The founding of Jeremy Corbyn and Zarah Sultana’s Your Party is the latest attempt to trap workers and young people looking for a socialist leadership within a pro-capitalist “broad left” formation led by reformist and Stalinist bureaucrats.

The crisis besetting the party demonstrates that the objective basis for doing so has been undermined by a deepening economic and social crisis that has not only rendered impossible new reformist half-measures but drives the capitalist class and its governments to destroy those implemented in the past.

As with all past efforts, such as Syriza in Greece and Podemos in Spain, the formation of Your Party is intended to fence off those seeking an alternative to despised right-wing parties like Keir Starmer’s Labour from a revolutionary socialist opposition to austerity and war.

The disorientation produced by the inevitable betrayals of such “broad-left” formations has repeatedly allowed the ruling class to proceed with its attacks and serve to strengthen the far-right. The key role in every case has been played by pseudo-left groups, who claim to represent a revolutionary alternative only to insist that the working class must accept the leadership of “left reformist” leaders or political current emerging from the breakup of the old social democratic and Stalinist parties.

This has led to one disaster after another for the working class. In 2015, Syriza infamously betrayed its 2015 referendum mandate to oppose European Union and International Monetary Fund-dictated austerity that inflicted social devastation on Greek workers, leading to the party’s ignominious collapse.

Rivalling Syriza’s betrayal was that carried out by Corbyn during his five years as leader of the Labour Party between 2015 and 2020. This was hailed by pseudo-left ideologue Chantal Mouffe as a potentially far more successful example of a new wave of “left populism” because Corbyn stood “at the head of a great party and enjoys the support of the trade unions”, provided that he rejected the “traditional left political frontier… established on the basis of class”.

Corbyn went on to carry out the worst rout in political history as he repeatedly betrayed the hundreds of thousands who flocked to the party and capitulated on all fundamental issues to the Blairite right.

None of this dissuaded the pseudo-left groups from insisting that forming a new Syriza-style party under Corbyn’s leadership must be the “next stage” that British workers must pass through and that the only alternative was the victory of Reform UK and the far-right. To call for the building of a revolutionary alternative was sectarian, when the only option was for the “organised left” to join Your Party and to argue for more thoroughgoing reforms, while advocating, in a personal capacity, revolution at some long-distant point in the future.

Zarah Sultana and the Socialist Workers Party

The depth and speed of Your Party’s sink into the mire provides additional proof of its rotten political foundations. The founding conference held in Liverpool on November 29-30 followed months of unprincipled factional warfare between Corbyn and Sultana over control of financial assets and membership lists that whittled down the 850,000 who signed up as supporters in July to just 55,000 becoming members, and a forecast attendance of 13,000 ending with between 1,500-2,000 coming to the Liverpool Arena and Convention Centre.

Politically the dispute between the two is over how left Your Party must posture if it is to have any hope of winning support.

Corbyn, who never wanted to form a party at all, wants only the most pathetic variant of a reformist programme, modelled on the Labour Party manifestos of 2017 and 2019 which combined some re-nationalisations and minimal tax rises for the major corporations and super-rich with pledges to defend British capitalism, including maintaining membership of NATO and keeping nuclear weapons.

Sultana advances a more full-throated programme, seeking to commit Your Party to nationalising the entire economy and running it in the interests of workers, combined with an anti-Zionist and anti-imperialist foreign policy.

She knows that Corbyn has been substantially discredited due to his refusal to fight Labour’s right-wing, and that the groundswell of anger and anti-capitalist sentiment among workers and youth will not be satisfied with his meagre palliatives. However, despite her more militant rhetoric and insistence that she is not in favour of building a Labour Party Mark 2, Sultana has never once proposed that Your Party be based on anything other than the pursuit of social reforms through parliament.

This ideological conflict determined events at Your Party’s founding congress. Leading members of the Socialist Workers Party were expelled or denied entrance, as Corbyn’s inner circle used their control of the apparatus to insist on the exclusion of the pseudo-left parties. Sultana, meanwhile, relied on the pseudo-left to strengthen her position just as they relied on her to back their assertion that Your Party was not a lost cause.

The SWP, Britain’s largest pseudo-left tendency, is the main such force in Your Party. It concluded its coverage of a conference that expelled its leaders with claims that it had backed calls for “radical alternative” when presented with “rival visions”—“radical, insurgent and democratic”, meaning Sultana, or a Labour Mark 2, meaning Corbyn.

Making clear this “insurgent” option has nothing to do with building a socialist alternative, the SWP cites as proof that such a “vision that breaks with the status quo can be popular… Zohran Mamdani’s victory in New York.”

They follow this uncritical adulation of the newly-minted partner of Donald Trump with the admonition that “Your Party needs to back “credible candidates with local support” in “local elections and for the Welsh Senedd and the Scottish parliament next year.” They never define opposing a Labour Party Mark 2 as meaning a break with reformism, but rather as undefined “traditions and methods” that see “elections as more important than what happens outside parliament.”

The SWP’s cautions against the pressure to capitulate like Syriza are belied by their silence on the featured presence of the Belgian Workers Party, Die Linke and La France Insoumise who are playing Syriza’s role today—not to mention their shameful promotion of Mamdani and Sultana. Nor does this stop them insisting that it is time to end factional infighting and unify the two wings of Your Party, in an echo of the “broad church” argument that protected Labour’s right-wing from challenge for decades.

The anti-revolutionary politics of the pseudo-left

The pseudo-left parties for the most part have their origins in an explicit repudiation of the revolutionary internationalist programme of Trotsky and the Fourth International following the Second World War and a wholesale adaptation to imperialism and to the reformist and Stalinist parties and trade unions. They are today the most insidious opponents of revolution, led by a privileged upper middle-class stratum with a vested interest in defending capitalism.

In 2016, at the beginning of Corbyn’s leadership of the Labour Party, the SWP’s Donny Gluckstein defined this as “The rebirth of social democracy”. The “radical politics” of Bernie Sanders, Corbyn, Syriza and Podemos was the “repeat of a cycle driven by contradictions within mass consciousness.” Because “most ordinary people are subject to the ideological influence of the system,” despite facing “one disaster after another”, “Contradictory”, i.e., reformist consciousness therefore, “supplies an eternal wellspring of mass reformist potential.”

Scarcely addressing the October 1917 revolution, the 20th century was divided up into reformism’s “Traumatic adolescence” leading up to World War I, a “Coming of Age” encompassing World War II, and a “Golden age in the post-war decades, in which reformist parties held unchallengeable sway because capitalism was expanding.

The deepening crisis of world capitalism from the 1970s appeared to be reformism’s “Decrepit old age”, with intermittent booms and slumps, and now prolonged stagnation” leading the social democrats to abandon reforms and make major attacks on the working class.

However, though it appeared that the “first life cycle had now run its course” and produced parties like Tony Blair’s New Labour from which millions turned away in disgust, in fact, “Old age prepares the way for new birth… the enduring combination of adaptation and resistance from below still regenerates hope that reforms are possible. The wellspring that gave life to social democracy long ago still pours forth and will find a channel for expression if given the opportunity, whether that be in Syriza, Corbyn or another vessel.”

Gluckstein never offers any real explanation of why the social democratic and Stalinist parties and states fell to pieces and attributes no lasting significance to this collapse.

The development of globalised production during the 1980s had in fact fatally undermined all parties, trade unions and other organisations rooted in the nation state, destroying any possibility of securing reforms through limited trade union action and parliamentary reform. In every country, parties and trade unions committed to the defence of the capitalist profit system responded by abandoning reforms, demanding instead endless sacrifices by workers in the name of global competitiveness and carrying out an endless series of betrayals.

This did not lead automatically to workers breaking from reformist illusions, but the turn by millions away from their old bureaucratic leaderships evidenced the unprecedented objective opportunities to win workers to a genuine socialist perspective.

As the International Committee of the Fourth International explained as early as 1988, in its perspectives document The World Capitalist Crisis and the Tasks of the Fourth International, the changes in the form of capitalist production had brought with them a change in the form of the class struggle:

It has long been an elementary proposition of Marxism that the class struggle is national only as to form, but that it is, in essence, an international struggle. However, given the new features of capitalist development, even the form of the class struggle must assume an international character… Precisely the international character of the proletariat, a class which owes no allegiance to any capitalist ‘fatherland’, makes it the sole social force that can liberate civilisation from the strangulating fetters of the nation state system. For these fundamental reasons, no struggle against the ruling class in any country can produce enduring advances for the working class, let alone prepare its final emancipation, unless it is based on an international strategy aimed at the worldwide mobilisation of the proletariat against the capitalist system…

The ICFI understood this as the essential basis for the construction of a new revolutionary internationalist leadership, whereas the SWP treats it as a political hiccup presenting no way forward other than for workers to search again and again for a new reformist road.

More recently, in July 2025’s “Revolutionaries, hegemony and the united front”, Héctor Sierra declared that the only task before the SWP was to accept that “The balance of forces is much more decisively tilted towards reformism than in the inter-war years, even if social democracy has also experienced a long period of decline.”

“A small party such as the SWP” can only propose alliances “to sections of the Labour left, to specific trade union leaders, and so on, with an orientation on using those national agreements to foster alliances at a local level, encouraging activists in different parties and none to engage in joint action.”

He insisted, moreover, that “The balance of forces between revolutionaries and reformists today renders the project of making the revolutionary party a pole of attraction within united front activities a less straightforward proposition,” by which is meant that even creating “tension with reformist forces within the united front” is restricted because “the onus is often on revolutionaries to fight to preserve the unity of fronts.”

Revolutionary politics: the fight for socialist consciousness

Prior to Your Party’s founding conference, the Socialist Equality Party insisted that the issue facing workers was whether to support a programme and party based on reformist delusions or build one dedicated to the struggle for socialist revolution. The pseudo-left stand unambiguously for the promotion of reformist delusions.

The SEP fights to arm the working class with a revolutionary perspective. We not only reject entirely the demoralised argument that reformist consciousness cannot be challenged. We are preparing the most powerful means of doing so.

On November 22, the SEP hosted a lecture in London delivered by David North, chairperson of the World Socialist Web Site, “Where is America going?: Oligarchy, dictatorship, and the revolutionary crisis of capitalism.”

North insisted that “a critique of capitalism based on moral outrage, however justified that outrage may be, cannot provide the foundation for a revolutionary struggle against it… The violence of oligarchy, the brazenness of its power-grabs, the descent into authoritarianism—all of these express the terminal crisis of the capitalist mode of production itself.”

Stating that the rapidly deteriorating conditions of life for the great majority of Americans is already producing a growing sentiment that an alternative to capitalism is necessary, he noted that the initial beneficiary of this, Mamdani, was already in “full Corbyn” mode, “assuring the media and Wall Street that nothing he said during the election campaign should have been taken seriously, and going so far as to ask for an audience with Trump, and humiliating himself in the process.”

Mamdani’s treachery “demonstrates again that the central issue of our time is the crisis of revolutionary leadership… Objective economic processes create both the necessity and conditions for the overthrow of capitalism. But the socialist revolution is the outcome of the conscious intervention of the working class in the historic process,” led by a revolutionary Marxist party.

Explaining that the conditions now exist for an extraordinary advance in the political consciousness of the working class, North announced the launching December 12 of Socialism AI.

In a subsequent December 7 perspective, he explained that the Socialism AI chatbot “will use the power of amplified human cognition to advance the development of socialist consciousness in the international working class.” It will expand and accelerate the education of workers, student youth, progressive intellectuals and artists by making accessible “the theoretical, historical and political experience of more than 150 years of the Marxist movement, above all, the heritage defended by the Fourth International” and in this way will “prepare them for the irrepressible escalation of the international class conflict.”

This is our answer to the efforts to corral workers behind Sultana and Corbyn’s doomed project. We are the sole tendency that not only sets out to build a revolutionary leadership, but which has, in the rich political heritage of the World Socialist Web Site and now the essential tool of Socialism AI, the necessary means to do this.