My grandfather served in the British Army, his father died during the Blitz. My Nana and him were orphaned in the war, raised in different homes of different classes than their birth. My grandfather was raised poor, by a gentleman who found him and cared for him when he was alone. When he was 16 he joined the Army who taught him to read and write. Eventually he would rise to teach at Sandhurst Military academy. When he retired he would go live in the Lake District, in a modest house and serve on his local council. He believed in the power of government to raise people out of their station and provide them the leg up and support to thrive in a cruel and often brutal world. A world that prevents so many people from living up to their fullest and often bars them from basic human needs like time with their family.

I think about him when I think about our country. How his experiences brought him to socialism and towards a compassion for all people even those he fought against in the Army. With the results of the 12th fresh in our collective mind it is hard to reflect, and even harder to plan for the future. Yet that is what we must do in order to pick ourselves back up and reignite the spirit of a movement. For myself I spent the last few days thinking, raging, moping, reading an inordinate amount of social media takes, and analysing the trickle of information about the vote that has come out since and I have some good news. That the issues facing Labour are not any different those we faced before the election, before Corbyn and I would go so far as to say since Thatcher. So instead of wading into the goopy morass that is the debate over who will become leader I will instead offer an action plan for the next five years. We all need to think right now how we can grow, rebuild, and support our party and the communities that it is active in.

And with that in mind…let’s get ready for 24'.

Co-operative and Community Benefit Societies

You: Oh Christ he’s starting off with some co-ops will save the world tosh.

Me: Well hold your skepticism for just a minute and hear me out.

One of the amazing organisational inventions that was foundational not just to the start of our movement, but also that of both liberals and christian democrats were benefit societies.

Simply put a benefit society is an organisation were people come together to provide a service and/or support for each other mutually. They can be anything from renter’s associations who would provide financial support for each other when they couldn’t cover their bills, to cultural associations between migrants or minorities to protect themselves against abuse or assist with legal protections. While benefit societies can be traced back to the earliest recorded human history, they truly came into their own as a political organising tool in the years following the Revolutions of 1848, American Civil War and the ongoing industrial revolution. This was a time when the state while expanding in control across the world was actively avoiding sharing the spoils of their colonial and capitalist conquests. So people did what people always do when pushed by circumstances beyond themselves, they worked together to provide relief. It was in this environment that the founders of our movement developed the politics of the modern Left. These societies became a key connection between the trade unionists, political organisers, left intellectuals, and workers to meet, connect, educate and form into what would eventually become the Socialist and Social Democratic parties of the next century.

This massive community of interconnected benefit societies created a community based web of allied and likeminded people across the nation and world.

In short the Labour Party didn’t have to worry about connecting with the community because it was the community.

We can still to this day see the remnants of these early organisations; our friends at the Woodcraft Folk the British section of the International Falcon Movement continue to educate young people, providing them the opportunity to grow as individuals and leaders and live the compassionate ethics our politics hope to achieve in everyday life. The Fabian Society founded by the early Socialist intellectuals to be a self-organised educational and policy laboratory still publishes and even has a highly active, though small, youth wing 100 years later. Yet the issue remains that while these groups still exist they are but pale shadows of their glory days. Decades of disinterest and withering has left but a creaking skeleton of our socialist community. It is in the ruins of a once thriving community of leftist religious, educational and political associations that we will refound our society. Not just in the restoration of the old, but in the development and inclusion of new and current movements and groups.

Something that came as a curiosity to me as I spent the last few years traveling, researching and learning about our sister parties and organisations across Europe and the Americas was how this issue of the withering social ties and community bonds would come up again and again. Robert Putnam described in Bowling Alone how these fraying societal bonds and the rise of radical individualism threatened democracy, specifically the liberal democratic world of his postwar youth. It was his view that community organisations allowed for people to cross class and social boundaries, bred tolerance and promoted the value of reciprocity. It is no wonder that when we look at this period around the world that political party identification was at a high and these parties, whether in West Germany, Austria, the UK or US, all had a direct connection with these organisations.

The idea of apolitical charity is a modern invention, which whole reems of scholarship has been written on. This movement towards apolitical activism was achieved with brutal efficiency in the Cold War where open Leftism or opposition to imperialism would see your grants evaporate, yet in some places politically minded charities persisted. In Austria you still see the strength of Housing cooperatives providing staggeringly cheap rents across Austria and promoting endless new building, in Germany you see Caritas a Catholic Leftist charity fighting for social justice for the poor and downtrodden in a number of fields. Even more impressive for me was how in Austria and Germany their Student and Youth Political movements still thrive and grow a century on even when their mother parties are at their weakest in decades. It is a reminder that the movement isn’t the party, and the party isn’t the movement, they are mutual creatures intermingled, yet separate and ultimately bound together in destiny and through strong institutions can weather even the longest of storms.

In the Austrian and German Left the community’s history, the societal importance put on it, and the direct financial support by the party have given it a resilience to weather the decades of neoliberalism and austerity. These institutions provide the foundation for resistance, as well as, the place for activists to develop, grow and, as seen just recently in the election of the new Leftist leaders of the Social Democratic Party of Germany due to the work of JUSOS (their youth movement), to transform political parties.

And while our friends in Austria and Germany have the benefit of century old organisations, other places had to invent their on the fly. With the rise of Donald Trump in the US you saw a flurry of organisations pop up to challenge the rise of the Far Right: the Women’s March, the Sunrise Movement, Never Again and more. Out of the UK we’ve seen such incredible movements like Extinction Rebellion who just like us reject the destructive global status quo. The spirit of rebellion is alive and well in the world, we just need to provide the spaces to channel that energy into action.

But the first steps begin at the community level. With Constituency Labour Party’s (CLPs) connecting with existing community organisations, local church, youth organisations, food banks, women’s shelters, and homeless shelters. The CLP should determine also what gaps exist in their communities, which organisations would be open to cooperation, and more importantly what resources both human and financial they have available and potentially available to assist.

While I am not expecting every CLP to set up a day care or a food bank, I do expect every CLP to be able to hold a food drive a few times a year, to organise volunteering days and even help them with donations. Likewise each and every CLP can begin the process of political education and providing young people a safe and constructive place to organise. These can be small things like starting up a football group, a reading group, or even hosting movie nights. Getting older members of the community together for potlucks or organising a fair. Bringing in experts to help people navigate their benefits or their housing issues. There are a million and one things both political and social that can be done to rebuild that sense of community and present ourselves as the open and compassionate party we want people to know we are.

Community Institutions

While there is much we can do in supporting existing organisations in our communities, to achieve our political goals we must also make sure that we’re creating and supporting new and existing socialist organisations.

Five places we can do this are:

1) Youth Centres 2) Woodcraft Folks 3) Anti Racist Organisations 4) Arts Programmes 5) Think Tanks

Youth Centres

Youth Centres one of the very clear example of austerity failing our communities is here. This also presents a very clear opportunity to provide a community service that we know is needed and well loved. Socialist sports clubs aren’t a new phenomena and in some traditions like Austro-marxism they stood as a pillar in their municipal approach to socialist society. This idea of Körperkultur or Body Culture comprised an approach to health that while simple is also profound, that a healthy body creates a liberated mind. That sport, time for rest, and an opportunity to experience nature and pleasure was vital for working people. This is why in Red Vienna (the name of the period of radical socialist government in Austria’s First Republic) they took a proactive approach to setting up, supporting and funding a huge network of sports and outdoors groups. Groups based in a socialist ethics of equality and whom firmly stood against the forces of Monarchism, Papism and Fascism at the time. The remnants of this idea still persist to this day with groups like the Roter Körper and some of the national sports clubs who can trace their origins to their socialist roots in Red Vienna.

It is with this idea in mind that Labour can step in; it can identify places lacking these resources, establish them, and provide the volunteers and infrastructure to keep them healthy. Some might be concerned about costs, but a lesson we can take from our friends in the Sanders campaign is that people in our movement are willing to give for the cause whether time or money in massive amounts. And in the socialist spirit those with more can give more. With a membership as large as ours, fundraising should never be the issue, it is just giving people someone worthy to donate to. Later on I will get into the nitty gritty importance of Labour making permanent capital investments into communities including property, but let’s hold off just yet.

Though a picture I’d like to present to you is important to guide the next bit. I work in marketing so tend to have the bad habit of overly noticing advertisements and signs when I am walking around a city, this combined with my academic training focusing on public history creates quite a political cocktail when I am in a new place. You can tell a lot about a city this way, and when I visited Vienna the first time it was clear this was a Socialist city. Every district of the city has a party HQ with proud and prominent signs, every district has permanent meeting places or offices for their youth movements, half of the bus stops have advertisements for the Social Democratic Party of Austria (the SPÖ) or some initiative they are promoting, socialist community organisations are everywhere with their symbols and logos dotting buildings on what feels like every street. When I bring Labour people there and start pointing them out they quickly realise how much of the city is blanketed by the SPÖ and the community surrounding it. And to really press the point, the largest open-air festival in the world Donauinselfest is hosted by SPÖ Wien with three million visitors in three days every single year. In a nation of 8 million they manage to get 3 million people to a Socialist event every year. This is not to say the SPÖ is perfect, far from it, and I could write for days about all the issues it faces, many which are the same as what Labour faces like rural outreach and losing their traditional working-class base to the Far Right; but if we have to pick a place that has for one hundred years (barring the Fascist period) been successfully achieving and defending their socialist programme it is Vienna. And while it might be easy to think I am taking a city based approach, I think you have to remember that in Vienna the approach is on the district level which are closer in population size to smaller cities like Daventry (84,484 pop.) and Bolsover (79,530) than places like Liverpool (494,814.)

Woodcraft Folk

Silly name, great idea.

I met Daniel, the Young European Socialists Bureau member for Die Falken the German section of the same organisation the Woodcraft Folk are from about two years ago. And when he pitched me the idea of what I understood as “Socialist Scouts” I was immediately hesitant.

(Tip don’t call them Scouts. Just trust me on this.)

For me someone while born in London I lived and went to school in America for many years and was politically socialised into a knee jerk aversion to the idea of promoting politics to children. It was too “soviet” or something, but after awhile I came around to the idea. See I was in the Boy Scouts of America and my sister likewise was in the Girl Scouts. The Scouts though they state they are non-political this isn’t entirely true. The catch comes that the ideology they expound just is the currently dominant one. Status quo support is often used interchangeably with non-political. And thus just like the Woodcraft Folk they are a political education youth group.

From its inception the Scouts success in connecting with young people would become a standard for decades inspiring many similar movements. It is from here the International Falcon Movement also draws its spiritual history. But unlike the British Scouts or their American counterparts which were based around a politics of christianity, militarism, and duty to god and country; the Falcons were based around the idea of organising society around radically democratic lines.

“From the start, the basis of IFM was international co-operation, education for tolerance and respect of human rights, as well as the concept of socialist education.”

A “socialist education” being one that working class young people can self-organise, critically reflect on society, and experience solidarity. And I mean working class in the classical Marxist sense of nearly all of us who aren’t the owners of the means of production, or perhaps more comfortably coined the 99%. See my mom had me to join the Scouts to help me assimilate into American culture; and I can tell you it definitely worked. Now years later I realise how powerful the effect that has had on my life, worldview and politics many years later. And if it is fine to teach about god and country, then it is just as fine to teach about international solidarity and tolerance. We even know this is acceptable because these are pillars of the modern Scouting movement, which just this year has made some of its annual causes assisting war refugees and addressing climate change.

Scouting never was about tying knots or camping. It was about developing leadership and character in young people and making them good citizens for their country. This isn’t a bad idea, just as socialists we’ve a different idea of what good citizenship means than the Scouting Founders of 1909. With a waiting list of tens of thousands of kids the Scouts in the UK are overwhelmed already. Many of those waiting are the kids of Labour voters and wouldn’t you prefer your kids to participate in an organisation that supports your family’s values? One where kids can develop themselves and their views as apart of a global movement for justice made for and run by young people.

For me I’ve come to the decision that answer is yes, if I could go back and have a do-over I’d love to have had the opportunity to be in the Falcon Movement. There are few places that are political without the pressure of a party attached to them, and that is special about them. Too often party membership is the first step to participation in the Labour world for young people. When they should have a multitude of opportunities and interactions years before they should have to take the leap into membership. We should take the lesson from Extinction Rebellion and Fridays for Future, that young people want non-party spaces to organise and develop their political views and activism. So let’s make them.

Anti-Racist Organisations

Nazis the worst reboot of the 2010s, and what we do about them.

Well y’all they’re back, have been here and will be here for the foreseeable future: the racists. Unfortunately Boris’s embrace of a pistache of Cummings and Bannonite racial and ethnically charged nationalist political messaging will be a clear and constant dog whistle to the darkest tendencies and normalise a level of hostility towards minorities that has been on a steady rise since the Brexit campaign. Just like they’ve against Trump in the US it is important to stand vigilant against a Far Right who are claiming victory in the aftermath of the election and the opportunities to restrict immigration with Brexit. Don’t you worry, EU immigration was never their issue, it was just the tip of the iceberg and Brexit was just a vehicle. These lovely chap like Generation Identity will grow and whatever the next Farage vehicle for prominence will continue to push and pull at Boris to enact further measures to achieve victory in their culture war.

Not only that, but you’ve already seen the first efforts of the US Republican Party to franchise into the UK with TurningPointUK and I will wager that time will prove that a lot of US money poured into digital ads promoting Brexit, Boris and the Conservatives. So what to do? Well we can develop the tools and institutions to combat these forces, provide legal aid, and deradicalise people from supremacist ideologies. This isn’t just an issue for socialists, but also all people who believe in democracy. Rooted in many strains of racism especially the current brand of Far Right racism is an anti-democratic ethos that glorifies authoritarianism. It preys on slick messaging and the promise of prosperity and community, it presents a clear answer to everything under the sun and in an age of austerity is a seductive lure for at risk young people. This is how the Alternative for Germany grew and the Freedom Party in Austria. And while the electoral prospects of a Far Right party in the UK remain low for the next few years, the more immediate issue is the radicalisation of the Conservative Party and enough of the vote bleeding into the Far Right to act as a spoiler on Labour opportunities to come back, or really any part in marginals for that matter.

While groups like Hope Not Hate are incredible they are still limited by their size and scope. We need to make sure that we’ve local community based groups functioning as on the ground support, but with the ability to call on a nationwide infrastructure and funding network. Organisations that can help not only defend rights, but can educate their communities, lobby their local and national governments, provide safe spaces and social engagement, and promote and celebrate the culture or cultures they represent.

These organisations should also be founded upon socialist principles and not just be apolitical. Yet let me be clear, these should not be just arms of the party, but rather independent socialist organisations within the Labour community. For two reasons, 1: that in order for institutions to stay strong they must develop their own sense of self and tradition, and 2: these organisations should not be a factional party battleground, rather an open place for all people to interact with who share progressive values. This goes back to the importance of these institutions not only as a value to their communities, but as a bridge into political participation.

Where we already have spaces in Labour to represent minorities we must review if they are truly open, democratic and fit for purpose. In a Labour that is centred around London we must make sure national bodies are able to nationally represent all their members. Where they cannot we need to provide them the space and resources to succeed.

Further Labour needs to provide support in developing a strong socialist minded political tradition for minorities. In the years I was politically active in New Orleans one of the inspiring traditions of the city was the pure and incredible sense of political blackness that ran through the city. The sense of self and empowerment by having a grand tradition to draw upon that was supported by the establishment in the city meant that even in these times of political apathy there was a strong motivated community to keep hope alive.

In every place in our party and the Left communities we need to make sure that young people of all background are being given the opportunity to grow their leadership qualities and take ownership. This means actively mentoring and engaging with these people, and giving them the means to self-organise. Where existing Labour structures are too rigid we need to develop additional space for people to participate actively, without harming the valuable work already being done.

Arts Programmes

Whereas traditional organising tools have been outlined so far I think it is also important to look at additional tools that aren’t very common in the mainstream of Labour Party thought. One idea comes out of a grand tradition dating back to ancient Greece of political theatre, but more recently in the socialist tradition exists in the Theatre of the Oppressed in Brazil. Where professional performers and their audience together participate in an evolving performance that describes the social conditions their communities are facing. The idea of using art to reach and engage people in an actively political way is not new, just underdeveloped. As we saw with Stormzy’s support among others, people are engaged through art and the artists they love into politics.

The arts is also a way to foster community, develop the economy, and teach valuable soft and hard skills to people of all backgrounds. I spent a good deal of my teenage years in nonstop plays and musicals, and the comradery I felt for my castmates was incredible. It was something that bound together hundreds of people over many years. Yet in the years of austerity these sorts of opportunities are shrinking, along with fine arts, music courses, choruses, and even the community centres that would have hosted these performances are closing or in disrepair. In the nation that brought us Shakespeare and the Beatles we are only doing ourselves a disservice when we limit the creativity of our communities.

And through art questions about life, the world and our relations to each other can be questioned and provided answers. Which is why Labour should take a systematic approach to engaging with artists and musicians of all sorts and create institutions to promote, support and expand the arts. With a particular focus on the community level for supporting young people.

This focus on fostering the arts cannot be limited to what we traditionally think of the arts either, but also include the disciplines we vitally need our young people and supporters to become skilled in; namly graphic design, web and software development and video production. Something that the Right does very well, especially in the English speaking world is create and deploy massive amounts of content across digital platforms. Which is to say, in the Meme Wars we’re on the defensive. Likewise on Youtube the small amount of progressive voices is drowned out by a constant flood of Right and Far Right content. And unfortunately we do not only need to worry about our domestic Right wing content creators, but we have to also worry about those abroad in the Anglosphere who are also pumping out content that is being actively consumed and automatically put in front of us most of the time.

Make no mistake the culture war is real, ongoing and we are not winning. Sure there has been advancements, but any achievement can be rolled back and a reactionary backlash can be a hell of a whirlwind. We also need to remember that the cultural battle isn’t just about social issues, but rather about maintaining the neoliberal cultural hegemony. The goal is to keep the system intact, concessions to civil liberties are par in the course to maintain the stability. We can see this when “rainbow capitalism” or “rainbow feminism” is discussed; how capitalism can co opt liberation when in many respects the discrimination was due to a contradiction of capitalism itself.

By training young people in the media skills to appear comfortably on camera, on stage and have the technical skills to also work behind the scenes we give them not only skills for life, but we boost their employability and capacities as an activist. Over the next five years we have the opportunity to develop an entire environment of influential progressive writers, youtubers, podcasters, artists, actors and more. People who can make the arguments for us, and with us. Who will develop their own communities of interest and create new avenues for the wider population to participate in politics.

In an ironic way conservatives worldwide have learned more from our own socialist understanding of culture hegemony than we have ourselves.

“The Italian philosopher Antonio Gramsci developed the concept of cultural hegemony out of Karl Marx’s theory that the dominant ideology of society reflects the beliefs and interests of the ruling class. Gramsci argued that consent to the rule of the dominant group is achieved by the spread of ideologies — beliefs, assumptions, and values — through social institutions such as schools, churches, courts, and the media, among others. These institutions do the work of socializing people into the norms, values, and beliefs of the dominant social group. As such, the group that controls these institutions controls the rest of society. Cultural hegemony is most strongly manifested when those ruled by the dominant group come to believe that the economic and social conditions of their society are natural and inevitable, rather than created by people with a vested interest in particular social, economic, and political orders.”

This idea inspired the Frankfurt School of political thought, weaved its way across the American political landscape powered by the Cold War and went Global with infamous conservative media titans Roger Ailes and Rupert Murdoch. And while some norms promoted to us like the importance of democracy are great, others like capitalism or survival of the fittest in society are not. This process is always ongoing and most people are participating due to the unconscious acceptance and thus de facto endorsement of the dominant hegemony. This in addition to active cultural steering by Conservative media and surrounding favorable content creators you are actively promoting and engaging your ideology with people, and more importantly normalising it as the status quo.

And while I would say liberal progressivism is still dominant in pop culture, the news media has taken a decisive slant towards the right, or at least Left skeptic on a good day. This means we need to start participating in this battleground and begin to normalise democratic socialist thought in the UK. Not just this, but all our admirable values and ethos.

Climate Congresses

The End of the World is coming, and surprisingly people give a damn about it.

Across the world massive climate movements are organising to do no less than save the world. Many are apolitical, non-partisan and look upon our existing system with disdain for not addressing the problems of now and the future. Where structures were not there they’ve developed them and led to action. Turning people out into the streets in ways many people in our movement only dream about. But like many movements before without a way to enact the change they want they stand the real chance of collapsing. Which is where Labour needs to take the opportunity presented to it to actively join in providing those spaces, and the resources for people to organise to save the planet.

Labour should establish climate congresses with regional office space to be used and shared by local and national climate groups to organise, and help CLPs directly cooperate with these groups and provide support too. This will provide these organically growing movements a foundation to continue to thrive in. These congresses can be apart of a community of Green Labour organisations that help develop and promote our climate programme.

With this we must invest in growing our green policy development and research so that we are at the cutting edge of climate science and policy. There should never be a reason that a person of any background can’t get involved in creating the solutions to climate. Which is why Labour should also create easy pathways to participation in policy creation and reinforce existing ones like the Young Fabians for young people. Age and profession do not tell the whole story about what a person can offer our movement and country, or what ideas appear in their mind. We must always be open to discovering something in unexpected places, and fostering ideas and talent that may need nurturing to truly shine.

Beginning with Community.

I began Ready for 24' with community because I believe that foundationally it is at the heart of the human condition. We yearn for it, we grow in it and where there is none we create our own. It is here we lay the foundation of our movement and from here our movement begins and returns again. But this is just one part we must also tackle our challenges of organising and empowering young people, developing a robust media strategy and environment, and discovering and preparing the next generation of Labour leaders both inside and outside parliament. All issues I will cover as we continue to be Ready for 24'.