasant things.

You can draw your own inferences to political parties there, of course. So I think we'll get on to talk about all of that stuff and try to link the two types of debates about parties together. But before we do that, of course, we need to have our parish notices. We were alerted by a friend of the show Matthew Ingram a few weeks ago to the fact that he actually published a book just this year, 2025, called The Garden, Visionary Growers and Farmers of the Counterculture, published by Repeater Books, great British radical publishers,

and I think it was really sort of felt like a big fail amongst all concerned that we didn't know about that book when we recorded a whole two episodes about gardening and growth, because the book is absolutely, really, connecting with the theme. It's a really interesting book, and I would really recommend having a look at Matthew Ingram the Garden, visionary growers and farmers of the counterculture. And also we've been contacted by a listener

in Victoria in Canada who would like to get in touch with any other listeners for potential constant restoration activity. We're still sort of talking and provocating about possible ways of helping listeners get in touch with each other if they want to.

We might have a Discord. We might have a Facebook page. We might just have an email address. But for now, I'm just going to say, actually, if there are any, if there is anyone out in or near Victoria, Canada, he wants to be involved with that sort of thing, then please, well, you can just email jeremygilbert atlack.com and I'll deal with it. I'll put you in touch. Remember, you can, we have a monthly newsletter, I believe. Jeremy's writing something about science fiction and a particular moment in science fiction in the UK for our monthly newsletter this month. Always interesting stuff in there.

And so you can sign up to that at navara.media forward slash ACFM newsletter. And then there's our ever-expanding ACFM playlist on Spotify. It's incredibly long now. I think it's something like 230 songs on there. Yeah, we're running out of songs that we know. We don't know any songs. Jeremy, this is all not true. We have enough songs.

Please don't write it until. No, that is true. Don't write in. We don't want you to write in about the songs, but we do want you to give us a five-star review on whatever platform you listen to. You can leave a comment there, perhaps, saying, I've heard a song recently.

You should talk about this. The way you can support us financially is to support our host Navarra Media. You can do so for as little as a pound a month by going to navara.media forward slash support. We have to play, you've got a fight for your right to party by the Beastie Boys from 1986. The Beastie Boys were sort of interesting.

They started off as a sort of New York hardcore punk band called the Young Aborigines. I think in late 70s, early 80s, et cetera. And then they sort of got into hip-hop basically and rap. And they were this a white breakthrough hip-hop band, basically. And this was their breakthrough song in 1986. When you look at the lyrics, the lyrics are sort of so over the top. They seem a little bit like it's a goof or a spoof on, like this sort of like hard drinking, hard partying sort of thing.

It's got lines like, my mum threw away, my best porno mag and all that sort of stuff. It's all a bit pathetic lyrics, rather than something to be embraced, although it was embraced, but a lot of people. You know, the Beastie Boys sort of make a big turn away from that sort of image after that album, I think perhaps because they were smoking more pot than drinking.

Yeah, they do turn far away from that. is to be doing sort of Buddhist rap and stuff in the 90s. But it's a bit of a classic so we should play it. Get past clear you smoke in men he says,

No way! That hypocrite smokes two packs a day. Men living at home in such a friend. Now you're my. Where are we going to start on this voluminous talk to party. Where are we going to start on this voluminous topic? Well, I do want to bring up one thing, which is just a response to what you just said, Keir, before the parish notices,

which is just to also think about not just like, you know, you said that the discourse and the kind of the level of conversation was quite confused. like people were talking about parties, but perhaps they meant other things. And I think one of the things that we need to think about is also like the pressure that people are putting upon institutions or like also people's understanding of what an institution is and what its role is. And I think that's also a space that perhaps might be quite confused. And this is not, you know, to patronise anyone, but also because we perhaps live in an era that, again, I'm going to come back to this, is not able for all sorts of various, I think, socio-psychological and political reasons to historicise even to the last 10 years. So the reason I talk about this and I just

want to bring up this theme as we go forward and talk about this topic in general is that it's not just that there's an issue of like strategy and where the conversation lies, but also one of like affect. They're not being a conversation about why perhaps people are loading so much onto expectations, as you said, onto the party and like what people want and where people see themselves as actors and agents within this. Basically, I think there's a lot of feelings around this sort of stuff because the stakes seem to be so high because where we are as a political moment. So I'd like us to think about that as we go through the definitional stuff. And also, of course, all of this applies to the House Party, the Dance Party, as well as the political

party. Yeah, an excellent point actually, yes. The confusion reigns and we shall add to the confusion with our own confused discussion. Jeremy, do you want to start us off with a bit of etymology? OK, sure. So we got interested in this question of this word party, which really, as we've already explained, it seems to refer to a bunch of different things, which obviously have some things in common. The idea of the party, the word party referring to a sort of purposeful group, a group that has come together for some specific intention, seems to sort of develop over the six. 16th to 18th centuries, and also at the same time develops the idea of the party as a kind of side in a political conflict. And it obviously shares etymology with words like partition and apart. And you can think of it. I mean, really, it's related to the French party, meaning to

have left, to have gone away. The French is still today, you say say patis sometimes, just meaning it's off, it's started, it's gone. And so the idea of separation, a partition, but also of grouping together the things that have broken away from another thing for whatever reason or are separated from another thing is always there with this idea of party, the idea of the party. So the party is at once defined by its separation from whatever mass or collective or aggregation it's separating from, but it's also defined by kind of collectivity and some homogeneity of purpose, you know, within itself. So that terminology, which would include things like a hunting party and would include a sort of political party that sort of develops

over the 16th, 18th century. And the idea of a political party, we'll come back to this more in detail, but it's important to understand. Like, the idea of a political party is like a formal organisation that you sign up for and become a member of is a really late development. But the term party, just meaning like the sides in a political conflict, is really early. It's one of the earliest uses of it. And then the idea of a party, specifically a social, festive gathering, that really sort of develops in the 18th century. So you might have talked about a hunting party earlier than that, but at some time in the 18th century, you might start to talk about a card party, a dinner party, that sort of thing,

or just a group of people like, you know, meeting in town or in a home to have fun. And as Nardi said, we haven't been able to settle on a term for like a fun party, a leisure party. This concept always has something to do with ideas of both exclusivity and inclusivity. You can really see that. I'm seeing so much discourse like on social media around the new party, for example. And it really indicates the extreme difficulty that people have with holding the ideas of exclusivity and inclusivity together. I mean, I keep seeing people tweet things that literally seem basically say, you know, I don't want to be in a party with you, you exclusive bastards, you know.

With no sense of irony whatsoever. No, no sense of irony at all. Which is interesting, this is really interesting phenomenon in terms of people's either behavior or, you know, is this behavior or is this like characteristic of something? You know, maybe we can do like a follow-up about this because it really is a thing of our time. Yeah, exactly.

But I think it's not just about time, to be honest. Like I remember when I was a teenager, I was sort of, I was quite attracted to kind of anarchist groups because anarchist groups always going on about how sectarianism on the left was bad and then eventually I realised the trouble was the left anarchists thought of themselves as not sectarian

but they thought of absolutely everyone else as really sectarian and therefore they wouldn't work with them. So it was like it doesn't, it doesn't it's a problematic frame of reference and I don't think it's like new at all and I don't think it's specific to the left and I think it is

to some extent in here and in the whole problem of a social organisation, actually. It's inherent in the idea of a party as in something that parts from the mass, isn't it? If something is parting from the mass, then in order to do something, like it be a purposeful group, then what are the boundaries of that party? And of course, if your aim is to become a mass party, well, how do you negotiate that, you know, the people who are on the inside of that and the people that you want to get on the inside of that who might not match up to it?

That's just the big, big tension of political organization. No, no, totally. But I think what is also there, going back to the point of expectations and people loading things onto it, is whether even the idea of a mass something is actually, it has appeal to people. Because I think, because a lot of people are behaving, seem to be behaving in quite an exclusionary manner. And I think that's a defense mechanism, actually.

My, you know, if I was making a gambit about like, why, I think it's because the stakes are so high and people are so frustrated, that effectively it finds it difficult, they find it difficult to want to work with all the other people. So there's almost like a contradiction of like wanting a mass party so it's effective. And you have like critical mass, but also like not wanting to have to work with, you know, not wanting that heterogeneity of, of, of experience and, you know, thought effectively. But we'll get on to this. Maybe I'm jumping the gun. So, well, anyway, so the idea of the party as a kind of loose eye, ideological collective,

start really sort of emerges in the 18th century. And this is where you start to get this idea of partisanship that is implied here that's sort of interesting to talk about. And that is something I've been interested in and it's something I've written about

a bit in the past, like years ago, about, because I'm always interested in the question of, well, to what extent do you need a formal political party to have a sense of partisanship? You know, for me, you know, something I was writing about. It was, you know, years ago,

you know, a decade ago now, at the time of the anti-globalization, anti-capitalist movements of the early 21st century, but there was a real animus against the traditional formal parties of the left. In many cases, for quite bad reasons, it has to be said. But one of the things I was sort of interested in at the time was the question of, well, what does it mean, like for a social movement, a political movement, to have partisans, to have supporters, let's have people have like a general sense that, yeah, I'm sort of on the side of this thing.

because for me I often say the great model for a successful social movement really is women's liberation and women's liberation didn't form political parties it formed some sort of NGOs and organisations but it was mostly successful because it managed to get loads and loads of people at every level of society to think yeah I'm basically on board with this project like I sort of support it I sort of understand what it's trying to do and I've always thought to some extent that should be the aspiration for socialism. It's not just about getting people to join your organisation. It's about getting, and it's not just about getting people to turn out and vote for you

every few years. It's about this kind of intermediate space where people generally have a sense that they know what you're about and they sort of think you're all right and they sort of think they're on your side rather than your opponent's side. And I think historically, like successful movements and parties, they always have that. They always have some quite generalized sense in the society, like what it means, to be a partisan of that cause, even though that doesn't necessarily involve people in a great deal of commitment to anything other than sort of casually supporting it.

Yeah, I think that's a really good point, Jeremy, and I just wanted to point out that I think maybe one of the reasons why the women's movement was able to do that is because every man knows a woman, and women are literally like 50% of the population, whereas people who perhaps self-defined as socialists or were defined as socialist at a certain point, that those are terms which could change, whereas, you know, 50% of the population being oppressed by patriarchy is like, you know, that's everywhere, that's all the women all of the time. So, you know, it's quite a different kind of subject situation. Yeah, that's true. That's true. And it's also, I mean, it's, of course, it's also important to understand that it's not true, that the women's

movement as such, as a constituted organisation, was hated and, like, despised in the culture. The standard line from, like, most people, is, oh, I'm not a feminist, but although I believe in equality, That was the thing you would hear from people all the time for decades. And what they meant was, actually, I'm not a partisan of the women's movement, even though I sort of agree with the project of liberal feminism. But there were enough people in university departments, in NGOs, in political parties, who were self-conscious partisans of women's liberation, that it was able to achieve quite a few of its objectives.

Something I'd add to that, though, is that, like, I don't think it's just that people recognise that they were partisans. I mean, it's also, this is another sort of, another, political function that some people assigned to the party, which is, it's about political subject formation, isn't it, basically, about people changing how they think. Or, you know, they've got confused ideas about how the world works, and then there's a political articulation one way or the other. And they say, oh, yeah, actually, yeah, that makes more sense. The other confused bit I used to also hold, I'll sort of push into the background a bit. The whole point of like this

political partisanship is to change the way people think and act in the world, basically. I think that is what feminism over the long term succeeded in doing to a large degree. And you're right, Gem, at the time they were attacked and ridiculed and hated. You know, at certain times, it's gone into sort of certain forms of acceptance of certain forms of feminism.

There's a huge backlash against feminism now, of course, as well as, you know, there are political projects to roll back the gains of the 60s and 70s and 80s, etc. That's all true. That's all true. I mean, I think, I mean, it's interesting to observe. everything's worth observing. If I ask my students these days, like, are you a feminist? Like, most of them will say yes. And that wasn't true until about 10 years ago, like all through the 90s, 2000s. It wasn't true. They'd say, and I would always have this little spiel I would do

with them. So you say, you're not a feminist, but do you believe this? Do you believe this? Do you believe this? Yes, yes, yes. So I'd say, well, you are a feminist. And I thought it was like a clever trick, like to get them to admit to themselves as a feminist for years until I started thinking about it in this more historical context, that what they actually meant was they disidentified with their idea of what the women's liberation movement of the 70s had been about, and men,

even though they actually did accept all the norms of liberal feminism. But it's interesting, I think it's interesting to note now the battle for feminism to not be a dirty word, I think it has been one, and it was only one very recent. I would also say that, specifically on the 90s, in the 90s, there was the explosion of

ad culture in the UK and Ledet culture. What the 90s also had, right, was this, this flat time where people were unable to get involved in politics, right, in relation to a political party. And at the same, and at the same time, what was happening with feminism was in culture. It was like, feminism's done its bit, it's one. Now we can, we can go back to like women being naked and objectified. You know, and you had all the wonder bra ads and all of that in culture, it was very strong to be like, we've done feminism now. You kind of have an equal pay. Now go back to being, you know, objects, like I said. So, so it wouldn't have been fashionable for people to say, even if you believe that women are people, like men, if you were men that believe that or women

that believe that, it wouldn't have been fashionable in the late 90s to say you're a feminist. Well, I'd elaborate on that even further, actually, thinking to these conversations I had with students, actually, a lot of the time, when I got them to interrogate it a bit more, actually, what they meant was something quite thoughtful and quite serious. And what they meant was, where they weren't active in a movement and they didn't even feel like there was a movement to be active in, a sort of women's movement. And it wasn't even the idea that it would be bad

if there was such a thing, it's just that there really wasn't one. The sense that even if you had like nominally, notionally kind of radical ideas, there wasn't really much to do with them if you didn't want to join the SWP, that was a really important part of the culture, which has left a really lasting legacy.

We should definitely play, get the party started, a song by Pink from her second album, Misunderstood. It came out in 2001, originally written for Madonna, but rejected by her team. And I love this song. It's got great energy and it's got the fantastic lyric, of course, for those party people of I'm coming up, so you better get this party started. Once I'm coming off so you better get this party started Once we get into the 19th century and the idea of the party's waiting for me to arrive Sending out the message to all of my friends

We'll be looking flashy in my Mercedes-Benz Once we get into the 19th century And the idea of the party is this increasingly, the political party, is this increasingly formalised kind of membership organisation that will, for example, contest elections and even maybe plan revolutions. It really develops out of the French revolution and it develops over the whole course of the 20th century

to the point where by the early 20th century you have the idea of the party as an organisation led and staff by professional politicians and that's really developed. And it's developed across all parts of the political spectrum, You know, from the fascist parties to the conservative parties. In Britain, the sort of dominant party before World War I is actually the Liberal Party. And then the Social Democratic parties and Labour parties are also in some ways, in some places at a real peak just before World War I, you know, famously the German Social Democratic Party is the largest mass socialist party in the world that has this whole, it's this whole social world of like gyms and pubs and cafes.

and theatres. Also out of that involves the specifically kind of Leninist idea of a particular sort of revolutionary party, or that itself has a history going back to sort of theories of radical organisation coming out of the French Revolution. I've got a question just for this kind of era, because what I'm trying to do is to think, well, when we're talking about what, you know, how the term party was used and what was happening with the formation of political parties around the 18th, 90th, 19th century specifically, I'm also trying to think, well, what was happening on the party scene, i.e. non-the political party scene. And that drove me to thinking, as you were speaking, Jeremy, about the Paris commune, of which I forgot quite a bit. I know that

was slightly earlier. What was happening politically in terms of political parties and the way that the concept of a party was used around the Paris commune. Do we know of the top of our heads? With the Paris commune itself, I think that like the sort of Marxist view on it is that basically what you saw was the emergence of an active working class as a sort of like working class character in the commune, but they didn't have an organised party and that's part of the analysis of why it got defeated in the end, basically, is it went to democratise loads of stuff,

but didn't have that sort of decisiveness it needed in what was quickly a war sort of situation, basically. Yeah, and within the sort of international radical socialist movement at that moment, there wasn't really agreement over whether the political party was even a desirable form because the anarchists, the Buccunianites, were very strong at that time, even including in France. They thought the party as such was a bad kind of organisation

because it would necessarily lead to the creation of a professional bureaucracy. Which in my head, I'm also building links between this and the movements of the squares, right, in the early 2010s. And I'm thinking to myself, that's an interesting parallel to think about what the movements thought, whether their energy should go into a party or not. And I would say, you know, tentatively, because obviously we don't have enough historical space

between that moment and this one, but I would say that by not having a party, one of the downsides of that or not being organized at that level is that you just, there's other people are going to fill the vacuum. And I don't know if that's what happened with a Paris commune, but that's definitely what happened in Egypt, for example, in other countries. It's what always happened.

The anarchist proposition that you can do without party has been tested again and again, And it's, you know, as I always like to say, the Jewelry of History is in on that one. Like, it's not, it doesn't, but it's not to say you might need other kinds of organisation. I think that's something we're going to come to on the show. Because I also think, I mean, the default need-a response to the failures of non-party types of organisation, going back like more than 100 years is for people to say, oh, it turns out you do need a party. So what we must need is a highly centralised vanguard party.

like Lenin says, and that's the only kind of party. And I'm like, and my position, the thing I'm always interested in exploring is, well, you know, there's a set of political functions that need to be carried out, and some of them probably only can be carried out by a thing you would call a party, and some of them might need to be carried out by other types of organisation. I mean, I agree with all that, but like with the Paris commune, it wasn't quite the same as like the Arab Spring where it wasn't that somebody else emerged to give the political articulation to the commune.

They basically took over the city. they took over Paris and, like, you know, formed an incredibly democratic system of government to run it. The problem was they got surrounded by, you know, by Prussians and, in fact, defeated militarily. And they had a really good go at it. And then something like 40,000 people get slaughtered because they want to wipe out those political subjects who have been formed. But, like, when it forms quite a big part of how Lenin starts to think about the political party. partly that thing of like it needed to cohere into something which could be decisive in a sort of military sense but it's also his analysis was you know that paris couldn't survive about the countryside they were cut off from the

countryside and so what the lesson of that is that you know the proletariat the working class needs the peasants of course that is the hammer and sickle like which is the symbol of communism to that point you know that you need those two forces probably not particularly relevant in the UK now but like it just forms an incredibly big part of the formation of a Leninist political imaginary. Also, can I just say they had hot air balloons. I just have to say that. I don't know if they had canteens, but they had hot air balloons. And to have a hot air balloon, like, flying into the commune is just like fucking amazing.

If they had that and canteens, like, take me there. Put me on the barricades. I mean, I'll say, I think there were, actually, there were, like, distinct groupings within the commune, weren't there. I think there were people who identified themselves directly with the Jacobins of the late 18th century. And then there were the people really allied Marx, the socialist, internationalists, and the Blancists. And the Blancists were the people, the followers of Louis Blonky, really had a sort of conception of politics and party organisation that ended up being quite influential on Lenin in some ways. Yeah, sort of like almost like a secret organisation of. of insurrectionists.

Yeah, exactly. Yeah, maybe they're the ancestors of Lenny, maybe they're just the ancestors of the Invisible Committee, I don't know. Yeah, yeah. But like the other thing we could, I don't know if we meant to talk about the commune, but the everything it presents is this,

is one of these other binaries with the party, which is, you know, the event or even the crowd, because Jody Jean has that book, the crowd and the party, doesn't see. And so because, you know, nobody planned the past commune, it was something that emerged, one of these events, It's these things that happen, and it basically took on a form that nobody predicted at all.

You know, it's beyond what was expected and had a massive influence of Marx, you know, all of a sudden he was like, Christ, I need to learn from history. Do you know what I mean? And we can think about that as, you know, the big wave of protests and revolutions in 2011, etc. You know, that's the crowd in action, et cetera. And then it's like, well, how do you institutionalize those gains? How do you institutionalize the new common sense that's produced by something like the political commune not even a new common sense, but like the new possibilities that emerge at that point,

that's one of the dynamics at these people to think about what a political party could be. But that is very, very different from, you know, from the sort of like mass parliamentary parties that are also developing a little bit later in this time, you know, the Labour parties starts to form in 1902 around that sort of era. And, you know, one of the things that that drives the Labour Party, It's like it's not an event, but like, you know, it is this wave of unionism, new unionism in the 18... 1890, mainly. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, in 1889 onwards, in which like, you know, a huge wave of people who were not unionized, suddenly become unionized as sort of like semi-skilled workers, and which just presents this huge political constituency, basically, who need representation. Do you know what I mean?

That's the other way in which it can move. really big recomposition of how people live and work, which then produces political effects. So there's like two different forms of quite different parties related to two different extra parliamentary events, I suppose you put it that way. I mean, that's all quite right, but I would also say that that idea of the mass party is not confined to the left as you go into the 20th century, that it becomes the dominant model of political organisation, even on the right. so in Britain for example

the real golden age of the mass membership party is the 50s and both the Labour and the Tory party have like literally millions of members I mean how you count members of those parties is quite complicated in both cases because you don't there isn't really a sort of individual membership system there are local there are like 650 local parties by constituency

I haven't got digital direct debits yet no and those are federated but The normal estimate of the number of members of local conservative associations is that it was huge. It was like, I think it was like one and a half million or something like this. It's huge. And like part of what pulls that together is like a huge network of conservative clubs, you know, drinking clubs. On the left there are working men's clubs and they're even liberal clubs, etc. You know, this sort of the embedding of these big electoral parties in, you know, everyday life at some degree.

And this is a really, really important point, which almost is the thing, I think, that draws kind of the fun party or whatever I want to call it and the political party. And, you know, arguments that I've been having with people recently about, you know, what brought 100,000 people to the, you know, the right wing march in London, which is that usually the thing that makes people join things is not some kind of well-thought-out, fact-based analysis on the part of individuals. It's because they went to an event by somebody they know or somebody they know has done a thing and they became convinced by a proxy and by relationships. And if you're drinking in clubs or you're hanging out with other people who, you know, are members of the Conservative Party, you're probably going to join, especially if it gives you some kind of social setting in which to act your daily life. Like that is one of the main reasons why people act.

And I think it's really important to understand that how this, parties perpetuate themselves as in political parties from both ends of the polls. And so one end of the poll is the obvious sense, which is the leadership of the party, right? Or even if you want to talk about like the PLP or whatever, parliamentary Labour Party and what their ends or what they're trying to achieve. And on the other hand, it's not just you've got the membership apparatus. You've got the people going about their everyday lives who want to self-actualise or want to feel like they're agents or to do something or to fit in, and they are joining as members on that level, on that level of identification. And it's really important to understand those two polls to get to the point

of understanding how you get, like, the, how membership is constituted and, like, at which level there is agency and action. Yes, that's all completely right. I think, I think that is really interesting to think about what the kind of contemporary relevance of this might be. Because indeed, it's certainly true. I mean, the word. men's clubs were really central to the social lives of working class people, especially men, and they had all kinds of attractions like entertainment and social gathering, but also very importantly, subsidised beer. And in the 50s, the conservative clubs really became, I mean, the Conservative Party is a mass institution in the 50s is really an extraordinary phenomenon.

I mean, the conservative party in the 50s, it doesn't last that long really, but for a while, it becomes more or less just coterminist with the whole idea of the middle class in Britain and like the number of people who would go you would go to Conservative Club dances if you were a young middle class person I was just going to ask this question about whether they were this is

literally just thinking this I was going to ask who was running the dance halls were obviously where most young people met after the war was at a social dance whether you know and these dance halls which are still some of them survive unfortunately a lot of them have been demolished

these amazing halls that can still be, you know, some of them be rented. No, it was a real, it was a cliche for like Tory MPs of the sort of 60s, 70s generation to say that, well, they only became Tories because the, the Conservative Club had prettier girls at the dances because they were posh. There we go. Yeah, you know what I mean? This is interesting, this stuff. Yeah, that's the post-war consensus for you.

So, yeah, it's really, it was really significant, you know, it's a cliche, political, history that from the 80s onwards really you see this real decline of the whole idea of the mass party. And for me, I always think the easiest way to explain this and to understand it is that really the mass party is a phenomenon of Fordism, like so many other features of mass culture. Now, people are living in this culture where the way they work in these big factories, the way they socialise, like a big local football matches, in cinemas, in local pubs, is about large numbers of people, they're drawn together by some degree of homogeneity, like congregating in large numbers. And in that kind of a society, in that kind of a culture, and in a culture where

people's material culture, the culture being produced by consumer capitalism, tends to be characterized by quite a high level of homogeneity, you know, there aren't that many different kinds of clothes you can choose in the shops. Under those circumstances, the idea of the mass party becomes very easy for one, a very easy one for people. to identify with or invest in emotionally. And I think that's really significant because I would say certainly in Britain, like our entire democratic system, it was basically set up then. And it really hasn't been significantly reformed since. And it hasn't, we haven't been through any significant period of reform to adapt to the fact that we're no longer in a Fordist society. And that's why,

you know, it didn't really work during the post-fortist period. The post-fortist period saw mass politics decline and be replaced by the sort of situation where people engage in the rituals of mass politics, but actually politics is done by this professional elite who are just going to do some flavor of neoliberalism, no matter what people vote for. And then in the era of sort of platform capitalism, we're just seeing the whole thing totally collapse. And the cliche in the 80s and 90s was that, well, mass parties were on the way out, mass society was on the way out. Everything had to be more nuanced and specialised now, et cetera. I would say something maybe we'll come back to in a bit, but I think one of the features of what people like me call

platform capitalism, the kind of form of capitalism we've been in for the past 15 years now, maybe, is that because of the capacity, and indeed the necessity for massive online platforms to aggregate millions of people in particular ways, in a way we've seen a sort of return to mass politics. But we've seen a return to mass politics under conditions whereby nobody really knows how it works in this weird digital world and the institutions we've inherited are institutions we've inherited from a period of mass politics that was nearly 100 years ago now that just can't really function under these circumstances. I mean, that sort of brings us up to where we are now in terms of the history of the mass party, that we've had this kind of extraordinary phenomenon

of, well, we had the extraordinary phenomenon of the Labour Party under Jeremy Corbyn. been becoming exactly the kind of thing that political scientist had said was never going to happen again, like a properly mass member political party, like with loads of volunteers and people knocking on doors. I mean, that was a thing that loads of people confidently stated was never going to happen again in the 90s, for example. And you also, you had the phenomenon of this sort of this post-forwardist, like, technocratic neoliberal elite, absolutely hating that mass party and wanting to stop being a mass party as soon as possible. And a lot of what they've done over the past five to six years has to be seen in that light.

And now we've just seen, again, this remarkable phenomenon of like something up to something like 800,000 people signing up online to say they want to, they might be at least interested in joining a new mass left party to be led by Corbyn. And it's an extraordinarily live history at this moment as we're speaking, I think. I do agree of all of that, but let me just give a different sort of version of that story, which I think might hold up, which is the history of the growth of the mass parties. We could say that it starts with the left, really, because you don't get mass parties unless you have mass suffrage. You have universal suffrage, or perhaps universal male suffrage and then universal suffrage. And so, like, you can see one of the routes for the mass party being in movement, such as the Chartists in the 19th century in which you have, like,

you know, real mass movements of a modern form emerge, basically. But at the same time you see unions emerge and sort of workplace organising, but charitism is this, you know, this huge mass movement which wants to form, it forms many of the aspects of a political party. Of course, you can't have access to the state because you don't have mass, you don't have mass suffrage, etc. And so basically, you know, the whole of the 20th century, you can sort of see as the attempts to avoid the possibilities of,

universal suffrage, basically, the possibility that basically people will vote in their interests and get rid of capitalism. And so, like, one of the things that hangs over that as well, which hangs over Western democracies, is like the example of the Soviet Union and then China, etc., etc. In the UK, it's not so clear, but in a country such as Italy, for instance, it's just clear that the whole mass party system is set up to prevent the Communist Party from winning elections. The sort of non-mass party system, the anti-mass party political system, yeah, the anti-mass party system, yeah. But all of the political parties are set up, funded by the CIA, backed by the Vatican, etc, etc., to prevent the fact that this. Because the Italian Communist Party is just huge, basically, and it has incredible validity in the post-World War to era, because of the leading role they're taking in the partisans, etc., the defeat of fascism and this sort of stuff.

And as soon as the Soviet Union fall collapses and the communist Italian Communist party sort of collapses, the whole political system collapses in the sort of the clean hand scandal, all of the scandals about corruption, etc, which everybody knew about all along, of course. All of those sort of bring down every single party. And what do you get in the placement of that? You get Berlusconi's party, which is one of the first instances of, you know, Berlusconi is they. is this media magnet who owns like newspapers and television stations, etc. So slightly pre-social media, but like he's showing the way, basically, he's the pre-Trump Trump. He's showing the way of this sort of like hyper-leader mobilizing a disaggregated mass through control over media platforms. Of course, I think that's sort of like the leading, that leads into like what the, what the mass party, the platform parties look like now and why they're the, the right.

right is leading because basically the far right has bought all of the social media media platform. But I think you can sort of see that in a way. It's like, you know, basically it was, in many ways it was like the threat of communism that added weight to the compromise that capital was prepared to make around social democracy in the post-war years, you know, and like that project falling apart is the thing that like really, you know, collapses the project of mass parties, which does fit in with like, you know, perhaps you see this, the re-emergence of mass parties around, you know, the re-emergence of a left possibility. Yeah, I completely agree. I mean, one of the most interesting questions

into the left historiography is the question of what actually drives to shift from Fordism to post-Fordism. And there's a sort of technological determinist version of it. And there's the sort of Robert Bremener version of it, which said the American economic historian that says, well, what really drives it is like competition between German and Japanese car manufacturers and British and French and American ones. And then there's the version of it, which I would say is endorse both by people like Tony Negri and actually people like St. York Hall, really, which is that, well, one of the major drivers is the fact that most of the ruling class, the capitalist class in the 70s,

come to the conclusion that they can no longer afford to allow mass democracy to function because too many people are going to vote for socialism if they do. and so they proceed quite openly to start dismantling mass democracy and replacing it with something else. And that's part of the process of shifting the regime of accumulation from forwarders into post-forwarding is you can't really distinguish it from the process of politically shifting to a situation in which mass democracy might exist in a sort of formal sense but it has no real efficacy.

And indeed, that's exactly right. It's because the fear, I mean, the fear of social elites, literally since the days of Plato and Socrates, is if you let mass democracy go unchecked, it's going to lead to communism. And basically what happens in the 70s is it looks like that's, they were right. It looks like that's probably right. So they start dismantling it. Parties are not always enjoyable, you know. So we should play, it's my party and I'll cry if I want to, which was originally a hit. for Leslie Gore in 1963. It was recorded several times, so I know it from a version from

1981 by Dave Stewart and Barbara Gaskin. And it's a song of a young girl who's crying at her own party because Johnny's gone off with Judy, basically. Why was he holding her hand? He was supposed to be holding mine. The lyrics were written by Seymour Gottlieb. She was like a freelance songwriter in the 1960s, and it's based on his daughter's 16th birthday party. where a similar thing happened. Her name was Judy, so he might have changed the order of the things around. But it's just a great song that speaks to like that highly charged emotion that goes with parties, particularly parties such as a 16th birthday party where you're,

there's huge expectation you should be having a good time, basically. And when that doesn't happen, of course, all sorts of emotions can explode out. We'll leave listeners to make their own links to recent events and political parties if you want to make that analogy. I was going to say, think about the lyrics of that song if you're thinking about yourself as a member of the Labour Party. It might not be too far away from the truth. I think so, yeah.

Nobody knows where my Johnny has gone, but Judy left the same time. Why was he holding her hand when he's supposed to be mine? It's my part. so I'd cry if I want to cry if I want to cry if I want to how they, for lack of a better, or perhaps this is the word, for lack of a better, or perhaps this is the word how people party is linked to how they, how they relate to, to a party, a political party. This is where we're getting, I think this is where we're getting to, and we'll test this,

and we might come to the end of this show and decide that maybe it's more complex than that, I'm sure it is, right? But this idea that if we get to the point where people start to identify and socialize with themselves within, you know, the family and very small groups and no longer in this kind of mass way, then does that mean that people are actually able to trust a mass organization because they have no experience of doing things in or identifying. And this also links to it. It's not just about the doing. It's about how people see themselves in relation to other big groups of people, which is why I think Corbinism was really interesting, because it was

like this kind of like, here comes everybody, you know, sensation that people had. And I think the question around platform capitalism that we need to think about around, you know, these questions that we're trying to unpick is that does this? the online, does the mass online facilitate people's ability to see themselves as memberships of something bigger? Or actually is this kind of like a false mode of being in communication? I mean, I don't actually know what the answer is. I would think that if people are unable to socialize in big groups, in IRL, in real life, then, you know, but that's maybe because I'm coming from a 20th century perspective on some of these things.

I mean, my experience of my students, you know, the bar, the student bar is completely empty. People go home and sit on their phones and play games with other people. That's what they do. That's my understanding of, you know, how the student bodies are functioning at the moment. Maybe I'm completely wrong. And maybe, for example, the Palestine demonstrations in some cities, although I wouldn't say this is, you know, white all over the country, meant that there have been sites for people to come together. But I think these are important questions in terms of how they interface with whether a mass,

political party is actually possible, regardless of whether, you know, 800 people sign to something, sign up to something online, where the stakes are very low to be able to sign up to that. But what happens when you actually try to activate those people, if those people are not used to seeing themselves in big groups? And maybe, you know, maybe the event of the festival or, you know, a big part, you know, a big one-off event in the summer, it enables people to have that experience in their, you know, in their bones of doing things with other big groups of people. But I do think these things have an impact on each other. You know, I think maybe if the free party scene was around at the moment and people were driving, obviously, there's a London

centric comment around the M25 to meet with other random people and take mushrooms in a field or whatever, MDMA, maybe, you know, maybe this would have an impact on like the mass party. I don't know, but I think it's interesting to think about the two forms of party together in this way that is the function of the tommy robinson a demonstration or riot though the one i i was going into london that that morning basically people going on that protest i was getting a train down from leeds these were also playing fulham so there were some lots of just lees fans who were just going to the match etc not going to the protest but like basically they were all just getting pissed at like 10 o'clock in the morning and you'd go past the pubs it'd all be in the pubs

basically and then you'd go and have like a crowd situation basically where they'd be a bit of pushing our barge, you'd feel your power as the crowd, basically, is what the Tommy Robinson protests do. You know, you basically go somewhere, people look the same as you, that, you know, that you immediately think they think the same as you, and that is articulated by, you know, people on stage, including the richest person in the world, Elon Musk, etc. You know, that is what, that's what crowds can do, basically. They form that bit. It's the joy of fascism.

Yeah, the joy of fascism. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, totally. you know I mean if we go back to all our theory about crowds when we did it we did an episode on crowds didn't me and all of that sort of stuff and like Kenetti says the feeling you want in that crowd the feeling that people get addicted to is the feeling of equality that we're all the same we all of the same purpose of course that can be that can be a fascist equality I we're seeing the crowd are equal and we're better than other people and people look down and us etc resentment and all that sort of stuff that sort of crowd feeling and then the other part is reform a political party? It's a private company owned by Farage. And it's like, so one of the, we should define a little bit

about what we mean by these platform parties or sometimes people call them movement parties or network parties is that you have like, Paolo Gabado writes really well on this. And he sort of says, like you have a hyper leader basically who is the point of identification.

So we have all of that bit that we've talked about before in terms of crowds. And, you know, the crowd identifies with a leader. That also produces a sense of equality. We, you know, we've got the same sort of sense of identification.

And because of like social media and the internet, etc., that can allow huge amounts of mobilising large amounts of people, et cetera. But what Gabaldos says is like what it doesn't, what it removes is like the key layer of what we'd call cadre, basically, really committed activists who were the key to the 20th century form of mass party. Basically, what you have is like you have very undemocratic. forms of party in the movement party because you have this mobilised mass who may have may be able to

participate in one member one vote will be able to like vote for the policies of a party perhaps or you know direction of a party that's not true in terms of reform but like because they because their form of identification is with the hyper leader that means that they're they will basically be led by what the hyper leader wants basically and so it's and there's no there's no layer of of like cardre or like, you know, branch organization in order to exercise democracy in that sort of way. We're going to do a microdose on your party. But that's one of my fears about your parties is that. And in fact, like what Corbinism and momentum and all that sort of stuff was doing was it was a hyper-leader type situation. It was a network movement party type situation.

And people were trying to backfill, or at least some people were trying to backfill the other aspects of a political party that they wanted, the aspects of a mass democratic political party, basically, to try to build up that cadre, do all the other functions, political education, etc. We'll come to your party, but I think there's a similar dynamic, basically, in that. I think that sort of helps us to explain the situation of what mass parties look like now, basically. They don't look like the 20th century party. It looks slightly different. And it's still not clear whether you can actually build a properly democratic mass party out of a movement. Party. Yeah. And I think going back just very briefly to the, you know, to the whatever,

the right-wing demo where I don't even know what to call it, right? And I think that's interesting, like the 100,000 people who came down to London. Like, that's a lot of people. And that wasn't mobilized by one political party necessarily, right? And that's quite similar, I suppose, in that way to like Palestine demonstrations, obviously very different in terms of like the issue, but, you know, you've got a lot of people there. And I don't think it was just people that were, I was also going in and out of London on that day, and it wasn't just, you know, loads of piss heads. Of course, there were loads of people who, you know, were taking that as their day out, but there were women and children, you know, with draped in England flags in a way that I've never

ever seen before. I mean, maybe I've not had the chance to see, but I've never seen before in London as if it was a day out, as if it was last day of the proms, or as if it was trooping the colour or something. That's kind of what it looked like. It was like a day out for a lot of people. And if we think back to the platform capitalism model, it's like, well, would that mobilization have happened in that way if those people had all been a member of a particular political party? But also, I think for some people, that demonstration functioned as a party. It was a day out with people, like, you know, you guys have said where you feel some kind of identification. I'm not sure we even need to go to the level of thinking like, oh, those people

all think like me. And I'm not sure that I would agree with the theory that, what people are looking for in the crowd is equality. I think what the affect that comes into a crowd, I would say, I would argue, is more of one that this is greater than the sum of its parts. You get that euphoria of the fact that the crowd functions as a body, rather than explicitly, cerebrally thinking about it as equality. And that will work on the right and on the left and at, you know, like a massive gig or concert as well, where like everyone's a fan of this band

or everyone knows the words to this song. You know, I wasn't at the 100,000, you know, right-wing demo, and I'm sure there was all sorts of different kinds of people who were there, who were there for there, who felt strongly enough that they wanted to go down there for whatever reason. But how that interfaces with right-wing movements and parties is not something that I think that we've invested enough time trying to, like trying to understand.

I think I say we in general. It's an area where I'm definitely very interested. I mean, that fascist demo in London, I mean, it had this celebratory quality, partly because, you know, there are a bunch of delusional dickheads who think they're far closer to winning something they want than they are, basically.

You know, but it has this sort of celebratory quality that a sort of left-wing demo isn't usually going to have because when we do a demo is because we're really angry about something. We're angry and we're upset. Like in the case of Gaza, Like we're really kind of really, really distressed. But it does, but there is something worth thinking through about that. I don't know if we can think through it today.

I don't know. I've been playing sambon demonstrations for 18 years. That's true. Pretty celebratory in part. I would agree with, I would agree with Gaza where we are now. But I'd say a lot of, you know, a lot of reclaim the street stuff and the stuff that we've been on has had a very celebratory quality to it. But, you know, to that point, it's really. worth understanding

what's the experience that people have of these spaces? Because that fulfills a certain function and it says something about whether people are going to come again. I mean, I think around this celebratory thing on the right, well, if people are pretty convinced that Farage is going to be the next prime minister, I mean, I was convinced of that

the week after Labor got in power. So I'd put money on it. I'd be very surprised if you won't be. So I would understand why there would be a celebratory power even though, you know, a lot of those guys on the stage were saying psychopathic, like, dickhead shit. Like, it was mad. Like, some of the speeches were mad, you know. I think Farage will probably be Prime Minister, but I think you'll probably only be Prime Minister for a couple of years. And I think it will not have any of the outcomes that they want.

We should do it, ACFM sweepstake. I don't think it'll be that long. But, yeah, no, yeah. A song I think we should play, this is from 1978. This is a song by the Canadian Cultural Workers Committee And it is called The Party is the Most Precious Thing Plant the party seeds in every factory Bolshevizer ranks relentlessly stand firm in her defence against the enemy

For the party is the most precious thing The party is the most precious thing Our party smashes every bar to progress in her way voicing the aspirations of the proletariat today Her bold leadership gives us the strength To smash the chains that bind our hands And build our Canada As a strong free socialist land

I talked about the importance of like the Conservative Party dances For example And we talked about this important the importance of the party as providing sort of social clubs, really, which is really important. And it's an idea that was mooted around the, the World Transform Network a few years ago, that what should be set up was a network of socialist clubs, which I still think, like, something like that is a good idea. But it was also a really important element of the, the gendered history and identity of those parties.

Like, it was something that political scientists were really interested in, that up until the early 90s, It was the Tory party, which was completely dominant among women voters in Britain. And it was mainly to do with different experiences of work and home. It was mainly to do with the Labour Party being so associated with trade unionism and the experience of work. And women not going out to work so much. But also, one of the factors was the fact that basically what it meant to participate in the life of the Labour Party was you had to go to working with men's clubs, which were really smoky and really noisy and really boozy. And there was a lot of kind of vulgar language.

I mean, my mum, you know, my mum, who, like, came out of, like, the American New Left and, like, is politically really radical. I remember, you know, she just, she couldn't hack it. She couldn't have a Labour Party meetings in Skem and Skelmersdale, like, in the early 80s for that reason. And that's something that gets reported by accounts of sort of women trying to participate in Labour movement politics, going back really like 100 years. Some of them are still like that. Some of them are still like that, which is telling. Whereas, you know, the Tory part. The conservative associations would be more likely to have, like tea dances, like tea parties, like things that seemed less alienating to a lot of women, even relatively poor women.

And that was significant. So I think the question of what kind of parties you have in the sort of social, in the leisure sense, the sense of fun parties, it does end up having an implications for, you know, what kind of a political party you have and what kind of political support you have. So therefore we should talk about all those other kinds of party now. Like one way would be to go through different forms of party, such as like dinner parties, etc. Because a dinner party always seems to me quite a middle class affair. You have someone around and cook them a meal and then, you know, have polite conversation. Do we do dinner parties?

That's an interesting question. I'll be honest, the only people I have done anything resembling a dinner party with in the past like five years is you two. I was going to say that's the only, like I don't mind it when it's us. That's the closest thing. I always sort of think about dinner parties as something which, sort of like 1980s thing. You know, we used to have more dinner parties.

People around for dinner anyway, basically. I don't know if they count as dinner parties. But like it always makes me think of Abigail's party, which is this Mike Lee film. I don't have you ever seen that. Mike Lee, he's got this thing where he basically has this sort of methodology where they gets actors together and they sort of improvise a lot of the lines and sort of. But Abigail's party is this like incredible, cringe-inducing, awkward dinner party, basically,

between people who don't really know each other very well, etc. And who are trying to sort of one-up the other person to some degree, something like that. Because I associate it with the 80s, you can sort of think about the rise of the dinner party is linked to that to, you know, the expansion of homeownership through the 80s and into the 90s, etc., which was a project of political subject formation. You can put it that way, basically, expansion of home ownership. And of course, like, the idea of a homeowning democracy, that arises in the 1920s, basically, amongst conservative writers, specifically because what do we do about the dangers

of mass suffrage? How do we deal with universal suffrage, basically? you know we need to do we need to change the way people see the world we need to change their political subjectivities from workers to asset owners and i think that has been one of the key forms in which basically people have been politically demobilized right from the 1980s but particularly now basically if you just think about you know we talk about post-forwardism etc and that but that focuses still focuses on production and we've moved past that you know It's much more, you know, economies such as the UK,

much more dependent on rising asset prices than they are, then they are something like rising productivity, etc., because basically we haven't had any of the latter, and we've had plenty of the former. That's what I want to say about dinner parties. Yeah, I mean, I think it's very difficult to talk about dinner parties specifically in the UK, especially, you know, with a film or a kind of play like Abigail's party, which is 1977, by the way, so like slightly,

slightly earlier. Oh, wow. In that case, my whole point is done. No, I think it still stands because also talking about the creation of like the suburbs and like the suburban like subject, which is really interesting one in terms of like UK social history,

right, and how people behave. That epitomises basically what's going to be my point about dinner parties, which is that it's, it's this, that even just talking about a dinner party is like laden with so much like cultural weight in the UK. So I think, it's interesting to think about are these sites where people come together and kind of what is

performed, right? And in the case of Abigail's party and talking about like dinner parties as a phenomenon in the UK, like it's very fraught with all sorts of different class expectations and changes in class composition, which is why it's, I guess, interesting. I don't know about enough about the history of how people socialised and the relationship between that socialisation and food and kind of cultural and social and even political decision making around, you know, the home as that being a space. I'd imagine, like, historically in the UK, that was not the site where people were perhaps making decisions as much as they were outside in other clubs and pubs, you know, and as we're talking about working men's clubs and then the gentlemen's clubs in terms of, you know, middle and upper classes. But of course, going back to Jeremy's point about whether we like dinner parties or not, I mean, the number one reason that will make me leave the UK if I leave the UK is the lack of my ability to actualise like people breaking bread together around the dinner table. So if you remove this from a kind of Anglo-American perspective, I think people sitting around a table and spending a long time eating together is something that's very important to me, which is why I'm so big on like canteens.

and I understand like why supper clubs and all of these things have come out. I think these are important sites for socialisation and ones that I think, you know, Anglo-American, perhaps Nordic countries more, have less of as a cultural thing. But, you know, for myself as a Mediterranean, that is something definitely that I miss, which is, you know, the weekly ability to sit around the table with people, share a meal and just like talk and chat about shit and politics for hours. But I think you have to be careful of not taking. for granted the idea that

what goes on in the sphere of cultural representation necessarily correlates with lived reality because partly what we're talking about, if we're talking about dinner parties as an 80s phenomenon or we're talking about Abigail's party and this sort of thing, or we're talking about them as being sort of fraught, we're talking about really the fact

that it becomes a cliché of cinematic and television representations of domestic life from the 50s onwards that the dinner, in both in Britain, and the States, that the dinner party is seen as a sort of aspirational phenomenon. There's something which is engaged in by people who've got the material resources to do it for the first time, because they've got a big enough house to have a, to fit a dining room table in it, basically. And the performance of their new prosperous middle-class status causes

anxiety. That's a comedic trope from the 50s onwards, and it's a response to the emergence of this kind of new consumer society and a degree of social mobility. Like to what extent that ever really correlate to how people really live? I don't really know because I don't think it's like a new phenomenon that people like go around each other's houses for tea or whatever. So, and I don't

know how many people ever really were that experienced it is like really stressful or something. I don't know. I mean maybe they did. Maybe it does correlate to a real lived reality. Maybe it doesn't. I'd really love to see an ethnographic study of social eating in people's homes.

Yeah, but social eating in people's homes isn't the same as a dinner party. Dinner party is something a little bit more formal. Well, notionally, yeah, but whether people really experience it that way or whether it's just a sitcom trope that they do. I don't know. I don't know. Well, sitcoms are the only evidence we have, so we have to go on with them. Yeah, sometimes I like sitting around eating with friends. Sometimes I like it.

It's not something I kind of bother to make happen that often. I do sort of like it, actually. But also an interesting phenomenon to think about in relation to that is obviously the idea of the House Party. I mean, that has its own really interesting history. The idea of the House Party is obviously something I'm really invested in. Like, as I mentioned at the top of the show,

I've been helping run and DJ at a club night. Although we don't really call it a club night, we call it a dance party for decades now. And our website is, www.houseparty.org.com. And the reason it has that phrase house party, even though it doesn't really resemble a house party at all these days, is because when we started doing it,

the idea was that it would sort of feel like going to a good house party. And that's an idea which is really important within the sort of specific microculture we belong to because we sort of trace our genealogy back to the loft in New York, which was this very famous iconic dance party. I mean, arguably the first sort of modern dance party, which even some more famous commercial discos like Studio 54 borrowed a lot of its, their techniques from. And I mean, the loft still exist in New York. I mean, the party happens about three times a year.

It's no longer held in a loft apartment as the first one was back in 1970. So the idea of like the house party really meaning like a dance party mainly, but also where people might come and eat. and socialise, as distinct from like a commercial club, but also as distinct from, like, a dinner party where everybody's going to sit around and talk, and as a very specific type of formation, a very specific type of practice. I mean, it is something that's really important within that tradition. And it was something that became, you know, it had become really important to me and my closest friends, by the end of the 90s, actually.

We sort of became, you know, sort of famous or notorious within our social networks, for throwing these big house parties, these big shared houses we would live in in Leighton and Leighton Stone. And that was, for really complicated reasons, that speak to some of the things we talked about at the top of the show, that on the one hand, we were all sort of coming at a rave culture. And we sort of identified with rave culture as like the thing that we, you know, the thing that sort of marked the cultural specificity of our historical moment and our generational experience. But we also thought that basically rave culture was shit, you know, that it was the actual quality of the actual parties that took place. Whether you're

talking about free parties, or whether you're talking about commercial clubs, were all just very poor. Like the music was usually unimaginative, and you'd just hear one kind of music for hours at a time in a really sort of monotonous way, and very often, like, the scenes were quite

sort of exclusive, you know, you, again, you know, you can sort of idealise the free parties, but I sort of hated the free party scene because it was very cliquy. It was like, people were really, really pleased with themselves for having the, you know, being in the know, and having like the spiral tried phone number and knowing where the secret rave was. And I was always like, well, you know, you've got all this ideology about being utopian and changing the world, but you're not willing to kind of advertise it.

So if people don't happen to know the right people, they can't go. But on the other hand, of course, the whole point of having a house party rather than going out to a club or putting on a club night was so that you could completely control the composition of the crowd and the music and people couldn't just wander being off the streets. So this sort of dynamic of exclusion

and inclusion and you know, it really gets kind of exemplified there in a really interesting way. And, you know, I remember in the early days, I mean, our night beauty and the beat, it started off as a group of people who've met each other,

putting on dance parties that were being DJed by, David Mancuso from New York who started the loft in the early 70s. It's kind of iconic figure of dance culture and the kind of group, the collective that grew up around the organisation and hosting of those parties with David in London and like the early 2000s. We had a lot of internal disagreements, for example, about how public we should be and how secretive we should be. Because the loft in New York to this day, doesn't advertise publicly. It basically has this word of mouth model, you've at least got to know who to ask, like to get invited

or to get on the email list. I mean, they won't turn people away. If somebody emails them and says, can I come, they'll let them come, but you've at least got to know that it exists for that to happen. And historically, you had to sort of know someone, really, or you had to even be recommended by someone in a network. And that's how we started off doing these loft parties in London, this place, the light bar in, in shoreditch. But we had this really interesting the episode, after we've been doing that for a couple of years, where the core group of us organising the parties had become really anxious that basically we didn't like the composition of the crowd. And the crowd was completely dominated by white men, a lot of them kind of taking

a lot of coke. Because basically it had been organised on this kind of, you know, word of mouth basis, but the word of our social networks that we were in that people that had brought people to the party, actually, apart from the kind of group of people who'd come through my sort of own house parties they were all people from like the music industry around shoreditch so they were all these fucking shoreditch twats and um and we really we just we didn't really like them and it was all these kind of white men and i and i kept arguing really hard look we should be advertising if we advertise the party publicly if we list it in time out because this is pre this is like i mean the internet existed but it was still the case in that if you wanted to to advertise a public

event in london you you had to put an ad in time out magazine that was the only way you could really do it. And there was these arguments that went on for months. And eventually, like, the fraction of us who wanted to open it up won the argument. And we put an ad in time out. And within, like, a year, the composition had totally changed. We had loads more women, those more people of colour, loads of more younger people, and older people as well, actually. We had both really young, like curious young ravers and old people who'd been around, like, the jazz dance scene in the 80s. I remember even David himself being quite taken aback saying, actually, yeah, this actually worked.

By opening it out, you'd actually made it much more pluralistic, and you made it much more of the thing that you wanted. Whereas back in New York, it had been the opposite. The whole point of him having this invitation-only system was to make sure that you had a crowd that included, like, the right kind of people. And the right kind of people for him, it meant like queer people, people of color,

people out of the anti-war and civil rights movement, and like not just sort of curious tourists coming from uptown. But you know what, but the interesting thing there is, sorry to interrupt, but the interesting they're listening to the story of both situations is it still involves curation. Yeah, yeah. Regardless of what the strategy is, it still involves curation, which I think is interesting when you come and make that when we relate this back to the political party as well, is that I would argue that it does need to have some kind of visionary or a small group

who are like, this is what we want, right, what is the strategy to achieve it? where do we close or open the party or how we go about it? Because if you don't have a strategy or if you don't have a vision, then what you're going to end up with is going to be based on all sorts of historical and social and political factors of the moment, right? That composition of who's going to come to your party, right? So you've got to have the vision of like,

this is what we want, right? What is the strategy that's going to achieve that? Curations are a really good way of putting it, actually, because that's almost like the classic role of a, not the doorman, because that's the balance. but the person on the door, the picker, is to try to get the right mix of people, basically. So there's always that inclusion, exclusion sort of thing. Perhaps, you know, what you're looking at.

So just to do it in a sort of parallel to a political party, like what you're trying to look at is trying to get a critical mass of people who have got a certain attitude perhaps or whatever or, you know, share some certain attitude even though there's a cross mix of people, basically. then you can start to have the inclusion because then people can come in and the people who come in will be able to grasp what the common sense of the spaces, do you know, I mean something like that.

Yeah, that's exactly right. And for me, it all illustrates something which I often talk about, which is a basic principle of hegemonic politics or politics which is aspiring to hegemony or counter-hegemony. There's a constant tension to an inclusion and exclusion.

I mean, it's the same in political coalition forming. You can't get any, you can't achieve any radical objectives without building a broad coalition. But of course there do have to be some limits to the coalition. Like you probably can't include fash in your coalition. There's no point trying to include, like, people who think that it's actually good that the city of London is the most powerful institution in the country in a coalition that's even minimally social democratic, I think.

But also, lots of listeners will be aware we all know, I think generally people on the left in Britain, are totally unrealistic about how broad the coalition does actually have to be to actually get anywhere. I think we're not getting a progressive government in this country ever that doesn't include the Liberal Democrats, in my opinion. It's not happening. We don't need to dwell on why now, but the numbers just are not there.

Or those kind of voters. Well, not just that. I just institutionally. They're not going away. They're not going away. They're not going away. And they're never getting less than 7% of the vote. And there is no political, there is no political coalition.

that can command enough support for a social democratic project that doesn't include them. It's just not happening. Even if you don't like the fact that it's not happening, it's not happening. That's my view. But I also do, but I do think, yeah, would I include reform in that? If reform said they would sign up to a social democratic program and PR or something, no, I wouldn't. A really important point is, I would say I'm committed to this view, having studied this for decades, there is no theory which can tell you in advance what the limits of the coalition can be or have to be in a specific historical conjuncture.

And one of the great fantasies of left politics and political philosophy for 150 years is we'll get some theory, some theory of what it means to be proletarian party, and what it means to be a vanguard, like what it means to be a mass party, we'll come up with a theory and the theory will give us a formula and the formula will tell us who can and can't be in the coalition. and there is no such theory, you can only work that out under specific historical circumstances. Yeah, my response to that is why, and this might be an argument for leadership here that I'm making, I'm trying to think about this as I make it, is that that is why you need to know who the curator is, both in terms of like the political party and the social party, right? Because what you seem to be saying, Jeremy, is we're thinking, well, can we have a theory? because we need a theory to sit outside leadership, right? Because then we can point to the theory and say this is what is needed.

Whereas I think actually, you know, you're right. You cannot have such a theory. And so that's why you have to look at the curator and who the curator is and what you think about the curator in whether you are going to join or not join the party. And this is why is that everybody has a different line about who can join and who can't join and who is beyond the pale. And if I'm talking about a social party, if I'm going to Beauty and the Beat, right, as a woman, all it takes, and this might be your reform might be the equal, like the equal example here when we're talking about political parties, right?

All it takes is one group of lads, one group of lads, lads, lad's type lads, to come and like get on the dance floor of beauty and the beat to be, there's a certain kind of male behavior to kind of ruin the night for me. Now, as much as I might think, like, I don't want that to be the case, you know, as a woman on the dance floor, Like, it often takes just like one small group of men to make it very difficult, like, for you to really not have a good time. No, well, dissuading the lads is the constant, like, process, which is difficult because we don't, and it's really, and it's an ongoing dynamic because normally, because of the kind of party we are, we have an unusually large number of women you come, but then when the lads here, there's going to be a lot of women, they come and try to be lads, and you have to figure some way of dealing with them. Yeah, and I don't want to go to, you know, a women-only party either. Like that's not the point here, but the point is about like my experience going into that party is going to be, you know, and in a theoretical level, I want the lads to go to beauty and the beat because maybe they'll see an environment where they will, you know, become less, you know, misogynistic in their behaviour and less like they're out on the pool or whatever. But in practice, I don't want that, right? And the same goes with political parties. There might be somewhere where I'm like, that is beyond the pale, right? On the same way that I definitely view like broad-based alliances as very good. good. I'm happy to be in a political party. I am still a member of the Labour Party in a political party with people who I hugely disagree with. There is going to be a line, right, where I go,

where I go, no, you know. And that will be for, for probably for practical reasons or theoretical reasons or both, but it's not, it's not the same thing. And this is an interesting thing to think about, going back to our original point, about people saying, being exclusionary about who they are willing to work with. Because I think that the experience of that and the theory of that are not exactly the same thing. At least being cognizant of that is kind of important to understand the experience of the political party or the social party as it is experienced by the people who are in that space at that moment. Just to go back to the curation bit, though, I sort of agree there's no, there isn't a theory

you could have which will tell you what the limits of a particular political coalition should be because that's a contextual thing, you know, it's a situational thing. You can have theories which help you to work out where you begin that coalition building or where you begin the subject formation. Do you know what I mean? You can have an idea of like the class composition, etc., these sorts of things which say, well, look, you know, our policy should basically not be focused

on how to win over reform voters, right? That's a longer term aim, perhaps, but you don't start there. I mean, and that's obviously, you know, this would be a lesson for the leadership of the Labour Party if they were at all interested in that problem. you start with the more meanable people basically and you work out basically

and you work out where the limit is from that sort of position which is a little bit like the door picker who's saying right if we build up a critical mass of people then the lads on the dance floor might be disciplined by that no that's true well that's true I mean in a way that makes the situation even more sort of difficult but it's the difficulty we have to live with you do have to use some sort of a theory

to make the judgment to make the analysis without thinking that it's going to automatically produce a formula I think the analogy between curation and leadership is really interesting, actually. Yeah, but I think it is, like, the reason I brought up that term curation is because it really comes up against democracy, right? This is the problem, is that a good party is one that is curated because people know what they want and they have a vision. I would make the argument, it's the same for this podcast. We do this podcast.

Basically, the theory behind this podcast is we're three people. this is what we're doing and we like it and we're doing it because we're enjoying it. Yeah, sometimes we take on, you know, people's suggestions and stuff, but we kind of have quite a strong base that is quite coherent and we understand what we are doing over here. If you like it, great. If you don't like it, go away. And I think the same goes for, you know, when we're talking about the party or the political party, you have to have a strong vision or a base where you understand what is the makeup, what is the texture, what is the flavor of the thing you're doing. Sure, this might react to social realities and, you know, political realities and economic

realities around you, but it has some kind of coherence. Classic celebration of the idea of the House Party is from 1980. It's a disco classic. Fred Wesley, great funkmaster, with his song House Party. I can't go to the movies. I ain't got the fair. I like to let the disco, but I haven't got a thing to well. I'm going to get my stereo and call up everyone. Come on over to my house and let's have some fun.

Gonna have a house party. Gonna have a house party. Gonna have a house party. Gonna have a house party. Should we start talking about? Because I think we are talking about the different functions that a political party can fulfill. So in the discussions about political parties now,

I think people want all sorts of functions, some of which are just sort of contradictory. But it's not been sort of brought out to some degree. Because there's all sorts of functions that a political party could or should fulfill. You've talked about one as like political identification. I think that is important. And I think that's one of the things that's driving 800,000 people to sign up,

at least be interested in signing up to that your party, the Jeremy Corbyn, perhaps, perhaps not Sarah Sultanah party. We'll have to see how that pans out. But there's all sorts of other sorts of functions that political party should, you know, has traditionally been seen to fulfil, you know, as sort of, you know, the political party has been, as being the memory of the class, etc, you know, a way to sort of like produce some sort of unity of purpose amongst a disparate sort of purpose, all of these sorts of things, basically.

Well, let's think it through. Let's think through this, some of these, like, different things that people want from parties. Because I think that, you know, that's a useful way of framing it. Because obviously what's obviously what a lot of people want. And we talked about this before, actually, is, you know, people want a sense. belonging, they want to feel like they've got a place for them, they want a sense of identity from a party. I mean, I remember the way Nadia put it, when we were referring to the fact of people

talking about the possibility of a new party last year, she said people were asking, is there a place for me? And of course, this is one of the issues with all the kind of anxieties around the place of the left in the Labour Party. I mean, this is a useful way of framing it, really. I think It's a useful way framing it is partly with reference to. Like, what is it that people wanted from the Labour Party when they joined because Jeremy Corbyn was leader? And what did they get or not get from it? And what do they want from a new party?

And what are they going to get or not get from it? And what do they want from other kind of party? I mean, the way I always put this, you know, fairly crudely, is, well, lots of people, lots of people joined the Labour Party when Jeremy was lead. and they joined it thinking they were joining the Jeremy Corbyn party. And they wanted to join a party made of a bunch of other people who really liked Jeremy Corbyn. And they found actually what they joined was this incredibly complicated organisation, which was absolutely not the Jeremy Corbyn party.

It was like this big terrain of struggle between like multiple factions and organisations, some of whom were sympathetic to Jeremy, some of whom weren't, some of whom were just Jeremy Corbyn fans like them, many of whom weren't. and they, and to a large extent they really didn't enjoy that, they didn't like it, and a lot of them just left as soon as Jeremy was no longer the leader, and it obviously wasn't the Jeremy Corbyn Party. And, you know, and, yeah, there was a lot of people like me, I mean, people like all of us actually, for most of that period,

saying, well, that's not how you should think about it. You should think that the Labour Party, you have to think of the Labour Party as a terrain of struggle. You know, if you want to join something that's going to give you a sense of political identity and home and belonging, maybe you can join. a fractional organisation like momentum, but you should not relate to the Labour Party that way. And we could say that we were blue in the face, but it didn't really work, like, for a lot of people, because that's just not what they wanted. They didn't want to join an organisation that's like a massive terrain of political combat between competing forces. That's not, that's not

what they wanted. They wanted something else. But I also think it depends on what your experiences and how long you've been doing politics, because I'm definitely of that group. I would have never have joined the Labour Party before Jeremy Corbyn joined. I absolutely joined because I believed that it was possible to do something from within that party. And a lot of people that I agreed with joined and because John McDonald was in it. And I was completely taken in that wave. And it was also, you know, like, but was also working for momentum at the time, right? But I think because I hadn't experienced the Labour Party previously had only experienced the Labour Party under Blair.

And there was absolutely no way I would have joined the Labour Party in the late 90s and early 2000s because of Iraq, because Iraq is what politicised me, right? But this time round, it's like, well, I've joined the Labour Party and I'm still in there. I'm not sure why I'm still in, to be honest, if I'm completely honest. But I was definitely from that group of people because I was taken with this sensation of being signed up to something officially with loads of other people. I think that's important, yeah. I mean, that's really important.

And I think partly what's going on there, partly what you're referring to is one of the key things people want from a party is a sense of collective agency and a sense that by joining with other people in this thing, they're going to be able to achieve something and get something done. And I would say historically, the risk of far left and ideologically pure parties is they don't give you any real collective agency. They give you the opportunity to sort of larp,

but they don't actually get anything done, frankly. and they actually create a sort of illusory sense of collective agency that just sort of sucks people's energy. That's the risk. They don't always do that. Sometimes they do become the kernel of a revolutionary wave that overthrows capital of social relations, but often they don't.

But even knowing that, I wasn't going to take the risk of not joining. You should what I mean? So even knowing that analysis, it's like, well, we all were members of the Labour Party at the time. We still thought, okay, we'll give it a shot, even if you have this understanding and analysis of where it's, sits under history and what the previous experience of this was. The experience of like the Labour Party, joining a Labour Party, etc.,

it sort of illustrates the Labour Party as an arena of struggle in which we lost. It illustrates that there's a couple of things for a political party. Yeah, it's a container for, it can be a container for political effervescence, which it was when hundreds of thousands of people joined the Labour Party. And even an incubator of effervescence. Yeah, definitely an incubator of effervescence. But that collective agency has to come through some forms. of bureaucratic organisation, it has to be some sort of organisational forms.

You know, as it happened, the bureaucratic organisation was firmly in the hands of basically the most unpleasant political operators, the most unscrupulous, anti-democratic political operators, perhaps in the world, certainly in the UK, the Labour Right, who went to war against the membership, basically, you know, and that what we all knew all the way along is now being revealed by the, as now being noticed by the journalists knew about it all along as well, just because we are, where we are in the political cycle, where they sense that Kea Stama's time is at, even more revelations of the revelations we knew five, six years ago, coming out now, a new book. It's been leaking a load of this stuff.

That's a real problem, isn't it, basically? Part of why there was a reaction against political parties in the latter half of the 20th century, you know, the post-68 sort of wave, was because a lot of these political parties have become ossified bureaucratic impediments to a lot of the functions that we want, basically. You know, the sort of like the idea that the party is a, is the memory of the class. Well, yeah, but it'll only remember a certain thing and it will open itself to new lessons, etc., etc. You know, there's a certain conservative sort of dynamic to bureaucracies in which the bureaucracy wants to basically support its own position within a party, et cetera, something where we've seen in your party already, even though it's not been formed, these sorts of

things. One of the ways to think about that, that way for the 20th century, we can go back to Rodrigo Nunes' book, neither vertical nor horizontal. We had a discussion with Rodrigo and one of a microdoses quite a while ago about revolution. But one of his sort of ideas is that, look, there's been this twin melancholia running through the 20th and 21st century. There's the melancholia that comes from the failed sort of like communist parties, the, you know, the bureaucratization of the communist party. There's the melancholia that came from like a more horizontalist movements or organizational structures that came out of 68, et cetera, that sort of idea. What Rodrigo says is that we probably need to get rid of that binary, basically.

When we talk about political party, lots of people talk about it as though it is the solution to all of these problems, says, the solution to all of the limitations that come from more networked movement sort of politics. And Rodrigo say, no, actually, basically, we should think of political parties as pretty much like a, you know, they operate sort of like a network, like an ecology of stuff, basically. They're not a unified body. There's all sorts of stuff going on within them, do you know what I mean? And so we have to think about what functions we want

and then have a look in each situation about what sort of organisational form can best fulfill those functions. Of all of the functions that we might want, and so there'll be stuff like, you know, an arena in which you can have political recomposition, right? That's sort of what people wanted out of Corbinism, which is to give political articulation to people's developing or revealed interests and ideologies and these sorts of things.

There's all sorts of functions that we might want, but one of the functions at a political party is the only thing that can fulfill is that political identification thing and then the interaction with the state thing, or the idea that you can take over the state. Do you know what I mean? Those are the two functions at political parties can fulfill that other things can't fulfill. And there's huge risks with that, basically. You know, as soon as you're into that,

you're suddenly into a realm dictated by all sorts of temporal rhythms, etc. You know, the rhythm of elections, et cetera. And mediated politics in terms of, you know, you have to have some sort of relationship with the media. You know, you can have an antagonistic relationship with the media. And I hope any sort of like new left political party will do that. You can see already Zach Palanski of the Greens is really quite effective at like taking quite an aggressive mode towards sort of.

like, you know, what we might call the mainstream media, etc., etc. Yeah, I agree. I agree with all of that. Obviously, I agree with Rodrigo, and I'd say, indeed, as you've said, and as Rodrigo says, there's this process whereby, indeed, in the late 60s, there's disillusioned both with the experience of the bureaucratization of social democratic and Labour parties,

which is something you've already seen, like, in the 1920s, with the betrayal of the German social democrats and also the Labor government under Ramsey McDonnell, or rather Ramsey McDonald, the first Labour prime minister, you know, basically completely betraying the Labour movement and the socialist movement in the national government. So that's already been going on for like 50 years by 68, and it's still going on like now, predictably.

But also the ossification of the Leninist parties into the Stalinist and post-Salinist bureaucracies of the Soviet Union. And China. We should mention, actually, I was thinking earlier when we were talking about the days of the mass party being gone. Of course, the biggest mass party in history is the Communist Party of the People's Republic of China, which today I think has more members than any political party anywhere else in the build has ever had. So it was millions, millions. I mean, that's just worth observing. But for the most part, there was this sort of disillusion. And that disillusion led to these various experiments with disaggregated network, distributed times of organisation, really several waves of such experiments. And of course, one of the problems that was already becoming apparent, say, by the early 21st century, and it was being observed by some scholars and just by people who were old enough or knowledgeable enough to realise this, is one of the problems was basically like every five years from 1968 up until 2003, really, like a bunch of people pretty much seem to reinvent the wheel of kind of 1968, street activism and a bit of networked organisation.

And they don't seem to learn anything from the successes or failures of what people were doing five years earlier or 10 years earlier or 15 years earlier. And it just seems to keep repeating itself. You know, there's all these people doing reclaimed the streets in the mid-90s. You've never heard of stop the city in the mid-80s. But it's basically just the same thing. And so it becomes apparent there's a real problem. There's a problem in that there isn't any kind of institutional memory.

There's a problem in that there isn't any learning of lessons of passing them on. There's a problem in that there isn't any sort of formalized or even really informal political education. And so people become sort of conscious that actually maybe you do need a sort of mass party again. But then the immediate response to that, I have to say, is this moment we've talked about quite a lot before, the sort of 2010 like rediscovery of communism by a kind of cohort of activists and intellectuals. And suddenly everyone's a Leninist again. Like, you know, Gijet calls himself a Leninist, even a Stalinist. Jodi does her book, Crowds and Party, you mentioned before, which really presents

a completely binary idea that you're either like a dickhead hippie who thinks just spontaneous crowds can make the revolution, or you believe in a Leninist vanguard revolutionary party. Which, you know, it's a useful book in Savoy who identifies some of the functions that the party has to carry out

or the someone has to carry out, but as you say, as Rodrigo says, and I think as people like us have always argued, well, it's not, there are, a, there's no point just acting like the reasons why people reacted against the party form weren't reasons like as if they just they were just idiots and also it's not a given it's not even clearly demonstrable that the mass the the the the party as conceived

either by lenin the sort of highly centralized you know relatively small kind of organization of professional revolutionaries that that organized is a much wider network of sort of activists and then supporters but organizes itself in this very disciplined way according to the logic of democratic centralism, where everybody has to commit to the policies that have been agreed on democratically once they've been agreed, even if you don't agree with them. There's either that or the kind of mass version of that sort of party conceived by Gramsci, in his famous essay, The Modern Prince, which is a reference to Machiavelli's book, The Prince, which follows on from that Leninist conception, but is thinking about what it might mean more in the context, say, mass democracy, but still really has an idea

of the party is this very large, quite homogenous organisation, which is going to do all the work, really, of organising the social struggle and organising culture and organising political education. And it's not clear that either of those models are necessarily the best ones. And it might be that in the contemporary world, what you need is some general recognition that all those functions have to be carried out, but you might need other sorts of organisation. I mean, to be honest, like people like me and also you, Keir, really, and Rodrigo and other, people, we have been saying that since the 60s. Well, not since the 60s. We weren't born in the 60s. Well, no, not us, but people, I said people like us have been saying, yeah, well, it might not be one or the

other, and maybe we need different sorts of organisations to carry out these functions. And, like, no one's, no one's really done it very successfully. Like how, like, you know, it just hasn't really happened. And like, we said even on the last show, and I still think it's true, I think, you know, it would be really good if we had some sort of a broad socialist organisation in Britain that people who are like eco-socialists in the Greens or your party activists and members if that becomes a thing can join and people on the Labour Left can join and people in none of those things can join and people in the nationalist parties could all join and we could all be socialist together and have socialist clubs and do kind of analysis about broad trends and do

campaigning around issues outside the electoral cycle I think that would be great that sounds great let's do it well maybe we should we'll be talking about this a bit of the world transformed in a couple of weeks. So maybe we'll platform a proposal to actually do this. But also, it's sort of significant that people have sort of been saying things like that for a long time. Now, there was an attempt in the 80s in Britain to set up this thing called the Socialist Society. The people like Hillary Wainwright were involved in, I think people like Ralph Miniband had been, were involved in. But it only lasted about 10 years.

And more recently, Jeremy Corbyn's Peace and Justice project, it attracted some support, but I think not as much as a lot of people might have hoped. So I think, I mean, this idea of a non-party radical organisation covering various issues rather than just one issue, I think it might yet be an organisation, an idea whose time is yet to come. No, I think there's also another issue, which is that of trust. I think people don't like each other very much. People just don't trust other people. No, genuinely, I think people are not used to being in a room with other people,

they have to listen. Like, I genuinely think that, and that's definitely on the left as well. I mean, people will say they would. They will. But that's why it's much more, the terrain that's been more successful is kind of like allotment groups, growing groups, like social groups, where there's a low, where the stakes are low about what you're trying to achieve. And like, that's building more community and trust between people. I think once you're trying to like change the world, I think people are just fraught with all kind of suspicion of each other. And I think that's a socio-psychological, political and economic problem. I agree. That's why podcasts are the scaffolding of the party in the 21st century.

The parasocial relationship people have with podcasts. I'm a Nadia person. No, I'm a Gilbertist. It's the hot air balloon of the 21st century. There we go. There's certainly a lot of hot air. That is true. Do we think we need political parties? Do we all agree that we do need political parties? so we can't just get entirely to do without them. Yes, I think we do need political parties. And particularly in the current conjunction,

it seems almost seems as though like Steph needs to start from a political party, partly because of that identification function, basically. Yeah, I think it's a really good question. And one where I can't abstract my thinking away from the reality of the social conditions that we exist in. So I would say, yes, we do. but that is not necessarily a yes for my future utopia.

Like if you were asking the question, like in your future, would you imagine political parties? It's like that I'm not necessarily going to say the answer is yes, but I would say from the socio-political reality that we live in currently, yes, you do need political parties. Because I can't quite completely see outside capitalist realism in terms of what kind of of organisation would fulfil those kind of functions that we need to exercise power and agency in some meaningful way? Yeah, I mean, I think we obviously need them because only a party can fulfil certain strategic and institutional functions and a certain function of identification within the arena of electoral and institutional politics. I've always tended to be, as I think

is clear, committed to the idea that parties are probably necessary but not sufficient, that then you probably need other kinds of network and organisation that can carry out important political functions. But I'm willing to be proven wrong about that. I can imagine a future in which, say, your party does become this kind of mass organisation. And to some extent, it becomes the key point of attraction or the key point of identification for a range of initiatives around political education, around social organisations, even sort of social clubs, institutions, locally, this sort of thing. I can imagine, I can imagine, I can imagine, that happening. I can imagine a situation in which, you know, even if I'm in the Labour Party,

like formerly, and like I'm doing a lot of stuff in some kind of direct orientation to this new thing and the thing might be this political party. So I think we don't really, we don't really know, we don't really know actually what the mass party can or should be in the era of advanced platform capitalism. And so I'm willing to test out various hypotheses and see what works. I definitely think that the political parties need to have some sort of a relationship to fun parties, like to dance parties, tea parties, dinner parties. But you could even talk about the way, the whole idea of the political parties, we haven't even talked about this, the whole idea of the political party, even in the loose sense, it came out of the liberals, the wigs, like

in Britain, in London, meeting in coffee houses and the Tories, like meeting in pumps. So I think You can't really separate the idea of the party, even in the broad sense, the idea of an effective, dynamic, agential partisanship. You can't separate that from leisure and socialising and sociality. I think that's going to be really important. And I think there is going to be a role for people like us, actually, in making sure that whatever ecology of political parties emerges on the left over the next few years. And I think there is a new emerging ecology that it has that element of socialising. fun. That's always been an important theme of the world transformed. It's always been an important theme of ACFM. And I think it is going to be kind of down to people like us to help some of that

stuff happen, probably, actually. I do think that the idea of a like a political social club or social centre, it just makes so much sense in the contemporary conditions, not just because you need something where people who are in different parties, political projects can all feel some sense of belonging in. But also because there's been an absolute collaboration. lapse in what we might call associative politics. So it just makes a lot of sense in all sorts of ways. And I think it's important to, you know, say clearly that part of the project and part of the functioning of late capitalism is to create that segregation, is to segregate all of these different aspects of life from each other. And part of the problem is that, you know, almost like

in a Buddhist sense, like the oneness of the project of like trying to live as a healthful human being, socialize in a way that gives us joy and to be able to take action for social change is part of life and part of the experience. And these things do not need to be segregated. Part of the project, it should be like bringing these together in a way that is experienced as, you know, normal and good and, you know, fun and important and, you know, militant altogether and not in some kind of like weird segregated way. That's too far out.