The potential of Labour Transformed
Just before the UK election last year, a group of London Labour activists started a group called Labour Transformed. Ostensibly anti-capitalist, the group felt like a response to Momentum’s spiral into pure factionalism. Of course there are plenty of far left members in or adjacent to Labour, so what made Labour Transformed different? One was that seemed to realise that Momentum and Corbynism’s stalled energy could not simply be blamed at the hands of the dreaded mainstream media, but had come in part from organisational limitations.
Outside it’s official institutions, Labour governance is a hierarchical beast. If a member wants to connect on an issue outside their CLP, outside of serendipity or personal networks, there are very few horizontal tools to do so. Thus factions have formed around single issues (Environment, migration, etc) or general ideology (Blue Labour, Momentum). What has united virtually all these factions is there insistence on a hierarchy that in most cases replicates the Labour mainstream.
So It was encouraging to see that Labour Transformed in their opening statement noted that :
“Our strategy, structure and decision making bodies should be accountable to all in the membership. There will be no informal hierarchies or unaccountable steering committees.”
A brief from the opening meeting also stated
[Momentum’s] absence of any meaningful internal democracy has severely hindered [socialist political culture] from developing into the force we need it to be.
For activists sick of hypocrisy among the left when it came to organisation and career activists pulling favours for their friends behind the scenes this seemed like a breath of fresh air. Labour Transformed also promised to be “a mass-membership organisation”. Inspired and ready to get involved, I signed up for their mailing list in December and eagerly awaited details of how to join and how to contribute to what was looking to be just the Labour faction I had been waiting for.
But by March 2020, things were moving slowly. LT’s ‘provisional organising group’ sent out a ‘communique’ detailing some upcoming events. The events looked cool, but the message had me confused. There were references to ‘Labour Transformed members’ and ‘activists’ giving talks, even ‘working groups’ on unions and imperialism (the latter was especially of interest to me as neocolonialism and global governance is my specialist subject) there was even a mention of a whatsapp group. So clearly Labour Transformed was active and had members and people doing stuff.
But at no point did the message tell us how to become involved. Well, there was a note at the end saying ‘Keep an eye out for updates’, but despite the communiqué listing all these good, left, activities, it didn’t feel like a radical organisation. If anything it was like an NGO, where participation doesn’t mean being involved in setting the agenda, but a more passive obligation; come to our marches, pickets and talks as an audience not as a facilitator.
Of course it’s early days now, only four months since Labour Transformed inception and the team do ensure us that they are ‘laying a foundation for a more open organising structure’. But how open will this be? What the ‘organising group’ will come to realise in the next few months is the same thing that leftists with even a smidgeon of power have come to realise: You cannot build an open network without giving away your own power, something which the LT transformed central group have quite a bit of, at least potentially.
The delay by Labour Transformed organising group, (who still for the most part remain anonymous) in opening up the group to meaningful participation and membership is because they are in a quandary. A good faith interpretation of this quandary is that they are stuck on how to simultaneously open up their organisation beyond the tiny core, while ensuring that it remains focused and does not drift or become liable to capture.
However a more cynical interpretation of this quandary is that the LT organising group realise that by opening up the group and building legitimate and radical democratic structures, they will necessarily need to give up the personal power they could potentially accumulate. As it stands, the LT core can promote events, write CLP motions, appoint working groups, decide who is and isn’t a member and write the party line on various issues. If LT becomes a dominant force within the party, then this potentially gives the LT organising group a high amount of personal power and brand. Thus a highly cynical take on the delay from inception to membership structure assumes that currently they are designing what must be an ingenious system of governance: One that gives the appearance of radical democratic participation, but nevertheless allows the central organising group to retain high levels of power.
On the other hand, an optimistic take is that the organising team are taking their time to carefully design a fully radical organising structure that will be truly democratic which each member as equals.
The third option is that they might quietly drop the commitment to membership, and become an NGO, with participation limited to invitees only, which is pretty much what they are now.
The thing about neoliberalism and what Mitchell Dean calls culture governance, is that we rarely appreciate just how deep it goes. It is no longer simply an economic system, but an organisation logic that permeates throughout all our institutions. The bitter truth for socialists in the labour party is that the short term path to power and influence isn’t done through a mass line, but through network building and trading favours with other individuals in your network. The ‘inner circle’ Labour Transformed are now at the point where they find that they may achieve their short term political goals with or without the democratic membership system they have professed is essential.
