A New Political Geography of Labour. Part 1- Orders of Governance

It’s tempting and provocative to draw parallels between the State and the party, or to ask what is Labour was a state, what kind of state would it be?

First order, Second order and Metagovernance

Bob Jessop, Jan Kooiman and Svein Jentoft are among the political theorists who have conceptualised the different levels of governance into “orders”.

First order- socio-political problem solving via the institutions set up to govern.

Second-order-redesigning those institutions in order to better solve first-order problems.

Third-order/metagovernance refers to assigning the normative principles and/or calibrating the organisation of the entire system.

While these levels of governance are usually used to describe the State, there is no reason they cannot be a valuable analytic tool in our critique of the Labour Party as it runs.

Gaining Territory

It’s easy to see how, since 2015, Corbynism and the Labour left has made incredible in-roads into the tools of first order governance. Key institutions of the party: the manifesto, the NEC, and of course the leadership itself, were “won” by the left and the party’s internal overton window has seemed to move past the neoliberal “consensus” of the previous decades.

Yet, they still play by the party rules that were established in a different era. The Italian philosopher Nicos Poulantzas criticised the idea of State as “instrument” (to be captured and wielded), yet this how much of the modern left work within Labour’s political economy, it is necessary to get “our people” on the NEC or in seats of power, but it is not enough to focus on this first order of governance. Poulantzas concluded that the State was not a tool but the condensation of relationships, ones that benefit the elite power bloc. Thus democratic change must come from the second order reorganisation of those relationships.

Since the Corbyn moment arrived, there has certainly been talk of democratising the party, and yet it seems to have mostly been placated with half-hearted measures, (trigger ballots anyone?) or simply fizzle out and be forgotten as other concerns make themselves known. It’s arguable that prioritising winning first order seats is valid strategy for the Left, especially after the attempted coups that aimed at reversing the shift back to the centre ground.

But without attention to second-order governance, then we could end up with a situation in which the central hierarchy’s continued assumption that the membership will continue to donate their time and money to the service of the party may find itself crumbling. The previously apathetic who joined the party in their thousands in order to defend insurgent Corbynism, will start to lose faith in formal politics again if they feel that they are being mobilised to defend the privilege of the party’s few.

The limits of our current relationship

There is the uneasy feeling that leftists who found themselves at the high table of party governance have found the seats too comfortable to consider dismantling them.

This is most clearly seen in the abusive behaviour of the NEC towards the members of the party. It’s important to remember that the current incarnation of the NEC includes many styled as being from the left of the party, winning election in the “JC9” slate backed by Momentum and CPLD. Yet in the the run up to the 2019 election, the NEC acted with what from the ground was seen as an incredibly authoritarian impulse, imposing candidates and shortlists on CLPs and refusing to explain why. There are perhaps many on the committee who would prefer that this was forgotten about, but it really shouldn’t be. Labour members, many of whom had been servants of the party, who had given years of unpaid labour to the party, had used their own time and resources to work on local campaigns to seek approval of their local branches and parties. Then with no warning, they were removed from the candidacy positions. Despite multiple requests for explanations, no one from the NEC has ever explained the reasoning behind this. Perhaps those with influence or who see themselves as future insiders will handwave this, saying “it’s just politics”. But that’s exactly the kind of attitude that will lead to growing feelings of indifference within the party.

With leadership elections looming and a post election spirit of change in the air, now more than ever is a crucial time for labour members to mobilise.

Digital Visions

What would a radical and truly democratic Labour party look like? One model comes from Europe and the rise of the digital parties such as Italy’s Movimento 5 Stelle (M5S) which in the 2018 elections became the largest party in parliament only ten years after forming. Via the online platform Rousseau, members of the party can exert instant democracy, directly voting on policy and leaders. Yet M5S’s opposition to the traditional party hierarchy through which one must navigate also brings a problematic element. Paolo Gerbaudo has argued that elimination of the middle levels of party governance in digital parties creates a “distributed centralisation” in which reliance on direct democracy alone actually increases the power of the leadership, as they control the limits and agenda of the platform. Without party hierarchy, Gerbaudo argues, the democratic process sacrifices much needed deliberative aspect for a shallow participation, which at worst leads to kneejerk governance of a digital mob.

The issue with Labour f(r)actions such as Momentum, and the Campaign for Labour Party Democracy, is that they mostly seem to slot far too comfortably into the party hierarchy. This isn’t to suggest that their members are secretly anti democratic, but without second-order governance strategies they are constrained by the vertical hierarchy at the centre of party organising. Thus serious attempts to reform and redesign the party must tackle the problem of making horizontal information between CLPs simple.

Conclusion

The third order of governance, metagovernance, is the way in which we calibrate the very common sense that informs our organisational logic. For many in the party a long term goal is to arrive at a place where democratic values are the way things work.

However, the route to a democratic metagovernance of the Labour party cannot be achieved by leapfrogging the second-order of governance, that of redesign. For all the rhetoric we have had since 2015, there has been little achieved in the sphere of party democracy, simply because even with the “right people” in place, they were constrained by the relations that their new positions gave them.

Thus, the lesson here is that any call for democracy that does not make specific demands is a waste of hot air. In the case of leadership hopefuls, vague rhetoric on party democracy needs to be challenged and made specific.

It is no longer enough to simply demand democracy in the Labour party. We must design it together and demand our designs be taking seriously.

Appendix

Some specific ideas for redesign.

1. Open selection is of course one such design change that no one ever publicly disagrees with, but nevertheless still needs a sustained effort to get over the hill and become party policy.
2. Making it policy that the NEC publishes transparent meeting minutes would also go some way to ensuring accountability at the top of the hierarchy. At the CLP level, local parties should be agitating for autonomy in selecting their candidates without interference. This would require a motion to be passed that makes selection of candidates a purely local procedure.
3. Labour’s 2019 manifesto included ambitious plans to abolish the house of lords in favour of a senate of the regions. Given that much criticism of the current Labour party revolves around it’s London-centricity, one key act of second-order governance would be to create an analogue of this within Labour’s own hierarchical structures and to devolve more power and responsibility to the regions.

Ewan Cameron, 2019.