Momentum: Business as usual fights back

Just over a month ago I was posting about Momentum. As befits the organisation's name, a lot has happened in the time between now and then. A quick Google will fill the reader in if necessary, and I have no intention of using up pixels repeating what has been reported across the British left internet ad nauseam. The news in brief is that Jon Lansman has imposed a constitution on the organisation and that many members are not happy.

Over the coming days local groups will have to work out their positions on the coup, and on what to do next. I have my own view, as will be apparent from the way I'm writing, and I think it's important to defeat what I see as a power grab. But there's a caveat: the way we debate and interact within groups in the hours ahead matters as much as the outcome. Momentum, and the Corbyn movement more generally, is easily the most positive thing to come out of the British left for a generation. It cannot be allowed to go to waste. To this end, the necessary disagreements that lie ahead are ones that ought to be conducted in a comradely fashion, preserving the relationships on which practical solidarity depends, and keeping enough unity within local groups to go forward. This is especially the case because many people in Momentum are new to political action. Seasoned faction fighters would do well to bear this in mind.

If how we conduct the dispute is important, so is understanding it. This is a conflict about labourism, that peculiarly British way of doing working class politics, where the politics of the workplace is outsourced to the trade union movement, with the Parliamentary Labour Party keeping charge of the bulk of business. A strict separation of powers governs the labourist settlement, with trade unions straying into the 'political' being met with disapproval. So too, the PLP preserves its distance from the constituency activists who keep the Party ticking over at local level. If, on this model, political power is distant and insensitive to pressure from below, the devotees of this remote deity receive compensation in the form of the culture of labourism. The Labour Party and unions provide activities, friends and comrades, structure, purpose, and the possibility of office.

Labourism can be left-wing, just so long as it sticks to the rules of the game - politics is for parliament (and not for the streets, still less - God forbid - for 'political' strikes), MPs are important and to be treated with reverence, the 'Labour family' over-rides all other political loyalties. For all that he is the best leader Labour has ever had, and for all that his election would be a momentous step forward, Jeremy Corbyn remains squarely within the labourist consensus (by contrast, Tony Benn was set upon not least because he didn't).

The Corbyn movement, especially in the form of local Momentum groups, however, challenged labourism. It challenged it politically, organising and expressing solidarity with extra-parliamentary action, tying strikes into political agendas. Voices began to be raised about the deselection, and even mandatory reselection, of Labour MPs, turning the assumptions about power within the labour movement on their head. Scarcely less importantly, the movement challenged labourism culturally. More diverse culturally, ethnically and in gender and sexuality terms than anything the British left had ever produced it confronted a Labour establishment that in many localities is monocultural, white, and male.

Why am I writing about labourism? Because some people do well out of left labourism, those who get established positions in organisations, jobs with campaigning organisations or MPs, those who have just enjoyed being immersed in its culture and feel comfortable within it.

The Lansman coup is left labourism fighting back. It is because labourism, for all its undoubted achievements, can never deliver socialism that it would be good were the coup to fail.