Karl Marx was a man of considerable foresight, but when he adapted that quote from Hegel that all great world-historic facts and personages appear twice: the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce, not even he could have imagined that Jeremy Corbyn would apply the farcical conventions of pantomime to the job of setting up a new party.

Jeremy is the unworldly innocent dealing with situations he struggles to make sense of; Zarah Sultana is the wicked stepmother; the various careerists making decisions are a sort of dark, scary forest; the remaining MPs are put upon sidekicks and the membership have the job of booing and cheering the antics of the people on stage.

In his pamphlet The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte Marx unfavourably contrasts Napoléon Louis Bonaparte with his more famous uncle. The nephew is mainly remembered because Marx took the piss out of him so brilliantly, whereas his uncle is famous for getting millions of people killed and replacing a revolutionary dictatorship with a monarchy.

For the Bonaparte family it took two men and a generation to get from tragedy to farce. Corbyn managed to achieve it in a matter of months. The breathless accounts of 800 000 people expressing an interest have translated into a paid membership of 21 000 and not one single thing has gone right with Your Party. Like light and matter accelerating as they are sucked into a black hole, the closer it got to conference the more disastrous things became.

There was the issue of Sultana and the money; various MPs storming off; conference delegates having to get their arses to Liverpool at short notice and find somewhere to sleep; a decision making process that seems to owe a lot to the East German Communist Party and, the absolute showstopper, an eve of conference decision to expel members of the Socialist Workers Party even though it had been organising many of the local meetings.  

My own view is that the smaller left groups don’t have the personnel or the ability to manipulate an organisation of 21 000 people, but the SWP are incapable of acting in good faith in any project they are involved in. However, it was distinctly shabby to expel them on the evening before the conference. A more serious approach would have been either to not admit them in the first place or, acknowledge how they operate and set out rules to prevent them taking over branches and structures.

Some of that 60% of members who today voted to permit members of other parties to join without having rules in place may soon conclude that they should have given the issue a bit more thought.

The younger Bonaparte gave his name to the Marxist idea of Bonapartism. He was a figurehead who hovered above the contending class factions. Corbyn didn’t so much hover as try to preside over the competing Your Party factions from his allotment shed, never once taking a clear public position beyond his customary vicar platitudes. He does not seem to have a malicious molecule in his body, but this reluctance to come out fighting makes him a useless leader. That said, the collective leadership agreed by Your Party is a bold experiment for an outfit with parliamentary ambitions.

It looks like the Your Party conference is going to limp on to some sort of just about OK conclusion. That is irrelevant. Recent weeks have been an absolute embarrassment to the left. Every single stereotype about factionalism, ineptitude, egos and scheming have been confirmed to anyone who has been following Carry On Up Your Party. It will have some sort of existence for the next couple of years, but it has forfeited the right to be taken seriously.

Oh yes, it has!!!

Postscript

The conference closed with the audience singing Imagine, John Lennon’s hippy bollocks, liberal dirge which is the closest thing we have to an explanation of Corbyn’s theoretical underpinnings. Worse than the fact that it’s an atrocious song, it says something about the age profile of the audience and the cultural moment they are stuck in. It’s irrelevant and meaningless to anyone under the age of sixty. It is a small thing, but one that tells us Your Party is going nowhere.