Tag Archives: Momentum

Democracy and the Labour Party, The left

Uncritical support for Corbyn

Gallery

David Shearer of Labour Party Marxists reports on last weekend’s LRC conference.

The February 20 ‘special general meeting’ of the Labour Representation Committee was a strange affair, not least because of the poor attendance of only around 150 comrades. The leadership had gone out of its way to insist that there could be no annual general meeting – the 2015 AGM should have been called in November – because of the election of Jeremy Corbyn.

The new circumstances apparently meant that no motions from members or affiliates could be entertained, and there could be no elections for the executive or national committee. But, apart from that, the meeting had all the features of an AGM – officers’ reports and constitutional amendments, for instance.

The reason why only the leadership’s own motions were permitted was obvious. You and I might propose an ‘extremist’ policy or course of action that might embarrass comrade Corbyn and his number two, John McDonnell, at a time when they are under constant scrutiny and attack in the media. So the membership was permitted only to move amendments to the leadership’s own motions.

Having said that, however, the NC’s statement – ‘After Corbyn’s victory – building the movement’ – contained some useful points. For example, it correctly stated: “While participating in, and encouraging, industrial and social struggles, at the present time the LRC has to emphasise the internal battles in the movement.” It also declared: “… we need to work at every level in the unions to encourage participation, democracy and transparency …” Once again, quite correct – although the leadership was not best pleased by the attempt of Labour Party Marxists to add some meat to the bones when it came to union democracy (see below).

However, there was certainly some ambiguity over the LRC’s original and continued purpose. The statement claimed that, unlike others on the left, the LRC had always accepted that “the radicalisation of working people will at some point attempt to create a mass left wing within Labour”.

However, NC member Mike Phipps usefully pointed out that the “origin” of the LRC actually lay in the possibility of an “alternative to Labour” during the days when the right was firmly in control. In fact I seem to recall comrade McDonnell himself hinting on more than one occasion that such a possibility was not ruled out. But let’s not talk about that!

Nevertheless, taking into account such an “origin”, what today is the LRC’s purpose, now that the mass-membership Momentum has come into being? The statement read: “There is no contradiction between the LRC participating fully in the creation of a national network of local and internet-based Momentum groups and maintaining the existence of our own organisation – for the time being.” Indeed it foresaw a time when the LRC “has outlived its usefulness”. This point was also made by comrade McDonnell himself in his address to the conference. He thought that “maybe in the future” there will be “just one organisation”, but apparently we are “not ready for that yet”.

Mick Brooks, in presenting the leadership’s statement, said that Momentum was a “genuine mass movement” and we “have got to be in there”. The LRC has a “critical political role to play”, he continued – it is our job to help shape Momentum’s politics, it seems (even though the NC wants to keep those politics within safe bounds – ie, bounds determined by the rightwing media and its eagerness to blacken the name of the new Labour leadership in whatever way it can).

As the statement put it, our aim is to “advance the Corbyn agenda in the party as a whole” (my emphasis). The overwhelming majority at the meeting favoured more or less uncritical support for Corbyn – there was a clear consensus that the most important thing was to get him into No10 in 2020. According to Jackie Walker, speaking for the NC in the afternoon session on Momentum, we should “go to meetings, knock on doors” to “get Jeremy elected as prime minister”. There were several other such comments. Many were couched in the language of socialism – including the Labourite ‘socialism’ of the 1945 Attlee government.

Despite this, the meeting accepted an amendment to the statement, moved by Sacha Ismail of the Alliance for Workers’ Liberty, which called on Corbyn and McDonnell to be “politically bolder” – it specified “taxing the rich, nationalising the banks, reversing all cuts” and explaining how such demands fit into a vision of a “different society from capitalism”. Within Momentum, the amendment proposed, the LRC should fight to go “beyond ‘progressive’ and ‘new politics’ towards a clearer political programme based on class politics, working class political representation and socialism”.

One comrade said the amendment “misunderstands where we are” – Corbyn and McDonnell are in a “precarious position”. We shouldn’t tell them “we know better”, that “they’re not being bold enough”. Our task is not to advise – “our task is to build”.

Together

While there were guest speakers from the junior doctors and Heathrow 13 campaigns, the star speaker was undoubtedly the shadow chancellor. John McDonnell was pleased to bring a message of “solidarity and thanks” from Jeremy Corbyn – who had, after all, been a “founder member” of the LRC.

Comrade McDonnell stated that the shadow cabinet was an example of the Labour “left, right and centre working together” – the implication being that this can only be a good thing. But the left was gaining ground: “When they realised we had momentum, they started taking some of our ideas.” According to him, most of the Labour right had now “bought into our idea of Labour becoming a social movement again”.

So Labour as a whole, it seems, is now attempting to “transform the social and economic system” and establish a “radically fairer and more equal economy”. And the LRC’s role should be “to the fore” – that of “campaigning to develop policy”. We should “aim for the election of a socialist government” in 2020. It was the “opportunity of a lifetime” – what he had been waiting for all these years: “Now it’s here, let’s grab it with both hands.”

Following a standing ovation, it was announced there would be questions from the floor, although only three were taken. In response, comrade McDonnell stated, among other things, that if there was a challenge to the Corbyn leadership, the left would “organise just as hard” as last time – but it would “do it in a way that holds the party together”. Answering a question from Pete Firmin on the party’s attitude to the European Union and the coming referendum, comrade McDonnell said that Labour should be “working with socialist and social democratic parties across Europe” in order to achieve “a workers’ Europe, a social Europe”. Otherwise we would be left with a “capitalist club”.

He ended by saying: “Now we are the Labour Party. We’re the mainstream!” Which earned him a second standing ovation.

Following this, Mick Brooks presented the leadership’s statement. He began by stating that we were attending a special general meeting, rather than an AGM, because it “was not a question of business as usual”. Since the 1980s Britain had been dominated by rightwing politics, where the situation for socialists was unfavourable. But now there is “radicalisation to the right and to the left”. In contradiction to McDonnell’s claim of a growing unity, comrade Brooks said that within Labour Corbyn is “surrounded by enemies”. Our job was to mobilise his potential support and “channel it into the Labour Party”.

Liz Davies spoke next from the platform. She was delighted to be “back in the Labour Party” after a couple of decades in organisations like the Socialist Alliance and Left Unity. Then she had thought that Blair and Brown had “changed Labour irrevocably”, but “I am delighted I was wrong.” Now Labour was once again opposed to the “wicked” Tory policies on welfare, housing, migration and so on.

Bolt-on

The first amendment to the NC statement was moved by Pete Firmin representing Brent Trades Council. This mandated the NC to “call the overdue 2015 AGM within three months”. The last AGM had been in November 2014 – when comrade Firmin himself had been elected political secretary – and there was no real reason why we should not now have a proper conference, where a full range of motions are heard and the leadership is elected/re-elected.

The excuses given by a range of NC and EC speakers opposing this were truly abysmal. The intention was to “call an AGM as soon after the Labour Party conference as possible” – didn’t comrade Firmin know that an AGM “takes time and money to organise”? It had been “a difficult year” and now was not the time for “the usual resolution-passing” (unless they are resolutions from the leadership, of course). It would be “an enormous distraction” to organise a “second major event”.

But Graham Bash, LRC treasurer and editor of Labour Briefing, was the most embarrassing: “For goodness sake, in the next three months there are local elections”, plus lots of local Momentum meetings, he said. Organising the AGM would “take the LRC out of politics” and we shouldn’t let such things “get in the way of the struggle outside”!

Other comrades, including Andrew Berry, pointed out that democracy was not a “bolt-on extra” and there was no reason why we could not fully engage in politics while preparing for an AGM. Although the amendment was defeated, the vote was close enough to necessitate a count – there were 35 in favour and 57 against.

This was followed by the LPM amendment mentioned above. This stated: “The fight to democratise the Labour Party cannot be separated from the fight to democratise the trade unions.” It was essential to ensure that both Labour and union officers are fully accountable and recallable, and are paid only the average wage of a skilled worker. The amendment put forward several other concrete proposals – we should, for example, aim to abolish the Bonapartist post of Labour leader.

In introducing the amendment, Stan Keable insisted that democracy must be seen to be implemented. Democracy was our best weapon against the class enemy, in that it could help to transform our movement into a genuinely powerful force. That applies to the trade union movement as well as to the Labour Party.

Once again there were some very weak arguments against such a basic proposition. One comrade said that it was “not for us to tell our affiliates how they should organise”, while another said that at last we have our own leader and yet here we have Labour Party Marxists making the “mad” proposal to abolish the post! Surely everyone knew it was our job to “get behind Jeremy’s agenda”? And you would have to be “bonkers” to expect him to get by on a worker’s wage.

LPM’s Jim Grant argued that if it was wrong for us to tell the unions how to organise, presumably we should not ‘interfere’ in their affairs by calling on them to support the junior doctors, for example. But it was to no avail: the amendment was defeated, with about 25 comrades voting in favour.

Unpleasant

After the lunch break NC members Michael Calderbank and Jackie Walker introduced the session on Momentum. Comrade Calderbank said that Momentum was “crucial to the Corbyn movement” and to “getting Labour elected” in 2020, while comrade Walker stated that the aim must be to double Momentum’s membership. She was very enthusiastic about her local Momentum group and its ‘consensus democracy’ – “and, you know, it works!” What is more, “If you say something unpleasant, we ask you to leave!”

Comrade Walker also thought it was better to have “more people who don’t have experience” coming into Momentum than members or ex-members of the organised left. But there were “too few blacks and too few women” – which was all down to people (like members of the experienced left, no doubt) “saying unpleasant things” and others (like herself, it seems) “being intimidated”.

In a similar vein Andrew Berry had raised a point of order in an earlier session objecting to the use of certain words – he specified “losers”, “mad” and “bonkers” – the last two having been directed against LPM. We don’t mind, Andrew, honestly!

The final session dealt with organisational matters, which revealed the poor state of the LRC. As Norrette Moore for the executive said, “Last August we got down to about £100 in the bank.” This was one of the reasons why the “very large national committee” had to be streamlined. The ‘streamlining’ consisted, amongst other things, of a constitutional change that would end the current two-tier structure, whereby the executive committee “takes proposals to a national committee”. Instead there would be a single national executive committee. The NC was proposing that the AGM (when it is eventually called) should elect not only the NEC, but eight individual officers (at least four of whom “should identify as female”), including a “treasurer”, “web manager” and “administrator”.

Our amendment called for all officers to be elected by the NEC itself, not the AGM. In moving it, I pointed out that very few LRC members knew which of those standing for election would make a good “web manager”, for instance. What is more, if the comrade elected turned out to be a total incompetent, then, under the current method of electing officers, there would be nothing anyone could do – they had been elected by the membership and could not be removed until the next AGM.

But comrade Moore said that if we elected the committee as a whole and gave them the job of allocating the various responsibilities from amongst themselves, that would make them a “clique”. No, I’m not sure how she worked that one out either. In any case, the amendment was lost, with, once more, around 25 voting for it.

 

Momentum

Momentum: Fight for political clarity

Gallery 1 Comment

Jim Grant of Labour Party Marxists surveys the left response to Momentum’s founding national committee meeting.

Akira Kurosawa’s classic film Rashōmon is based around the narrative concept of a series of self-interested characters giving their partial accounts of the same event –  a procedure borrowed by many subsequent works in all narrative media.

It seems also to have been borrowed, ingeniously, by Momentum: its inaugural national committee this weekend was undoubtedly an important moment, but the precise nature of its significance is something nobody can seem to agree on.

So, to the good news: proposals to ban leftwing literature from Momentum meetings were resoundingly defeated. That the impulse was there at all is, alas, hardly surprising – there is nothing a shiny new movement likes less than the reality of the haggard old Trots its meetings will attract, but it was still silly. Would Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament leaflets be banned? If not, then what about slightly more contentious campaigns (Cuba Solidarity, say)? Even on its own terms, it would be a bureaucratic nightmare, and a ridiculous price to pay for the slender benefit of keeping Socialist Worker at bay. (There is, of course, the small matter of elementary democratic principle to bear in mind as well.)

That Momentum is – for now – relatively open to the participation of avowed Marxists can be gauged from the fact that its steering committee (which will take care of things in between NC meetings) included a certain Jill Mountford of the Alliance for Workers’ Liberty. Any regular reader of this paper will know that our criticisms of the AWL are legion; but, given that Momentum is screamed at in every paper for basically being the Militant Tendency with better social media nous, comrade Mountford’s election is a good omen for left participants in Momentum more generally. They are not yet buckling on this one. Good.

The most contentious issue, however, is related to Momentum’s membership rules. On the table were three options: Momentum is only open to Labour members; Momentum members must have Labour Party cards, but a separate category of supporters would have voting rights on all matters not directly connected to internal Labour politics; and finally, that Momentum was open to Labour members, affiliated supporters (such as members of affliated unions) and those who support the “aims and values” of the Labour Party, provided they do not support any party other than Labour.

The third option was chosen by a decent majority vote, and its vagueness is probably responsible for most of the leftwing confusion in the period since the meeting. We have argued repeatedly that Momentum should orient itself very firmly in the direction of the Labour Party, and aspects of the agreed wording fudge the issue somewhat. Talk of ‘aims and values’ is plainly lifted directly from the wording of the Labour Party’s ‘registered supporter’ category, which proved under the pressure of Jeremy Corbyn’s insurgent leadership bid to be somewhat elastic, with many of those who had left Labour for the Greens and suchlike excluded on the basis of ancient Twitter postings.

In context, the Momentum agreement is pointing in the opposite direction: it is, after all, the most elastic of the options available. Momentum members will merely have to employ the appropriate due diligence of not openly supporting opposing candidates under their own names. Yet it is still not nearly as elastic as some would like. Again – good. Momentum has chosen not to be yet another self-perpetuating campaigning mechanism along the lines of the People’s Assembly, Stop the War and sundry Trot fronts past and present. It is an (admittedly unofficial) organisation of the Labour Party, and all who sign up will at least have to stand in some proximity to the larger body.

Dogma

So, unsurprisingly, opinions divide. Many are pretty upbeat about the whole thing: “I believe the lobbying and pressure from grassroots Momentum branches won the day at the new NC on Saturday,” chirruped a triumphant Stuart King, formerly of the International Socialists, Workers Power, Permanent Revolution and the Anti-Capitalist Initiative (and possibly still a member of Left Unity, but who knows?), on Facebook.

The AWL’s Ed Whitby, who was present, used his own blog to accentuate the positive. “People should join the Labour Party, and it is right that Momentum will strongly encourage this; but there are still many people coming to the organisation who for whatever reason haven’t joined yet. We need to encourage and persuade them, not throw up an unnecessary barrier.”1 (The AWL, of course, has a longer track record of conducting Labour work, so the result is probably easier to swallow for its members.)

Many Left Unity members are … less enthusiastic. It is hardly surprising: as its membership shrivels, LU is more and more dominated by the ‘carry on as before’ tendency; those for whom the desire to stand candidates in their particular locality automatically supersedes any attention to the goings-on in wider national politics; those for whom the narrow horizon of politics is fitting in as much low-level do-goodery into a given week as possible. No doubt LU will continue to ignore the great shifts happening all around it, in favour of trying to turn out what remains of its membership on whatever demonstration is looming.

The ne plus ultra of this political approach is, as ever, the Socialist Workers Party. A headline in this week’s Socialist Worker asks: “Is Jeremy Corbyn supporters group Momentum cutting off its grassroots?”2 Beyond being a great exemplar of Betteridge’s law (which states that any headline which takes the form of a question can be safely answered with ‘no’), it differs very little from any of SW’s recent ruminations on the topic.

“Momentum’s national committee rightly agreed to support the CND demonstration against Trident nuclear missiles in London on Saturday February 27,” writes the article’s author, Nick Clark. “And it also committed to build for the People’s Assembly national demo in London on April 16. But the committee’s agenda emphasised a focus on building the Labour Party.” For shame!

Comrade Clark’s bizarre conclusion deserves to be cited in full:

“Such a strategy risks allowing the groundswell of support that grew around Corbyn’s campaign to melt away. Corbyn’s strength came from the hundreds of thousands of people who voted for him because they wanted an alternative to austerity, racism and war. Sustaining that will mean building a broad-based movement.”

Might we naively suggest that people voted for Corbyn because they, er, wanted him to be the leader of the Labour Party? Does the SWP really expect people to take no further interest in the matter now that he is Labour leader, and – worse – actually think that is a good thing?

We will not find out from comrade Clark, who refrains from anything so vulgar as justifying the claims he repeats mindlessly, like a penitent monk. For that, we turn to Mark L Thomas, writing at greater length in the latest International Socialism, the SWP’s quarterly journal:

“The key to social change remains through collective struggle from below. Every advance in the struggle creates a greater self-confidence among layers of workers, so weakening the hold of rightwing ideas. This in turn is Corbyn’s best defence of his position against the Labour right … But if the mass of Corbyn’s supporters are simply drawn into bitter internal battles over Labour policy and candidate selections, in practice their focus will not be mobilising in workplaces and working class communities, but on arguing with the right wing … Paradoxically, this can weaken, not strengthen, Corbyn’s position.”3

Things are, alas, little better here – we have proof only of the bankruptcy of the SWP’s hyper-activist tunnel vision. For decades, we have been told with increasing desperation that every passing strike or demonstration is ‘really important’ and the ‘start of the fightback’. Well, comrades, the fightback has come – and you are reduced basically to complaining that it was not the fightback you had in mind. Would a little rethinking be too much to ask?

This sort of dogma is, as we have already seen, hardly limited to the SWP, which merely presents it in its purest and thereby most ridiculous form. Indeed, even organisations that take the Labour question more seriously as part of their operative activity slip into this paradigm all too easily. Thus we find the aforementioned Jill Mountford and Ed Whitby, along with AWL stalwart Sacha Ismail, in last week’s Solidarity:

“It would be false [sic] at this stage to push for anything like a clear, sharp statement of socialist aims, but we need to go beyond Lib Dem-style platitudes and commit to goals for changing the labour movement and developing workers’ political representation. Momentum also needs a clear orientation to supporting workers’ and social movement struggles, and taking them into the Labour Party.”4

It is, we note, never the right time to push for a “clear statement of socialist aims”; nor are we certain that “supporting workers’ and social movement struggles” goes beyond the platitudinous. Mountford wants Momentum to be ‘socialist’ in some sense, still: just not clearly or sharply so. So it is somewhat odd to find comrade Whitby ambivalent on this point in his later blog post: “The basic statement of aims was amended to refer more to socialism and the working class [but] it is still, in my view, far from adequate.” It is a difficult thing, indeed, to satisfy precisely the AWL’s demand for blurry, blunt socialism!

Focus on labour

Still, we must agree with comrade Whitby that the Momentum decisions represent movement in the right direction. And there is a small nugget of truth even in the SWP’s Nick Clark, when he complains of “a focus on building the Labour Party”. However, it is clear that, left to its own devices, Momentum has a very clear sense of what building the Labour Party means, and that is to support Jeremy. At all costs, Labour must be returned to government in 2020, with the honourable member for Islington North at the helm.

So, although Clark’s crypto-Bakuninist ravings and the Corbynist electoralism of the Momentum mainstream may seem to be directly and diametrically opposed, they have in common one thing: the need to suppress political clarity. The object of working class struggle is the conquest of political power, and in fact the ‘instinctive’ class vote for Labour – as with other humdrum matters of official labour movement politics – is a distorted reflection of that reality. The existence of the Labour Party can be put down, ultimately, to the fact that even the infamously bureaucratic British trade unions of the 19th century knew that the workers’ movement needed an effective ‘political wing’ to make anything stick.

Yet there is a vast gulf between what the extant forces of the Labour left consider to be ‘taking power’ and what is actually required to break the grasp of the ruling class on society. For one thing, capital is organised internationally, as the recent Google tax scandals have neatly illustrated; ‘getting the Tories out’ and putting in a tax-and-spend budget does not change that by itself. Organising internationally, however, renders unavoidable the necessity to think at a very high level about the sort of world we want to create. More immediately, the very structures of the state are organised in ways favourable to capital and hostile to labour (in extremis, we have had off-the-record coup talk about Corbyn from army chiefs already). Again, a laundry list of worthy reformist policies gathered into a Labour manifesto is not adequate as a response.

In short, rigorous and effective political discussion is not some self-indulgent distraction from the ‘real work’ – be that getting a Labour government or nudging up attendance figures at some demonstration. The great promise of Momentum is that it provides an opportunity to fight for political clarity among greater numbers of people and, by focusing on the Labour Party – an organisation that, for better or worse, actually matters – the chance to make that clarity a practical force in society at large.

Notes

1 . https://edsunionblog.wordpress.com/2016/02/09/steps-forward-for-momentum-report-of-first-momentum-national-committee-6-february-2016.

2 . Socialist Worker February 9 2016.

3 . ‘A house divided: Jeremy Corbyn and the Labour Party’ International Socialism No149, winter 2015.

4 . Solidarity February 3 2016.

Momentum

Momentum – through the looking glass

Gallery

Jim Grant of Labour Party Marxists wonders if the bourgeois press thinks their readers are sheep 

We are barely two weeks into Momentum’s existence, and already the British media is terribly excited – bringing to bear the fearless pursuit of truth, attention to detail and scrupulous fair-mindedness for which it is famed.

There is, of course, nothing more suspicious than a group of persons associating together in pursuit of common political objectives. There must, surely, be some hidden agenda. And our brave hacks have done a stand-up job assembling as much evidence as possible to demonstrate that all those participating in Momentum have, unbeknownst to themselves, joined a lunatic Trotskyist cult.

Representative of this tendency is, first of all, Dan Hodges writing in The Daily Telegraph. Hodges cut his teeth as, according to his former byline in the paper, a “Blairite cuckoo in the Brownite nest” at the fag-end of the last Labour government; though he no longer calls himself a Labour member, his agenda has not significantly changed since departing (which really ought to tell you something about how closely his ‘values’ were aligned to the labour movement in the first place).

Anyway, for Hodges, “Momentum [is] spelt M-I-L-I-T-A-N-T”.1 It seems you cannot turn over a rock in the Labour Party without finding some swivel-eyed, ranting leftie beneath, and Hodges is fixated on one Jon Lansman, associated with such sinister ventures as, er, his blog (Left Futures) and the Campaign for Labour Party Democracy. Hodges’s ‘smoking gun’ is an article by Lansman noting that Jeremy Corbyn’s rightwing opponents have not gone away, and it will be necessary to defend the leftwing leadership “when they strike”. Very militant-sounding, of course – but surely little more than a statement of fact. How dare the Corbynistas not abandon their leader to the carnivorous affections of his enemies!

Momentum is thus described rather grandly as Corbyn’s “Praetorian guard”, when – inasmuch as it has any success getting off the ground – it will resemble not some elite military unit, but rather the same bundle of naive, excitable human material that so spectacularly swept aside the cynical Brewers Green machine people this summer. If one were so minded, one could call such an agglomeration a ‘mob’; and, indeed, Hodges comes close when he declares mandatory reselection of MPs to be a “protection racket” (how dare those little people in branches and CLPs presume to interfere in promising careers!). Praetorian guard, not so much.

It paints a pretty picture, though – on one side, a vast invading force of hardened warriors (or, otherwise, a Mafia family – if only Hodges could make his mind up); and the other, a rag-tag militia of simple-hearted Labour ‘moderates’, with only parliamentary salaries, corporate backing and the entire bourgeois press to defend them. Will our plucky heroes survive, against all the odds?

Hodges is not the only journo with Militant on the mind. While he can only manufacture silly conspiracy theories about Jon Lansman, however, The Sunday Times at least managed to find some kind of tenuous connection – in the person of Dave Nellist, former Militant MP, and still a leading light in Militant’s modern incarnation, the Socialist Party in England and Wales.

The first sentence – which, as any journalism course will tell you, is the most important, since it is the most likely to be read – reads: “Trotskyists are being urged to join a new group for Jeremy Corbyn’s supporters in a fresh effort to purge moderate Labour MPs and shift the party further to the left.” Those who make the effort to read a little further are rewarded with the subtle clarification that comrade Nellist supports … mandatory reselection, “which moderates fear will lead to a purge”. By “moderates”, they mean rightists; by “fear”, they mean ‘are telling the press’; by “purge”, they mean a reckoning with their treachery. Other than that, entirely fair and accurate.

Lest the reader imagine that this sort of fanciful material is restricted to august mainstays of the rightwing press, we cite, finally, the Huffington Post: a terribly modern, web-only bunch of liberal clickbait peddlers. Breaking with the pattern observed so far, HuffPo’s Owen Bennett discovers the hidden hand not of Militant, but the Socialist Workers Party. What’s the skinny here? That the SWP’s Party Notes – forced into the open by this paper – calls for its members to attend Momentum meetings, make their political affiliation clear and see if any of those present would be interested in attending the Next Really Important Demonstration.

SWP national secretary Charlie Kimber was happy to offer a few ‘damning’ quotes to Bennett (who, somewhat ungratefully, calls him “Mr Kimble” for most of the piece – whoops!), suggesting that the SWP might perhaps consider standing candidates against Labour “when you have a rightwing Labour council sticking two fingers up to Jeremy Corbyn”.3 Displaying an uncharacteristic sense of caution, “Mr Kimble” insists that any such action would have to be considered “very carefully”. Very wise – not that Owen Bennett is able to judge.

Wrong for 20 years

In truth, none of the far-left bogeypersons advanced by the media are really plausible. We may return to SPEW, née Militant: it would be a wonderful thing, truly, if it were leading its members decisively into battle against the poor beleaguered souls of the Labour right. It is, alas, doing no such thing. It is plain enough at this point that its leadership has come round – grudgingly – to the idea that the fight is worth having. Very good.

However, it has spent the last two decades committed more staunchly than anyone to the idea that the Labour Party is dead and it is necessary to break all remaining pro-working class forces from its allegiance, to form a new workers’ party in the idealised image SPEW has of old Labour. Instead of merely admitting the plain truth – that, in the light of newly available evidence, those 20 years were spent committed to a wrong theory – SPEW instead chooses to contort reality, claiming that it was correct all along, and a full and final victory for Corbyn would represent in reality the founding of the new workers’ party it had always envisioned!

This is a notably lithe theoretical dodge, but advancing it among people who have not already drunk the Kool-Aid will provoke laughter at best, and a discreet phone call to the men in white coats at worst. The confusion does not stop there – SPEW has called for affiliations to be opened up to its like, but still opposes the re-affiliation of the RMT and FBU unions, and still insists that it will run candidates against Labour in the next local elections – SPEW supremo Peter Taaffe is evidently not as circumspect as “Mr Kimble”.

In short – ladies and gentlemen of the press – Militant is not back from the dead, and is not presently the danger you remember it to be. But without Militant running things in secret, and without SWP infiltration, just what is there left to be scared of? Fortunately, Sam Coates – deputy political editor of The Times, no less – has discovered another insidious threat.

Labour Party Marxists has published a six-point plan to ensure that Mr Corbyn’s agenda is widely adopted: “As the hard right begins its civil war, the left must respond with disciplinary threats, constitutional changes and reselection measures,” it said.

Indeed, we did – and do. These people are traitors, and need to be ushered – politely but insistently – out of the Labour movement. This is not their place. It is not clear how many people are listening to us, if that matters. We do not exaggerate our influence in the wider movement; after all, we have the deputy political editors of eminent daily papers to do that for us, apparently.

There are three possible explanations for these egregious stupidities. The first is that they are honest, if severe, mistakes. The deputy political editor of The Times has mistaken our small propaganda group for a large organisation that will rise, rampant, should mandatory reselection be placed on the Labour Party rulebook. Its Sunday sister is genuinely under the illusion that the modern successor to Militant still has the wherewithal to take over city councils and get people onto the Labour benches. (Simple error, if nothing else, almost certainly accounts for the “Mr Kimble” business.)

Number two: these papers are actively and deliberately lying. Their activity is equivalent in substance and form to the forged ‘Zinoviev letter’ – a cynical and dirty trick to delegitimise the Labour leadership.

And finally, the middle way: the elementary errors of research and fact are to be explained by an indifference to the truth of the matter. This is the mode of communication defined by philosopher Harry G Frankfurt as “bullshit”.4 The bullshitter cares not if what he says is true; only that it convinces enough people enough of the time.

The common thread among all three is contempt for the readership. Either these stories are deliberately deceptive; or they are advanced in the confidence that nobody will check either way; or those commissioned to write them are incompetent. None of these options shines glory on the papers concerned. The condition for any of them working is uncritical acceptance of untruths by the people they purport to keep informed.

Well, if anybody is curious enough to find this article as a result of all this free publicity, and patient enough to read all the way to the end – socialism is, above all else, about not treating the general population like morons. It is this dangerous idea that rankles both the careerist technocrats of the Labour right and the demagogues of the press.

Notes

1. The Daily Telegraph October 10.

2. The Sunday Times October 18.

3. www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/2015/10/16/momentum- swp-jamie-reed-entyists_n_8312330.html.

4. HG Frankfurt On bullshit Princeton 2005.