 So I'm joined by Leo Panic, Emeritus Professor at the University of Toronto, editor at the Socialist Register, mental to Max Shanley. We're in TWT, we're in Liverpool, we're covering all things Labour Party related. Great to have you here. Great to be here, Eric. I'll start with them, I think probably the most important question one can ask. What are your politics? I'm a socialist, proudly so. And I would say, honestly, that my generation of socialists has failed in our attempt since the late 1960s to build an alternative to either the old Leninist Communist parties or to the Social Democratic parties, both of whom by the 60s had run their historical courses, agents of transformation. There were some of us who thought they could go off and find a better Leninism, a non-Stalinist Leninism. There were others of us who, following in the trajectory of Benism and the Greater London Council, felt that you couldn't change social democracy into socialist agency any longer. And we hope that we'd be able to create mass socialist parties outside of social democracy. We haven't done it. Not yet. No, and I don't think we're going to. I think what we're seeing, I think what we're seeing in the Labour Party is that it is going to have to go through those parties. We'll see what happens with them. It'll inevitably lead to splits in those parties. One would hope that it'll be socialists who hold on to the party apparatus, the party tradition, et cetera. But it looks like that's the way to go, whereas back in 1979, when I wrote a piece on Socialists in the Labour Party in the Socialist Register, it was the first piece I ever published in the Register. I challenged Ken Coates, who was part of the Institute for Workers' Control, close to Ben, and was part of the attempt to change the party. And he had said, where have you seen a new mass socialist democratic party built outside of the old ones? And I ended my essay saying, where have you seen a social democratic party transformed into a socialist one? It looks like what you guys are engaged in here is the way we're going to have to go. And it's very exciting. It's very impressive. It's very fraught, enormous responsibilities on your shoulders, the whole world's looking at it. But it's where things are at right now if you're a socialist. You often talk about the importance of democracy for socialist parties. What are the functions of having a democratic party? Because it's not just a moral ask, is it? You're not just saying democracy in and of itself is a positive thing, therefore these parties should be good. That democracy also serves quite important political functions. Can you sort of go over those briefly? Yeah. I mean, it is obviously partly a matter of the experience over the last hundred years with mass working class parties not having been internally democratic. And that doesn't only apply to the communist, you know, democratic, centralist, Leninist parties, which then evolved into Stalinism, it also applied to all of the social democratic ones. If you look even at the Swedish party, it, you know, could make communist parties blush in terms of how top-down bureaucratic it is. Conferences every three years, you know, it can be good in policy terms but in terms of democracy not at all. And why that matters is not just the matter of the accountability of the leadership. It matters especially because an undemocratic socialist party is not developing the capacities of its members, of its supporters, to govern their lives, to engage what is socialism except the ability of ordinary people collectively to engage in the broad range of decision making that collective life is all about, whether it's in the community, whether it's at the workplace, whether it's in the school, whether it's in the media. The assumption that people know how to do this is wrong. I think that's the anarchist assumption. The assumption that people can never do it leads you to technocracy and bureaucracy, you know, which is not socialism. So party democracy, for instance, the Labour Party, that would, if it was successful, that continued exercise of party democracy necessarily prefigures radical democratic socialist government. Yes. Insofar as it isn't just a matter of securing reselection, it isn't just a matter of securing the accountability of members of parliament, it isn't just a matter of making sure that conference resolutions appear in the manifesto. No, it's a matter of the people who are voting for the party, who are engaged in the party, developing their capacities as political actors, developing their understanding of how this bloody capitalist system works, so they don't have to depend on some professor to tell them. So successful socialist project necessarily has to have this. It has to have that capacity-developing capacity project. And if it doesn't, it will not yield, I don't think it will yield socialism at all, it certainly won't yield the kind of socialism we're aiming for. Because often people in the Labour Party, people on the good side, the right side of things will say, we need more political education, but it sounds to me like you view political education and democratisation of a socialist party as more or less one and the same thing. Yes, certainly as part of the same trajectory, that's right. Let's move to mandatory selection. That's been the big conversation for conference so far. We're sort of doing the sort of theoretical underpinnings of mandatory selection. Why is mandatory selection so important? I guess we've already talked about that a bit, but in the present context, why is it so important? And in particular, why has it caused such consternation from the establishment both outside the Labour Party, but also within it? Well, the achievement of the British establishment has been that the Labour Party has produced a class of career politicians who have no interest in transforming this society. In fact, they are opposed to socialism. That may be because they think it's romantic, because it'll lead to bad outcomes, etc., but the vast majority of Labour MPs are opposed to it. And how do you then have a socialist project where the parliamentary party, the vast majority of people in it, are against the project? Even those, let us say, who are sympathetic to Corbyn, I think, are not themselves well-developed enough politically as the people close to Corbyn are to be able to see this through, to take the initiatives they need to take, etc. Blair engaged in his policy forums in an explicit project of educating people into the project of accommodating to thatcherism, accommodating to the City of London, trying to ride the airsets prosperity that that gave you. And the same thing now has to happen, not only with developing the political education at the level of the base of the party, it has to happen with the MPs. Reslection therefore can be a bit of a fetish. You can get rid of a MP who has signed the letter against Corbyn, who is very vocal about his opposition or her opposition, etc. And you put someone in place who has been riding the wave, is involved in it, etc. But is quickly absorbed into the Westminster Boys' Club that Parliament is. And it is modeled on a gentleman's club, it is very structured. And you therefore can put too much emphasis on reselection and accountability itself. So I think that while the victories that have been won on this are important, it is elementary democratically principle, it seems to me, that someone who gets a nomination in one round should have to stand in an open selection the next round, obviously. It's only the British Parliamentarist tradition which sees the Parliamentary Representative as accountable to the Crown and to Parliamentary sovereignty rather than popular sovereignty that makes it seem so scandalous in the society. It's not scandalous in a republic, not scandalous in the United States. It's true that most congressmen do keep on getting nominated and running again, normally because they have the funds from businesses in real estate companies in their local area to be able to do more advertising than anybody else. But it's taken for granted that there is no automatic incumbency. So this is an elementary democratic struggle, but it needs much, much more than this. And if it's just a matter of turning out MPs and putting in new ones, you'll find that the majority of those MPs won't be all that different from the old ones. What should the role of MPs be? Because if you speak to most Labour MPs, well MPs from any party, but obviously we care more about Labour MPs because these are the people we're trying to either persuade or ideally I think to have somebody who's more in agreement with the political project we're involved in, they would say, well look, the system in this country is, I'm elected, I go to Parliament, you delegate your sovereignty like you say to me. So you've criticised that, and you've said that's an outgrowth of sovereign power representing the Crown or serving the Crown rather than the people. What should the demand be on MPs? What kinds of functions should MPs be performing when they are elected on the behalf of the Socialist Party? And Tony Ben stood in Bristol for his first nomination in 1950, 51. And he was asked how he would define the role of an MP. He said then I would see my function as educating people to socialism. He said that in 51. And he often said it to me later that he saw his role as that of a political educator. And I think that's the responsibility that an MP should have. A Socialist member of Parliament should of course be concerned with introducing legislation and if it's government engaging in the process of being at the head of a department in order to transform it from being the type of institution which in its pores is organized to reproduce capitalism and its social relations into the type of institution that is oriented to building a democratic socialist society. That's a big task. But in order to be able to do that, the representative needs to be a political educator, needs to be able to develop the ambitions and the capacities of the people who have elected them to be capable of seeing through the democratic socialist project. You can't leave it to the career representatives, those people who when they go study PPE at Oxford and join the old-style young labor and then end up working in one of the MPs or offices in Westminster are going to have a career and feel they have a job entitlement. No, this is not the way forward and this is being challenged and successfully. A rejoinder from those kinds of people, they would say all of the things you just outlined holding the government to account when you're in opposition being part of government means that you can't, it's not possible to do that properly and also be as you say a socialist educator to be somebody that's serving a movement outside Parliament as much as representing them inside Parliament. So what's your answer to that? Because they would say there's only 24 hours in a day. There are always constraints on resources, on time, of course. And we're engaged in something very ambitious that involves expanding our own capacities to operate more efficiently but also to have a sense of priorities. And I think that if we only have 24 hours a day then people who are representatives need to recalibrate their priorities. There's no recipe for this. We are engaged in the 21st century in a process of discovery. It's increasingly desperate that the path of discovery we're on be realized because if it isn't, what's clear in the 21st century is that capitalism is throwing up undemocratic alternatives, not even liberal or bourgeois democratic ones. It's, you know, Adorno once said he who speaks of fascism and doesn't speak of capitalism should remain silent. What I fear in the 21st century is that he who speaks of capitalism and does not speak of fascism should remain silent. So we are in a process in the 21st century of figuring out how to do socialism as a political project that goes beyond the failures of socialists in the 20th century. It's an enormous responsibility. Final question. We had a debate, a small debate I suppose in this country on the left about the general secretary of the Labour Party. And my view was the general secretary should be elected because once Labour, hopefully under Jeremy Corbyn's leadership and obviously after him as well, once a socialist Labour Party or a socialist leader is in government, I can't understand how the Prime Minister can serve both the country and implement a radical platform of changes that would transform society. I can't see how they can do both that and transform the party into, because clearly it would have to be elevated in the context of a Labour government, right? That movement would be what keeps them in power. And that's why I said, well, you need to have a separate head almost at the head of the Labour Party, because when we are in government, when Labour is in government, this movement will no longer be a movement, it will be a machine and it will be something that's occasionally mobilized rather than. Absolutely. I totally agree with this. One of the things I found most astonishing about the Syriza experience, and that was the one radical Labour government that emerged in the whole world out of the crisis of 2008. I mean, really astonishing. And what they were engaged in was very difficult as a government and they were given very little time to do it by the bloody EU. With virtually no support from the Northern European Labour movements, when they finally were forced to sign the Memorandum of Agreement, it was either that or get out of the European Union, not just the Euros out. So they did it in the hope that they would eventually be able to get it to a situation where their social agenda a few years down the road might be taken up, the General Secretary resigned and left the party. The General Secretary of the party resigned and left the party. On the contrary, what should have happened was that people in the party should have redoubled their efforts to build the party, to build capacities. That's what should have happened. It's essential, I think therefore, that the General Secretary be elected, see his or her responsibility as changing the party so it is an educated, developmental force. And of course, we're not going to be able to achieve socialism in one government. The forces that are arraigned against this are immense. That government will need itself to discover how to introduce non-reformist reforms, reforms that people need, but don't close off the possibility of going beyond them. It'll be constrained in all kinds of ways. It can't simply expect the party to be a supportive, mobilizing device for that government, precisely because that government is so constrained in the struggle it's engaged in. So yes, the party has to have its own thrust, its own dynamic. And the tragedy of the Labour Party, of course, is that for so long its regional organizers have been highly skilled at expelling people. And that's a terrible, terrible, not simply waste of resources, but misuse of resources. Great. On that note, thank you very much, Leo. My pleasure, as always. And before we go, this is the 2019 edition of Socialist Register. Yes, it is. Where can our viewers find this? They can pick it up in good bookstores everywhere. They can order it from the Merlin Press, which is a wonderful socialist publisher. We couldn't do what we do without really quite impoverished socialist publishers. Even more impoverished than social media guys like you. And so just go to www.merlinpress.com or www.socialistregister.com and you can order it. And you can subscribe very cheaply to a E-edition as well. Founding out it's a rough middleman, says it all. Thank you again. Good to be here.