At least two of the candidates in the Labour leadership election see a future for the party as a kind of ‘movement’. David Miliband seeks to rebuild Labour as a ‘movement for change’ and has committed himself to providing basic introductory courses for 1000 activists in community organising in his campaign. Meanwhile, Ed Miliband wishes to see a Labour party that is a ‘living social movement’ of ideals and values.

Creating a ‘movement’ is clearly attractive to a party in which membership and activism have precipitously slumped over a sustained period – with a few well-documented and eye-catching exceptions. To what extent though can a party really become a ‘movement’? The answer is with great difficulty, especially if we understand the true nature of ‘movement’ politics.

We could of course look back to our own history. There is the Labour movement itself whose successes are self-evident – though they built up over the course of a century. The collective and pluralistic pursuits of social action oriented faith, the trade unions, cooperatives and friendly societies coalesced into a movement that eventually led to the creation of the Labour party. Only the Chartists and other political reformists and women’s representation movements come even close to matching the achievements of the Labour movement in modern British history.

The key point here, though, is that the Labour party came out of a movement not the other way round. And yet, the challenge that is now presented to the party is to do precisely the reverse: to create a new movement out of the party.

Evidence from across the Atlantic also suggests that this task may well be trickier than it sounds. There have been two great movements in recent American history. There is no questioning the monumental achievements of the civil rights movement. It was driven by the ideals of moral justice. Its power was that of people – marching, gathering, resisting, and mobilising. When Martin Luther King stepped down from the Lincoln Memorial and made the short journey to the White House in August 1963, he was greeted by a grinning John F Kennedy who told the preacher from Georgia that he had a dream too. And thus, America’s cruel walls of segregation and separation crumbled.

Equal voting rights and civil rights changed America. But it was the movement that followed it and, in part, was a reaction to it, that was America’s most successful ‘movement for change.’ That was the audacious and many headed conservative movement. If the civil rights movement was driven by a sense of moral injustice, the conservative movement was motivated by a sense of moral outrage.

The outrage was in reaction to judicial and legislative changes which took place from the 1950s to the 1970s. Civil rights; judicial activism resulting in the banning of prayers in schools, rights for suspects, and, of course, abortion rights; and the passing of an equal rights amendment (never enforced) suggested to many a country that was shifting away from responsibility and moral rectitude to one that was permissive and morally hollowing out. Race riots in America’s big cities, humiliating defeat in Vietnam, and an economy spiralling out of control by the early 1970s further suggested a country that was on the wrong track. Its leaders were impotent – and corrupt – and the American way of life was seemingly under threat like never before. At the same time the USSR was a real and ever present threat to the country’s national security and its deepest held values.

By 2008, the conservative movement had helped Republicans to occupy the White House for 28 out of the 40 years following the Voting Rights Act. The presidencies of Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton seem almost anomalous. Carter beat the hapless post-Watergate Gerald Ford. Bill Clinton was fortunate in having the well-financed independent Ross Perot take millions of votes away from George H W Bush in 1992.

Context is one thing but the response was particular. The conservative movement was idealistic and formed from not entirely compatible strands of conservative thought: neo-liberalism, neo-conservatism, and Christian conservatism. It worked through thinktanks, publishing houses and periodicals (and later talk radio and cable TV news.) It was driven through churches and other civil society institutions to disseminate argument, politicise socially conservative America, and mobilise for power. It built a financial and institutional infrastructure to maintain its social, ideological, and political power. And this is the key point: it was comprehensive, deep and frighteningly well resourced and financed. It wasn’t the Republican party that built it. In fact, the Republican party was more often its object.

Equally, that was the case with the Obama campaign. The Democratic party was its target. It was built entirely outside the party machine – other than the fact that it was the party’s primary process – and then essentially initiated what was a hostile takeover. Whether it proves to be as enduring as the conservative movement remains to be seen. It should be said that the main paradigm of the campaign was not community organising – a different thing. It was more the movement-based politics of civil rights, Chicago’s urban movement politics of the 1980s, and, yes, the conservative movement also.

Again, much of the infrastructure-building on the left had taken place before the campaign: financing and strategy was provided by Democracy Alliance. Grassroots campaigning know-how and technology advantage was identified by groups such as Move On and those techniques were first brought into the Democratic party by Howard Dean’s campaign in 2004. So this wasn’t a case of ‘let’s build a movement’. It was more a response to a disparate and inchoate movement that already existed.

So the construction of a movement by a party or a party leadership may be a strange way round of doing things. What is far more important is that the state of the plural left’s institutional infrastructure is considered. Beyond party ideas, action and institutions will all matter. The money question can not be ducked by the left. Again, this is not just about the party. It’s about unions, campaigns, blogs, technology, think tanks, publications, and media. It’s also about realising that there isn’t a single answer to the renewal of Labour or the left more broadly. We live in fragmented and pluralistic times. Labour may simply get to engage and amplify a movement – if it gets it right.

Ed Miliband has shown an understanding of this by working with Citizens UK on the living wage campaign. Amplifying their campaign, and acknowledging their ownership of it, demonstrates the type of pluralistic commitment that Labour will need.

Movements are complex but remarkable social and political phenomena. How does a stream become a river and what course will the river take? What the labour, civil rights, conservative, and Obama movements share is this: there is cause, there are ideals, there is a sense of injustice or outrage; the movements exist on a range of intellectual and organisational levels, they are pluralistic, have practical aims, and while there is leadership, it never has real control.

Movements and parties can be symbiotic. Movements create the space and necessity for change. Parties use their political and legislative muscle to make it happen. For that symbiosis there needs to be common cause. Where should Labour begin? An expression of authentic and humane idealism might be a spark. At the very least, it might mean that the party is heard once again. And that won’t do any harm at all.