Category Archives: Momentum

Momentum

A false narrative

The current Momentum crisis has nothing to do with age, Trotsky or even the voting method to be used at conference, says Carla Roberts of Labour Party Marxists. It is about who controls Momentum and for what political ends

You have got to hand it to Jon Lansman: he seems to have managed in record time to spread a totally fabricated ‘narrative’ about Momentum. Ever since comrade Lansman – the sole director of the company, Jeremy for Labour Ltd, which controls the database and the income of Momentum – lost the vote on the organisation’s national committee on December 3 he has been a busy getting the word out that, in fact, Tom Watson and the bourgeois media had it right all along: Momentum is riddled with Trotskyists and something needs to be done about it.

Of course, when Labour deputy leader Watson first published his ill-researched dossier on “proof of Trotskyist Labour infiltration” back in August, Lansman was quick to hit back: “That isn’t what Momentum meetings are like. The vast majority of people are entirely new to politics. In some areas, yes, you have some returners, but most of the returners aren’t Trots. This is not an entryist operation in any way.”1)www.newstatesman.com/politics/uk/2016/05/jon-lansman-interview-theres-no-leader-who-would-find-it-easier-win-jeremy

Well, either he was lying then or he is lying now.

How scary is the AWL?

In any case, in what is clearly a coordinated attack against the left in Momentum, Lansman has organised various ‘leftwing’ journalists and Labour apparatchiks to get out there into the mainstream media and warn the good people of Britain of the horrid “Trotskyist sectarians” and “saboteurs” who are organising a “takeover bid of Momentum”, as Owen Jones puts it in his particularly distasteful piece in The Guardian. The same Owen Jones, of course, who could not bring himself to support Jeremy Corbyn before and during this year’s attempt to remove him sparked by the Parliamentary Labour Party right wing.

In reality, there is only one side in Momentum that is organising any kind of coup or split. Jon Lansman and his allies are preparing the ground to overturn the decision of the national committee by undermining the NC’s legitimacy. In fact, they want to do away with this annoying body altogether.

“The sectarians” here are supposedly skilfully led by the few dozen members of the Alliance for Workers’ Liberty. As readers will know, we have little time for the AWL’s soft stance on imperialism or its attempt to paint any criticism of Zionism as anti-Semitic. In this respect its support for Lansman’s removal of Jackie Walker as vice-chair of Momentum has done much to help embolden his position.

But the AWL generally stands with the left majority in arguing for democracy in Momentum, while the pro-Lansman minority argues for a constitutional set-up that amounts to a one-man dictatorship. Despite its social imperialism, we defend the AWL against the witch-hunt in Momentum and the Labour Party.

And to claim that it is responsible for the fact that the NC majority voted on December 3 in favour of a delegate conference rather than online plebiscites (rather misleadingly summed up as ‘one member, one vote’ – Omov) is just absolute nonsense. The overestimation of the AWL’s influence stems largely from the fact that leading member Jill Mountford managed to get onto the steering committee, which was elected at the first meeting of the NC early last year (attendance at which was by invitation only). Its real influence can be gauged from the fact that the AWL’s November 26 ‘Stop the Purge’ conference attracted a mere 70 people.

But Owen Jones and his ilk would have us believe that the ‘old Trots’ are now a serious threat to Momentum. Apparently, there is an inter-generational war going on in Momentum, with most of the ‘old’ people firmly on the side of the evil Trotskyists. Jones, of course, takes the side of “their opponents”, who are “younger, idealistic, campaign-oriented and pluralistic, lacking Machiavellian strategic ability – all of which the sectarians exploit”.

Or, as the young(ish) Laura Murray – the oh-so-hip daughter of well-known Stalin admirer Andrew Murray – puts it, “When I arrived [at the NC] what I witnessed was horrible. The generational divide was starkly visible for all to see. In the seats in the horseshoe-shape around the room were the pro-Omov delegates – more likely to be younger, in the Labour Party and close to Momentum staff and Jon Lansman. In the seats in the centre of the room were the anti-Omov delegates – more likely to be older, Trotskyist, seasoned in far-left factions, not in the Labour Party. It was like a doughnut of desire for change, with a sticky centre of angry socialist stalwarts.”

A doughnut of desire … with a big brown filling of utter horseshit.

A number of ‘young’ NC delegates have, by the way, since criticised this attempt to spin real political divisions into a question of age (and have stated that they did, in fact, vote against systematic online plebiscites). Considering “the recent coverage”, one could be “forgiven for thinking the divide was between a Trotskyist old guard, who can’t countenance new ways of working, and hip youngsters who are filled with idealism and better at memes”, as Red Labour delegate Rida Vaquas puts it in her amusing article in the New Statesman.

Owen and Murray might look under 30 years of age – he, is, in fact, 32, and she is 27 – but they undoubtedly have far, far more political experience than most Momentum members, young or old. These members, let us remember, had mandated all their regional representatives at the NC to vote in favour of a delegate structure at the forthcoming Momentum conference – and against Omov. Those members active in Momentum branches have no interest in Momentum being controlled by one person. They want democracy and transparency. Unfortunately, however, many of them feel so sidelined and powerless that they mistakenly believe that Omov would give them at least some power. This is the alienated layer that Lansman is appealing to. But most of those actually running the branches, organising stalls and demonstrations, etc, know what is happening and have backed a delegate conference precisely for that reason.

It was mainly those delegates who had won the hastily called elections for supporters of “liberation groups”, together with those from Labour organisations personally invited by Lansman, who ensured that his view was not utterly trashed, but was supported by almost half the meeting.

But Jones, Murray and Lansman will not let this rather inconvenient fact get in the way of a good story. Or even their own experience – they should know better. Owen Jones likes to trace his family’s radical roots back to a “gunrunner for Garibaldi”, through to a “Russian Revolution-­inspired” train driver who took part in the 1926 General Strike, a grandfather who joined the Communist Party in the 1930s, and a great-­uncle in the Independent Labour Party. He himself was literally a child of the Militant Tendency in the Labour Party, where his parents met in the 1960s. Unfortunately, he is now busily in the process of betraying that heritage.

Keeping up with the Murrays

Murray, on the other hand, can look back at a very active, proud Stalinist family history. The story goes that, back in 1983, her parents wheeled their baby, Laura’s sister Jessica, into the 38th Congress of the ‘official’ CPGB and had her pram searched by Eurocommunist stewards – who found copies of Straight Left’s banned publication Congress Truth tucked away underneath her. Talk about a proper faction fight! Seamus Milne was business editor of Straight Left at the time and remains a close family friend of the Murrays.

But we are supposed to believe that the now almost grown-up Laura (did we mention that she’s really young?), who is an official advisor to shadow cabinet member Grahame Morris MP, had no idea that things might get a bit heated at the national committee. Come off it.

Her faux naive style has been further discredited by the fact that her dad, Unite’s chief of staff Andrew Murray, has just left the Morning Star’s Communist Party of Britain in order to join the Labour Party. Not that he is accused of being a communist ‘entryist’ by the right, of course – after all, there is talk of him being wheeled in to help sort out Momentum. In the run-up to Corbyn’s re-election last summer, Murray was among those who went along to a summit at a Unite training centre,2)www.politicshome.com/news/uk/political-parties/labour-party/news/79087/excl-tom-watson-tells-plotters-trying-oust-him which was also attended by Corbyn, John McDonnell, Len McCluskey, Diane Abbott, Seamus Milne and Jon Lansman. Apparently, it discussed, among other things, the possibility of Murray eventually replacing the hated Iain McNicol as Labour Party general secretary.3)www.spectator.co.uk/2016/09/from-left-to-left-a-whos-who-of-corbyns-comrades

Murray does not even have to bend his politics very much. Yes, he will have to cut back on his well-known admiration for a certain 20th century Georgian, but in terms of its political outlook, the CPB is no more revolutionary than even the Labour Party under Ed Miliband was. In the run-up to the 2015 general election, The Daily Telegraph published extracts from both parties’ programmes and asked its readers: “Can you tell them apart?” Slightly exaggerated, you might think. But it does underline the CPB’s lack of coherent strategy in terms of actually trying to transform the Labour Party (rather than just supporting it).4)http://weeklyworker.co.uk/worker/1056/no-strategy-towards-labour/ And, of course, Andrew Murray is among the large number of CPB members to have deserted it in favour of Labour since Corbyn’s election as leader.

Just like Paul Mason, Murray senior clearly feels that the current situation in Momentum is reason enough to jump on board. Not despite the struggles within the organisation, as Mason dishonestly claims, but precisely because of them – in order to come down heavily and with some authority on the side of Jon Lansman.

Paul Mason

Paul Mason, a member of the semi-orthodox Trotskyist organisation, Workers Power, for close to 20 years,5)http://labourpartymarxists.org.uk/paul-masons-consensus-democracy-same-old-ephemeral-new is now acting as turncoat par excellence. He has reinvented himself as a critic of Corbyn from the right, arguing in favour of keeping Trident, investing in nuclear power and increasing the arms budget.

On the BBC’s Daily Politics show on December 8, he said that Laura Murray was “broadly right” to describe Trotskyist groups as being “destructive” in Momentum, though some might question his expertise after he admitted that he had, in fact, “never been to a Momentum meeting”. Still, he is absolutely certain that “we need to be a network – open, broad, diverse”; and that “having an app on your cellphone” is really useful in terms of members making decisions. Definitely young at heart, this one. He even uses the American term for, you know, a mobile phone.

This magical app “would avoid re-enactment groups from the 1970s taking over, because that’s their key skill. There are not just Trotskyists though: they are people who are obsessed with anti-Zionism.” And, would you believe, “Some of them are rampant supporters of Vladimir Putin.”

Mason then went on to land his (and Lansman’s) killer punch. He basically demands that all those expelled or even suspended from the Labour Party should also be given the boot by Momentum:

Momentum has to be ready to become an affiliated society of Labour. That means everybody in it has to be in the Labour Party and everybody has to conform to the rules. And if somebody breaks Labour rules, as Jackie Watson [he meant Walker] is deemed to have done and who has been suspended from the party, then she can’t be …

At this point, he was interrupted by presenter Andrew Neil, but I suspect he was going to say ‘in Momentum’. He did state, for example:

If Jill Mountford is not allowed into the Labour Party – and I can’t see her being allowed in the short order in the Labour Party – and she remains an expelled member of the party and remains in Momentum, I will not remain in Momentum and nor will thousands of us. This will be sorted in the direction of party loyalty, discipline and a moving on very quickly.

You could be forgiven for thinking from especially this last sentence that Mason knows more than the average Momentum member (even those who do attend meetings) what Lansman is planning next. As it happens, he was also at the gathering with Corbyn and Lansman I referred to earlier, along with Andrew Murray. Surely, an official job in the Labour machine is the next step in Mason’s career.

Aside from implying that Momentum should not even differentiate between those expelled and suspended from Labour, he is also wrong to state that all members of a Labour-affiliated society have to be individual members of the party. This is clearly not the case: members of such societies are entitled to become “affiliated members” of Labour, who enjoy fewer rights than full members.6)“Affiliation means that the socialist societies – like a number of British trade unions – pay an affiliation fee to the Labour Party, and the affiliates’ members become affiliated members of the Labour Party (a different status from full member), unless they specifically choose otherwise. In return the societies receive a formal role in Labour decision-making, and the affiliated members can take part in all-member ballots in certain circumstances. For example, they can participate in the election of Labour Party leaders and deputy leaders, have delegates and votes at Annual Conference”: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socialist_society_(Labour_Party)

As an aside, Mason slipped up rather badly when trying to correct the other participant in the Daily politics discussion, Labour First honcho Luke Akehurst, who referred to “Workers Power, which Paul was a member of”. Mason replied, “No, no – that is now Red Labour.”

Mason’s ex-comrades in WP are now organising under the banner, Red Flag. Red Labour, on the other hand, is the soft-left online outfit of Momentum’s former social media manager, Ben Sellers.

Ben Sellers

Interestingly, Sellers is one of the few people close to Lansman who has now come out publicly against him. In a much-read and commented-on post on Facebook, he writes:

Could the real Jon Lansman please stand up? … Is it the Jon Lansman who only wants a “pluralistic”, democratic, grassroots organisation, facilitated by a new era of digital democracy? Or the Jon Lansman who told me to my face just a year ago that Momentum groups should be banned from having social media accounts and encouraged a completely unaccountable ‘helper’ to take over regional Facebook pages from local Momentum activists?

Lansman and Sellers fell out some time ago, it seems, and he continues;

I didn’t want to have to do this, and I think 12 months plus of silence on the issue is a sign of that, but Jon continues to use the press to push a version of events and an approach that I believe is harmful to the whole Corbyn movement and the Labour left, not just Momentum. What am I supposed to do? Sit on my hands while everything we’ve built gets taken apart?

The obvious reply to this is: ‘Why didn’t you comment in public 12 months ago, when the rot first set in and you still had a position of influence in Momentum that could have helped steer the ship in a different, more democratic, direction?’ Surely, openness is the most powerful weapon when confronted with a wannabe-dictator like Lansman. In any case, Sellers is making up for lost time now by spilling the beans on Lansman’s anti-democratic crusade in Momentum. Better late than never.

And it is certainly a more honest and fruitful method than the incredibly naive online petition being circulated by Chris Ford (ex-member of a many far-left organisations), which calls on everybody to just stop fighting and “work together”. Easy. It states: “We consider Momentum a dynamic plurality of ideas that demands respect for each other in the spirit of the New Politics.” The New Politics? What exactly is that? Something like New Labour, but better?

It then calls on those who were among the small leftwing majority at the December 3 NC meeting to recant the decisions taken – in order to push for an unworkable hybrid of Omov and delegate voting:

We believe the manner that digital and delegate democracy is being counterposed is unnecessary. We call upon the delegates to the national committee to put past disagreements behind them and secure a consensus which combines both methods of working to complement one another and thus strengthen opportunities for democratic engagement.

Not about voting method

This petition misses the point spectacularly. As if the current anti-left drive in Momentum is about the voting methods used at national conference. It is about who controls Momentum – and for what political ends. If a delegate conference ensured that Lansman and his allies continued to make up the majority on the new steering committee, there is no doubt he would go for it. They are pushing for Omov, because it is the only way to make sure the organisation stays in the hands of ‘Team Momentum’.

This team consists, of course, of the staff employed and controlled by Jon Lansman. He is, in effect, their direct boss. He decides how the database is used (basically, it is his personal property) and how the dues of the members are spent. Not a penny finds its way back to the branches; every email a branch sends has to be okayed by ‘Team Momentum’. There is no transparency at the top of Momentum at all.

Of course, we are not claiming that Jon Lansman has set out on this course in order to enrich himself or because he is suffering from a particular bad Bonapartist character flaw. Clearly, he is acting on behalf of Jeremy Corbyn and John McDonnell.

The current crisis in Momentum underlines the fact that Corbyn’s election was a historical accident, rather than a result of the power and strength of the Labour left. Most districts, regions and councillors – in other words, the Labour machine – are all very firmly in the hands of the right. The Labour left (Corbyn and McDonnell included) is disorganised and has no coherent strategy of how to transform Labour into an organisation that could fight for a socialist society. They also have no idea what to do with Momentum.

They no doubt appreciate that there is a database of 160,000 Corbyn supporters, some of who can be called upon to operate phone banks or hand out leaflets for this or that Labour campaign. But what Corbyn and McDonnell do not want is a strong, coherent organisation that starts to challenge the current (and temporary) ‘peace settlement’ with the right.

Witness Momentum’s silence on the purges in the Labour Party. Or the way in which the basic democratic demand for mandatory selection of MPs – until recently the standard position of the left and the Campaign for Labour Party Democracy – has been quietly dropped and is now seen as a major embarrassment.

Or the outrageous way in which the organisation not just went along with the entirely fabricated anti-Semitism ‘scandal’ in the Labour Party, but helped to facilitate it by throwing Jackie Walker to the wolves. Clearly, the longstanding Zionist, Jon Lansman, is seeking a rapprochement with the Jewish Labour Movement. Thanks to Corbyn’s and therefore Momentum’s stance on this matter, it is now ‘common knowledge’ that the Labour Party is ‘riddled with anti-Semites’: Theresa May has been handed the moral high ground on the question and no self-respecting member of the establishment objects, when she says the Labour Party is “disgusting” for “turning a blind eye to anti-Semitism”.7)http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2016/12/12/jeremy-corbyn-turning-blind-eye-anti-semitism-party-theresa/

Of course, in reality there can be no permanent peace between the left and right in the Labour Party. After Corbyn’s thumping second victory, the open warfare conducted by the right has merely been suspended for the time being – we are in a ‘pre-election period’, after all. But Corbyn is on borrowed time and he should know it. The next attempted coup will come soon enough, for the right will never accept him. Either he gets rid of them or they will get rid of him. The latter seems more likely, unfortunately.

Rather than using this fluid political period to openly fight to transform the Labour Party into a real party of labour, Corbyn and his allies are peddling the utterly deluded line that we must all ‘unite’ in order to secure a Labour victory at the next general election. And in their view, the only way that could happen is by bowing to the right – on Trident, Brexit, immigration: you name it. Of course, that does not make the Labour Party an ounce more ‘electable’. It just makes Corbyn look like a weak and rather dishonest leader who does not believe in his own vision of socialism.

The left in Momentum must be careful not to step into the ‘unity’ trap. This is a crucial moment for the Labour left. We must oppose the red scare in Momentum – and develop a plan to ensure that policy-making and control of the database and income is firmly in the hands of a democratically elected national committee – before Jon Lansman goes for the nuclear option.

 

References

References
↑1 www.newstatesman.com/politics/uk/2016/05/jon-lansman-interview-theres-no-leader-who-would-find-it-easier-win-jeremy
↑2 www.politicshome.com/news/uk/political-parties/labour-party/news/79087/excl-tom-watson-tells-plotters-trying-oust-him
↑3 www.spectator.co.uk/2016/09/from-left-to-left-a-whos-who-of-corbyns-comrades
↑4 http://weeklyworker.co.uk/worker/1056/no-strategy-towards-labour/
↑5 http://labourpartymarxists.org.uk/paul-masons-consensus-democracy-same-old-ephemeral-new
↑6 “Affiliation means that the socialist societies – like a number of British trade unions – pay an affiliation fee to the Labour Party, and the affiliates’ members become affiliated members of the Labour Party (a different status from full member), unless they specifically choose otherwise. In return the societies receive a formal role in Labour decision-making, and the affiliated members can take part in all-member ballots in certain circumstances. For example, they can participate in the election of Labour Party leaders and deputy leaders, have delegates and votes at Annual Conference”: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socialist_society_(Labour_Party)
↑7 http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2016/12/12/jeremy-corbyn-turning-blind-eye-anti-semitism-party-theresa/
Momentum

Fit for a dictator

Allies of Jon Lansman have produced a draft constitution for Momentum. William Sarsfield takes a look

We should start with Jackie Walker’s pungent assessment of the “proposal” published on Momentum’s MxV online forum. She writes: “So here we have the coup coming to fruition. This is appalling.”

Comrade Walker’s damning indictment of the three-page proposal is hard to quibble with. I would personally add that in my decades of political work on the left I have rarely, if ever, had the misfortune to come across a more wretched, cynical document than this farcically misnamed ‘A transparent structure that involves all Momentum members and groups’.

So it is appropriate we start with Momentum’s annual conference. Traditionally in the workers’ movement, the conference/congress represents the organisation as a whole. It is empowered to take decisions about every aspect of its programmatic, political and tactical orientations. In the Lansman draft, however, conferences are redubbed “national gatherings”, whose primary purpose is “like The World Transformed” to be “a space for members to share skills and experience, debate ideas and coordinate activity … an opportunity for political education, and to showcase the wealth of ideas being developed within our movement”.

Almost as an afterthought, it adds that “time will be set aside for the debating of the eight proposals which qualify for national referenda …” Yes, that’s right – only eight “proposals” (not ‘motions’ obviously) can actually be voted on every year.

Before we look at the laughable process of ‘qualification’ that these “proposals” must go through, it is it is important to note that this “national gathering” is not by definition Momentum’s sovereign body: its participants have not been elected by an official body of the national organisation. They are simply people who turn up for the event on the day and may or may not be interested in a chat on some motions other people have chosen for them to talk about. It is a pointless discussion as part of an arcane process. The level of interest and engagement that we (and the online audience) will see among the meat-space participants will probably reflect that disengagement.

So these eight motions then – where do they come from? We are told that they will be chosen by a “yearly referendum” and will consist of “the four most popular motions in local groups (ie, which have been endorsed by the most groups)” and “the four most popular motions from individual members, as shown via endorsements on MxV”.

These eight “most popular motions” can then be debated at the “national gathering”, but the vote is taken by “all members online”. But even that is not the last of the hurdles. A motion is only binding when “at least 40% of the membership have taken part in the vote”. Just to remind readers, based on Momentum’s current membership of 20,000, this is a requirement that some 8,000 members actively participate. Not very likely, given the level of commitment and engagement that these peripheral comrades have shown so far. So what happens to these “popular” motions that have failed to clear the 8k hurdle – as all of them surely will?

“If this threshold is not met but the motion has majority support of those who voted,” we are told, “it will serve as an advisory motion to the steering committee” (my emphasis).

The national committee has been disappeared in the Lansman draft. The SC is the only national committee name-checked, and it is proposed that this SC is made up of seven elected members, plus “one MP, one councillor and up to three representatives of affiliated trade unions”. And how exactly would the councillor, the MP and these three trade unionists be chosen and how would they be accountable to Momentum membership, we wonder?

Sprinkled throughout the document are proposals that indicate that Lansman and his supporters have, to a certain extent at least, been stung by the charges of bureaucratism and contempt for democracy that have rained down on their heads. For instance, the draft carries this absurd idea: “In addition to the above 12 members [of the SC], on a three-month rotational basis, three members of Momentum, drawn at random, will be invited to join the SC.”

This really is quite pathetic – a lame parody of genuine leadership accountability and transparency. (Each individual Momentum comrade – based on that 20k membership – has a 0.06% chance in any given year of ‘winning’.) Interestingly however, it does reveal a niggle in the mind of Lansman and co. This gimmick is meant to “discourage alienation of ‘expert’ leaders of the movement from ordinary members” and assumes that the lucky lottery winners will “at the conclusion of their term” go back as envoys for the SC “to share their experiences with others in the spirit of continuous self-improvement of the steering committee …”

The same type of flashy, flatulent empty noise is made about SC minutes, which have thus far been conspicuous by their absence. However, the Lansman draft now solemnly intones that

minutes of all … meetings will be published on line within 24 hours. Failure to publish these minutes within this time frame will void the membership of all members of the steering committee. New elections will be held that bar the current steering committee. This is to demonstrate the seriousness of the commitment to transparency.

This nuclear option has a failsafe, however: “Exceptional circumstances that [that the 24-hour deadline might be missed] must be signalled to a dedicated transparency officer who will launch an investigation as to why this has not occurred.”

This sort of crap is not worth the paper it is written on. The brutal truth is that at every stage the Lansman draft abounds with stipulations and proposed measures that blunt, negate and block democratic accountability and control from below within Momentum.

Supporters of the draft may protest that the proposals relating to the local Momentum branches contradicts this assessment. The document reads: “… local groups can organise as they see fit, so long as they don’t contravene Momentum’s democratically decided ethical statement and political statement.”

But it would be a big mistake to read this as an expression of a relaxed, democratic attitude to the basic structures of the organisation. In fact, it represents (1) a contemptuous attitude to these branches and the people who staff them; and (2) a conviction of Lansman’s that soon – if his proposals are accepted – he will not have to factor them at all into any considerations about how he runs ‘his’ Momentum.

Momentum

Replace the Momentum steering committee!

 

Some good decisions were taken at the December 3 National Committee meeting of Momentum. However, while the Steering Committee survives intact and Jon Lansman maintains his ‘ownership’ of the organisation, Momentum is seriously flawed – as new leaks and attacks in the bourgeois media show, warns Carla Roberts of Labour Party Marxists

Around 60 members of the National Committee of Momentum met in Birmingham to discuss, among other things, the first Momentum conference. It was a very fractious and ill-tempered meeting.

Crucially, a motion to recall the current Steering Committee (which has a majority in support of sole Momentum company director Jon Lansman) and replace it with an interim body elected at the NC was voted down by 30 to 29 votes. Even three recounts could not change the outcome. Ironically, Nick Wrack had successfully moved to change the agenda so that this item was discussed first, as he feared it would be excluded because of time constraints. But had this vote been taken later in the day, it is likely that a majority would have voted in favour of it, as a number of pro-democracy members arrived later in the day.

There were some good decisions taken. Most importantly, there will be no OMOV (one member, one vote) voting at or after conference, despite this being the expressed will of Lansman. Conference will decide on a new constitution, a code of ethics and various policy motions – and all of these decisions will be taken by delegates at conference.

Fearing exactly such an outcome, Jon Lansman and his allies on the Steering Committee had successfully prevented the National Committee from meeting since May 2016. On October 28, they even launched a deeply undemocratic coup by cancelling the meeting of the NC scheduled for November 5 and simply declared that the conference would in fact be a livestreamed national debate, with voting then taking place online afterwards. When the national media picked up on the coup and Lansman was asked by John McDonell to ‘sort it out’, he relented and called another NC meeting for December 3.[i]

In the meantime, he has done pretty much everything in his power to stuff the NC with members who support his plans to make Momentum into nothing more than a big phone bank that sporadically sparks into life for this or that campaign. The hastily called elections of additional NC delegates from the “liberation strands” have to be seen in this context.

Ditto the presence of a number of voting delegates from “Labour organisations” who seem to have been there merely on the invitation of, yes, Mr. Jon Lansman. So we had Labour CND, Labour Against Austerity, Campaign for Labour Party Democracy, Labour Briefing, Labour Representation Committee, Labour Futures (Jon Lansman’s personal blog) and, farcically, Open Labour and Compass. These last two are not exactly known for their pro-Corbyn-stance, to put it mildly. Needless to say, the list of invitees did not stretch to Labour Party Marxists.

AWL and Momentum Steering Committee member Jill Mountford writes that, “with the exception of LRC delegates (Jackie Walker and Michael Calderbank) the other Labour groups’ delegates voted en-bloc for Jon’s proposals, and were in fact, the only people getting up to support any of his proposals (which were often billed as the Steering Committee’s proposals).”[ii]

Jon Lansman claimed at the meeting that it was in fact the handful of MPs who set up Momentum last year who suggested that these organisations be represented. But there is no method to take groups like Compass or Open Labour off the list of invitees or for other organisations to get involved – chiefly, because there is no official method for affiliation. Only trade unions can affiliate, pay an affiliation fee and then send two delegates to the NC – the Fire Brigades Union (FBU) and the Transport Salaried Staffs’ Association (TSSA) are the only two organisations officially affiliated to Momentum. Clearly, this situation is untenable.

In any case, Lansman failed this time. The NC saw a tiny pro-democracy majority and most motions were passed “with majorities of 1, 2 or 3 votes”, writes AWL fellow traveller Michael Chessum (who, like Marshajane Thompson, is now still on the SC, although they both haven’t been reelected to the NC, from among which the SC is supposed to be elected).

“Regional delegates, who make up a majority of the NC, almost all arrived mandated to vote for a purely delegate based conference”, he writes in a report that can otherwise be safely ignored: He wants to “build a coalition around a mixed system of decision making” (ie, OMOV plus delegates – a system that clearly is unworkable, otherwise somebody, anybody, would have come up with a concrete proposal by now) and he calls the current debates on the structure and democracy “Mickey Mouse politics” that “need to stop”, while predictably demanding that Momentum should “turn outwards”.[iii]

Opening Momentum

In this, Chessum actually echoes those supporting Lansman’s vision for Momentum. A new Facebook page has been set up “for Momentum members disappointed in that [NC] decision, and who believe all members should be able to vote on Momentum’s future. A delegate based model was originally hoisted onto Momentum without consultation with its wider membership. Letting a small group of delegates decide to maintain their own power, at the expense of all members, isn’t a good starting point for a new political movement. Beyond February, we believe Momentum should adopt a structure that is inclusive and unbureaucratic. We are in the process of transforming the Labour Party, building a parallel organisation with the same structures and procedures of Labour would be a mistake.”

The Facebook page, called Opening Momentum, also prominently features a pretty nasty, gushingly pro-Lansman report of the NC meeting by recently elected women’s NC representative Laura Murray. She claims that, “Naively, I was excited for the National Committee”, but was to be disappointed by all the “infighting” at the meeting. “How silly I was.”

Not as naive as she pretends
Laura Murray: Not as naive as she pretends

And how dishonest. In reality, she is far from the political newcomer she pretends to be in this report. She works as adviser to Grahame Morris MP, member of the shadow cabinet. Oh, and she happens to be the daughter of Andrew Murray, member of the Morning Star’s Communist Party of Britain and out and out Stalinist. Seamus Milne is a close family friend.[iv]

And look how well he has taught her. Laura writes that she “is not anti-Trotskyist per se, but thinks that “the sectarian attitude taken by Trotskyist groups within Momentum is destructive to our movement”. She has a go at the Alliance for Worker’s Liberty and then turns on those purged from the Labour Party on the most spurious grounds:

“Given that Nick Wrack, Jill Mountford and Jackie Walker are, in turn, blocked, expelled and suspended from being members of the Labour Party, it is unsurprising that they care little for reforming and democratising the Labour Party and even less so about getting it elected into government.”[v] Do we see here the beginnings of an attempt to oust those members of Momentum who have been expelled and suspended from the Labour Party?

The Guardian, who quotes generously from her article, writes that, “The development has meant that Lansman is threatening to walk away from Momentum, Labour sources said.”[vi] If only.

Quite the opposite seems to be happening. Opening Momentum looks like Lansman’s call to arms, perhaps his organisational vehicle to reinforce his grip on the organisation. Needless to say, it is more than ironic that the man who launched an outrageously undemocratic coup in Momentum is now trying to claim the mantel of democracy.

Clearly, he is very unhappy with these decisions taken by the National Committee:

  • Conference will take place on February 25 (or one week either side of that)
  • Branches select delegates (2 per 100 members or any part thereof)
  • Each local branch can submit one motion. Ditto Momentum Youth and students, each “liberation group”, each affiliated union, the national committee and each regional committee.
  • Members in areas without local Momentum groups are “to be represented at the same rate as members in groups, elected by OMOV ballot in regions”. 30 of those members can also submit a motion
  • Motions to be submitted up to three weeks before conference on aims, structures, ethics, policy and campaigning.
  • An open e-forum for all members will be set up, where motions can be discussed, amendments can be mooted and compositing processes can be arranged.
  • A Conference Arrangements Committee (CAC) has been elected, which has a small left-wing majority (4 to 3). We sincerely hope that this will prevent those crucial decisions being overturned again.

Why is Lansman so powerful?

Jon Lansman
Jon Lansman: controls Momentum database and income as sole company director

But, as we all know, Jon Lansman and his allies have overturned decisions before and he basically makes up Momentum policy as he goes along. Momentum is still very much the private property of Lansman, who is the sole director of various companies that “own” the Momentum database and its income. And he treats it very much like his private property.

For example, in mid-November he launched the MxV platform, which asks members to post “proposals” (ie, motions) for conference which are ranked by how many members have clicked the “support” button featured next to each headline. There is now a long list of no less than 300 proposals, which range from the supportable to the bizarre. Clearly, nobody can read them all – and that is of course the point of the OMOV system favoured by Lansman: it is not “empowering”, as people like Paul Mason[vii] claim, it is exactly the opposite. It alienates people, makes them less engaged with Momentum, sidelines the branches – and concentrates all power in the hands of King Jon.

It is of course noteworthy that Lansman launched this platform a couple of weeks before the December 3 meeting of the NC, which was tasked with deciding on how motions should actually be submitted. Clearly, he thought he had it in the bag and that his proposals for an OMOV conference would be supported at the newly stuffed NC. (I recommend the report by Josie Runswick, LGBT rep on the NC, on this matter, as she usefully publishes Jon Lansman’s full OMOV proposal, which can only be described as a bureaucrat’s wet dream [viii]).

Also, there are enough ambiguities in the motions voted through by the NC for us to remain on our guard:

  • The NC voted in favour of an “online priorities ballot”, which can only mean that some motions submitted will not be heard at conference. Such a ballot (presumably organised via the already existing MxV platform) is also designed to bring easily digestible and short motions to the top. Who wants to read a proposal for a constitution that could actually work (and therefore would have to be of a certain length). Boring!
  • Local branches are “encouraged to composite motions (motions composited by more groups will move higher up the agenda as incentive to composite). Amendments to be circulated before the conference.”[ix] However, it is not stated which Momentum bodies can actually submit amendments or how many. The tight timeframe will also make it rather difficult for Momentum branches to meet and discuss motions or amendments.
  • The National Committee and regional committees “may send 1 motion or constitutional amendment”. The problem is that there is no constitution yet, so how can it be amended? Or does Lansman have some kind of draft constitution in his back pocket that he will surprise the organisation with just before conference? Via his SC, perhaps? Why don’t branches have the right to submit “constitutional amendments”? It is all very unclear.

Ideally, all of these issues should be resolved by the CAC soon. But the Steering Committee could again overturn it all – it has done similar things before. Also, the next NC (scheduled for January) could easily see a small majority for the Lansman wing, if a couple of pro-democracy people are absent for some reason.

In any case, the Lansman wing has the clear advantage in the current struggle. Not numerically. Needless to say, most members want democratic control over the organisation that they pay regular dues to.

But it is important to understand why Jon Lansman can command such power. After all, he is just one man. We have been told not to “personalise” things so much by placing the blame for Momentum’s inertia onto his shoulders.

But Lansman has been tasked by ‘our Jeremy’ to set up and run the organisation. There are quite a few members of the SC and NC who work for Corbyn and/or the Labour Party. Clearly, they understand that any future career in the Labour Party and parliament depends on them ‘playing nice’.

They know that Corbyn has given his okay to the deeply undemocratic set up of the organisation, which is “owned” by a couple of companies that Lansman is the director of. Momentum was never designed to be democratic or to be run by its members.

Just like the Labour Party itself, Momentum is split, though of course the fault lines do not run between those that want to keep Corbyn and those busy plotting his overthrow. Momentum is split between those who want peace with the right (justified by the mantra that any Labour government is better than a Tory government) and those who think we should be fighting for some kind of socialism.

All those pesky lefties who come to Momentum meetings and talk about mandatory selection of MPs, the need to transform the Labour Party into a real party of Labour or the fight for socialism are viewed as nothing but a diversion. In fact, branches are seen as a diversion, especially those that function well.

Momentum is supposed to be an extension of the Labour electoral machine, designed to support Corbyn in the event of the next coup (which will come sooner rather than later). It is far from impossible that Lansman will be told to close down the organisation if the left becomes too powerful or branches become too autonomous and energetic. Anybody who then continues to use Lansman’s database will make themselves liable to be sued – and probably successfully, it should be noted.

To sum up. Of course, it’s great that the left, pro-democratic wing in Momentum has managed to pull off a couple of victories on the NC. Clearly, all is still to play for in Momentum. But as long as Lansman is in charge of the organisation, it cannot become anything more than a fanclub for Jeremy Corbyn.

And not a very dynamic or effective one at that.

Notes

[i] http://labourpartymarxists.org.uk/jon-lansmans-coup-in-momentum/

[ii] https://jillsmomentumblog.wordpress.com/2016/12/04/decisions-on-national-conference-positive-steps-forward-to-building-a-democratic-movement/

[iii] https://theclarionmag.wordpress.com/2016/12/05/michaelncforward/

[iv] http://www.newstatesman.com/politics/uk/2016/04/thin-controller

[v] https://medium.com/@lauracatrionamurray/momentum-vs-inertia-e525c8f9e217#.e7djumgoq

[vi] https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2016/dec/05/trotskyist-factions-seeking-to-take-over-momentum-member-claims

[vii] https://medium.com/mosquito-ridge/why-i-joined-momentum-e2e8311ea05c#.pksd32xel

[viii] https://momentumjosie.wordpress.com/2016/12/04/nc03_12_16/

[ix] https://momentumjosie.wordpress.com/2016/12/04/nc03_12_16/

Momentum

Dec 3 Momentum national committee: Mixed results

The December 3 national committee decided by the smallest of margins that Momentum’s first conference will see delegates vote on everything – structure, constitution and policy motions. There will be no OMOV (one member, one vote), despite the best efforts of Momentum company director Jon Lansman to stuff the NC with delegates favourable to his conservative outlook for Momentum.

Also, the newly elected conference arrangement committee has a small left majority, which – hopefully – should prevent those crucial decisions being overturned.

On the negative side, an early vote to replace the current steering committee and have new elections was lost with 29 to 30 votes.

Clearly, all is still to play for in Momentum.

Here are a couple of reports:

  • By Josie Runswick, one of the two LGBT+ reps on the Momentum National Committee. This usefully lists all the motions submitted, including those voted down. It shows for example the convoluted and deeply undemocratic plans Jon Lansman presented and which would have committed the organisation to an OMOV vote after conference.
  • By Steering Committee member and AWL member Jill Mountford 
  • By Ed Whitby, Northern (North East and Cumbria) regional delegate and AWL member
Momentum

Paul Mason’s ‘consensus democracy’: Same old ephemeral new

Paul Mason may now be championing ‘consensus democracy’, but its failings have long been established, writes Mick Last of the Labour Party Marxists

In an article published on November 1, journalist Paul Mason announced that he is joining Momentum.1)https://medium.com/mosquito-ridge/why-i-joined-momentum-e2e8311ea05c#.w4d2rhk1i He gives three reasons. The first two are to support Momentum, and to support Jeremy Corbyn, against the Labour right (one reason dressed up as two). The third, much more elaborated, is to support the organisational proposals of Jon Lansman and his co-thinkers against their internal opponents. Momentum, Mason says, “faces two alternative futures: one in which all the negative, hierarchical and factionalist tendencies of the 20th century left are allowed to resurface; another in which Momentum?- and ultimately Labour itself – becomes a horizontal, consensus-based organisation, directly accountable to its mass of members.”

Mason is a fairly eminent journo (BBC2’s Newsnight business editor and then economics editor for Channel 4 News before quitting this February in order to pursue a freelance career). But his potential political weight in support of Lansman does not come from his background in “impartial” TV reporting. Rather, it has two elements.

The first is Mason’s four books, Live working or die fighting: how the working class went global (2007); Meltdown: the end of the age of greed (2009); Why it’s kicking off everywhere: the new global revolutions (2012) and Postcapitalism: a guide to our future (2015).2)I leave on one side his ‘journo China novel’, Rare earth (2012), available used at 1p or remaindered at 98p on Amazon. This fertile book production on large issues can make Mason appear as a serious theorist. (No matter for this purpose that all four books are, in fact, journalistic rather than rigorous theoretical productions, that the predictions of the first three have already been falsified, and that the illusions of the fourth in the ‘gig economy’ have been recently exposed by the industrial tribunal ruling in the Uber case.3)www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-37802386.)

Second, and probably equally importantly, Mason is a ‘repentant Leninist’ like the Eurocommunists and, before them, many others (like Arthur Koestler or Roger Garaudy), though less significant than any of these. Though he tends to downplay his involvement with the semi-orthodox Trotskyist group, Workers Power, he was certainly already involved with WP in 1984 aged 24,4)www.reportdigital.co.uk/gallery/1980s/1882/2159/1286/feminism-1980s.html., as he still was in 2001, aged 41. 5)See M Larsen, ‘A tale of two campaigns’ Weekly Worker March 1 2001. In 2007 and 2008 he spoke at the weekend schools of the Permanent Revolution splinter from Workers Power (listings at www.permanentrevolution.net/search/?s=%22Paul+Mason%22), though, given that on these occasions he was plugging his 2007 book, no more than slight sympathy with the Permanent Revolution side of the split can be inferred. This is a substantial track record of involvement with one of the more dogmatic and bureaucratic-centralist among the Trotskyist groups. Work on political economy under this aegis may well account for Mason’s ability to turn himself from a ‘music and politics’ graduate and music teacher in the 1980s into an economics writer from the 1990s.

It is this substantial period of bureaucratic-centralist commitment, together with present explicit condemnation of Leninism, which qualifies Mason as a ‘repentant Leninist’ rather than merely a left Labourite with a far-left past.

Like ‘repentant Leninists’ more generally, he adopts the general line that ‘Leninism leads to Stalinism’. Like them, too, he argues for “respecting … the democratic institutions of the UK”. And, also like them, he advocates policies of exclusion: “Momentum must have the ability to immediately exclude from membership people who breach Labour Party rules, and who engage in [undefined] unacceptable behaviour.”

Mason claims, however, to offer a new alternative to discredited Leninism; not a mere repetition of the same old repentance. But it is anything but new. It is merely the same old pseudo-anarchism (with bureaucratic control supplying the real practical decision-making mechanism) of the ‘consensus’, anti-globalisation ‘social forums’ movement around 2000; and behind that, the same old ‘anti-authoritarianism’ which goes all the way back to Mikhail Bakunin.

If there is an added element, it is that ‘horizontalism’ is to mean plebiscitary ‘democracy’ without either any effective possibility of deliberation or means of unseating the authors of the plebiscite question – as practised by Louis Bonaparte, Adolf Hitler and Ayatollah Khomeini, and most recently before our very eyes by the Brexiteers and their fraudulent press.

The presentation of something old as really new is a distinctive inheritance of the post-1956 ‘new left’, and thereby of the Socialist Workers Party and related groups (Workers Power, which originated in the ‘Left Faction’ expelled from the SWP in 1975, is one); and of the Mandelite Fourth International, which adopted the idea of a ‘new vanguard’ in the 1970s. The basic idea is that the ‘old left’ is a waste of space and it is necessary to start again from scratch with ‘newly radicalising forces’. Ever since the post-1956 ‘new left’ the novelty of each ‘newly radicalising force’ has proved illusory.

What, if anything, are we to make of the more concrete arguments Mason offers in his ‘joining statement’?

Social movements

To begin with, Mason responds to discussions about “how Labour could ‘become a social movement’”. He argues that as an electoral party it cannot become a social movement as such, because “its structures have to mirror those of constituencies, councils, parliament itself”. However, he argues, Labour has to “learn from social movements”, meaning that it should “become much more clearly an alliance of groups with limited common interests: in social justice, workers’ rights, a zero-carbon energy system, the liberation of oppressed minorities, and opposition to adventurist wars”.

He makes no attempt to define what he means by a “social movement”. If what is meant is a mass movement mobilising very broad forces in society, there is not the slightest reason to suppose that the Labour Party’s ‘electoral’ and affiliate structures are an obstacle to such a movement. Consider the Social Democratic Party of Germany before 1914 and its European congeners; or, for that matter, the French or Italian Communist Parties at their height. Cooperatives, trade union fractions, social clubs, local fiestas, and so on, all operated alongside and together with the electoral form of organisation.

It is reasonably clear, however, that what Mason means is not this, but rather “social movement” in the sense of the 1970s women’s liberation movement, or the 1990s-early 2000s anti-globalisation movement, or Occupy.

By comparison with the late 20th and early 21st century far-left grouplets, these phenomena are no doubt impressively large. But by comparison with the mass European social democratic or communist parties of the past, or even with the Labour Party, they are trivial.

In the first place, even by comparison with the hundreds of thousands who signed up to Labour to support Corbyn, the numbers involved in them are marginal – with the exception of the Brazilian Workers Party (the source of the “people’s budget” idea), which, Mason conveniently forgets for a moment, both was a conventional political party and, when it took office, became merely a player in the ‘social-liberal’ game, like the Blairites and so on.

Secondly, and more fundamentally, the ‘social movements’ make a big splash for a little while, but are temporally ephemeral. Where now are the social forums? Where is Occupy?

In contrast, the big mass workers’ parties were built over decades and were able to achieve real, if limited, gains. The Labour victory of 1945, celebrated by Ken Loach’s film and by many Labour left supporters, depended in part on a favourable political conjuncture – but also on 14 years’ hard slog after the spectacular defeat of 1931. Before that, the Labour Representation Committee was founded in 1900 – it took 22 years for the party it established to become a contender for power. (This is, in fact, also true of the Brazilian Workers Party, which took a decade to achieve more than 10% of the vote.)

Remodelling Labour on the basis of the “social movements” would then mean abandoning that long, hard slog in favour of a series of ephemeral campaigns and street actions, without long-term results.

Moreover, if Labour is anything useful at all, it is, as it was in 1900, a political party which seeks the political representation of labour – that is, of the wage-earning class as a class – through the means available in the electoral system. To remodel Labour as “an alliance of groups with limited common interests” would, in reality, be to achieve what Blair and his Eurocommunist allies failed to do: to liquidate Labour as a party of the working class in favour of a ‘broad democratic alliance’ coalition.

From this angle, Mason’s ‘joining statement’ is his equivalent of Georg von Vollmar’s 1891 Eldorado speeches, in which this former ultra-left and general strike advocate announced his conversion to a ‘realism’ well to the right of those like Bebel and Kautsky.6)FL Carsten, ‘Georg von Vollmar’ Journal of Contemporary History No25 (1990), pp317-22. Such conversions are commonplace: both ultra-leftism and rightist coalitionism reflect an impatience to ‘do something now’ – it is just that the option of the hard slog of building, (or in 21st century conditions rebuilding) an effective movement is excluded a priori. Then, when it becomes too obvious that ‘direct action’ is not producing results, the only remaining option is coalitionism.

The fundamental step has been taken. Mason’s view remains overtly of the left. But the logic of his view is to become a Blairite, a Clinton Democrat or a Renzi-ite.

Anti-factionalism

The demon of faction that over them hungIn accents of horror their epitaph sung

While pride and venality joined in the stave

And canting democracy wept at the grave 7)Memoirs of the life of the Rt Hon George Canning New York 1830, Vol 2, p58.

So wrote Tory politician George Canning on the 1807 fall of the ‘Ministry of All the Talents’ government, which introduced the abolition of the slave trade.

For Canning, both ‘faction’ and ‘democracy’ were ‘boo words’, carrying as much negative emphasis as ‘pride’ and ‘venality’. For Mason ‘democracy’ is not a ‘boo word’; but ‘faction’ still is. This complaint about ‘factionalism’ is a feature of the underlying dominance of British high politics by Toryism (including the Cobbettian radical Toryism of the traditional Labour right). But it is also a reflection of the ‘orthodox Trotskyism’ Mason continues to inherit from his time in Workers Power – which even if it does not ban factions outright, or ban ‘permanent factions’ (as the SWP does) – still regards them as wholly exceptional and undesirable. Thus,

I am not worried about ‘entryism’. Anybody who is in a leftwing group or party right now should be allowed to join Momentum, so long as they openly and irrevocably dissolve their organisations and pledge to support Labour in all future elections.

The emphasis is in the original, so that it is the demand to dissolve groups that is Mason’s main point; not the demand for unconditional and permanent future support for Labour.8)That itself is problematic. Is it to be even if Labour was to break the links with the unions, or to launch a new aggressive war, Mr Mason?

What is involved is a deep misunderstanding of absolutely fundamental necessities of social decision-making; a misunderstanding which also supports Mason’s advocacy of plebiscitism. Anti-factionalism makes sense for Toryism, which is an oligarchical and leader-cult politics, and all the more for open anti-democrats such as the early 19th century politicians like Canning. For purported democrats, it is a complete contradiction.

Equally, for traditional Stalinists, with their monolithism and leader cults, anti-factionalism makes a bizarre sort of sense. For Trotskyists – including former Trotskyists – the inheritors of Leon Trotsky’s Third International after Lenin, it should also be an obvious contradiction.

It is just in the nature of things that human beings have disagreements. Assuming there is a straightforwardly ‘right thing to do’, what it is is rarely obvious. Very frequently, there is not only a choice to be made between option 1 or 2, but from options 1 to 7 and within these, 1 (a) (i), 1 (a) (ii), 1 (b) … and so on.

To reach a decision, then, it is necessary to reduce the range of options. This is, of course, why the Labour Party, when it functioned at all democratically, had (1) the right of constituencies to introduce amendments to proposed motions, (2) compositing procedures and (3) discussion at party conference before the vote was taken.

Factions (and, in the politics of the state, parties) are a part of the method by which, on the one hand, the full range of possible options is brought to light in discussion; and, on the other hand, the range of options is reduced to a manageable number, through individuals allying, compromising and coalescing in factional groupings, between whose proposals choices are then made.

The underlying problem does not in the least go away if factions are banned. It is still necessary that the range of possible ideas should be reduced in some process of discussion, amendment and so on.

Otherwise, let us imagine a Momentum of 200,000 members, of which every member has (a) the right to put proposals by electronic circulation to the whole organisation and (b) the right of individual veto over all such proposals (which is what is actually meant by proceeding by consensus, rather than by vote).

Then, on the one hand, I get up in the morning, switch on my computer and find 10,000 emails with individual proposals for Momentum decisions waiting to be read. However, on the other hand, actually, I need not read them, because I can be pretty certain that someone among the 200,000 members will veto any of them, so that none of them will be adopted.

The reality is that someone has to reduce the range of possible choices. Behind any consensus process, there must be some decision-making mechanism which works otherwise. Thus, in the World Social Forum, the decisive voice was of the bureaucratic apparatus of the Brazilian Workers Party; in the European Social Forum, that of Rifondazione Comunista; in the London variant, Ken Livingstone’s London mayor’s office. In the absence of freedom to organise factions which endeavour to persuade others of their ideas, it must be so.

Hence my point above about The Third International after Lenin, where Trotsky makes the point that the full-time apparatus must function as a faction. Hence, to ban factions is merely to ban all factions except the full-time apparatus.

The apparatus then functions in exactly the way as Mason claims the ‘Leninist’ left group does – as an ‘enlightened-minority’ cog driving a half-ignorant bigger group – and, by not admitting its own factional character, it befuddles the believers in a real ‘consensus process’.

The ‘zombie ideology’ (which Mason claims affects the left groups) is, then, Mason’s ideology, which is a zombie version of the ideas of the anarchists, the ‘new left’ and the ‘children of 68’. The result of this ideology is to make democratic discussion impossible. In turn, this produces demoralisation as soon as the first flush of enthusiasm fails, which is in turn the reason for the ephemeral quality of the ‘social movements’ of the past period.

References

References
↑1 https://medium.com/mosquito-ridge/why-i-joined-momentum-e2e8311ea05c#.w4d2rhk1i
↑2 I leave on one side his ‘journo China novel’, Rare earth (2012), available used at 1p or remaindered at 98p on Amazon.
↑3 www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-37802386.
↑4 www.reportdigital.co.uk/gallery/1980s/1882/2159/1286/feminism-1980s.html.
↑5 See M Larsen, ‘A tale of two campaigns’ Weekly Worker March 1 2001. In 2007 and 2008 he spoke at the weekend schools of the Permanent Revolution splinter from Workers Power (listings at www.permanentrevolution.net/search/?s=%22Paul+Mason%22), though, given that on these occasions he was plugging his 2007 book, no more than slight sympathy with the Permanent Revolution side of the split can be inferred.
↑6 FL Carsten, ‘Georg von Vollmar’ Journal of Contemporary History No25 (1990), pp317-22.
↑7 Memoirs of the life of the Rt Hon George Canning New York 1830, Vol 2, p58.
↑8 That itself is problematic. Is it to be even if Labour was to break the links with the unions, or to launch a new aggressive war, Mr Mason?
Momentum

A party, within a party within…? Report of the November 5 meeting of “Momentum National Committee members”

Carla Roberts of Labour Party Marxists reports from the November 5 meeting of members of the Momentum national committee

Thirty-four people, including observers, attended the unofficial meeting for members of Momentum’s national committee, which was held in Birmingham on November 5 on the initiative of Matt Wrack, general secretary of the Fire Brigades Union.

This a was an important attempt to stand up to the decision by a small majority at a hastily called emergency meeting of the Momentum steering committee on October 28 to cancel an official meeting of the NC, which was supposed to take place on November 5 and make decisions on how Momentum’s first ever conference in February should be run. Instead, the SC – by a vote of six to three – decided that it should also make one of the most crucial decisions on the matter: namely, that conference should be organised not on the basis of local delegates, but ‘one member, one vote’ of the entire membership. A coup, in other words.

No wonder then that Momentum regions and branches up and down the country were livid. They had, after all, held meetings to discuss and make – mostly critical – amendments to the proposals put out by the Momentum office in early October on how to run conference. In the absence of a ‘horizontal’ line of communication between Momentum members or branches, it is difficult to know precisely what all the regions and branches decided, but, judging from posts on Facebook and the occasional report or set of minutes published, it looks like most regions favoured changes to the proposals (which, it should be stressed, did not come from the elected steering committee itself, but from Jon Lansman and a couple of his allies on the SC).

For example, many regions criticised the Omov plans and instead argued either for a delegate conference or a ‘hybrid’ and there were lots of proposals to lower the threshold needed to submit motions to conference. According to Lansman’s suggestion, a motion would need the support of 1,000 members before it could be heard at conference – an impossibility for any motion that is not supported and pushed by those having access to the database. The proposals criticising such nonsense seem to be the real reason why the NC was cancelled.

Immediately after the cancellation was announced, four Momentum regional conferences, a number of branches and dozens of individual members protested loudly against the move. Bourgeois newspapers quickly picked up on the “looming split” in Momentum, which in turn led John McDonnell to call an emergency meeting between comrades Lansman and Wrack to sort out the mess and limit the damage. Together they drafted a statement that was put to the SC on November 2 and initially attracted the unanimous support of its members. (Jill Mountford has since recanted, as “I woke up in a cold sweat and thought, I shouldn’t have signed this”, she said in Birmingham – though it is probably more likely that the cold sweat was down to a phone call from the leadership of the Alliance for Workers’ Liberty, of which she is a member).

The new statement, which “recognises and regrets the discontent and frustration felt by Momentum members in recent days”, gives some ground to the opposition by confirming that a new NC meeting will take place on December 3 and partially retreating on the voting arrangements for conference: “There will be both a physical delegates conference to thoroughly debate proposals submitted from the membership, and then Omov voting on the proposals in the period after the conference. The details of this procedure will be determined over the coming week.”

Yes, good luck with that. There was no such recommendation forthcoming at the Birmingham meeting – and it is doubtful whether there is any way the two methods can be combined, despite half of those present on November 5 arguing for a “hybrid”. More on that below.

Mess

Although the November 2 statement undoubtedly reduced the number of those travelling to Birmingham three days later, there was clearly still a strong desire to discuss what had happened and how similar undemocratic moves by a small leadership (whose democratic credentials are shaky, to say the least) can be avoided in the future.

Eighteen of the attendees at the November 5 meeting were members of the national committee. The AWL had four comrades present and there was a member each from the Labour Representation Committee, Red Labour, Socialist Appeal and Labour Party Marxists. A journalist from Socialist Worker was shown the door before the start of the meeting and, after a brief discussion, a member of the Socialist Party in England and Wales was also barred from attending.

Four members of the Momentum steering committee were present: Jackie Walker, Matt Wrack, Jill Mountford and her AWL fellow traveller, Michael Chessum. But because of the outrageous decision by the AWL to effectively support the right’s witch-hunting of comrade Walker by demoting her from the position of vice-chair of Momentum on the initiative of Jon Lansman, there is clearly a lot of bad blood between those four ‘left’ members on the SC.

Funnily enough, as the first speaker of the day, Jill Mountford started off by saying that “we shouldn’t turn on each other and witch-hunt each other”. Clearly, that was not meant as an apology to Jackie, but was perhaps intended as an attempt to stave off criticism of the actions of her own organisation.

But Jackie made her displeasure known, complaining, “The things that have happened to me have created a culture that has made the current move possible.” Too right. She was also self-critical: “Some of us have been coerced into supporting things that we wouldn’t have otherwise supported” – for example, the “lack of democracy within Momentum has been present for a long time”.

Comrade Wrack described an organisational “mess”, with “badly planned and badly run” meetings of the SC, where “outcomes are unclear and it is even less clear who will act to implement which decision”. There is a real discrepancy between the elected officers and the staff in Momentum office, “who don’t come from a labour movement background” and don’t know “that they are supposed to put into action the decisions that the elected officers have made”. He warned that this “tyranny of structurelessness” means that “people get away with all sorts”.

Speaker after speaker shared stories about the lack of democracy and, crucially, the inefficiency of the organisation. A comrade from Worcester told us how for months he pestered the office for contact details of other Momentum members locally, so he could set up a group: “Now I know there were six of us doing exactly the same thing at the same time. We all got the same reply from Momentum: silence.” Some of them actually bumped into each other when they were distributing Momentum leaflets at the same event.

Of course, Jon Lansman and his allies on the SC have used the fact that about a third of Momentum members are currently not organised in branches as a reason to push through Omov. In fact, like so many problems with the organisation, this is the fault of the leadership of Momentum, which is clearly not facilitating the organisation of local groups. If anything, the opposite is taking place: local groups are not allowed to send out their own emails (they all have to go through Momentum nationally), they do not receive a penny from the dues of 20,000 members and are often discouraged from organising activities.

Nevertheless, despite the obvious democratic deficit at all levels, there is clearly no desire to “split Momentum”, as had been reported. “I am here because I am convinced we still have everything to play for within the organisation”, said Matt Wrack. “We can’t throw this opportunity away and this assessment colours my whole tactical approach.”

A range of proposals were put forward in a useful if rather wide-ranging brainstorming session on how to democratise the organisation in the run-up to conference: they ranged from the need to publish the SC’s minutes and to clarify that the steering committee is subordinate to the national committee; that a new SC should be elected at the next NC meeting; that the Momentum office should help setting up local groups; to, crucially, the need to challenge the current company set-up, which gives Jon Lansman as the sole director total control over Momentum’s database – and money. Michael Chessum told the meeting that he happened to be in the office when he “overheard that Momentum had given a substantial donation to the Jeremy for Leader campaign and had seconded staff and equipment”. Chessum is the treasurer of Momentum, we should add. He should – at least – have been informed of such a decision.

It seemed to me obvious that the four members of the SC who were present should take a lead in cohering these proposals into a range of motions that regions and branches could move locally in order to give direction to those calling for more democracy. However, there is so much bad blood between the four that this is not going to happen. So the proposals are now being shared online in rough format by those who attended the meeting, with people naturally stressing those things that they found most important. An unsatisfactory outcome.

OMOV

Very interesting – though with an even less concrete outcome – was the discussion on ‘Omov versus delegate structure’ for conference. Speakers correctly identified that there are “two distinct visions” for Momentum: One, personified by Jon Lansman, is the idea that getting Jeremy Corbyn elected was the main thing that Momentum should do. From now on, it should exist as a centrally controlled organisation with lots of money and lots of staff that can organise lovely Facebook campaigns. Members of such an organisation can occasionally be activated to organise phone banks when the next coup or general election comes – but otherwise are nothing but “silent foot soldiers”, as Jackie Walker put it. Omov probably does look attractive to all those members who have so far been denied a real voice in running the organisation as a direct result of the lack of democracy in Momentum, as one speaker put it.

The other vision was supported by pretty much everybody in the room. This understands that “we are not a Jeremy Corbyn fan club”, as Matt Wrack put it. According to this outlook, Labour lefts need to actively organise in every ward and every Constituency Labour Party in order to remake the whole party from top to bottom if we are serious about fighting for a socialist future. Jeremy Corbyn is not going to do it for us.

A top down conference, followed by an Omov vote some time later, is, of course, designed to support vision 1, whereas a delegate structure is based on the need for active branches, discussion and debate amongst members – vision 2. These two visions are now openly clashing, with Jill Mountford warning that “Jon Lansman could not be more dismissive of local groups. He utterly rubbishes them at every opportunity – that is no secret.”

Her fellow AWL traveller, Michael Chessum, unsuccessfully tried to calm the waters by insisting that “I don’t think a lot of it is an active conspiracy, but there are also a lot of genuine mistakes and cock-ups. I don’t want this to become too personalised around Jon Lansman, who is not just a control-freak. Let’s show some good will.” He was openly laughed at and stopped talking after noticing that “everybody is rolling their eyes at me!” “You are kidding yourself if you think that Jon Lansman has learned a lesson,” warned Jackie Walker.

She is right. Vision 1 and vision 2 are clearly incompatible. Which is why it is a shame that about half the attendees in Birmingham supported the idea that conference could be run on a “hybrid” between Omov and a delegate system. A few seem actual fans of Omov, though most seem to think that “the genie is now out of the bottle”, as the SC had already agreed on such a method. “Now we have to make it work, otherwise we will have an insurgency on our hands if we try to overturn this decision at the next national committee”, said comrade Chessum (to the disdain of some AWL members, who heckled him).

The devil, of course, is in the detail – how on earth would it work? Would those at the “physical delegates conference” vote on the proposals before them on the day? If so, what if the ‘clicktavists’ at home subsequently overturned the decision of those they had delegated, many of whom are actually running Momentum locally? Who is going to implement such decisions? Would that not make Momentum even more undemocratic and ineffective? Everybody at our meeting argued against such a use of Omov.

Overall, this was a useful gathering, but it painfully underlined the need for the left within Momentum to start organising. The recent ‘mass amnesty’ of those suspended by Labour and the real possibility of an early general election make it imperative that the left gets its own house in order. This is still somewhat hampered by the fear of some in the room that this could be seen as a “split” within Momentum (which nobody argued for) or the forming of ‘a party within a party within a party’ (which is, in fact, just what is needed).