My understanding now is that Roger Hallam's involvement in Your Party isn't so straightforward nor so bounded. It sounds like the synthesis he's found with James Schneidder is for the 10 x 1000 regional assemblies to engage in constitutional design—to be decided/approved by Thursday 4th. (The only alternative founding process I've heard published is Max Shanly's.)

For these regional assemblies, he's started at the end point, then worked backwards to clarify 4 stages of role recruiting and setup. Stage 4: training thousands of regional assembly 'guides'; Stage 3: training 400 enablers to train those guides; Stage 2: recruiting 25 'multipliers'; who can practically implement the outputs of Stage 1: programme design, led by a few volunteers with affiliations to Assemble / Humanity Project / the XR-o-sphere (though they're still in need of people). This is a similar approach to Hallam's London rebellion organising.

But the regional assemblies are, for him, just part of a bigger picture, longer-term programme, which is orthogonal—only incidental—to the party's foundation process, static constitution or procedural standing orders. Hallam's "engine” approach is to follow the regional assemblies with spin-off local assemblies leading to community campaigns, that raise cash, allowing for the hiring of local campaigners and people to continue to build capacity, more assemblies, more campaigning and so on.

You could read this as the Hallam Caucus's national organising programme, the same kind of driving force which animated XR until his lot left, contributing to its loss of orientation and its local branches' stultification. The Labour Party's 1997+ engine was militant constituency-triangulating electioneering, and Constituency Labour Party cadre was essentially its old guard of once-officers and did-election. Hallam's idea of cadre is the trained-up cohorts of facilitators from this time round—training is due to begin this or next week.

I get the sense these local assemblies are going to be organised with or without Your Party's blessings, and Hallam wants this cadre to retain independence from formal party structures, so the question for Your Party is to what degree the Hallam Caucus is integrated into the party members' shared vision for local organising, branch operations and member activity.

What's notably absent from all this is the substance of a *political strategy.* There's a lot of discussion around process and form and little critical content. I think it's interesting that the self-appointed bigwigs have found affinity with the Hallam Caucus at the operational level of 'how'—because it is a ready-staffed organising programme that "gets conference done," reserving questions of political strategy and content to the membership at a local level, and to bigwigs at the national level, without the demand of any vertical synthesis within the party, or the identification of objective political struggles—whether between classes or otherwise.

Developing a national organising programme for the democratic socialist left

I think this leaves an open door for the 'democratic socialist left' to align and build its own coherent national organising programme(s), built off of its own political critiques — and to develop the same degree of personal, practical and political persuasion as Hallam's. You might even find useful synthesis emerges.

Elements exist in articles like Joe Todd's and, I'm sure, many others, but that's not good enough for right here right now. So working together to develop some political leadership around an alternative (or complementary) national organising programme could be the focus of coalesced left groups. For example, the Democratic Socialists Caucus could come up with an organising plan to implement via its members at a local branch level, and campaign for it at national party elections for national implementation in a future cycle.

Time for mass political education?

In the shorter term, I'm entertaining the thought that, though it feel the form of this early founding process is firming up, democratic socialists could have an impact on the content and bent of popular deliberations around the constitution, initial political programme, and the character of early campaigning interventions by members, by working out a well-defined mass political education programme around a few key trunks:

• ✅ Constitutional education. Popularisation of mass democratic socialist party constitutional elements. This was begun with Max Shanly's initial work and is now being led on by his DemSoc/Party Republic caucuses.
• 🔲 Liberatory socialist political education. Popularising liberatory socialist political frames that currently don't have common sense purchase, that we want to bring into the mainstream of party and public deliberative life: particularly around class exploitation and oppression.
  • in relation to class material issues (e.g. housing, health, care, cost of living, wages, energy)
  • in relation to 'signifier' debates (e.g. migration, trans rights, womens' and childrens' safety)
  • leading to new, alternative approaches to political challenge than those promoted by the far right and reacted to by the loose left. E.g. Universalism, internationalism, abolitionism, de-commodification, municipalisation, just transition, etc. etc.
• 🔲 Class power organising training. Popularising approaches to building class power for these almost 1,000,000 Your Party members so we don't end up in another Labour Party lowest-common-denominator passive, instrumentalised membership situation — and to enable a collective development of a new national organising programme.
• ✅ Democratic facilitation training. Assemble's lot are leading on these facilitation trainings and I feel somewhat confident that wing of the party will popularise deliberative assembly practices. That said there is probably room in a democratic socialist programme to cover comradely conduct.

Basically all this work can and, for efficacy's sake should, be done between aligned left groups.