Labour Party membership: at just £15 it’s an affordable special gift for your loved ones this Xmas. It’s just a shame that it keeps kicking you in the teeth.

It’s no joke. The Labour leadership have got a smart, new fangled idea to boost their flagging recruitment figures at the festive season.
A new leadership scheme encourages Labour Party members to ‘give the gift of membership’ to their friends and family this Christmas, writes Luke Cooper 
Think about it for a moment.
You are there on Christmas morning and you eagerly open up a sealed envelope. But to your disappointment you find not that crisp £20 note after all, or even that book voucher that you won’t get round to cashing in till next Xmas, but a letter from Ed Miliband saying your Uncle Sidney has just given you a 12 month gift membership for the Labour Party.
Yes, that’s right you’ve been involuntarily signed up to a political party.
But don’t worry, if you ‘don’t want to join the Labour Party’, after all it is – as the website says – ‘a voluntary organisation’, then your uncle’s gift will be treated like any other donation to party coffers.
The only snag is that you’ll be left present-less.
And believe me it really could be you.
The instructions on the recruitment drive that have been sent out to the party faithful say, “we’ve all got one – a friend or family member, who after finding out you are in the Labour Party starts talking about politics. You realise that they want to see the back of the Tories as much as you do – yet you know that they have never thought about joining the Labour Party, and, even if you asked, they would probably never get round to signing themselves up”.
So, be afraid, if in the last twelve months, you, like millions of other people, have said to a Labour Party member that you want to see the back of the Tories. And be doubly worried, if they also know you have never joined, never thought about joining and would never get round to signing up anyway. In other words, you don’t want to join.
But instead of just leaving you in the world of non-Labour Party members – or, God forbid, asking why you’ve ‘never thought about joining’ – they give you a free 12 month membership.
The party wins. It gets £15 and another notch on the recruitment figures.
You however are left as the loser with two equally unpleasant options.
You either have to go through the nerve-jangling-sheer-awkwardness of telling Uncle Sidney you don’t want to join. Or, if you can’t bring yourself to break the old man’s heart at this special time of year, then you’ll have to live with the embarrassment of him gleefully recounting how you joined the party at your aunt’s buffet lunches for the next decade.
Time to emigrate?
The ‘Fukuyama Taboo’
Seriously though – this is a grim example of the loss of meaning in politics.
It’s just a few weeks after the biggest strike for a generation.
There could hardly have been a better recruitment opportunity for the Labour Party. But this was predicated on something that the leadership couldn’t quite reconcile themselves to.
They’d have to give unwavering support to the strikers. But it wasn’t forthcoming and the Labour Party in general and Ed Miliband in particular were decidedly out of favour on the pickets.
Unequivocal support for the strikers would have carried a political cost. It would have meant having to substantively challenge the political consensus (that ‘strikes are bad’) in British politics.
It would have actually had to re-introduce an element of meaning into the post-political void of neoliberalism: where ideology settles around a pro-market status quo that Labour was long ago bewitched by.
Slavoj Zizek recently called it the ‘Fukuyama Taboo’ – the idea that history has decided on liberal democratic capitalism and it is simply taboo, ‘not the done thing’, to challenge it.
Under Miliband, Labour want to be seen to be challenging the taboo without challenging it. That’s why Miliband talks about ‘breaking the consensus’ in British politics.
But, without giving this any substance at the level of ideology and policy – without actually proposing a concrete, radical alternative – the result is a world of sheer doublespeak.
Labour are with the strikers and against them. They are for #Occupy but against regulation of the City of London. They are for recruitment to the party, but without recruitment to anything even approaching a radical ideology.
Membership is packaged up and sold as a stocking filler, suitably gutted of anything ‘dangerous’ and sitting comfortably alongside the Nintendo Wii under the Christmas lights.
Neoliberalism – the pro-market ideology whose influence rears its head in all works of life – did this to mainstream politics.
It gutted it of meaning, filled it with glitz and glamour, and packaged it up as a spectacle to be bought and sold.
The Labour Party bought into all these assumptions. A usual month of members’ emails will include two or three invitations to a ‘three course meal with Ed Balls and Ken Livingstone’, or some other great figure, ‘for just £40 a head’.
If we want to break with mainstream politics as a weird world of dinner dates with pseudo celebrities, then Zizek is surely right – it’s time to break the Fukuyama Taboo.
And, yes, it will actually require political organisation and even recruitment – a set of taboos in their own right that form part of exactly what Zizek’s talking about –, but not to the Labour Party with its ‘gift membership’.
We need a new, unashamedly ideological, anticapitalist left.
Let’s, please, put some real, radical, meaning back into politics.