ON the evening of Friday, July 5, an email announced that the left-wing festival The World Transformed (TWT) would not be running at this year’s Labour Party conference. Instead, it would take place in spring 2025, with its location and format yet to be announced.
 
This marks, in a sense, the end of an era. Corbynism’s final institution has become unmoored from its founding purpose: to provide a counterweight of ideas and culture to the often stultifying Labour Party conference. Despite being a mainstay of the movement for nearly a decade, its end, or complete reformulation, seems to have occurred with very little fanfare or comment.
 
The festival has always been somewhat reluctant to explain itself, but it seems too significant a pillar of the Corbyn era to go unremarked and perhaps its examination can reveal some key lessons from Corbynism as a whole.
 
TWT launched in September 2016 as a fringe event at the Labour Party’s conference in Liverpool. It emerged in the context of the Brexit vote in June and Jeremy Corbyn’s victory in a second leadership election following the so-called Chicken Coup after the referendum.
 
Party conferences, by their nature, have their debauched side. Long-term Labour Party members tell tales of senior officials’ indiscretions and drug-fuelled after-drinks in hotel rooms with MPs in attendance.

TWT both rejected and embraced this tendency. The partying and socialising were not some sordid secret but front and centre. A day of learning about political economy and formulating future Corbyn-led government policies was followed by a Grime rave.
 
By 2017, with the defeat of Theresa May’s majority and the prospect of Labour coming into government seemingly just one step away, the hype was at a fever pitch. It was a counterculture at the heart of one of the British states ’ parties of government. To a certain type of socialist, culturally heterodox and somewhat libertine, distinct from the old left nexus around the trade unions, it was irresistible.

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I was a latecomer, not attending TWT until 2019 when I managed one of the venues in Brighton. By then I had already co-founded a local festival, Bristol Transformed. Despite not having attended TWT, from afar it was undeniably cool. Stories circulated among activists depicting TWT as a week-long bacchanal of intellectual discussions and late-night partying.
 
TWT itself had a galvanising effect. Every year, despite the synapses burnt out through a week of overindulgence, a powerful afterglow would descend on the movement. Some astute commentators warned against this, emphasising the need to keep analysis sharp and not lose clarity on political developments to the blur of collective joy pouring out of TWT each year.

On a practical level, being forced to socialise with someone you’ve been bickering with on Twitter for the last 12 months had a mitigating effect on certain excesses of anti-social behaviour common on the online left — a pressure valve of sorts. Annual conferences are a mainstay of political parties for a reason.
 
Large amounts of the movement’s resources were poured into TWT, costing over a quarter of a million pounds a year to organise and consuming many months of some of the most capable members of the Corbynite cadre. Yet, there was always a tension at its heart. The festival, which proclaimed to be part of the vanguard, wasn’t particularly democratic.
 
It was kept separate from Momentum so a power base could be maintained by its organisers irrespective of internal election results. This led to the paradoxical situation where the main mouthpiece for the cultural and intellectual aspect of the movement for grassroots democracy wasn’t actually all that accountable to the movement.
 
Unless you were already a hands-on volunteer or politically in the know, it wasn’t evident who made decisions. Even if you were a volunteer, it wasn’t clear how you could affect its direction.
 
Multiple people I knew were asked to plan sessions or even invited onto the steering group just to eventually be ignored or even ghosted with no understanding of why, or who’d made the decision, or recourse to challenge it.

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Sessions were run where attendees would formulate potential future policies for a Corbyn government, yet the idea that there might be some route by which those same attendees could be developed to play a meaningful role in shaping the festival itself was seemingly deemed unachievable.
 
This model was then exported across the country, starting with Bristol Transformed, followed by events in Derby, Teesside, Birmingham and dozens more. Removed from the genuinely national structures of Momentum and its local groups, claims to run a local group were doled out on a first-come, first-serve basis.
 
When Bristol Transformed contacted TWT, we received guidance on setting up bank accounts and getting insurance, and were told we could programme what we wanted. If it was deemed too “out there,” we wouldn’t receive advertising from the national entity. In the frenetic rush to action, we never considered the limitations of this approach.
 
However, this model of creating festivals without a real connection to any constituency or movement, based on activists’ whims who may not have a realistic assessment of what actually needs to be done, proved a fatal flaw.
 
Almost no provincial offshoots, other than Bristol Transformed (a city with a uniquely strong, if at times directionless, activist culture), managed to organise a festival more than once, stifled by lack of attendees, lack of money, lack of activists, or genuine fallings-out over political or personal differences.
 
All were symptomatic of a lack of a mandate, a lack of a real base, and an inability to read the conditions and know whether a local festival was needed. Yet the error was repeated again and again across the country and the replicating of TWT’s model without the buzz of a Corbyn-led Labour conference made the organisational failings painfully clear.
 
This constitutive failing was reflective of Corbynism as a whole. Andy Beckett’s recent book, The Searchers, succinctly tells the inspiring history of the Labour left via the history of Ken Livingstone, Tony Benn, Diane Abbott, Corbyn, and McDonnell.
 
Yet it also reveals the movement’s major flaw, which was its ability to take power in areas of London but never truly wrestling with the strategic implications of spreading those victories outside of the capital. TWT replicated the most problematic facets of this: a self-selected clique of London-based activists dictating to the movement what could and should be done.
 
This lack of direction, due to separation from the actual movement, was sustainable only when a unifying aim was clear: getting Jeremy Corbyn into Downing Street. We didn’t need anyone to lead the way and gain the movement’s buy-in because we all knew what our aims were.
 
This is the fundamental strategic lesson from Corbynism, as formulated by Gramsci in his prison notebooks, instructive here as he was a key theorist cited in TWT’s aims to win hegemony: “Since defeat in the struggle must always be envisaged, the preparation of one’s own successors is as important as what one does for victory.” This is what TWT and its spin-offs never considered: what happens if we lose and who can replace us?
 
Having attended TWT in 2021 and 2022, it felt like it had lost its way. I feel loath to point to any particular misstep — errors are inevitable when organising any large event, and in politics, these can be blown up by the rumour mill into grand political slights rather than oversights by overworked staff and volunteers.
 
But perhaps the best way to highlight the problem is phenomenologically: it was genuinely nice to be there and see your comrades, but you were somewhat fulfilling a social obligation. You were interested in what was going on but the prevailing sense was directionless. Arguments could be had, but with no chance of power, the stakes were low.
 
The reasons given for the lack of democracy were often “We’re just a company that organises a festival. It doesn’t need to be democratic.” Yet Gramsci again pre-empted this when he said the function of a party “can be studied with greater precision if one starts from the point of view that a newspaper too …  is a ‘party’ or ‘fraction of a party’ or ‘a function of a particular party.’”
 
His point broadly is that left-wing institutions should be judged on how they will fit into an overarching political project focused on building itself and its cadre of activists ready to take power.
 
Fundamentally, institutions need to be built with a view to how a future society will operate. That won’t involve unaccountable leaders with no mechanisms for removal, nor will it involve the polar opposite, where anyone who turns up can drastically change the organisation’s political co-ordinates and guiding principles based on whims or fads.
 
It will involve a belief that anyone can be developed into a leader but not that “everyone is a leader” as TWT once claimed. It won’t involve wilful intransigence, but working within a delineated zone of action, one that can be developed and changed through thoughtful, democratic deliberation as conditions evolve.
 

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With all this said we must also celebrate TWT’s successes. They correctly identified that to build a successful movement, we must be offering roses as well as bread.
 
We need spaces to develop ideas and strategies. A space to build the friendships and networks required to win. They also showed that this could be fun, hedonistic even. Something people wanted to be part of.
 
At its best, the key imperative of TWT and the festivals it inspired was that ordinary people have the capacity to understand the world and what’s required to transform it.
 
Most importantly, we must work towards building institutions which last. That means embedding them in the movement and communities they profess to serve. Ensuring their structures include meaningful accountability and capacity to adapt as the world around us changes. The world really does need to be transformed and as a movement, we have to rise to the challenge.