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_Your Party_ may not have a united leadership or a basic political programme, but it does finally have a plan for launch.
Its founding conference, set for late November in Liverpool, will be populated by sortition. 13,000 party members will be enfranchised at random, with 6,500 attending on each day. The party membership as a whole will only get a symbolic, “confirmatory” vote on the final draft of the constitution. This constitution could, according to documents released in October, enshrine sortition as the permanent system for conferences.
If we take this plan at face value, the founding leadership of Your Party, with all of its embedded control freakery, is intending to entrust its future to an idealistic, unprecedented process, putting its faith in a literally random assortment of members. More substantive arguments aside (and we’ll come to those), would-be proponents of sortition in _Your Party_ must begin by asking themselves: is that really plausible?
## Where has this come from?
Most people active in the organised left, the Labour Party or the wider labour movement won’t have encountered sortition directly. So how can we explain its sudden appearance at the heart of the left’s new party?
The crisis of our age is above all a crisis of democracy – in the economy and the state. Cosseted by the media and an electoral system designed to shut out political alternatives, our political class remains addicted to a regime of privatisation, outsourcing and austerity, despite a longstanding collapse in public support. Billionaire wealth and asset prices are the only safe bets; for everyone else, the reality is declining living standards, dysfunction and economic stagnation. Neoliberalism has degraded the left’s institutions and organised tendencies, and delivered us an increasing degree of atomisation.
Sortition offers a neat procedural shortcut, offering to bypass unrepresentative democracies and the left’s own organisational scleroses.
That is certainly Roger Hallam’s perspective. In a strident piece for the New Statesman, he argues that “voting and elections are not democracy – they are a means to the end of democracy”; and that “it is sortition or death”. If you don’t like sortition, he says, “you believe a few are called to rule, like the people who believe that only white people should rule, that only men should rule.”
Citizens’ Assemblies are the most well-known form of sortition. A demographically representative set of citizens is selected at random to deliberate and make a series of recommendations. In Ireland, it was a Citizens’ Assembly that recommended the abolition of the constitutional ban on abortion. Depending on how you look at it, they are either a reincarnation of Athenian democratic principles or a beefed-up focus group.
Extinction Rebellion, which was co-founded by Hallam, made a Citizens’ Assembly on Climate and Ecological Justice was one of the movement’s key demands. It would presumably have a much higher degree of ambition and authority than the Climate Assembly UK, which the government has already run, or the many citizens’ climate assemblies run by local councils since then.
Momentum also experimented with the idea. When the organisation’s representative democratic structures were abolished in 2017, a ‘Members Council’, selected by sortition, was convened to advise the Momentum leadership. Like the promise of all-member referenda, it was an abortive gimmick. One of the Members’ Council’s first acts was to publicly disagree with the Labour leadership on immigration policy; funnily enough, it stopped meeting.
## Alien to mass politics
Sorition has its formal origins in the ancient Athenian constitution, where selection by lot was the primary way of allocating citizens to public office. Built on slavery and the total political exclusion of women, ancient Athens was by no means a modern democracy, but it was also radical. Sorition’s better–read proponents often point to CLR James’s 1956 essay ‘Every Cook Can Govern’, which offers a spirited and coherent defence of the Athenian system. James points out its radical egalitarianism, prolific contribution to human civilisation, and the fact that the aristocratic class was determined to destroy it.
James did not, however, advocate that the modern left immediately adopt sortition as its key demand and method of organising. More to the point, one would have to be wilfully naive to think that its appearance in _Your Party_ is down to the sudden conversion of senior Corbyn aides to the Athenian democratic ideal.
The use of delegates to represent organised groups of members or workers did not become the norm because e-balloting was not available or sortition had not been heard of. The organised labour movement and socialist left has, for its entire development, used some form of representative democracy to make decisions because it aims at making deliberation happen, and at making it happen at the lowest possible level – in branches and workplaces – rather than among a self-selecting or randomly-selected tier of decision-makers.
Most socialists claim to stand for the self-emancipation of the working class – and in a broader sense for mass politics. Open assemblies and conferences aim to enable universal participation. A well-functioning delegate democracy means that all members are invited to debate policy and strategy, and have real agency, at a local level. Even a semi-functioning delegate system, in which this or that political tendency might be overrepresented, at least serves the purpose of politicising the structures and linking members into decisions.
Both delegate and One Member One Vote processes are systems of mass politics, because strategy and ideas can be shifted from the base. Sortition, on the other hand, leaves decisions to a random sample of people, and the rest of us become spectators. It assumes that we will be better represented by someone who is demographically similar to us than someone who shares our political perspective.
When controversial decisions are made, structures must have enough legitimacy that the organisation can move on – the defeated side must be able to walk away knowing that it has put its case and (for now) lost a democratic vote. Big controversial decisions made by a literally random assortment of members will have no such legitimacy, especially if the conference process is viewed as a stitch-up.
## A stitch-up
For the true believers, _Your Party’s_ shift towards sortition is a way to circumvent the baggage of the existing left and to empower the grassroots of the party at the expense of incompetent leaders.
The obvious reality is that the leadership chose this system precisely because it has other ways to keep control. At the party’s regional assemblies, small groups have been invited to discuss topics and make suggestions – without any power to collectively deliberate or vote. Individuals can also suggest edits to the constitution online. Given the volume of “suggestions” and the lack of transparent process to record, let alone prioritise and consider them, we can only assume that they are destined for the bin. This is a performance of democracy, while the real decisions are taken elsewhere.
On the conference floor itself, sortition will make the process more, not less, dominated by big names and the top table. Will Jeremy Corbyn, Zarah Sultana and all of their bag-carriers be forced to enter the lottery to attend the conference? Obviously not. Some members will be more equal than others.
With elected delegates (as is the norm in the labour movement) or open attendance for all members (as the Green Party, of which I am a member, does), one can guarantee that the left’s factions and leading activists will be present in some form. With sortition, the _Your Party_ leadership has created the possibility of a conference without many of the people who might organise to defeat it in a vote.
## Quick fixes
Perhaps sortition will be a flash in the plan, and the founding conference of _Your Party_ will choose a less idiosyncratic constitution. But its appearance is symptomatic of a broader problem with the British left.
Tens of millions of Britons yearn for a serious left alternative to the current political elite. But our strength has been degraded, and we have a crisis of organisational form. This has left us stuck in a loop of quick fixes.
Some want the intervention of a “hyperleader”, as Your Party insider James Schneider put it in his interview with the New Left Review – someone like Jean-Luc Melenchon. “In Britain we don’t have that type of figure”, he lamented. “We have a kind of hyperleader in Jeremy, a person whose moral and political authority towers above anyone else’s, but he doesn’t act in that way. It’s not his style.”
If it was not already obvious from the experience of high Corbynism, the farce of recent weeks has demonstrated authoritatively that basing your political institutions around the whims of left celebrities is a bad idea.
Sortition offers a different, but equally chimeric, shortcut, offering to appeal over the heads of the left’s (supposedly tainted, failed) activists to a wider mass of (supposedly purer, simpler) supporters – a silent majority of “normal” members. Funnily enough, right-wing Labour politicians, conservative trade union bureaucracies and overprofessionalised NGOs can often be heard indulging in the same rhetoric.
Perhaps we should not be too critical. Electoral politics is _always_ an attempted shortcut to some extent. But there is a difference between building an electoral politics that develops grassroots politics and the wider class struggle, and one which cuts against it.
* Michael Chessum
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