Momentum

Fight back in Momentum – but for what?

The left in Momentum is organising a ‘networking conference’ on March 11

Nineteen national committee members and 25 observers attended the meeting of the officially disbanded Momentum leadership on January 28 – which is not bad, considering that everybody there was basically sticking two fingers up to Momentum founder Jon Lansman. His long-expected coup on January 10 did away with all democratic decision-making structures in Momentum, including of course, the national committee.

The organisers had received a few apologies, so the meeting was supported by about half of all NC members – there had been around 60 members in attendance at its last meeting on December 3 (which included people sent from affiliated organisations approved by Lansman, as well as ‘representatives’ elected online via ‘one member, one vote’ to hastily created positions). The December 3 meeting, of course, was the trigger for the Lansman coup: despite his best efforts to stuff it with allies, he was outvoted on all major issues – crucially, the NC decided to organise Momentum’s first ever conference on a delegate basis.

Lansman knew that such a democratic conference would have insisted on ending his own one-man rule. Local groups were preparing motions to democratise Momentum and no doubt there would have been a couple seeking to take control of the company set up by Lansman that owns the database and all the income. Plus, we could probably have expected a number of motions critical of Jeremy Corbyn’s current political trajectory.

So Lansman simply pulled the plug. No conference, no potential embarrassment and certainly no coherent challenge to his dictatorial rule over the organisation. Needless to say, the ‘How we win’ event he was planning instead would have been a mere rally, without motions. It did not break anybody’s heart when it was cancelled ‘because of the by-elections’. Of course, there is always an important by-election somewhere, so we are doubtful if this particular gathering will ever see the light of day.

Around 40 branches have so far adopted statements and motions opposing the coup and the imposition of the new, anti-democratic constitution, with only seven supporting it. Apparently, there are over 150 Momentum branches, but it is doubtful if a majority of these are active. The tone of criticism in their statements varies, as can be expected, with some branches declaring that they would not recognise the new constitution, while others merely regretting the way it was imposed.

This was reflected on January 28. Most comrades agreed that there is nothing that can be done about the constitution. It cannot be changed, though there are some question marks over exactly how some bits will be imposed – and when. The rules on barring non-Labour Party members from Momentum, for example, seem to have been written so that they can be used if and when required (for example, in order to keep Jill Mountford of the Alliance for Workers’ Liberty out of high office). New Momentum company owner Christine Shawcroft has meanwhile assured members that “there will be no expulsions”. We shall see.

No split

About a quarter of the participants at the NC meeting argued (sometimes more coherently, sometimes less) that the committee should continue to organise the conference cancelled by Lansman. In reality of course, this would amount to a split. Among them were anti-Zionist campaigner Tony Greenstein (who accused the “old left” of offering “nothing but a council of despair”), Delia Mattis from the London region of Momentum, a comrade from Red Flag and a few others. Apparently, “local groups can function just fine” without the national organisation, according to one comrade. It is true, of course, that no membership dues find their way back to branches, there have been no real national campaigns and most definitely no support from centre. (In the run-up to the coup, Lansman initiated some quick changes, designed to make team Momentum look awfully busy, with varying levels of success.)

But it has become clear in the last couple of weeks that there is no widespread appetite for such a split. And it has to be said that the January 28 participants in favour of that option did not really present a viable way forward: split and then … do what, exactly? And with whom? As these comrades did not propose a motion and were calling for different things at different times, their arguments basically ran into the sand.

The majority – amongst both NC members and observers – were against a split, however. It was most strongly opposed by the handful of AWL members and supporters in the room. Their motion was slightly less combative than another motion presented by Alan Runswick, delegate from the North West region (when it still existed), though both were eventually passed.

The AWL motion, for example, argued that the call for a “national networking conference” is “not the ‘founding conference’ that was planned for February and which was cancelled by the coup and, while it may establish some connections or forum structures, it is not to set up a rival organisation to Momentum”.

And, while Alan too argued for a “national meeting of local groups”, he proposed in his motion that the NC should “agree to support the conference planned by the conference arrangements committee” – ie, the conference that was cancelled by the coup.

But, thanks to some pretty impressive chairing by Matt Wrack (leader of the Fire Brigades Union), the AWL motion was taken and agreed first, which basically took the sting out of this or that formulation of Alan’s motion. For example, while discussing the AWL-inspired motion, the meeting decided – instead of electing a new steering committee, as planned – to set up a “coordinating group” to consist of the remaining members of the officially abolished steering and conference arrangements committees, plus representatives to be coopted from unrepresented regions. So, by the time we got to Alan’s motion, the conference “planned by the conference arrangements committee” had turned from the one abolished by Jon Lansman into the new (and clearly different) networking gathering agreed for March 11.

As an aside, both motions are equally deluded in one respect: both call for branches to elect and send delegates to the March gathering. Yes, 40 branches have issued motions and statements critical of the coup. But it is another matter altogether for a branch to elect and send official representatives to what will undoubtedly be presented by the right within Momentum as a ‘rival’, ‘illegitimate’ conference. Both motions seriously overestimate how many branches would be prepared to go that far. For example, Leeds, York, Manchester and Sheffield have a strong rightwing and would probably not send delegates. March 11 could end up a very small meeting indeed if the organisers do not rethink this and allow pro-democracy minorities in hostile branches to attend in an official capacity (and not just as observers).

A suggestion by the Red Flag comrade to add a clause to call for a boycott of the NCG elections was defeated with only her vote in favour. Quite a few NC members had actually argued in favour of such a boycott (among them Jackie Walker, Suzanne Gannon and Nick Wrack), but they also recognised that “some good comrades here have decided to stand” and they did not want to exclude them. Stan Keable of Labour Party Marxists was actually the only candidate present at the meeting (as an observer), though the AWL has also fielded a few candidates.

Wishful thinking

The final clause in the AWL motion was going a bit far for most comrades and was deleted: “We call on the structures created by the coup to recognise the elected national committee of Momentum and to enable the two parallel structures to come together”. That seemed like pointless wishful thinking. However, it was replaced with a no less pointless suggestion that we should send “a deputation” to meet Jon Lansman under the auspices of John McDonnell.

This suggestion had come about after an observer reported that he had run into the shadow chancellor; McDonnell had told him that he was “not happy” about the coup and that in his opinion Jon Lansman and Matt Wrack should get together to talk things through. And, yes, he would be glad to have this message passed on to others in Momentum. Let us ignore the fact that McDonnell did not contact comrade Wrack about this suggestion or that a similar meeting had already taken place after the unofficial November 5 NC meeting rejected Lansman’s previous coup attempt. Another comrade suggested in the pub afterwards that Corbyn was being “held hostage” by Jon Lansman, who had threatened to walk off with the 200,000 contacts in his database if Corbyn did not let him do with Momentum as he pleases. This seems rather hard to believe. Momentum has suffered from a lack of democracy from day one. While the precise details of the organisational structure might not have been planned out very well by Corbyn and Lansman, it is clearly not in the interest of the Labour leader to have an organisation, which is associated so closely with him, that has the potential to embarrass him – be it with the call for mandatory reselection of MPs, the fight for the free movement of people or campaigning against weapons of mass destruction in the form of Trident.

The Lansman coup was clearly designed to demobilise and depoliticise Momentum members. It is part and parcel of Corbyn’s seriously flawed strategy of appeasing the right in the Labour Party. It is no coincidence that Lansman abolished Momentum democracy on the same day as Jeremy Corbyn gave (a version of) his infamous Peterborough speech. Don’t rock the boat. Keep Tom Watson and the right as sweet as possible for as long as possible.

This makes it all the more important that the Labour left does not give up this important fight to take on the right and, crucially, transform the Labour Party. This fight is not about Corbyn, Angela Rayner, Clive Lewis or whoever else might next lead the Labour Party – it is the fight to make the Labour Party into a real party of the whole class.

While there was nodding all round when Labour Party Marxists supporters argued for such a political orientation at the NC meeting, the AWL seemed to want to push the organisation towards “campaigning”. It proposed the setting up of “working groups” on the NHS, migrants rights and “expulsions/suspensions”. In our view, these suggestions range from the pointless (why would we campaign separately on the NHS, when the Labour Party and Momentum are already organising their own NHS ‘days of action’?) to the downright cynical: the AWL has, of course, already set up its own campaign, Stop the Labour Purge, and indeed it suggested in its written submission to NC members that we should “encourage local groups to host a speaker from Stop the Labour Purge”.

There was little appetite at the NC for these suggestions and they ended up falling off the agenda. Let us hope they will not be resurrected for March 11.

Democracy and the Labour Party, Momentum

Why referendums are anti-democratic

Mike Macnair says referendums empower those above, not those below – as we just witnessed again in Momentum

Tim Stanley in The Daily Telegraph writes, apropos of Brexit and of the election of Donald Trump, that “The left are being sore losers and democracy is the poorer for it”. His objection is that, by failing to accept the result of these votes, “the left” is failing to “move on” to challenge the actual policy choices of Trump, and/or of the Brexiteers; so that “democracy” is “poorer”, both because there is insufficient ‘scrutiny’ of the winners’ policies and – more emphasised in his argument – because the tendency of the criticisms is, he says, to undermine the practice of having elections and votes at all.1)The Daily Telegraph December 12 2016

Stanley’s argument is a defence of the devices by which capital turns universal suffrage into an ‘instrument of deception’. These devices have been so ostentatiously on display in 2016 that they can hardly be missed; and hence might, just possibly, be threatened with public revulsion, which would make ‘democracy’ poorer – meaning, make journos and their employers poorer. But, of course, much of the mainstream ‘left’ is perfectly willing to help out Stanley and his ilk in this matter. To characterise Trump, or the Brexiteers, as fascists or protofascists – as something unusual – is to divert attention from the routine in which journos’ lies fool enough people enough of the time to swing referendums and elections. And, moreover, part of the left positively supports the sort of plebiscitary politics which facilitates journo-fraud as an instrument of corruption.

This is the nature of Jon Lansman and his allies’ campaign for a referendum-based constitution for Momentum: a campaign which revealed its true nature by being carried out through ‘red scare’ witch-hunting in the advertising-funded media: a small-scale imitation of the techniques of the Blairites against Corbyn, and of the Trumpites and Brexiteers in mainstream politics.

The left

“The left” in the context of Stanley’s argument means, of course, the US Democrats, and the British Labour right and Lib Dem ‘remainers’, not anyone further left. Stanley might have noticed, if he bothered to, that the Corbyn camp’s position was ambiguous (complained of, indeed, by remainer journos and MPs) and that the main forces further left – the Morning Star’s Communist Party of Britain, the Socialist Workers Party and Socialist Party in England and Wales – were all advocates of ‘left exit’, so that from their point of view the Brexit vote was a victory. Here “the left” is a selective view of the left, meaning ‘the rightwing part of the left, which we rightwing journos are willing to regard as respectable’.

The plain dishonesty or self-serving self-deception in this selective identification of the target should alert us to the probable dishonesty or self-serving self-deception of the rest of the argument of the article. Perhaps more immediately to the present point, Labour Party Marxists, and hence this bulletin, did not wait until the ‘unpleasant’ (from a liberal point of view) results of the Brexit referendum and Trump’s election to complain of the fraudulent character of the referendum process, of the direct election of presidents, party leaders and so on.

We argued for an active boycott of the Brexit referendum on this basis. Our co-thinkers were already arguing against these Bonapartist operations in relation to the ‘Vote for the crook, not for the fascist’ presidential election in France in 2002. They argued, similarly, for a boycott of the Scottish independence referendum in 2014, on the basis that it offered a false choice. Such tactics in relation to all these challenges are open to debate; but our school of thought can hardly be accused of raising objections to the process as a sour-grapes response to results we didn’t (or don’t) like. Nor is this LPM position a novelty.

It is merely a matter of recovering the historic position of the labour movement against plebiscites/referenda, and against the elevation of single-person executive presidencies, as forms of the Bonapartism of Napoleon III (directly elected president of France 1848-52 and emperor 1852-1870). Napoleon III’s 1851 coup was endorsed by … a rapid referendum, followed by a second referendum in 1852 to make him emperor. It is against these methods that Marx and his co-authors argued in the Programme of the Parti Ouvrier that the creation of a workers’ party “must be pursued by all the means the proletariat has at its disposal, including universal suffrage, which will thus be transformed from the instrument of deception that it has been until now into an instrument of emancipation”.2)www.marxists.org/archive/marx/ works/1880/05/parti-ouvrier.htm Similarly, that socialists sought to abolish the US presidency (like similar offices) was already a commonplace in 1893.3)Engels’ March 14 1893 letter to F Wiesen of Texas, copied to Sorge: https://www.marxists.org/ archive/marx/works/1893/letters/93_03_18.htm Readers might also usefully look at Ben Lewis’s overview of Karl Kautsky’s 1893 Parliamentarism, direct legislation by the people and social democracy, and earlier this year Ben’s translation of extracts from Kautsky’s book.4)Engels’ March 14 1893 letter to F Wiesen of Texas, copied to Sorge: https://www.marxists.org/ archive/marx/works/1893/letters/93_03_18.htm This argued at length against the idea of legislation by referendum.5)B Lewis, ‘Referenda and direct democracy’ Weekly Worker September 18 2014; K Kautsky, ‘Direct legislation by the people and the class struggle’ Weekly Worker March 31 2016

Forgotten

The fact that this routine pre-1914 labour-movement understanding has been lost by the majority of the left results from two sets of ideas.

The first is that called by György Lukács the ‘actuality of the revolution’: the idea, posed by the early Communist International in 1919-22, that revolution was on the immediate agenda, and that this meant essentially the struggle for power, growing directly out of strike struggles, as opposed to any thought wasted on concrete constitutional arrangements. This was a reasonable interpretation of conditions at the end of World War I and immediately after, but was already becoming problematic by 1923.

The second is the concept of the ‘transitional method’ developed by post-1945 Trotskyists on the basis of the idea of a ‘transitional programme’, first posed at the Fourth Congress of the Comintern in 1922, then elaborated in the Transitional programme of the founding congress of the Trotskyists’ Fourth International in 1938.

While the ‘transitional programme’ had some substance to it, the ‘transitional method’ turns out to be merely an attempt to con the working class into taking power by avoiding talking about constitutional issues: a variant on the line of the Russian economists of the early 1900s. In this context, talk of the Lukácsian ‘actuality of the revolution’ and the recital by modern leftists of old leftist objections to pre-1914 socialist policy turn into pseudo-leftist alibis for a concrete policy which fails to challenge the existing constitutional order.

When people who think like this argue, like Socialist Resistance or the Alliance for Workers’ Liberty, for resistance to Trump or Trumpism, or to Brexit, they do indeed engage in sour-grapes reasoning – and, in addition, appear merely as the enraged wing of the liberals.

Old corruption

It is, however, more interesting that Stanley argues that criticisms of the electoral process will necessarily undermine the practice of holding elections, because the defects complained of are merely normal. “Have you ever known an election in which a politician didn’t fib? It’s up to voters to play detective …”

Back to the beginning. Stanley’s argument shows signs of either dishonesty or self-serving self-deception in the targets he selects as ‘the left’. We may reasonably infer that the rest of the argument is the same. But what is it defending? The underlying nature of his argument is not dissimilar to arguments made against electoral reform in the 19th century: for example, an opponent of banning candidates’ agents bribing voters complained in 1870 that, “Given that ‘free trade’ was otherwise ‘a principle of universal application’, why ‘affect a fastidious indignation at a political offence that poverty makes venial?’”6)G Orr, ‘Suppressing vote-buying: the ‘war’ on electoral bribery from 1868’ J Leg Hist 27 pp289-314 (2006) at p294, quoting an anonymous pamphlet of 1870

We can, of course, push this sort of thing further back. A close analogy with Stanley’s argument that voters should act as detectives is Mr Justice Grose’s conclusion in Pasley v Freeman (1789) that there should be no civil legal liability for causing loss by fraud in the absence of a contract between the parties, since “I believe there has been no time when men have not been constantly damnified by the fraudulent misrepresentations of others: and if such an action would have lain, there certainly has been, and will be, a plentiful source of litigation”; and that in the instant case “it is that sort of misrepresentation, the truth of which does not lie merely in the knowledge of the defendant, but may be inquired into, and the plaintiff is bound so to do; and he cannot recover a damage which he has suffered by his laches [carelessness].”7)3 Term Reports 51, 100 ER 450, at pp53/451, 55/452. 7. Regina v Jones 2 Lord Raymond 1013, 92 ER 174 (The argument was rejected by the majority of the judges.) Or Chief Justice Holt’s 1704 objection to criminal liability for fraud: “Shall we indict a man for making a fool of another?”8)K Ellis, ‘Trevor, Sir John’: http://www. historyofparliamentonline.org/volume/1690-1715/ member/trevor-sir-john-1637-1717 (In this case the indictment was quashed. The conduct charged would now be covered by the Fraud Act 2006.)

Nonetheless, even when this sort of argument was commonplace, and buying votes was normal, the ‘voters play detective’ logic was not followed through fully. Sir John Trevor was sacked as Speaker of the House of Commons in 1695, when he was caught taking a large bribe from the City of London for facilitating legislation they wanted. Bribing voters was acceptable; fraud, of a sort which would be illegal in modern times, was on the edge of legality. But for the speaker of the House of Commons to take bribes was unacceptable – and so was, even earlier, for the Lord Chancellor to take bribes.9)Lord Chancellor: Francis Bacon, impeached for corruption 1621

In other words, there are limits. Even suppose that you are a strong advocate of free markets and the idea that caveat emptor (let the buyer beware). Still, without some degree of bribe-free and manipulation-free decision-making, there can be neither legally binding contracts nor property rights among market actors. The real meaning of ‘anarcho-capitalism’ is warlordism, in the style of Afghanistan or Somalia. Over time, the limits have shifted. In the 19th century, in particular, there was a major shift against ‘Old corruption’; one which in the later 19th century, both in England and the US, produced institutional steps against vote-buying.10)G Orr above, note 4; cf also Stokes et al Brokers, voters and clientelism: the puzzle of distributive politics Cambridge 2013, chapter 8

It is clear enough that these steps were linked to other institutional changes of the period, which involved most famously the extension of the franchise. Less famously a process of professionalisation of the state apparatus, which actually involved its proletarianisation: that is, that public office ceased to be a marketable asset (‘offices of profit under the Crown’, the sale and purchase of commissions in the army, and so on) and became instead mere employments, with the state official as an employee limited to a wage (salary). It is common on the left to regard the changes made at this time either as mere technical ‘modernisation’ (following Weber, perhaps by way of Lukács); or as ‘bourgeois democracy’ on the supposition that the capitalist class is inherently ‘democratic’.

The error is the supposition that ‘Old corruption’ was feudal – an error encouraged by 19th century radicals’ own interpretation of it. It is clear, however, that capitalist groups down to the early 20th century preferred restrictive franchises and co-optative systems of self-perpetuating oligarchy; a form of governance which continues to this day in the City of London, for example. The partial suppression of certain open forms of corruption, together with the extended franchise and the partial proletarianisation of the state apparatus, reflected partial concessions to the proletariat as a class, in response to the political threats faced by capital around 1848 and again in the 1860s.

Once we see this, we can also see that, while the boundary of unacceptable ‘corruption’ moved outward in the later 19th century, what continues is a regime of corruption and electoral fraud under limits – not one of the actual elimination of corruption. Actually to eliminate corruption and fraud would be to destroy the underlying Burkean conception of the state as a ‘joint stock’, a quasi-corporation owned by its ‘shareholders’, the property-owners, in proportion to their wealth.11)Burke, ‘Reflections on the revolution in France’: https://chnm.gmu.edu/revolution/d/563/, para 3 If anything, the acceptance of extended suffrage (ultimately and currently, universal adult suffrage) requires more means of control both of the electoral system, and external to it.

Fraud

There are a variety of such means. But one central aspect is the role of advertising-funded media as engines of electoral fraud. It is a marked feature of writers in the advertising-funded media to deny the influence of its own fraudulent misrepresentations when – as now – the legitimacy of this influence is called into question. But when the papers, and so on, are selling advertising space, a very different story will be told. And the same is true when efforts are being made to persuade the leaders of political parties that they cannot realistically ‘go up against’ the media, or are doomed to defeat if they do so.

To sell advertising space, or to back up advocates of ‘better media relations’, the story told is one of the great power of advertising and media. In reality, the story is neither one of feeble illusions that anyone can see through – the voters effectively playing detective – nor one of omnipowerful media controlling completely the terms of ‘discourse’. Consider, for example, the Brexit referendum result – 17,410,742 or 51.9% for ‘leave’, 16,141,241 or 48.1% for ‘remain’. Or the US presidential election: 62,979,636 or 46% for Trump-Pence, 65,844,610 or 48% for Clinton-Caine, with 6% given to third-party candidates and the votes distributed in such a way that the popular plurality for the Democrat ticket nonetheless produced a clear electoral college majority for Trump.

In neither of these cases – and in no recent British general election – is it necessary to fool all the people all the time, or even to fool a majority. It is only necessary to fool a small minority of people, the ‘swing voters’, for a small period of time – the immediate run-up to an election or referendum.

Sign up now!

How does it work? A large part of the doorstep conman’s or other fraudster’s trick is to reduce the information available to the mark. The primary fraudulent misrepresentations are expected to crowd out other information, less attractively presented, which might conflict with them; but also pressure is put on to ‘close the deal’ before the mark has had an opportunity to rethink. It is precisely for this reason that consumer protection regulation against these forms of fraud, primarily the Consumer Credit Acts, impose cooling-off periods during which the consumer can back off from the deal which has been pressure-sold to them.

Electoral fraud works in the same way. The primary fraudulent misrepresentations are broadcast by paid advertising and the state and advertising-funded media, crowding out other messages (indeed, the phenomena of junk mail, billboard advertising and flyposting for clubs and gigs themselves work to drown out all forms of political communication not backed by advertising agencies or the mass media). The role of the advertising-funded mass media is, in fact, central to corruption and sleaze, because the only way (within the rules of the game) that politicians can hope to counter the biases of the mass media and behind them the advertisers, is to buy commercial advertising, which demands donations from the rich to fund the advertising, which in turn demands the policy pay-off to the donors.12)Sleaze is back’ Weekly Worker July 20 2006

Meanwhile, elections happen once every five years, and the campaign is short: and the message from both the media and the main parties is that the job of elections is to choose a government. So don’t waste your vote – or your thinking time – on fringe parties. Close the deal! Political action in local government elections and the internal life of parties, which can provide some degree of political life outside the ‘government election season’, is as far as possible closed down: by first-past-the-post, which results in big-party control of councils and ‘rotten boroughs’, by the enormous expansion of judicial review (why fight for council policies when the lawyers will tell you what to do anyhow?) – and, in the Labour Party, by bureaucratic intervention by the central apparatus, backed if necessary by the trade union bureaucracy. Only in general elections are the voters to be allowed to make ‘real choices’. Close the deal! Close the deal now! No cooling-off period is to be permitted: this is the exact point of the intense campaign of the Brexiteer wing of the media to insist that the referendum result is final and force through irrevocable steps for Brexit. This campaign against cooling-off is precisely evidence that what they are engaged in is a fraudulent operation.

The anarchists produced a true slogan about capitalist elections: ‘Whoever you vote for, the government will get in.’ It would be even truer to say: ‘Whichever of the main parties you vote for, you will have been conned.’ The more referendum-like the election process is – the more the question set is defined by full-time political operators, the more the access to information and to arguments is controlled by full-time staff or MPs and by the advertising-funded media, and the more there is no opportunity to repent and change your mind – the more you will be conned.

Momentum

As I said earlier, Stanley is concerned to defend ‘democracy’, meaning corruption through media control of limited elections, against the threat that the obvious manipulation of recent plebiscitary votes just might lead enough people to call into question the ‘process’: that is, the instruments of manipulation. It is deeply ironic that at the same moment the group round Jon Lansman in the leadership of Momentum used just these old media-manipulative methods to defend the old plebiscitary methods which make media manipulation more effective (and thereby enforce corruption though donations to parties); and to defend these old methods as somehow ‘new’.

Lansman and Co lost a number of votes in Momentum’s National Committee meeting on December 3. It was perfectly legitimate for them to argue for the reversal of these decisions. It was equally legitimate for them to argue that the Momentum NC is unrepresentative. It could hardly be anything but, given Momentum’s weak structures; but then the small Steering Committee which the NC left in place on December 3 is even more unrepresentative, and Jon Lansman as the individual private owner of the companies which own Momentum’s funds and data is more unrepresentative still.

When, however, the form of the campaign to reverse the decisions is not through Momentum internal structures or self-publishing, but through the Blairite and employers’ technique of briefing the advertising-funded media, it is reasonable to suppose that Lansman and his camp have committed themselves to the constitutional order in which capital rules inter alia through journo-fraud.

An example of the journo-fraud operations in progress have been seen recently in the concerted media campaign against potential strikers in the rail and the post. This very old-fashioned Bonapartist plebiscitary form of politics, routinely used as a means of political corruption by capital, is nonetheless presented by Lansman and Co as new politics.

The culmination of this was the email issued by ‘team Momentum to Momentum members and supporters in the name of Jeremy Corbyn – and presumably actually agreed by him (this was followed by similar messages from Diane Abbott and Clive Lewis). Corbyn’s emails told us that:

We must not let internal debate distract from our work that has to be done to help Labour win elections. Momentum needs to be an organisation fit for purpose – not copying the failed models of the past, but bringing fresh ideas to campaigning and organising in communities, helping members be active in the Labour Party and helping secure a Labour government to rebuild and transform Britain. That’s why the Momentum team has drawn up a survey to give every member a direct say in its future …

The email pointed members to … a “survey”, or opinion poll, carefully drafted to maximise the vote for Lansman and Co’s preferred approach: that ‘key decisions’ should be taken by referenda; and that the job of Momentum should be to turn out the vote – ie, that it should not ‘waste time’ discussing policy questions. The activists, it is suggested, should not bother their fluffy little heads with these issues.

They are to be treated as belonging to the party leadership, or the leader’s office, or Team Momentum: as, for example, when team Momentum decided, without consultation beyond the Steering Committee, to dump Jackie Walker out of the sleigh to feed the journo-wolves of the media witch-hunt round alleged Labour anti-Semitism: briefed by what can best be called the Start the War Coalition of Labour MPs gung-ho for bombing Syria.

How can this very traditional bureaucratic, media and professional politician management possibly be claimed to be new politics? The simple version is that Jeremy Corbyn was elected by online ‘one member, one vote’, and if it is good enough for him it should be good enough for taking all sorts of policy decisions.

But this, of course, has nothing new about it at all, being merely a revived form of the argument of Louis Bonaparte for his legitimacy to overthrow the French republican constitution in 1851 and his use of referendums to decide ‘key’ questions. It is also true that a combination of accidents meant that Ed Miliband’s Omov scheme for election of the Labour leader allowed hundreds of thousands of people fed up with ‘Blairmeronite’ bipartisan politics to revolt at a low cost.

This low cost, however, has meant that the Labour left has been affected by an illusion of strength through social media – shown to be an illusion by the practical results of the political war actually being waged by the Labour right, which has allowed it to tighten its grip on party conference and party institutions.

A similar, but desperately more serious, example of the illusions of ‘new media’ activism, this time under conditions of real repression and war, can be seen in the Syrian uprising and civil war: a point made recently by Riham Alkousaa on Al-Jazeera.13)‘How Facebook hurt the Syrian Revolution’, December 4 2016: http://www.aljazeera.com/ indepth/opinion/2016/12/facebook-hurt-syrianrevolution–161203125951577.html

Leaving aside illusions of strength, does the new tech change the delusive character of ‘plebiscitary democracy’? Not in the least. It is just in the nature of things that human beings have disagreements. Assuming there is a straightforwardly ‘right thing to do’, it is rarely obvious what the right thing to do is. 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) even then, discussion at party conference before the vote was taken. Without such methods, 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 membership, and (b) the right of individual veto over all such proposals (which is what is actually meant by proceeding by consensus, rather than proceeding by vote). Then on the one hand I get up in the morning, open my emails and find 10,000 emails with individual proposals for Momentum decisions waiting to be read. However, on the other hand, actually, I needn’t 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 Forums, the decisive voice was of the bureaucratic apparatus of the Brazilian Workers’ Party; in the European Social Forums, that of Rifondazione Comunista; in the London variant, Ken Livingstone’s London mayor’s office.

In the absence of elected bodies able to narrow the options down, and of debate among rival trends, factions and so on, it must be so. That this is how Lansman and Co see ‘new politics’ is plain enough. They are already operating under a regime in which team Momentum exercises bureaucratic control and Jon Lansman has the authority to act on his own – though in consultation with the equivalent full-timers in Jeremy Corbyn’s office, and so on.

The idea that referendumism is new or ‘horizontal’ is a scam or, at most, a self-deception, just like Tim Stanley’s scamming or self-deceptive claims that criticisms of fraud in the Trump victory or the Brexit vote make “democracy” the “poorer”. They are, in truth, just the same argument in favour of media control: reflected in the use made by team Momentum of traditional media spin techniques.

References

References
↑1 The Daily Telegraph December 12 2016
↑2 www.marxists.org/archive/marx/ works/1880/05/parti-ouvrier.htm
↑3 Engels’ March 14 1893 letter to F Wiesen of Texas, copied to Sorge: https://www.marxists.org/ archive/marx/works/1893/letters/93_03_18.htm
↑4 Engels’ March 14 1893 letter to F Wiesen of Texas, copied to Sorge: https://www.marxists.org/ archive/marx/works/1893/letters/93_03_18.htm
↑5 B Lewis, ‘Referenda and direct democracy’ Weekly Worker September 18 2014; K Kautsky, ‘Direct legislation by the people and the class struggle’ Weekly Worker March 31 2016
↑6 G Orr, ‘Suppressing vote-buying: the ‘war’ on electoral bribery from 1868’ J Leg Hist 27 pp289-314 (2006) at p294, quoting an anonymous pamphlet of 1870
↑7 3 Term Reports 51, 100 ER 450, at pp53/451, 55/452. 7. Regina v Jones 2 Lord Raymond 1013, 92 ER 174
↑8 K Ellis, ‘Trevor, Sir John’: http://www. historyofparliamentonline.org/volume/1690-1715/ member/trevor-sir-john-1637-1717
↑9 Lord Chancellor: Francis Bacon, impeached for corruption 1621
↑10 G Orr above, note 4; cf also Stokes et al Brokers, voters and clientelism: the puzzle of distributive politics Cambridge 2013, chapter 8
↑11 Burke, ‘Reflections on the revolution in France’: https://chnm.gmu.edu/revolution/d/563/, para 3
↑12 Sleaze is back’ Weekly Worker July 20 2006
↑13 ‘How Facebook hurt the Syrian Revolution’, December 4 2016: http://www.aljazeera.com/ indepth/opinion/2016/12/facebook-hurt-syrianrevolution–161203125951577.html
Momentum

Yes to a Momentum opposition – No to a split

We all knew the Lansman coup was coming, says Carla Roberts. But now is the time for the left to take stock and organise

Once team Momentum announced its “online survey” of all members and supporters, the result was a forgone conclusion. In referendums the dictator gets to ask the question and, barring accidents, they get the result they want.

Not only were the questions loaded: they were also disgracefully backed up by Jeremy Corbyn, Clive Lewis and Diane Abbott. Topping it all it was the fact that team Momentum did the count … a wonderful opportunity to gerrymander.

So, with a victorious 80.6% voting for Omov, at a stroke the national committee, steering committee and regional committees were abolished. There will perhaps be a powerless ‘official’ Momentum conference … eventually (like the proposed November 5 national committee meeting, the February 18 conference has been cancelled – this time because of the by-elections in Stoke-on-Trent Central and Copeland). Moreover, everyone has to agree to Lansman’s constitution … or quit the organisation. They also have to be a member of the Labour Party by July 1 2017 or they will be “deemed to have resigned” (even though many have been already barred or expelled because of their activity in support of Jeremy Corbyn and Momentum).

Jon Lansman’s coup de grâce was a long time in coming … and, frankly, we are surprised it took him so long. Even though he has made his ally, Christine Shawcroft, a director of ‘Momentum Data (Services) Ltd’, he is still in charge of ‘Jeremy for Labour Ltd’. In other words, legal control of Momentum lies not with its membership nor its elected committees. No, it lies with its tiny group of shareholders (very capitalistic). Hence it is Jon Lansman’s hands on the databases and the funds. Effectively it is he too who appoints the full-timers who make up team Momentum.

However, not surprisingly, Momentum branches up and down the country have come out against Lansman’s January 10 coup. To date around 30 of them. Most Momentum activists are utterly appalled by the crass way in which all democratic decision-making bodies have been abolished and a new anti-democratic constitution imposed by Jon Lansman and his allies. But, as would be expected, there is huge confusion on how to best move forward.

On January 13, the (abolished) Conference Arrangements Committee released a statement (with the three Lansman allies on the committee not voting), according to which: “The CAC takes its direction from Momentum’s national committee, as per the original remit we were given. Until that body meets and informs us our role has changed, we will continue working towards Momentum’s first conference.” Brave talk … and, given Momentum’s original structure, perfectly legitimate.

A provisional date of March 11 for “the postponed conference” has been mooted. The statement rigidly sticks to the CAC’s initial brief, according to which the committee will accept only “one motion” from each branch and “one motion or constitutional amendment” from each region. The committee also told us that the national committee (majority) would meet, as previously planned, on January 28 in London.

The meeting will probably be a non-binding get-together. However, there are those who wanted to use it as a springboard for a full-scale split, with the national committee appointing a new steering committee, agreeing the date of a sovereign conference and demanding the transfer of funds and databases from Jon Lansman and his allies. Morally, this course would have been perfectly justifiable. After all, with the new constitution it is next to impossible to remove Lansman and his allies from their position of total domination.

However, it has become clear in recent weeks that very few Momentum members, let alone branches, are up for such a course. While there are countless expressions of outrage, there is also a heart-felt desire not to further divide the movement. So, for the moment at least, accept any anti-democratic outrage, any violation of basic principles.

There is naivety too. Some refuse to believe that Jeremy Corbyn, John McDonnell and Diane Abbott know what Lansman has done. Similar illusions existed in the Soviet Union at the height of Stalin’s purges.

There is also fear. A split in Momentum will give the bourgeois media a field day. Many worry that Ukip’s Paul Nuttall is set to win in Stoke. Jeremy Corbyn’s populist turn has not increased Labour’s poll standing. If Theresa May calls a snap general election this spring, we therefore face a wipe-out of 1931 proportions. Those who joined Momentum to support Corbyn and get him into No10 are almost in a panic. Hence the frantic calls for unity, not to rock the boat and the need to get rid of troublesome leftists who could embarrass Jeremy Corbyn by reminding the public of his former republican stance, his anti-imperialist campaigning and forthright opposition to Zionist Israel.

Hence the chances are that a split would only take a tiny minority of Momentum’s largely passive 20,000 members. However, the biggest problem for the opposition is its lack of solid politics and a clear perspective. The CAC was searching for some middle ground with Lansman. Its preferred constitution – drafted by Nick Wrack and Matt Wrack – had all the problems of Lansman’s: referendums, direct election of officers and mimicking student unions, trade unions and the Labour Party itself. By contrast we in LPM wanted Momentum to recognise that it was a faction united by its common politics and which, like the Fabians, ought to seek affiliation to the Labour Party.

Given the absence of a well-organised and politically principled left, the idea of challenging the Lansman coup head-on was never realistic. But that does not mean we should give up the fight for the hearts and minds of Momentum’s 20,000 or the 200,000 on its database. True, quite a number of people – for example, Nick Wrack – have talked about resigning or have already left Momentum. This level of frustration and impatience is understandable, but also short-sighted.

There has been a huge democratic deficit within Momentum right from the start. Ever since Corbyn won the leadership race he and his allies have had to improvise. Jon Lansman swopped his role as Corbyn’s campaign organiser for what became the Momentum brief. To begin with there was vague talk of grassroots control, involving wider protest movements and local campaigning. However, instead of channelling the huge enthusiasm generated by Corbyn’s success into a battle to transform the Labour Party, another, more conservative, course was chosen. The Labour Party right had to be conciliated … therefore Momentum has to be tightly controlled from above. Otherwise it would be demanding the automatic reselection of MPs (which was until very recently, the position of the Campaign for Labour Party Democracy, of which Corbyn and Lansman are members).

Of course, any organisation that cannot trust its membership is unlikely to be able to mobilise them … even as spear-carriers. The danger is that Momentum will soon become little more than an empty husk. But for now Labour Party Marxists will continue to work in Momentum while any life in it remains. We will do so with a view to spreading our vision of what Labour needs to be.

Demands for boycotting Momentum – crucially the elections to the new National Coordinating Group – are mistaken. There is no reason to impose isolation upon ourselves. Indeed we should use every opportunity, every avenue to spread the ideas of Marxism. That is why Stan Keable, secretary of LPM, is standing for the NCG, in the South East constituency.

True, Momentum’s new constitution is a travesty of democracy. The 12 rank-and-file members will find themselves swamped by chosen representatives of Left Futures, Labour Briefing (‘original’), MPs, councillors, affiliated trade unions, etc, etc, who are allocated specially reserved places on the NCG.

But the same can be said of the post-1905 constitution of tsarist Russia. An autocratic monarch; rigged, indirect elections; seats reserved for the aristocracy and priesthood; and a stifling regime of censorship. Nevertheless, it was right for the Bolsheviks to stand in duma elections.

Of course, the left should organise and debate the road ahead. That can involve electing delegates from Momentum branches. But there should also be a conscious effort to involve the groups and fractions committed to working in the Labour Party: the Labour Representation Committee, Red Labour, The Clarion, Red Flag, Labour Party Socialist Network, Socialist Appeal and, of course, Labour Party Marxists.

So, no to a split, yes to Momentum opposition.

Nationalism and internationalism

Establishment looking to dump Trump

First the salacious dossier, then the huge, but liberal-led, women’s marches. The left must maintain its political independence, says Jim Grant

World-wide over 2.5 million marched after Donald’s Trump’s inauguration. There were protests in at least 600 towns and cities. Truly, a mass outpouring of disappointment, anger and desperation. Not only did the US fail to elect its first female president, but Trump is an odious xenophobe, misogynist and a sworn enemy of virtually every progressive cause.

It is vital that we are not led by the nose in what could well be a carefully choreographed campaign to impeach Trump at the earliest possible opportunity. Who spoke at the rallies and what they said tells us everything we need to know about the politics of the organisers. In Washington speakers included Madonna, Katy Perry, America Ferrera, Ashley Judd, Michael Moore and Scarlett Johansson. Their message: stand up to racism and sexism. In London it was Sandi Toksvig and Yvette Cooper (she was there as unofficial Labour – somewhat stupidly the Labour front bench stuck to its NHS action day). Their message: stand up to racism and sexism.

On Twitter, Hillary Clinton, the unsuccessful Democrat presidential contender, thanked all who attended for “standing, speaking and marching for our values”. As for the media, it gave generous pre- and post-publicity.

But Trump cannot be impeached simply because he is an odious xenophobe, misogynist and a sworn enemy of virtually every progressive cause. That is where the infamous Trump dossier comes in. The author is widely assumed to be a certain Christopher Steele. His 35 pages of allegations against the president and his people range from the dubious to the treasonous, to the downright bizarre; all rendered in the bland, grey prose of the MI6 house style.

Steele, a former operative at the Circus gone private, and his firm, Orbis, are merely one of a whole nexus of private intelligence firms operating in London, whose previous claim to notability consists in compiling evidence of corruption at the top of football’s governing body, Fifa, on the UK government’s dime, which issued ultimately – after the information made it to Washington – in the dramatic arrests of mid-2015 and the resignation of Sepp Blatter.

Steele’s name came up after it was admitted that the source of all these allegations is a Briton, which in the end is hardly surprising. Britain has the right combination – slavish obedience to US policy, coupled with a most hospitable environment for Russian oligarchs to stash their fortunes. No doubt there are many Russian gentlemen with ambiguous relations to the Kremlin available for a ‘private chat’ in the right sort of Mayfair club. A whole industry, it appears, has grown up around this fortuitous position, with ex-spooks very quickly replacing their income (and more) in the private sector.

There are, now we think of it, a few parallels between Blatter’s case and Trump’s: both men are sexist buffoons, for a start; and what Blatter achieved within the small circles of football’s governing elite (founding a firm and unpleasant regime on the support of more marginal constituencies) Trump aims to replicate on the grander stage of American society. They are both, above all, men who are liable to make enemies, and Blatter’s ultimately caught up with him.

While the interest of the secret state and its semi-detached private apparatchiks like Steele in the black heart of international football is merely a testament to how bizarre the distempers of the imperialist world order can get, the interest in Trump’s Russian adventures is more easily explicable. US state department doctrine in the recent period has been dominated by the objective of encircling Russia, in order to ensure ready American access from western Europe all the way to the far side of the Mediterranean and the Arabian peninsula. Such activity has increasingly clashed with Russia’s perceived interests in its near abroad – a policy that has provoked crises over Nato expansion and the recent wave of fatuous doublethink over who may be said to have liberated cities from Islamic State in the Middle East.

Compromised

Trump’s stated foreign policy represents, on this point at least, a dramatic shift. He has made no secret of his admiration for Russian president Vladimir Putin, and is gleeful in ramming home the point that the Russians have a freer hand to bomb the hell out of jihadist militants than the United States, such is the diplomatic cat’s cradle the latter has built for itself in the region.

The Steele dossier alleges in substance that the new president’s approach can be explained simply thus: Trump is compromised by Russian intelligence. His close advisors are accused of collaborating in the hacking of Democratic national committee emails. It is alleged that the Russian authorities, while ‘cultivating’ Trump as a presidential hopeful for five years, were simultaneously gathering compromising material (kompromat) as a guarantee of good behaviour, including the eye-catching claim that he paid prostitutes to piss in a bed once used by Barack and Michelle Obama, while he watched.

Trump’s response was, of course, to call all this so much “fake news” and a “political witch-hunt”, which raises inevitably the question of exactly how much there is in these claims. An interesting piece on the website of the London Review of Books by Arthur Snell, a former foreign office apparatchik, makes the point that there are rarely smoking guns in strategic intelligence, which is not so much post-truth as para-truth. What the poor, beleaguered spook has to work with is essentially hearsay:

At the heart of this game of betrayal is trust: the source of the intelligence must be trusted by his or her handler. The reader of the intelligence report has to trust the provider of the intelligence, while remaining critical. Intelligence is about degrees of credibility, and reading it is not the same as reading reportage, or a piece of political analysis. In order to make an assessment of its reliability, a reader needs to examine how it’s been sourced, insofar as that’s possible.1)www.lrb.co.uk/2017/01/17/arthur-snell/how-to-read-the-trump-dossier

All news outlets, especially in libel-crazy Britain, are keen to point out the unsubstantiated nature of all these allegations; and it certainly seems at least that the most straightforwardly damning one (that Trump ally Michael Cohen met with Russian intelligence on a particular date in Prague to discuss dirty digital tricks) is factually incorrect. As for the business with the bed, it is unlikely that any interested parties in the west are going to get any DNA swabs from the sheets. Who knows?

The more interesting question is perhaps not whether such things are true in the narrow sense, but whether they are advanced in good faith. The story being told about Steele is that, having been commissioned by the Democrats to look into Trump for them, he was so spooked by what he discovered that he went to the FBI, who merely sat on all this stuff, not wanting to be seen to intervene in the election. In this version, Steele (or whoever) investigated and reported the allegations out of concern for the west’s internal security, and the leak is essentially a disaster, shifting the terms of debate from the probabilistic models of the securocracy to the less nuanced arenas of the civilian legal system and media scrutiny.

There is the alternative explanation, which is that the whole thing is straightforwardly a fabrication – a Zinoviev letter for the right, playing on Manchurian candidate-style fantasies of the White House somehow being seized by an enemy agent.

The Steele dossier then has two potential uses – the one, being employed as a pretext for impeachment early in Trump’s reign, in a ‘very British coup’ (spooks, sex, the whole works!); the other, being used to make it politically difficult for Trump to pursue his thaw with the Kremlin without appearing to confirm the idea that he is Putin’s catspaw.

Left response

On January 20 the transition of power was complete and Donald John Trump was sworn in as the 45th president of the United States of America. A new era of global politics has begun.

How should the labour movement – in this country and the States – respond?

It is no surprise that there have been huge protests; indeed, protests have barely let up since the election. The horror among liberals, progressives and socialists is palpable, and understandable, at the rise of this narcissistic, bigoted cretin to the Oval Office; and we are disturbed by the apparent reality that he succeeded in part not in spite of, but because of, his posturing machismo and gleeful chauvinism. Trump has exposed a rottenness at the heart of political culture in the Anglosphere; the question is merely what exactly it is that is rotting.

Yet it is a peculiar age indeed when America’s business, political, secret and cultural establishment and the Socialist Workers Party are eye to eye on anything, never mind their attitude towards a newly elected president: “We don’t want Trump – but neither do the bosses,” says SWP leader Alex Callinicos. But all he can offer is “redouble building” the Stand up to Racism front.2)http://internationalsocialists.org/wordpress/2016/11/we-dont-want-trump%E2%80%94but-neither-do-the-bosses-alex-callinicos/ Indeed the SWP’s main slogan, ‘Dump Trump’, is identical with the interests of what is commonly called neoliberal capitalism. There is no independent class politics. No independent class strategy.

The sad fact of the matter is that the SWP is far from alone. The identification of the left with the establishment, the meat and potatoes of the American (and European) right, is being successfully exploited in elections by Donald Trump, Nigel Farage, Gert Wilders, Frauke Petry and Marine Le Pen.

Unity with the ‘liberal elite’ is paralysing any meaningful counter-strike against rightist national chauvinism; and the radical left has failed to benefit because it fails to acknowledge that mere ritual denunciations of racism, sexism, etc have not only lost the dissident edge they once possessed, but are now official establishment ideology throughout the so-called western world.

References

Momentum

Stay and fight the battle of ideas

Despite widespread outrage over the Lansman coup, there is little appetite to split Momentum, says Carla Roberts of Labour Party Marxists

Momentum branches, groups and committees up and down the country have come out openly against the Lansman coup of January 10. Labour Party Marxists is publishing statements and motions as and when they are being released.

Not surprisingly, most Momentum activists are utterly appalled by the crass way in which the February 18 conference has been rendered impotent, all democratic decision-making bodies have been abolished and a new anti-democratic constitution imposed by Jon Lansman and his allies. But, as can be expected, there is huge confusion on how to best move forward.

On January 13, the (abolished) conference arrangements committee released a statement (with the three Lansman allies on the committee not voting), according to which: “The CAC takes its direction from Momentum’s national committee, as per the original remit we were given. Until that body meets and informs us our role has changed, we will continue working towards Momentum’s first conference.”

A provisional date of March 11 for “the postponed conference” has been mooted. The statement rigidly sticks to the CAC’s initial brief, according to which the committee will accept only “one motion” from each branch and “one motion or constitutional amendment” from each region. The committee “advises” that the national committee should meet, as previously planned, on January 28 in London.

Clearly, the CAC statement was written shortly after the coup, when people were still very sore and very angry. And at the time many were probably up for the kind of action they are actually proposing here: a split. Of course, within Momentum, it is simply impossible to wrest power out of Lansman’s hands – that was the case before the coup and is now even more so. He set up the various companies that control Momentum’s finances and its huge database. And, crucially, he has got the support of Jeremy Corbyn.

However, it has become quite clear in recent days that very few Momentum members, let alone branches, are up for that kind of fight. And it would be a massive undertaking: anybody splitting would be hugely disadvantaged and would have to start again from ground zero. Without the money, contacts and the database.

The CAC seems to have changed its mind, too. It looks more and more likely that the January 28 meeting will become not so much a meeting of the (abolished) NC, but the kind of event that the Alliance for Workers’ Liberty is pushing for: a “local groups network” within Momentum.

Fearful of a split, AWL members have been keen to tone down statements in branches and it is interesting that the left minority of the steering committee (which comprises AWL member Jill Mountford, AWL supporter Michael Chessum, Fire Brigades Union president Matt Wrack and Jackie Walker) has gone very quiet too, although apparently it continues to meet. 1)www.workersliberty.org/node/27459

The biggest problem for the opposition is its lack of a clear political alternative. The CAC was searching for some middle ground with Lansman. Its preferred constitution – drafted by Nick Wrack and Matt Wrack – had all the problems of Lansman’s: referendums, direct election of officers and mimicking student unions, trade unions and the Labour Party itself.

Given the absence of a well-organised and politically principled left, the idea of challenging the Lansman coup head-on was never realistic. But that does not mean we should give up the fight for the hearts and minds of Momentum’s 20,000 or the 200,000 on its database. True, quite a number of people – for example, Nick Wrack – have talked about resigning or have already left Momentum. This level of frustration and impatience is understandable, but also short-sighted.

There have been huge democratic deficits within Momentum right from the start. Ever since Corbyn collected enough nominations to stand in the leadership election, he and his allies had to play catch-up. They had no idea what to do with the tens of thousands of people enthused by his campaign who wanted to get more involved. Momentum was badly thought-out and badly executed.

One thing is for sure, however: it was never the intention of Jon Lansman to allow Momentum to become a democratic organisation that would allow members to decide on its constitution or policies. That was obvious right from the start.

After all, such an organisation could easily embarrass Jeremy Corbyn by publishing statements that were not to the liking of the Labour right. For example, calling for the mandatory selection of parliamentary candidates (which was of course, until very recently, the position of the Campaign for Labour Party Democracy, of which Corbyn is a member) would scupper the illusion of a ‘peace settlement’ within the party.

But any organisation that cannot trust its membership is unlikely to be able to mobilise them … even as spear carriers. The danger is that Momentum will soon become little more than an empty husk. But for now, Labour Party Marxists will continue to work in Momentum while any life in it remains. We will do so with a view to spreading our vision of what Labour needs to be.

Demands for boycotting Momentum – crucially the February 18 ‘conference’ organised by team Lansman and the elections to the new ‘national coordination group’ (NCG) are mistaken. There is no reason to impose isolation upon ourselves. Indeed we should use every opportunity, every avenue to spread the ideas of Marxism. True, Momentum’s new constitution is a travesty of democracy. But the same can be said of the United Kingdom constitution, with its hereditary head of state, unelected second chamber and ‘first past the post’ elections to the lower house, which leave minority parties massively underrepresented. Nevertheless, it is right to stand in parliamentary contests.

Of course, the left should organise and debate the road ahead – first on January 28 and then March 11 (perhaps). That can involve electing delegates from Momentum branches. But there should also be a conscious effort to involve the groups and fractions committed to working in the Labour Party: the Labour Representation Committee, Red Labour, The Clarion, Red Flag, Labour Party Socialist Network, Socialist Appeal and, of course, Labour Party Marxists.

Such a conference should establish a Momentum opposition and a politically representative steering committee. Obviously there can be no hope of winning a majority on Momentum’s NCG. Jon Lansman has ensured that he will enjoy a permanent stranglehold: a maximum of 12 people on this body (which will have between 27 and 34 members) will be elected by Momentum members – the rest being filled by unions, affiliates, MPs and other “elected representatives”.

And it is far from certain that the 12 will be made up of leftwingers – for example, Lee Jasper is one of the 17 who has already thrown his hat into the ring. 2)https://order-order.com/2017/01/18/male-shortlist-momentum-internal-elections Ken Livingstone’s race relations quango chief has the undeniable advantage of having name recognition. Ditto Paul Mason or Owen Jones, should they decide to stand or be persuaded by Lansman and Corbyn to do so.

In any case, the Momentum opposition can link up branches, organise joint action and fight for more space for leftwing ideas in Momentum.

To be a member or not? There is some dispute over the status of all those left Momentum members who have been expelled from the Labour Party for political reasons: Nick Wrack, for example, Tony Greenstein and a whole lot of members of the Alliance for Workers’ Liberty.

The key point in the constitution, point 5.8, states that “Any member who does not join the Labour Party by July 1 2017, or ceases to be a member of the Labour Party, or acts inconsistently with Labour Party membership, may be deemed to have resigned.” 3)https://d3n8a8pro7vhmx.cloudfront.net/momentum/pages/939/attachments/original/1484079394/momentum-constitution.pdf?1484079394

Labour NEC member Christine Shawcroft – Jon Lansman’s successor as director of the company Momentum Data Services Ltd, which controls the vast database of the organisation – assures us on Facebook that this

does not mean expulsions. 5.8 says if anyone ceases to be a member of the party they may be deemed to have resigned. Not will, but may … Even if we were to take action under 5.8, the member will have a right of appeal under 5.10. So there is no witch-hunt, no expulsions (well, only under very unusual circumstances, we hope).

Some hope. “Christine speaks with forked tongue”, writes Jackie Walker on Facebook. She is right. The new rules are actually very clear:

  • Those expelled by the LP for political reasons can appeal to the Momentum NCG to be allowed to remain/become members of Momentum” (rule 5.10) 4)“Where a member may be deemed to have resigned in accordance with rules 5.7, 5.8 or 5.9 there will be a right to be heard by the NCG or a delegated panel before a final decision is made.”
  • But even if those are allowed to become Momentum members, they will not be allowed to take up elected positions, either on the national coordinating committee (rule 6.2) 5)“The NCG shall consist of Momentum members who confirm (and can provide evidence on request) that they are current Labour Party members.” or in local groups (rule 12.7) 6)“Anyone who stands for office, such as chair or secretary, in a group or network shall be a member of the Labour Party and in the event that they cease to be a member of the Labour Party within their term of office, they are deemed to have resigned such office.”.

The current formulation, centring on the word “may”, means that we will basically have to wait and see how actively those expelled by Labour for political reasons will be hounded out of Momentum. The Momentum office has assured members that they will do no such thing. That begs the question as to why these rules have been put in the constitution in the first place.

They are not there to prepare Momentum for affiliation to the Labour Party, as has been claimed. Members of affiliated organisations – eg, trade unions and socialist societies – do not need to be members of the Labour Party. Instead, they are entitled to become “affiliated members” of Labour.

No, these rules are clearly there to get rid of troublemakers from the left, as and when the need arises. It is never a good sign when rules are written in a way that leaves them open to interpretation. Needless to say, the interpreting will not be done by anybody appealing to the kangaroo court run by the NCG, but the ‘judges’.

And if you have indeed managed to convince the judges that you are worthy of Momentum membership, you might still be thrown out for being “a member of an organisation disallowed by the NCG.” 7)Point 5.1.ii in the constitution.

References

References
↑1 www.workersliberty.org/node/27459
↑2 https://order-order.com/2017/01/18/male-shortlist-momentum-internal-elections
↑3 https://d3n8a8pro7vhmx.cloudfront.net/momentum/pages/939/attachments/original/1484079394/momentum-constitution.pdf?1484079394
↑4 “Where a member may be deemed to have resigned in accordance with rules 5.7, 5.8 or 5.9 there will be a right to be heard by the NCG or a delegated panel before a final decision is made.”
↑5 “The NCG shall consist of Momentum members who confirm (and can provide evidence on request) that they are current Labour Party members.”
↑6 “Anyone who stands for office, such as chair or secretary, in a group or network shall be a member of the Labour Party and in the event that they cease to be a member of the Labour Party within their term of office, they are deemed to have resigned such office.”
↑7 Point 5.1.ii in the constitution.
Momentum

Momentum: Reduced to a corpse

We knew it was coming, says Carla Roberts of Labour Party Marxists, but the sheer cynicism of Jon Lansman’s coup is staggering

Once team Momentum announced its “online survey” of all members and supporters, the result was a forgone conclusion. In plebiscites the dictator get to ask the question and barring accidents they get the result they want. Not only were the questions loaded, they were also disgracefully backed up by Jeremy Corbyn, Clive Lewis and Diane Abbott. Topping it all it was team Momentum which did the count … a wonderful opportunity to gerrymander.

So, with a victorious 80.6% voting for OMOV, at a stroke, the national committee, steering committee and regional committees were abolished. Now, there will only be a powerless ‘official’ Momentum conference and members have to agree to accept the constitution and join the Labour Party (even though many have been already barred or expelled because of their activity in support of Momentum). Jon Lansman’s coup de’gras was a long time in coming … and, frankly, we are surprised it took him so long.

Even though he has handed ownership of ‘Momentum Data (Services) Ltd’ to his ally Christine Shawcroft, he is still is in charge of ‘Jeremy for Labour Ltd’. In other words legal control of Momentum lies not with its membership nor its elected committees. No, it lies with its tiny group of shareholders (very capitalistic).

If Momentum were a film, we would say that it is now firmly in its final, third act. The witch-hunt of Jackie Walker, vice-chair of Momentum, could be described of the ‘inciting incident’ – the moment that set in action a narrative that almost inevitably led to the current situation. Lansman was flexing his bureaucratic muscles and, rather than defending the chair of Momentum from the ludicrous charge of anti-Semitism, he jumped onto the witch-hunting bandwagon and had her demoted. That was the end of act 1 for Momentum. What followed was a second act that felt much longer than the two months it actually lasted and which saw the action move up and down like a yo-yo:

  • First, Lansman cancelled the Momentum national committee meeting that was due to take place on November 5.
  • Then the small leftwing minority on the steering committee under the leadership of Matt Wrack (leader of the Fire Brigades Union) fought back and encouraged NC members to go ahead and meet on the same day.
  • This and an intervention by John McDonnell MP to “sort this mess out” led to an “unanimous statement” of the SC, which forced Lansman to allow another meeting of the NC to take place on December 3. But, despite his best efforts to stuff this meeting with people who are on board with his vision of transforming Momentum into nothing more than a well-financed phone bank, a majority voted – just – to hold a democratic conference, which would see real-life delegates discuss real motions and, crucially, agree on a constitution. A conference arrangements committee (CAC) with a small pro-democracy majority was set up which invited branches to submit motions and select delegates.
  • Lansman did not take this defeat lying down, however. A media onslaught followed, in which Paul Mason, Owen Jones and the “naive” Laura Murray declared that ‘old Trots’ were holding Momentum hostage.
  • Lansman then sent out the “online survey” to all members and supporters, which was stuffed full of (mis)leading questions. It is actually amazing that under those conditions 12.5% of participants ticked the box opting for decision-making by delegates. (As an aside, we know the survey was also sent to the well over 150,000 contacts marked as Momentum supporters, but their responses are not listed – presumably because the turnout was much worse than the 40.4% of members who replied.) The CAC ploughed on and announced on December 21 that a two-day conference would take place on February 18-19 and encouraged branches to elect delegates and vote on motions.


Final act?

Let us now look at the climactic action that has propelled us into the third – and no doubt final – act of Momentum’s existence as a potentially useful site for the exchange of ideas.

At 6pm on January 10, the CAC announced that, although it was “unable to get in touch with the steering committee” and was having its ability to communicate to members delayed, disrupted and censored by Jon Lansman’s team Momentum, a conference venue had been booked. For financial and organisational reasons, this was now scheduled as a one-day event on Sunday February 19 in Rugby. The CAC encouraged all members to “book transport now”.

At 7.39pm on the same day, Jon Lansman sent an email to the Momentum steering committee,1)You can read the full text here http://socialistnetwork.org.uk/2017/01/10/an-email-from-jon-lansman-to-the-momentum-steering-committee/ in which he asked the committee to impose on the organisation its first constitution, which would abolish the SC and all other Momentum structures and committees.

At 8.54pm he declared in another email to SC members that he had now received “a majority” in favour of his proposal (ie, his six allies out of the 11 SC members had replied) and that therefore the committee no longer existed. All national and regional structures in Momentum were abolished at that moment. The conference arrangements committee was declared non-existent. All online discussion forums for regional committees on www.loomio. org were deleted and branches’ access to the Momentum database severely restricted.

At 9.01pm all Momentum members received an email informing them about the decision, which, so claims Lansman, was the direct result of the survey he sent out in December:

80.6% of respondents said that key decisions should be taken by ‘one member, one vote’, rather than by delegates at regional and national conferences and committees (12.5%). 79.3% of respondents said all members should have a say in electing their representatives, as opposed to national representatives being elected by delegates from local groups (16.2%). Following this decisive response, the steering committee voted to introduce a constitution for Momentum to deliver the kind of action-focused, campaigning organisation that our members want.

So, let’s get this straight: 80.6% said they wanted to have a say on all key decisions – so the best way to implement this is to ignore them all and just impose a deeply undemocratic constitution on them (see William Sarsfield’s article). This is pure cynicism.

With an amazing power of foresight, weeks before the survey was sent out, Paul Mason had already announced on the Daily politics show on December 8 a key plank of this so-called constitution: the purge from Momentum of all those troublesome lefties who have been expelled from the Labour Party.

He claimed, wrongly, that in order for Momentum to qualify as an affiliated organisation of the Labour Party its members had to be current individual members of the party. This is clearly not the case: members of affiliated organisations – eg, trade unions – are entitled to become “affiliated members” of Labour, who enjoy fewer rights than full members.

No, this has nothing to do with trying to implement the results of Lansman’s deeply flawed survey or even plans to transform Momentum into a Labour affiliate. This is a witchhunt against the troublesome left within the organisation. Again and again, it has obstructed his plans to strangle the political life out of Momentum in order to preserve it as a mere fan club for Jeremy Corbyn: a money-heavy, democracy-light organisation that could be used as a massive phone bank for this or that Lansman-approved campaign or a mobilising tool when the next coup against Corbyn happens.

The more naive observers of the current crisis have pleaded for Jeremy Corbyn to step in and bring Lansman to heel. Nick Wrack demands to know on Facebook “who in the leader’s office” Lansman has consulted. But, while Corbyn might not have been involved in plotting the finer details of this coup, there can be no doubt that he will be on board with the basic trajectory. His recent email to Momentum members pushing Lansman’s survey has demonstrated this reality.

Neither Lansman nor Corbyn have any interest in Momentum becoming a vibrant, decision-making, memberled organisation that could fight for democracy and socialism. Any such organisation would undoubtedly embarrass the Labour leader sooner or later. A truly democratic conference would see motions criticising this or that particular attempt of Corbyn’s to become a “populist”, which has, for example, seen him zig-zagging over the question of immigration, Trident and Brexit.

Corbyn will not be happy about the negative press reports, of course – but he is on board when it comes to stamping out Momentum as a vibrant organisation.


Take it or leave it

The uneasy peace settlement in Momentum has now come to an abrupt end. The knives are out. Lansman has declared that, yes, there will be a conference, but it will be organised by his own personal company, ‘Momentum Campaign (Services) Ltd’, will take place on February 18 and will hear “no motions”. Instead, his “conference” will concentrate on “workshops” and “exciting speakers” and will no doubt look a lot like ‘The World Transformed’ event at the 2016 Labour Party annual conference.

Lansman has made it clear that in his view there is no room for manoeuvre, no space for normal members or branches to amend his ‘constitution’ or challenge any of his decisions: “If you consent to Momentum’s constitution, you do not have to do anything. Simply continue paying your membership fees. However, if you wish to opt out, you can email to cancel your membership.”

A happy ending to this drama seems unlikely and a split the most likely outcome. Credit to the CAC, which – as we go to press – continues to plan for its own conference on February 19, with motions being discussed and decisions taken democratically (though the details are still understandably fuzzy).

Labour Party Marxists supports this fightback. We would urge Momentum members and supporters to attend both events and fight for democracy, socialism and transparency on the two consecutive days.

Jon Lansman might have won this particular battle, but he is not going to ride into the sunset with a smiling Corbyn on his back. Without a strategy of fighting to transform the Labour Party into a real party of labour – a strategy that would require challenging Corbyn when he goes wrong, rather than giving him carte blanche – Momentum is nothing but an empty shell that is likely to run out of members and money before long. Whether ‘The end’ for Momentum can become the beginning for something better remains to be seen.

References

Refound Labour as a permanent united front of the working class

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