What is important about political parties as moral vehicles, if we think about this in a critical way, is representation: it’s the idea that they take the concerns of the political community seriously, which, through organisation in political parties, is able to then seek representation in parliament and have an input in the making of particular laws that shape public policies. What is really important about parties- in principle, in the ideal- is that through parties we become the authors of the laws to which we are subjected. We choose our representatives, and those representatives are instructed by us to try and represent our views, our principles, our commitments. I think of parties as communities of principle, and the role that parties have in political life as one of representing the principles of collectives, of individuals. Their demands on public life can become better articulated and better heard, because they are the demands of a collective, and not of isolated individuals.

In theory, the role that parties have, and the role that they should be promoting, is to try to mobilise citizens to take  their political commitments seriously; to enable them to channel these political commitments better; to formulate demands that then turn them into laws and public policies; and, on the basis of those programs and principles, to run for elections and seek access to political power. What happens in reality, in many liberal societies, is the opposite: parties are motivated by the desire to win elections no matter what. They stop trying to challenge the public. They stop becoming critical vehicles. They only take for granted the opinions and views of citizens as they are, and then try and take these opinions as they are and formulate programs or platforms that then respond to these views. The problem with that way of looking at things is that sometimes these views are crude. They’re not articulated enough. They are often the victim of media propaganda. They’re often the victim of particular ideologically perverted way of looking at reality. So, the risk is that when parties take those views for granted, they fail to play their critical role in channelling more principled ways of looking at the world, more principled commitments.

What is really important is to stop thinking about political parties as election winning machines, and to stop putting the emphasis just on the leaders, MPs, and the set of policies parties have; rather, think about parties as vehicles of empowerment of ordinary citizens, and also as places where activism can happen and one can be open, receive the demands of social movements and channel them more productively. If we try and think about how we can turn parties into a vehicle of empowerment, rather than one of disenfranchisement or one that consolidates the status quo and reproduces the injustices that shape the status quo, the most productive way to think about that relationship is to think of parties in continuity with social movements, articulating the demands of social movements in a way that is not bound up with the limitations of a particular electoral cycle nor with the limitations of a particular national sphere or arena.

When the relationship between parties and social movements work, it’s extremely productive, because it enables social movements to channel their demands much more efficiently, and to also channel them in a way that is continuous with social and moral critique. On the other hand, when it doesn’t work, the party elite or apparatus becomes an obstacle to activism, to social movements, and often tries to prevent them from being able to represent citizens more widely – often because of electoral or bureaucratic constraints in the party machinery. This is what paralyses liberal parties and liberal systems of representation from channeling the demands of social movements more effectively. What would empower them would be to open the channels of communication and make them much more fluid: to make the party not just for the elite or for the representation of opinions that are taken for granted, but to make them a vehicle of representation of members and ordinary citizens who feel that it’s only through participation in political parties that one can actually make a difference to law and institutions.

The difficulty of turning aspirations of social movements into political decisions, into public policies that actually deliver for these movements, is one with a complicated historical record. There are moments of heightened political activism; there are moments of inclusion of the demands of political activists in society, but then there’s resistance from institutions. Part of the problem is the combination between democracy and capitalism. Societies that are motivated by capitalist profit and motives, by a political economy that is oriented and shaped by capitalist incentives, will find it very difficult to accommodate the demands of minorities or particular disenfranchised groups without fundamentally changing its set-up, both legally and constitutionally, including when it comes to the organisation of political economy at a global level. The difficulties of receiving the demands of these groups at the national level after these heightened periods of political activism are obvious from the emergence of the Second International onwards. We see it repeated in different historical cycles: the difficulty of accommodating the demands of these groups while maintaining a capitalist set-up, in a system that organises society and the economy along capitalist lines – lines that are driven by profit, taxation and compromises between ruling elites and particularly privileged groups of people.

What enables the far right and the emergence of populism are the failures of liberal democracy. Populism is, in some ways, the desire for voice and agency when living in a world where technocrats make decisions and public policy is shaped by the ratings of market agencies. Populists respond to all that by trying to re-appropriate and take back control, returning to this myth of a common belonging, of shared community, and to a set of ideals that is ultimately regressive. The socialist critique and the far right critique of liberalism have some overlap. The difference is that one takes us back to a kind of premodern, pre-liberal world in which authority, family and traditional bonds make a comeback in all their exclusionary force, while socialism is a forward-looking theory that advances the critique of liberalism by trying to preserve the most progressive elements of liberal societies.