Lockdown Labour: lessons from mutual aid activism.

AuthorPerryman, Mark
PositionLESSONS FROM THE CORONAVIRUS CRISIS

Like many Labour Party members, I've spent a lot of time on coronavirus mutual aid activism in recent months. I'm an event organiser by habit, organising festivals of ideas and Christmas parties for my CLP; but while some of those skills are transferable to the kind of community activism that has flowered in localities all over the country, a lot aren't. My involvement with mutual aid activism has led me to reflect on Labour's conservative organisational culture--a conservatism which, despite all the Corbynite talk of the party as a social movement, has barely changed in the past five years.

I write as a convinced Corbynite, though the label is now past its sell-by date. Jeremy's appeal to a huge audience (many of them new or returning Labour members) was based on the offer of a 'different kind of politics'. In terms of leadership and policies that is largely what we got. But the experience of being a party member scarcely changed; Corbynism's promise to transform Labour as a party into a social movement failed to materialise. To be effective as a social movement Labour has to connect individual and collective action with a politics absolutely rooted in locality and community. This is quite different from the traditional model of a protest movement with which the left is most comfortable, organised around marches and placards.

Beyond Clause One Socialism

In the face of Corbyn's huge popularity among Labour members, the Labour right sought to promote an alternative vision of the party. They called this 'Clause One Socialism'. Clause One of Labour's constitution states that its 'purpose is to organise and maintain in Parliament and in the country a political Labour party'. There is nothing controversial in that. But what it has served to produce is a habitual waste of the membership as a campaigning resource. This wastage is not just something that is practised by the right: it is built into the party's organisation. As trade union activist and former PPC Andy Newman put it: 'the party often treats the membership as a rather unruly but largely decorative adjunct, useful for stuffing envelopes'.

Not only is this a woeful waste of such a huge human resource, but it also flies in the face of Labour's history, in which the labour movement as well as the party has been vital. Mass movements beyond the Labour Party, like the hunger marches of the 1930s or Rock Against Racism opposing the National Front in the late 1970s, are central to the history...

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