A Labour antisemitism action plan

Introduction

Progress has put out its 10 point action plan on tackling antisemitism, and Owen Jones supports a “massive expansion in political education” to deal with it. While there is common ground around the need for action, there is little to connect them in terms of proposed action — the former is all about expulsion, the latter about there being no need to expel.

This proposed action plan, built around the formation of a ‘kitemarking’ social enterprise, is an attempt to provide a way practical forward which can draw support from the bitter factions now at war over what is the best approach to tackling antisemitism. Any action plan which cannot draw on such support from the start is likely to fail. The plan seeks the creation of a programme for discipline AND education.

The proposals we present are a filled out version of the very tight wordcount submission to the Labour democracy review, and sent in well before the antimemitic mural scandal broke (or for some who support Corbyn, was raked up as a way to smear him).

Core proposal

Our core proposal is this.

Labour NEC should back, with a pump priming fund in the order of £40,000- £60,000 the development of an arms-length non-profit organisation whose role is to facilitate the development and the measurement of a common set of behaviour standards within all party units — from branches through the PLP — respectful and inclusive behaviours both on and offline.

An application for pump prime funding will also be made to the Joseph Rowntree Reform Trust, under its priority “Democratic culture [should be] thriving, with respect for diversity, collaboration and informed public debate, encouraging participation.”

Organisations that feel they can add value to such a bid, and assist the current factions in Labour to come together for delivery, are welcome to approach with a view to their fronting/participating in the application.

Starting as a simple Community Interest Company or Company Ltd by Guarantee without Shares, the new organisation should develop a fee-based membership structure targeted initial at Labour party and Trade Unit organisational unit, but with freedoms set out in Memorandum & Articles to expand the kitemarking/standards development service into other organisations with objectives compatible to those of the Labour party, with a view to financial sustanability.

While the kitemarking service should be one aimed at raising the level of quality of respectful discourse in all areas, it is quite appropriate in the current circumstances to make behaviour standards and associated awareness raising around antisemitism an early priority.

Such a prioritisation is warranted not just by the current crisis, but also pedagogically. As some of the more helpful commentary of recent days has set out, the growth (or at least staying power) of antisemitic tropes within Labour is causatively linked to a weak analysis of the structural forces of capitalism and the concomitant need to fall back on moralistic stereotyping, which then feeds precisely the kind of conspiracy theory that the far right are only too happy to foster.

And if Labour members can come together to develop shared understandings of how capitalist structures make them subject to the kind of harmful trope from which they are now liberating themselves, they can do the same around other structural constraints to free and equal participation, using the same kind of newly developed skillset.

An understanding (whether by primary reading or secondary discussion) [1] of Moishe Postone can facilitate, for example, an appreciation of Lise Vogel’s groundbreaking analysis of how the oppression of women is rooted in the need of capitalism to extract surplus value, and this in turn can help members to avoid the misogynist tropes (aka #everydaysexism), or even the argument that misogyny is no longer an issue. [2]

Wider context and what else needs to happen

A proposal for the formation of an organisation which pays its own way from CLP and local trade union organisation buying into the ‘inclusive behaviours and practices’ assurance system that it co-produces with them and others does, of course, fit with a wider aspiration to a radical, Habermasian centrism — a radical centrism influenced by Marxian materialist analysis but not constrained to pseudo-Gramscian revolutionary tactic, and in which the lies in the change of the key (transitional) demand for power over resources for the many, to a power participate.

Nor do you have to be a Habermasian radical to support such an organisation. It should command the support of anyone who would prefer to see an approach to Owen Jones’ notion of “mass political education” based not primarily on sanction for those who disobey, but on self-liberation, or in the terms Paolo Freire used:

the practice of freedom, the means by which men and women deal critically and creatively with reality and discover how to participate in the transformation of their world (pdf, paraphrase by Richard Shaull).

But of course it would be wholly unrealistic to think we can, in a short space of time, make Labour a 21st century coffeehouse of enlightened engagement. This is not the 1980s, when members’ and supporters’ only form of interaction within the party was in physical space, where racist language and sentiment steadily came to be seen as unacceptable (though I still remember having, as a chair, to ask an older member to desist from using the p**i word as late as 2004).

Much of what is unacceptable, especially but not solely in respect of antisemitism, comes online, and is concomitantly more difficult to deal with than it is in physical space, where social norms are developed by and with others going through a (self)-enlightenment process.

As a result, Labour does count amongst its ranks a debatable but significant number of people who have developed and consolidated the kind of views from which they will not retreat, and which mean they should not have a place in the party.

So warnings, sanction and expulsion from the party are still going to be needed, at least in the shorter term, whatever the plans for political education and self-improvement.

The difference between our proposals for this and those of Progress, say, are that such disciplinary measures should, where necessary, be administered as locally as possible, within branches, CLPs and other small party units.

Such a devolution of power to discipline and expel where necessary is not just of practical benefit in terms of the (currently) overwhelmed resources at Labour HQ, and the troublesome backlogs that this has caused; more importantly, it mirrors the devolution of self-improvement power set out above.

This is not to say that local parties should be looking at mass expulsions. When it comes to antisemitism, for example, there will be a continuum between those members who have through ignorance been caught up with an antisemitic trope — many of the 2,000 signers of this letter will, I suspect fall on this end of the continuum — and who will benefit from learning what an antisemitic trope is and how pernicious they are [3], and those members who are hardened believers in ‘Zionist conspiracy’ who will never taken on board a different way of analyzing the world. The challenge for local parties is to shift the balance amongst its membership, including that part which only engages on Facebook, towards a desire for better forms of political education than that offered by the algorithms of Facebook, and often this may have to start with a warning note.

Such a devolution of disciplinary power will of course, necessitate a strengthening of local party structures. The brutal reality is that in many areas of the country branch and CLP structures were hollowed out in the 1990s when they came to be seen as campaigning units only, and the dull but necessary bureaucracies that had served the party well over the previous 90 years were set to one side in favour of more top down command and control of party members’ times and energies.

This needs to be remedied. Labour party members need to again aspire to useful branch functions, and local parties as a whole need the capacity to run their own affairs competently without having to appeal to regional office and HQ for authority or, as in many cases, for adjudication between the warring factions that have developed in the organisational vacuum.

In practice, this may mean developing honoraria for chairs, secretaries, political education officers, and ‘standards committees’ so that they can and need to do their jobs properly, and in turn this means that CLPs and branches will need to be better resourced, perhaps in line with the wider recommendations on the ‘reversal of financial flows’ that we have been making in one form or another since the Collins Review (and on which Momentum Chair Jon Lansmann has previously commented favourably).

Commanding support from across the party

When it comes to antisemitism specifically, Labour is currently in a very bad position — not just because we have antisemites, but because the left of the party think the right’s remedy is cover for a witchhunt, and the centre/right think the left are keen to foster antisemitism.

The proposed antisemitism action plan here, set within a wider framework of local self improvement and devolution of resources, asks that, as a starting point, each faction accept its share of responsibility for the mess we are in.

The left of the party needs to accept that it has been infiltrated by some active and irredeemable antisemites and even holocaust deniers, and that these are provided with differing levels of succour by a range of other members who have not yet engaged in the kind of analysis to avoid the ‘pseudo-liberation’ inherent to antismetic tropes.

The centre/right needs to accept that over the years it has had control of the party structure, there has been a hollowing out of local structures and capacities, understandably in the drive to become a campaigning party but with long-term deleterious impacts on the capacity of the party to cope with a toxic mix of active antsemitism and the worst aspects of the interent.

This does not mean that each side should then indulge in a pointless argument about who was most to blame; the simple point is that corrupted agency met corrupted structure, and this has created a perfect storm.

There is a way beyond this if, via a bit of Habermasian positive thinking, we set aside our difference around an action plan which, in the first instance, will cost £40-60,000.

If there is engagement wit this outline proposal, a fuller business plan can follow.

Notes

[1] To be clear, it is not proposed that the new non-profit should involve itself in providing the kind of political education and awareness raising that is needed. It’s role should be around assessing, with local party units, the effectiveness of what resources are drawn in, and should not be prescriptive. All CLPs will have different knowledge and experience within their ranks within their local area or beyond, which can be co-ordinated by a more empowered political education officer.

[2] Advocating the same process of materialist analysis to come to terms with antisemitism and misogyny should not obscure what make antisemitism an exceptional form of discrimination; as Moishe Postone said, antisemitism is exceptional, and therefore seemingly a more intractable problem for the left in particular because it is often linked to a sense of “pseudo-liberation” which makes people self-ascribing to the left feel good about their discrimination.