The battle to come is not the usual bureaucratic bust-up

Anyone with even a little schooling in Marxism-Leninism, which these days means anyone who turns up to a constituency Labour party meeting in an urban area, understands that Marxists see ‘the party’ differently from the rest of us.

For democratic socialists, the party is a broad-based localised organisation, designed to win new recruits, aggregate local progressive views, raise funds, choose candidates and contest elections. It is the primary instrument for representing people’s views in local, regional and national forums, and, where a majority is possible, for exercising democratic power.

One facet of this, hitherto non-controversial, view of the party is that it should employ full-time staff. These people are employed to carry out many of the functions as outlined above: fundraising, administration of policy-making, servicing the membership, and helping to win elections through campaigns and communications. You would think that the fact that talented and diligent people are willing to give their time to such activities should be welcome by Labour’s members.

However, for many of Labour’s newer members, arriving on our shores from distinct and different political traditions, the party staff are not a welcome ally. No, the staff are the enemy to the advance of socialism. They represents the ‘bureaucratisation’ of the workers’ movement, which as every good Marxist knows was denounced in October 1923 by Trotsky himself, in his letter to the central committee of the Communist party where he complained that ‘the bureaucratisation of the party apparatus has developed to unheard-of proportions.’

We know that John McDonnell has read Lenin and Trotsky because he admitted they are his favourite authors in an interview in 2006 for Workers’ Liberty. More than this, he believes in their political methods. That is why, in 2012, he was happy to describe the Labour party as a ‘tactic’, with the rider ‘if it’s no longer a useful vehicle, move on.’ So this has to be understood as the context for his remarks in late August that Labour staff were responsible for a ‘purge’ and attempts to ‘rig’ the leadership election.

This forms part of a wider attempt to undermine the party’s staff, to get rid of former GMB organiser Iain McNicol as general secretary, and to capture the party’s headquarters for Jeremy Corbyn’s allies. It may seem that the anonymous briefings and attacks are personal, especially for the staff on the receiving end. They are not. This is purely business for the Corbynites. They know they cannot succeed in their hostile takeover of the Labour party without total control of the party machine.

McDonnell’s attacks provoked a cry of outrage from former staffers. In a letter to the Guardian they complained that, ‘to hear members of the Labour party attack their own employees is depressing; to hear talk about “clearing them out” is unacceptable; to hear such statements from the most senior level is intolerable.’ Staff, through their union, are desperately seeking two seats on the Labour party national executive to speak up for them. It is Labour policy for the private sector to have workers on company boards. However, it may already be too late.

The struggle to save the Labour party takes many forms. The newest battlefront – chosen by the leader – is at Southside on London’s Victoria Street, and in Harold Wilson House, Terry Duffy House, and the other regional offices. Here the people who believe in the Labour party as a platform for winning elections, rather than a ‘social movement’, are digging in for the assault to come. It is a fundamental divide: either you see Labour as a political party, or else as a kind of leftwing RSPB. This is no religious schism over the finer points of doctrine. It is either Corbyn’s view or Clause I; the two are not compatible.

Corbyn has shown a total disregard for any standard human resources practice by appointing his friends and relations to senior posts without advert, interview or open competition. The politically well-travelled James Schneider is apparently set to move from Momentum to the leader’s office without even printing off his CV. If the rest of the ‘posh boy revolutionaries’, to borrow Alastair Campbell’s neat phrase, take control of Labour headquarters, they control the party’s vast funds, property portfolio, the process of policy-making, the selection of parliamentary candidates, and, crucially, policing the rulebook.

Similar attempts to create a role among the executive directors, even for it to be called ‘deputy general secretary’, for Sam Tarry does not scream ‘meritocracy’. Because what the Labour party needs at the top is another straight white man.

The evidence is that if they control the process of party discipline and compliance with the rules, the floodgates will open to every revolutionary sect and paper-selling entryist who wants to join in the fun. No opinion too odious, no view too eccentric, no policy too repellent. That is tomorrow’s Labour party, unless we prevent it.

The future of the Labour party now rests with the gallant ranks of party staff. Ranged against them is Corbyn, McDonnell and Momentum. If he can winkle out members of staff by fair means or foul, and impose his own apparatchiks, Corbyn and his heirs and successors will win the party for a generation. If not, a flicker of hope is left alive. This, then, is Labour’s Alamo.