Momentum: it's time for change
Rory Hamilton
Last weekend I was in London for a 2-day workshop provided by Momentum, the left-wing organisation which helped Corbyn come to the Labour leadership in 2015 and is currently battling to democratise the Labour Party and promote socialist policies in the challenging environment of Starmer’s McCarthyism.
I was fortunate to be selected for Momentum’s 2023 Leo Panitch Leadership Programme, the third year of its running. Leo Panitch was one of the foremost thinkers on the political left. In Momentum’s own words he was, “a warm and critical supporter of Momentum, embracing the dynamism of the movement in support of Jeremy Corbyn while arguing for a deeper strategic approach focused on organising on the ground and in the labour movement.”
He argued that Momentum “needs to be permanently engaged in teaching people how to be organisers and in developing its members’ own political education, so they can work at the base to engage in what needs to be seen as class re-formation today”.
With this in mind, the weekend consisted of about eight different workshops and seminars, ranging from the political theory of class (a session nicked from the Austrian Young Socialists that provided a great refresher for an analysis of power relations), to team building, leadership skills, and training for public speaking among other topics. A particular highlight for me was a lecture by University of Sussex lecturer David Wearing on imperialism, race and racism: although I had learned much of this content during my undergraduate degree, a refresher can never hurt, and Wearing was utterly captivating, communicating complex theories with humour and passion.
Throughout the weekend, I got the chance to meet a number of other young socialist activists and get to know them and their organising experiences. It was a refreshing experience for me not coming from a Labour background, and something that filled me with hope, knowing that I’d found ‘my tribe’; that is, people who had a similar worldview and ambition to build a better vision for their community (be that national or local).
I had left the SNP around this time last year due to a build-up of a number of policy failures including but not limited to the reneging on the promise for a National Energy Company, the re-commitment to the Sustainable Growth Commission, and the clear influence of private consultancies on the National Care Service co-design process. I had previously held optimism that it was possible to organise on the left within the SNP, and while it is possible to an extent (see the admirable work of the SNP Trade Union Group), I came to the conclusion that there was no deep understanding of class politics within the party, and the failure to sufficiently tackle poverty with the devolved powers we have was evidence of a lack of willpower to change the status quo.
The motions submitted to national and YSI conferences demonstrated this lack of a class-critical understanding of politics, often routed in lived experience (a good thing, but without the theoretical underpinning how are we meant to propose solutions that do anything other than address symptoms). A recurring frustration of mine was the consistent grandstanding from wings of the party over identity-related policies, without a class angle (incidentally I think its incredibly important to tackle these issues, but they must be done in tandem with economic justice), or even the same sort of uproar when the party leadership u-turned on a National Energy Company and privatised our offshore-energy assets. How can you describe yourself a ‘centre-left’ party if your ‘progressivism’ is solely targeted at equalities issues, and not at economic policy.
Now this might lead many readers to question, why I would go from trying to organise on the left in a party which supports independence with a clear neoliberal leadership, to another party which doesn’t support independence and again a clear neoliberal leadership? I asked myself this same question.
A common theme from the weekend was that Momentum views the Labour Party as the main vehicle for the left to implement socialist policies, therefore more worthwhile to work within the party to build a socialist agenda for Labour in government, than fight against a first-past-the-post system rigged against anti-establishment groups.
Sometimes I do believe we are blinded by independence as a goal. It shouldn’t be an ends in itself. Rather, independence is the means to address the key issues in our society: don’t have the full powers over employment law? Devolve them; can’t set up a National Energy Company with the full powers it needs for energy security? Devolve them; Can’t raise the finance to implement a Green New Deal in full? Well, by that point there would only be one thing left to do: independence.
As I have previously written, I don’t believe independence can be achieved without Labour, and despite (or even because of) the centrist/soft right leadership of both parties in Scotland, undoubtedly the SNP and Labour have plenty of common ground to work together to build that fairer, greener, socially just we hear about so often. There is already evidence of this, to an extent, the negotiations between the Scottish Government and trade unions across sectors from the NHS to our teachers, to transport workers.
It is clear that trade unions in Scotland are pushing the left agenda and being the voice for workers rights that is so desperately needed. I will be starting a PhD in October, assessing the impact of Community Wealth Building, a Green New Deal and Place-based Regeneration on communities in Scotland, and I will take the organising skills I have developed over the weekend into my local UCU branch.
One skill I most valued and will take forward into this new period of political organising is the theory of ‘collective care’. The poet Audre Lorde described this beautifully: “Caring for myself is not self-indulgence, it is self-preservation, and that is an act of political warfare.” We will face challenges in our struggle for social change, and we will undoubtedly lose, as the past few years have shown – it is a big hill to climb, and its not helped by the power wielded by the political establishment who keep pushing us back down it. So we need to look after ourselves, and know that we have trust, faith and solidarity in one another. Burnout is a symptom of the capitalist system, and represents the fallacy that is meritocracy, i.e. if you work hard you can reach the top, when in reality if you work hard work wont necessarily love you back.
But what does all this mean? What are we fighting for? Why does it matter who I organise with? My answer: what is politics but the means by which we have to make life better for those exploited by the capitalist system. If we want to build an all of us first Scotland, we must offer a positive vision and a tangible vision that people can believe in. None of this ‘no hope is better than false hope’ shite.
Labour cannot take votes for granted in the belief that disillusionment with the SNP will push voters back to Labour. Likewise, the SNP cannot continue to march people up the hill on independence and expect them to stick around when they get to the top and say, “here’s another hill, oh and we’re now creating two freeports to crush your working conditions”. The old ‘education is free in Scotland’ line can hardly hold up as the SNP’s alternative vision much longer if universities are not democratised and secure contracts, fair pay and a decent pension held back from staff, while management build shiny new glass buildings for them to look at themselves in with their inflated salaries.
Tackling poverty, climate change, building a fairer society, and achieving independence can only be won by organising in grassroots communities, engaging with their needs and understanding them in the context of capitalist power relations. If we want to do that we need to end this reliance on private consultancies, and make policy for people first, not the soundbites that look good in The National.