On Heroes

I have political heroes. Nye Bevan, who built the NHS and understood that socialism meant using political power to transform people’s material conditions. Michael Foot, whose politics were driven by a strong sense of morality that refused to bend to political expediency. Jim Griffiths, who came from the coalfields and spent decades fighting for Welsh workers and building the welfare state alongside Bevan. Phil Piratin, the Communist who won Mile End in 1945 because he’d spent years organising tenants and fighting fascists in the streets of the East End.

These people inspire me. Their speeches and writings shaped how I think about politics. When I’m tired or demoralised, I read Bevan’s In Place of Fear or watch old footage of Griffiths speaking, and I remember why this matters. Heroes drive involvement and participation - they show us what’s possible, they articulate the politics we’re struggling to express, they give us examples to follow.

So I’m not going to pretend heroes don’t matter, or that we should purge inspiration from politics, or that being moved by great speeches and courageous stands is somehow ideologically suspect. Heroes matter. The problem is what happens when hero-worship replaces movement-building, when admiration curdles into dependence, when we start believing that the right leader can deliver socialism from above.

When I found out who was involved in Your Party, on paper it looked like it was exactly what we needed. Corbyn and Sultana leading a new left-wing party outside Labour - finally, a vehicle for socialist politics free from the careerists and compromisers. But its failure to launch has demonstrated something important to me: hero worship isn’t good for us.

Sultana announced it publicly in July without warning Corbyn or the other MPs, breaking agreed secrecy. Then in September, she sent out an unauthorised email opening paid membership, which Corbyn had to publicly disavow and relaunch himself days later - without mentioning her. Corbyn admitted they “haven’t covered ourselves in glory.” The party’s now registered with Corbyn as leader and Sultana apparently sidelined. A failure to launch in every sense - not just delayed, but revealing a movement with no democratic structures, no collective control, just competing personalities and unilateral decisions.

We pinned our hopes on the announcement, on the big names, on the promise of a new vehicle for socialist politics. And what were we left with? Disappointment, recrimination, personality conflicts, and the same structural weaknesses that made us dependent on those announcements in the first place.

The pattern repeats because we haven’t learned the lesson: movements built around heroes collapse when heroes fail. And heroes always fail.

The Problem With Saviours

When we organise politics around individuals rather than movements, we create a toxic dynamic where their identity becomes inseparable from our success or failure. Politics gets reduced to stories of great people doing great things, or great people being betrayed, or great people losing to the forces of darkness.

This is how you get the endless re-litigation of 2019. Was it Brexit? Was it antisemitism? Was it Corbyn himself? Was it the media? Was it the Parliamentary Labour Party? These debates matter for learning lessons, but they’ve become something else: a story about a hero who was undermined, a tragic narrative that explains defeat without requiring us to ask harder questions about power.

The reality is messier and less satisfying: Corbyn was a flawed politician leading a movement that wasn’t strong enough to overcome the structural forces aligned against it. That’s not a moral judgment - all politicians are flawed, all movements have weaknesses. But when you’ve built everything around a hero, acknowledging those flaws feels like betrayal. The movement becomes invested in defending the individual rather than learning from failure.

Individualism as Capitalist Ideology

Here’s the thing we don’t talk about enough: hero-worship isn’t just a tactical mistake, it’s a capitalist mode of thinking that’s infected left politics. We live in a society that relentlessly promotes individualism - the idea that success comes from exceptional individuals, that history is made by great men (and it’s usually men), that social change happens when the right leader appears. Of course we gravitate toward saviours and strongmen. Of course we look for someone to fix things from above. That’s what capitalism trains us to do.

The far right has mastered this logic. Trump, Farage, Orbán - they present themselves as strongmen who will save disempowered people from malevolent elites. The narrative is always the same: you are powerless, they are strong, follow them and they will deliver you. It’s feudalism with better marketing.

And I’ve looked at our failures - 2019, the collapse of the Corbyn project, the endless defeats - and watched the rise of these strongmen, and I couldn’t help but feel like we needed one ourselves. Someone who could fight back with the same force, the same certainty, the same ability to cut through the noise and just win. I infected myself with it, like a virus. The logic of the strongman is contagious - you watch it work for them and think, why can’t we have that? Why can’t we have someone who just breaks through?

But that’s the trap. That’s exactly how capitalist ideology reproduces itself - by making us think the solution to their strongmen is our strongman, that the answer to their hierarchy is our hierarchy, that we can fight individualism with better individuals. This is ideology in the proper Marxist sense: it reflects the material relations of capitalist society, where competition and hierarchy are structural features, where workers are atomised, where collective action is constantly undermined.

The left should know better. Socialism isn’t about finding the right leader to implement the right policies from above. It’s about building collective power, about ordinary people taking control of the institutions that govern their lives. “The emancipation of the working classes must be conquered by the working classes themselves” - Marx wrote that in 1864, and we still haven’t learned the lesson.

What Grassroots Actually Means

When I say we need grassroots movements, I don’t mean the kind of performative community organising that amounts to a few canvassing sessions before each election. I mean building durable structures of popular power that exist independently of electoral cycles and political leaders.

Look at what the Greens have actually achieved at the local level - not through charismatic leadership but through years of unglamorous council work, through building local networks, through demonstrating that different policies are possible. That’s not sexy. It doesn’t make for inspiring social media content. But it’s what actually builds power.

Or look at the union organising wave we’ve seen over the last few years: rail workers, nurses, barristers, university staff. These victories didn’t come from political leaders - they came from workers collectively withdrawing their labour, from building strike funds and picket lines, from solidarity. That’s the kind of power that can’t be voted away or undermined by a hostile media.

This is what separates a movement from a fan club. A movement can survive the loss of any individual leader because power is distributed, because structures exist beyond personalities, because the collective is stronger than any individual. When your politics are built around a hero, losing that hero means losing everything.

Leaders Without Heroes

None of this means leaders don’t matter. Of course they do. Someone has to speak in Parliament, someone has to front the campaign, someone has to negotiate. The question is what role leaders play and where their power comes from.

Noah Ablett understood this better than most. Writing in The Miners’ Next Step in 1912, he laid out the fundamental contradiction of leadership under the old model. Leaders, he argued, inevitably accumulate power - power of initiative, of responsibility, of decision-making. And:

The possession of power inevitably leads to corruption. All leaders become corrupt, in spite of their own good intentions. No man was ever good enough, brave enough, or strong enough, to have such power at his disposal.

This wasn’t about individual moral failings. It was structural. Leaders become dependent on maintaining their position, which means keeping the men in order to retain the respect of the employers and “the public.” They examine every new proposal and ask first how it will affect their position and power. They prevent solidarity - real solidarity, which Ablett defined as:

Unity and loyalty, not to an individual, or the policy of an individual, but to an interest and a policy which is understood and worked by all.

The South Wales miners during the 1910 Cambrian dispute tried to establish a new principle: leaders could negotiate, but the final decision rested with the membership through ballot vote. It was incomplete - as Ablett wrote:

This, while representing an advance, is by no means a satisfactory solution. It places the men in the position of a crowd at a football match. The players, selected by the crowd have to outmanœuvre their opponents, while the crowd either cheer or criticize their efforts. But of real control, save in the matter of selecting the players, the crowd have none.

But it pointed toward something crucial: taking the power of initiative, the sense of responsibility, the self respect which comes from expressed manhood away from consolidation in leaders and returning it to the membership.

This is what good leadership looks like: leaders who are accountable to movements, not the other way around. Their strength comes from organised power behind them, not from their personal qualities. They’re skilled communicators and negotiators, but they’re also replaceable - not because they’re unimportant, but because no individual should be essential to collective struggle. The movement must be capable of understanding and working policy collectively, not dependent on leaders to think for them.

When Corbyn was elected Labour leader in 2015, there was a moment where this could have happened. Momentum was formed, membership surged, there was energy for building something new. But instead of creating structures of democratic power within the party and beyond it, instead of organising communities and workplaces, we got a defensive crouch around the leader. The movement became about protecting Corbyn rather than building power.

I understand why. The attacks were relentless, the sabotage was real, the media was hostile. But responding to those attacks by circling the wagons around an individual was exactly the wrong move. I fell guilty of it myself. I spent more time arguing with people about whether Corbyn was a good guy or not than trying to sell our vision. Hours of my life defending his personal character, his record, his intentions - as if winning that argument mattered, as if convincing someone he wasn’t an antisemite or a terrorist sympathiser would somehow build socialism. It was a complete waste of energy that should have gone into organising, into building power, into making the vision real rather than defending the person.

And it meant that when Corbyn fell - and he was always going to fall eventually, because all leaders do - the movement fell with him.

What Happens Next

I’m not sure what the future of Your Party will look like. Maybe it’ll come together. Maybe it won’t. But whatever happens, the same old patterns are emerging: the focus on personalities, the investment in individual leaders, the search for someone to deliver socialism from above.

But here’s what’s different this time. The Labour Party is no longer a left-wing party. It was birthed and brought up by our forefathers and foremothers - trade unionists, socialists, working people who built it as their party, their vehicle for political power. And they took it. The careerists, the New Labour technocrats, the ones who saw the party as a career ladder rather than a vehicle for socialist politics - they took what our predecessors built and destroyed it. Gutted it of its democratic structures, severed its ties to the unions, turned it into a machine for managing capitalism rather than challenging it.

We can’t mourn it because there’s nothing left to mourn - it’s gone, decisively, probably irreversibly. And that means we no longer have to put up with these fucking dredges. The opportunists, the ones who were always one bad poll away from abandoning principles, the ones who spent the Corbyn years actively sabotaging their own party rather than fighting the Tories. As it stands, without fundamental change, the Labour Party will continue to be run by these dredges. And there’s something genuinely liberating about no longer having to support them, no longer having to defend their compromises, no longer having to pretend that entryism or internal reform or “one more push” will somehow reclaim a party that doesn’t want to be reclaimed.

If this moment is going to be different, we need to be ruthlessly honest about what actually builds power. The end goal has to be Parliamentary success - that’s where laws get made, where budgets get set, where the state’s power can be wielded. But to get there, we must do what is known to work.

The Labour Party wasn’t born in Westminster. It was birthed in trade union halls, in working men’s clubs, in the communities of the people it represented. Keir Hardie didn’t just give speeches - he spent years leading miners’ strikes, building trade union branches, travelling the country holding meetings with workers and socialists, forging a coalition that eventually formed the Labour Representation Committee in 1900. When local Labour parties began emerging around 1910, they were put on formal footing in 1918, empowered to select candidates and run campaigns independently. Money was raised through desperate measures - workers pawning watches, household goods, even wedding rings. Electoral machinery was improvised on the spot by people who had no resources except their collective determination.

This is what it looked like: unions pooling resources to elect working-class MPs, local Labour clubs that were social centres as much as political organisations, being embedded in the fabric of working-class life. Yes, it had charismatic leaders - Keir Hardie, Nye Bevan, and others who could inspire and articulate. But it won because it was rooted in communities, because it represented organised workers who had built their own power first, because those leaders were accountable to movements rather than the movements being dependent on them.

We need to do that again. Not the abstract version, but the concrete one. Build trade union branches workplace by workplace. Establish local organisations that meet regularly, that select candidates, that hold leaders accountable. Raise money from members, not corporate donors. Create social spaces where working people gather, where politics isn’t something done to them but something they do. Be willing to criticise leaders when they’re wrong, to hold them accountable, to replace them if necessary. Become embedded in communities, not as outsiders doing politics to people, but as part of the fabric of working-class life - the way Hardie did, the way Piratin did in the East End, the way every successful socialist movement has done.

Most importantly, it means rejecting the narratives of heroes and victims. We’re not powerless people waiting for a saviour. We’re not victims of vast conspiracies. We’re workers and tenants and patients and students - people with the collective power to transform society, if we organise ourselves properly.

The question isn’t whether Corbyn and Sultana’s new party will succeed. The question is whether we can build movements strong enough that it doesn’t matter. Whether we can create structures of popular power that survive individual leaders, that can withstand attacks and setbacks, that keep building toward socialism regardless of who’s in charge.

I don’t know if we can. But I know we won’t succeed by making the same mistakes again. We won’t win by finding the right hero. We’ll win by making heroes unnecessary.