I VENTURED into Momentum’s “A World Remodeled” jamboree—a type of parallel convention working alongside the principle Labour Social gathering convention—with some nervousness. Momentum has a popularity for enjoying hardball: they had been liable for ensuring that Brexit wasn’t actually mentioned on the convention, for instance. The assembly has seen a variety of journalist-bashing: Laura Kuenssberg, the BBC’s political editor, is accompanied by a bodyguard and any point out of the press elicits jeers. “A World Remodeled” is held in an off-putting warren of rooms: a makeshift “hub”, the place folks collect to talk and organise, a cavernous evening membership, the place conferences are held, and different rooms that regarded too scary to enter.
However I used to be instantly made to really feel at house. An enthralling lady known as Hilary Wainwright took me underneath her wing and launched me to the employees. (It turned out that Ms Wainwright is the aunt of The Economist’s Britain editor, Tom Wainwright, however that the assembly was a pure coincidence.) The younger organisers had been all unfailingly well mannered. The environment was moderately like a pop pageant (although one with an unusually massive contingent of older folks): folks had been relaxed however environment friendly, solicitous however business-like.
Ms Wainwright defined that Momentum is extra like an organism than a machine: it grows from the underside up and continuously evolves in new instructions. Moderately than being a sub-division of Momentum “A World Remodeled” is a free-standing organisation that was based final 12 months on the Labour Social gathering Convention in Liverpool and has reconstituted itself, greater and higher, this 12 months in Brighton. The pageant has bought 3,500 tickets and will have bought many extra if it hadn’t been restricted by well being and security. Folks queued across the block for hours to listen to John McDonnell discuss Labour’s programme for in the case of energy. Momentum’s natural organisation contrasts sharply with the commerce unions (which dominate the principle occasion within the Convention Corridor) and with Tony Blair’s New Labour, each of which, of their alternative ways, rely (or relied) on top-down course and management. In Tony Blair’s Labour Social gathering well dressed women and men in enterprise fits strolled across the convention telling folks what to do. A good cabal led by Mr Blair, Gordon Brown and Peter Mandelson managed the whole lot. In Mr Corbyn’s Labour Social gathering activists in saggy garments rush round in a state of artistic pleasure participating in self-organisation.
Ms Wainwright additionally identified that Momentum concerned folks of very completely different ages. The motion is mostly related to younger activists who flooded into the get together after Jeremy Corbyn’s election as chief and who supplied a lot of the leg work for Mr Corbyn’s “victory” within the election. These younger activists have had their early years scarred by two nice tragedies—the Iraq Warfare and the monetary disaster—and they’re decided to remake each the nation and the Labour Social gathering from the bottom up. However Ms Wainwright, who’s 68, says that there are many veteran socialists like her who’ve rejoined the Labour Social gathering after years of disillusionment. She received concerned within the lady’s motion within the Seventies, labored for some time as a store steward and campaigned in opposition to the Iraq struggle. Now, together with a number of different commitments, she is the co-editor of Pink Pepper, a London-based radical journal.
Speaking to Ms Wainwright and her comrades jogged my memory of a e book by Christopher Hill, a venerable Marxist historian who taught me at Balliol School in Oxford, “The World Turned Upside Down”. Hill argued that the English Revolution (as he insisted on calling a civil struggle that concerned Scotland, Eire and Wales in addition to England) revealed a radical sub-culture that had been flourishing for years however which established society ignored out of a mix of conceitedness and official censorship. There have been dozens of radical sects such because the Diggers, the Rangers and the Levellers, which spent their lives dreaming up schemes for abolishing non-public property, marriage and the state. By the identical token the collapse of the Blairite Labour Social gathering has revealed the truth that tons of of left-wing groupuscles continued to flourish underneath the floor of Britain’s shopper society. Many of those groupuscles are infused with the identical spirit of non secular radicalism that infused Hill’s sects: Momentum supporters even maintain periods the place they “bear witness” to their conversion to the motion, telling, in emotional element, how they first found radical politics or how they first realised that Jeremy Corbyn may, certainly, win the following election. The sensation is that if Labour may pull off the unattainable by overturning a Conservative majority in Brighton (Kemptown) by a staggering 10,000 votes then it may well additionally nationalise the technique of manufacturing and finish struggle on earth.
Some of the hanging issues about Momentum is how a lot emphasis it places on having enjoyable—treating politics as a department of leisure moderately than only a means to an finish. Folks repeat that politics is “open, participatory, leisure”. The partitions of Momentum’s hideous short-term headquarters are embellished with peace quilts, a world justice banner made from denim (due to its “affiliation with working folks in all places”) and commerce union banners. The “hub” has a “creativity chaos nook” the place individuals are imagined to be chaotically artistic or creatively chaotic. The “World Remodeled” has a number of “enjoyable” occasions comparable to a pub quiz, hosted by Ed Miliband, which is able to take a look at whether or not you possibly can inform your Karl Marx out of your Kinnock or your New Left out of your New Labour. Mixing completely different age teams collectively in such an surroundings can create issues: a number of rows of individuals of their 60s and 70s needed to take heed to deafening Goth music for half an hour as they waited for Mr McDonnell. However you possibly can’t have a revolution with out breaking a couple of ear drums.
The far left isn’t any stranger to divisions—between Trotskyites and Stalinists, Bolsheviks and Mensheviks, reformists and revolutionaries. The Labour left is now seeing the delivery of yet one more division—between skilled revolutionaries and leisure revolutionaries. The skilled revolutionaries could be seen gathered outdoors the Convention headquarters each morning: grim-faced women and men who’ve given their lives to “the motion” and attempt to make you spend a pound shopping for a duplicate of the Morning Star or Pink Pages, a compendium of Convention-related remark produced day-after-day by “Labour Social gathering Marxists”. There are additionally loads of these apparatchiks within the convention corridor—together with the chief of the species, John McDonnell, a hatchet-faced man who has spent his life on the far left. Momentum, however, is the house of leisure revolutionaries—people who find themselves visibly having enjoyable in politics. These leisure revolutionaries have a exceptional skill to draw new members to the motion and catch them up within the whirl of political exercise.
However there’s a darkish facet to the revolution as recreation. Some leisure revolutionaries get their enjoyable out of smashing issues up: these are the anarchists who flip up at demonstrations wearing black, carrying balaclavas and bandanas, with the categorical goal of inflicting as a lot mayhem as doable. And in some unspecified time in the future politics ceases to be a recreation and turns into severe. The politics-as-fun bubble will ultimately burst when Labour is confronted with hard-choices and troublesome sacrifices. That may depart simply the arduous women and men in cost: the individuals who perceive the distinction between a revolution and a tea get together.
Replace (September twenty sixth): This piece has been amended to take away a reference to trolling by supporters of Momentum and to replace the variety of tickets bought by “The World Remodeled”.
