IN OCTOBER, I traveled as part of an eight-person DSA delegation to The World Transformed (TWT), a socialist conference held in Manchester, England, and attended by about 3,000 people, mostly from across England and Scotland but with dozens of guests from the rest of the world.
TWT started in 2016 as a fringe festival held alongside the annual Labour Party conference, around the time Jeremy Corbyn took over leadership. This year, the conference broke away from Labour and acted as an independent political space where people across social movement organizations and factions within the new socialist Your Party compared notes.
“Your Party” was announced in July 2025 to wild enthusiasm among many alienated by the regressive direction of the Labour Party charted by the increasingly authoritarian neoliberal leader Keir Starmer. To fight the ascendent right-wing Reform party of Nigel Farage — which is capitalizing on the faltering of Labour and the Tories — the activists in attendance at TWT recognized the need to build stronger unions and social ties, and for a socialist political movement to lead such efforts.
“Your Party” likely won’t be the final name of the new party but is rather a placeholder while high-profile leaders, the MPs Corbyn and Zarah Sultana, and masses of activist proto-members wrangle over the construction of a truly socialist political organization. There have been bumps along the way, taking the form of conflicts between Sultana and Corbyn over the process for establishing party membership and determining the direction of the party. The nascent party has also received criticism from supporters about inadequate democracy within the organization.
At TWT I saw part of the grassroots efforts to make Your Party a democratic effort firsthand. Seven factions met privately and brought to the TWT assembly a proposal for a democratic party-building process. One night DSA members met up for beers with the Democratic Socialist faction of the budding party, and I got to know a couple of the DSYP leaders. These comrades kept us updated on side meetings during the conference, where they brought together representatives of these different factions to agree on shared demands. When the coalition presented their proposal at the third and final assembly of the conference, the church packed with leftists responded with applause to points of unity, which include a strong commitment to anti-imperialism, well-funded local branches with access to membership data, and a base-building orientation. The ad hoc coalition pulled off an impressive effort to translate collective concerns into demands, ratify them with a large group of people, and set the tone for moving forward.
The daily assemblies themselves were well organized, with a mix of pre-submitted statements, guest speakers from movement organizations and contributions from the floor. The affairs were all facilitated extremely well and responded to clearly defined questions — a good model of conjunctural analysis.
Panels and workshops at the conference were grounded in real-world socialist practice and vision. One panel on strikes in the United Kingdom featured local union leaders who discussed the reforms and deep organizing that have enabled their unions to strike transit systems, hospitals, universities, and public services with discipline and bigger-picture goals in mind. For example, the primary union of workers in the London metro system, the RMT, is building up its industrial union strength by supporting the demands of the mostly immigrant cleaning staff for higher wages, at the same time using increasingly creative rolling strike tactics to keep management on the back foot. Meanwhile, sanitation workers in Birmingham have been on strike for eight months and are organizing the temp scabs to stop crossing picket lines.
I attended a few sessions focused on international solidarity, including a discussion of the 80th anniversary of the 5th Pan African Congress, held in Manchester in 1945; a session on the mechanics of US imperialism; and a workshop on building Apartheid Free Communities.
At the Apartheid Free Communities workshop I learned that several cities in England have quite advanced campaigns, very similar to our Apartheid Free DC campaign here. One practice organizers are using in Bristol and Sheffield is door-to-door canvassing, which builds their ranks and popular awareness while also giving more weight to their asks of local businesses to sign the pledge to boycott Israeli products. Now I’ve got our campaign in DC talking about trying this tactic.
We experienced interest in DSA from conference goers, both as a potential organizational model for Your Party, and generally in its growth and successes. The conference included a DSA panel on which five of our delegates spoke.
There were also great parties with amazing anti-colonial music, including a Fela Kuti cover band and a DJ playing rare vinyl mixes from Palestine and the broader West Asian and North African regions (check out Checkpoint 303). I was psyched to party late without feeling tired due to the time zone weirdness.
At the closing party, I heard from a conference videographer who is also a Green Party activist from the South of England. This comrade was not sold on Your Party given the recent troubles brought on by its celebrity leaders. It’s interesting to see how the political situation in the UK is shifting what’s possible towards an actual multi-party parliamentary system, arising from the decline of the brittle status quo.
My biggest takeaway was a sense of commonality in how our socialist organizations are relearning to build mass people’s movements through unions, international alliances, and cultural production. For instance, while standing in a bathroom line, I learned that British socialists have been successfully drowning out the abusive chants of right-wing racists outside hotels housing refugees using speakers with loud pop music. These types of exchanges of basic organizing practice are invaluable. On the electoral side, I think we can learn from the sense of possibility the new party has created in the UK. Midwifing 21st century socialism into robust life requires many factions to believe in working together, and I saw some promising headway in Manchester that I hope can inspire us here.
