Momentum: the quickest campaign outfit on the block?

Momentum comes in for a lot of criticism from the media. I can’t but help think that this is in large part a consequence of the success they have had in influencing Labour Party policy making, in particular, the National Executive Committee (NEC) of the party.

The NEC is obviously a body they’ve set out to influence, as was demonstrated by their success in getting all their ‘slate’ candidates elected to the NEC in early September.

But it is not just in their success at winning high profile elections that’s impressed me, it’s also in their ability to stay on top of the issues at the NEC and ensure that, when needed, the campaign’s digitally engaged activists are mobilised to bring external pressure to bear.

A case in point was the mini-furore that erupted this week upon the leaked details about mandatory re-selection, a policy supported by the Labour Party membership, but apparently subject to a trade union / parliamentary Labour Party (PLP) stitch up.

I received an email ‘call to action’ from Momentum at 10:08 am, urging me to email NEC members to get them to reject plans that might undermine the further democratisation of the PLP.

Three hours later and NEC members’ phones had been inundated with messages from Momentum members urging them to reject the plans allegedly under consideration by the NEC.

Here’s the Huffington Post’s Paul Waugh commenting on what he’d heard:

Prominent NEC members with close links to Momentum, ie Jon Lansman, were quiet on the issue, though his preference for open selections, was clearly very strongly reflected in the email sent out by Momentum.

Whatever you think of Momentum, as a campaigning group, I can’t think of anyone else that remains so effective at mobilising its activist base in this way.

The curse of unlimited choice: music technology

I’ve never been a fan of the Steve Jobs, Elon Musks and Peter Thiels of this world.

But, the German music tech entrepreneur (sound engineer, musician, coder and artist) Robert Hencke, is different. He’s fascinating.

Imagine being the co-founder of a genre defining $18 million music software company and then decrying what your incredible piece of technology has done!

That’s what Hencke, co-founder of Ableton, does in this excellent presentation, which is essentially a treatise about the tyranny of choice that comes with technological abundance.

I've been obsessed with music production down the years and finally bought my first copy of Ableton about 10 years ago. The software combines incredible power and versatility with a bewildering capacity to stifle creativity. I have had a love-hate relationship with the programme  ever since I bought it. My feelings towards it are  well expressed by Robert in this talk.

That said, I constantly go back to Ableton, knowing that the urge to get another synthesiser or plug-in, learning or even building a fully modular synth, is almost certainly unnecessary and will get me no closer to the type of music or art I want to produce. Certainly no closer than the universe of synthesis, composition and emulation that exists in Ableton.

Others disagree, having basically rinsed Ableton as part of their studio and liver performances for years already. 
There is something intensely creative about limiting your choices of technology, mastering a piece of equipment, pushing it beyond its absolute capability and creating something entirely new as a by-product.

Ultimately, this is what I think Hencke is urging us all to do.

It is a great talk by someone who’s clearly still in touch with his fundamental creative drives and needs, he even comes tantalisingly close to saying Ableton should be scrapped altogether!

Well work a watch.

Hayek, astroturf and centrism

In my efforts to understand astroturfed political campaigns, I decided to read Hayek’s polemical essay ‘The Intellectuals and Socialism’.

The essay is the source of Hayek's reference to “second hand dealers in ideas” often assumed to mean think tanks. I’m not sure this is what he meant in 1949, regardless of how apt it feels today.

Hayek’s "intellectuals" are journalists, school teachers and other purveyors of knowledge. They are the second-hand dealers in ideas whose role is to act as an intermediary between social, political and cultural ideas and the public at large who, he assumes, are inescapably under their influence.*

In the essay he rails against a media and cultural world dominated by socialist intellectuals , putting this dominance down to the awe-inspiring utopianism of socialist ideas in contrast to the workaday “practical”  “sensible” “realistic” (dare I say) centrism of liberalism.

Hayek complains that: “what [liberals] lack is a liberal Utopia… a program which seems neither a mere defence of things as they are nor a diluted kind of socialism, but a truly liberal radicalism which does not spare the susceptibilities of the mighty… which is not too severely practical, and which does not confine itself to what appears today to be politically possible.”

This quote could literally have been uttered by David Cameron or Tony Blair. It is precisely the kind of “what works is what’s best” managerialism that guided first term New Labour. It feels entirely apt for a society chugging along with 3% growth, decent wage growth and a public sector borrowing requirement of 37-40% of GDP.

Hayek didn’t believe he was living in an actually existing capitalist society.

And I think it is precisely this that's is at the root of the failure to adequately respond to the crisis of 2008. It is the reason why liberalism offered, at most, an apologia to 2008 according to this week’s Financial Times. It is possible Hayek would have campaigned for Brexit, though our current no-deal trajectory sits ill with the centrism in his 1949 essay.

All of which is to say that Hayek and today’s “intellectual neoliberals” in the media continue to spectacularly miss the point.  

In a society marked by social distress, it is insanity to think a media ‘huddle’ with Michael Gove a masterstroke of social action.

When millions of children cannot get a decent diet; if you don't know where next week's wages are coming from; if one of the great markers of human progress has gone into unprecedented reverse, then no amount of editorializing, lobby briefings or press releases is likely to shift public opinion.

Because Hayek was wrong, fatally wrong, if he believed that public opinion turned solely on whatever vision or anti-vision is on offer from media intellectuals.

Surely this is what the 2017 general election result, and all opinion polls since, conclusively demonstrated? Public opinion does not turn on whatever latest smear is concocted in the Westminster lobby, it turns on the deep and long-standing churnings in people’s everyday material conditions.

Unless and until liberals are able to understand that a politics that addresses 2008 and its fallout is the new centrism, they will stay irrelevant.

*Note - I find the essay useful in getting my head around the funding decisions of charities like the Political and Economic Research Trust (PERT). Not just the money it gave to the TaxPayers Alliance, but the money doled out to early culture war outfits like the New Culture Forum. I’m researching a longer piece on this, including how PERT ended up funding a campaign to have traffic lights abolished).