Left wiped out in Scotland May 4, 2007
Posted by franklittle in Marxism, Scotland, The Left.trackback
I was never one of those people who greeted the success of the Scottish Socialist Party in 2003, taking six seats in the Scottish Parliament, with unquestioning delight, having doubts over anything that involved the SP and the SWP so heavily. I was also never convinced by the arguments in the radical left in both Britain and Ireland that their achievements pointed the way to political re-alignments in England and Ireland so that we could emulate our Scottish comrades.
But my doubts and suspicions were very much secondary to seeing socialists campaigning in the Scottish Parliament for free school meals for children, backing trade unions in industrial disputes, for the destruction of the union, opposing the war in Iraq and Trident, pushing redistributive taxation proposals and so on. Even Rosie Kane’s famous ‘oath to the people’ stands out in my mind as a powerful image. It would not be going too far to describe the SSP of 2003 as an inspiration, even to those of us with some doubts.
And now, four years later, the two different factions of the SSP, the Tommy Sheridan led Solidarity and the SSP remnant under Colin Fox, have lost all six seats in the Scottish Parliament. The combined votes of both amounts to 3.5%, a far cry from their breakthrough in 2003 where they polled 8.8%. What makes it all the more despairing is that the split was not on political positions, not the result of a contest between the pro-independence faction and the anti-independence faction, but because of an implosion of personality clashes, lies and slander.
No doubt there will be plenty of gloating in Solidarity this morning at the fact that they defeated the SSP. When in-fighting gets this bitter, it’s not necessary that you win, so long as you beat your most hated opponents. I wouldn’t claim to be an expert on the SSP/Tommy Sheridan split, but everything I have read points to the dangers of putting too much faith in a political leader who turned out to be dishonest and utterly unscrupulous. Lessons there for everyone on the left.
There’s a good piece from the Irish Socialist Network on it here. But regardless of where you come down on the dispute, what is inescapable is this. Four years ago, Scottish Socialist Republicans achieved a substantial political breakthrough undreamt of by the radical left anywhere else in Britain or Ireland. Today, they have been shattered at the polls and their two factions politically emasculated.
Whatever one’s attitude to the Trots, or to Tommy Sheridan or the SSP, that’s something to mourn this morning.
[...] I’m not doing the Scottish elections. Frank’s piece on Cedar Lounge pretty much says what I wanted to say, and there’s very little I could add to it. [...]
Great piece, I too warmed considerably to the SSP as time went by. I also think that the ISN document is a masterpiece of honest and measured comment about the situation.
Echoing what you say, whatever side one takes on the personalities this has been a disaster for left and progressive politics in Scotland and beyond.
Oh puh-leeease, I’m going to cry. Holyrood is well shot of that bunch of blowhards, ideologically pure to the end, politically impotent to the end. Normal service - sort of - has been resumed.
Who knows though, maybe we’ll be treated to the sight of Tommy and Rosie brawling in the shopping streets of Glasgow on Saturday afternoons over who said what to whom, instead of dragging Parliament’s reputation even lower than it was already with their kindergarten-level stunts. I’d pay to see that.
At least Tommy has a degree in Economics - although every time he opens his mouth he seems to show how much he’s forgotten of the first-week-of-the-course basics, but Rosie Kane? She’s nothing - an ignoramus (ignorama surely?) with a certificate from Langside College, who got her 15 minutes of fame living up a tree in Pollok and graffiti-ing her hand with a magic marker. If that’s what “the people” aspire to have as a “representative” then maybe we do after all get the government we deserve.
Total difference made to the real world by any of them?
None.
At.
All.
If the Scottish socialists and republicans that I know are anything to go by, the SSP’s collapse can probably be blamed not only on the party’s internal difficulties but also to a significant degree on tactical voting. I was surprised how many people told me they’d be going for the SNP this time just to get that referendum.
Paul, I note that on your blog you say that “politics leaves you cold”. That’s fair enough but it’s worth pointing out that some of us here on the CLR would be the first to point out the faults and flaws of the SSP (having a somewhat jaundiced view of other further left formations), and such a lack of interest does somewhat call into question your assessment of the broader aspects of the SSP. BTW I’m not entirely sure that degree qualifications are absolutely necessary for political success or indeed any sort of success at all.
More to the point I’d direct you, as franklittle has, towards the ISN piece which you might find echoes some of your criticisms while at the same time taking a perhaps slightly more open stance to their virtues.
Good article, but I think the below is wrong:
“having doubts over anything that involved the SP and the SWP so heavily”
The SSP was set up, in the face of virulent opposition from the CWI (the SP’s international London-based leadership in effect). The SWP were never significant within it. In many ways, it was an attempt to move beyond the dead hand of the trots and form a genuinely democratic organisation - it had many factions and a large amount of internal democracy.
I agree with WBS’s take on the basic problem, although I’d go beyond his conclusion and say that it shows the dangers of vesting too much power in leadership - unless your party is made up of 100% saints, the leaders are going to be corrupted by power.
The other ‘lesson’, I think, comes down to the limits of democratic tolerance. Sheridan’s ego was only able to destroy the party because both the SP and the SWP jumped in behind him - something that almost beggars belief. The problem being that the SSP was so open that it tolerated internal groups who were certain to stab the party in the back as soon as they thought they could get something out of it. How do you deal with this though, without getting authoritarian and going all control freakish?
As a member of the SSP, I would like to say that I found my self very much in agreement with both the ISN and the Socialist Democracy articles.
Also, I agree with the following comment whole heartedly:
The other ‘lesson’, I think, comes down to the limits of democratic tolerance. Sheridan’s ego was only able to destroy the party because both the SP and the SWP jumped in behind him - something that almost beggars belief. The problem being that the SSP was so open that it tolerated internal groups who were certain to stab the party in the back as soon as they thought they could get something out of it.
Oh, we have tons of work to do.
“The other ‘lesson’, I think, comes down to the limits of democratic tolerance… How do you deal with this though, without getting authoritarian and going all control freakish?”
Pursue this line of thought a bit longer…
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gulag
“Pursue this line of thought a bit longer…
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gulag“
Yep, setting a requirement that your members support your party is exactly equivalent to sending millions of people to labour camps where they will die in their millions.
Swiftly ignoring the above, I’ll return to another ‘lesson’ of the SSP. I think that this particular election result shows up the inherent dangers in left-wing parties adopting electoral strategies to advance their agenda. Firstly because the electoral system has the unaccountability of leaderships hard-wired into it. There is no way that party members can impose a mandate on their leaders or recall them if they decide to ignore the party’s policy, reps can even choose to change party allegiance if they want to - something that ex-stickies should know all about.
Secondly, because electoral support is normally pretty fickle. It is really difficult to know how much of it represents support for the parties’ core politics and how much represents a personal, or just a whimsical preference. Small parties are always in danger of being wiped out by a large-scale swing to bigger oppositional currents, who are seen as credible alternatives in the short term. For example, while the SSP got wiped out primarily by the SNP, the SP is most under threat from SF who could wipe out all the fruits of their long, hard slog to establish candidates if SF got a sense of momentum behind them.
Of course, as somebody who walks on the anarchist side of the street, I would think that.
Not sure I’d agree with either of your points Chekov.
In the second case, I think in the few constituencies the SP is a serious force, it’s Sinn Féin that has more to fear from them than the other way round. The SP growth in Cork and Tallaght must be seen as a danger to Sinn Féin. They’re likely to take a seat in Dublin North, preventing the Shinners from growing there. Only in Dublin West is there the possibility, long-term, of a threat to Higgins in the shape of Sinn Féin’s Felix Gallagher who seems to have a high profile.
To take your first point second, I’m not challenging your argument on the impact of adopting electoral politics as the sole method of bringing about change, merely that I’m not convinced the SSP abandoned all other forms of activity and that the debacle in Scotland had little to do with elections as such. The SSP split was not over what should be in the manifesto, or who should be candidate, but the decision of the party’s leader to lie to the courts and his attacks on the remnants of the party when they chose not to perjure themselves for him.
“I think in the few constituencies the SP is a serious force, it’s Sinn Féin that has more to fear from them than the other way round. The SP growth in Cork and Tallaght must be seen as a danger to Sinn Féin. They’re likely to take a seat in Dublin North, preventing the Shinners from growing there. Only in Dublin West is there the possibility, long-term, of a threat to Higgins in the shape of Sinn Féin’s Felix Gallagher”
Hmmm. It seems to me that you’re sort of assuming that the votes already belong to SF and the SP are currently blocking them from going where they should go. The SP has spent a couple of decades now building up local candidates in four constituencies across the country with some success. My point is that, if there were a surge of support behind SF (not in this election, maybe in the next one), the SP could find themselves wiped out. There is no possibility at all of the reverse happening. SF have a much less local profile and could be seen as a credible alternative in the not-too-distant future, not so with the SP - they have no national profile and anything that they get will come through the painstaking building up of a local profile over years. The problem for the SP is that they could potentially lose all the fruit of their decades of local work on an electoral whim and be left with nada.
“I’m not challenging your argument on the impact of adopting electoral politics as the sole method of bringing about change, merely that I’m not convinced the SSP abandoned all other forms of activity and that the debacle in Scotland had little to do with elections as such.”
I’m not actually arguing that point. I’m arguing against any use of electoral politics at all. Simply because it creates a small group of leaders who are in an inherently unaccountable position and whose privileged access to the public and to the media allows them to ignore the wishes of the party and the electorate whenever they decide it’s inconvenient.
“The SSP split was not over what should be in the manifesto, or who should be candidate, but the decision of the party’s leader to lie to the courts and his attacks on the remnants of the party when they chose not to perjure themselves for him.”
He could only do it because he had been put in a powerful, unaccountable position by the party. If an ordinary SSP member had found himself in the same position, he would have been kicked out and nobody would have thought twice about it and the party would have suffered no damage.
Of course, my argument can seem to be very idealistic and incredibly unpragmatic. I mean electoral politics are generally seen as equivalent to politics and to abstain from this domain would seem to be equivalent to abstaining from having any chance whatsoever of effecting any change at all. However, I think that point of view hugely over-estimates the space for effecting change within a parliamentary system and under-estimates the seriousness of the situation in which we find ourselves vis a vis democracy. Or to put it another way, those who think that it is possible to effect any significant changes through elections in the current climate are far more idealistic and less realistic than I am. A pragmatic and realistic look at the political landscape in Ireland today would acknowledge that democratic and socialist forces are just incredibly weak and there just aren’t any shortcuts around that problem.
I like a lot of what you’re saying Chekov, but…it strike me that taking your point that “democratic and socialist forces are just incredibly weak” and then eliding that with a view that electoral politics is less useful than most consider it is a sort of retrospective justification for that weakness. I don’t think it is. I think the left is weak here because of integral structural reasons and is unlikely to get much stronger in the short term and most certainly won’t - again for structural reasons - if the left discards electoral politics.
Having spent twenty five years on both sides of that divide, campaign, or community activism and electoral I just don’t see that it’s possible to evade the centrality of electoralism to our system, nor the fact that it is considered (and arguably correctly) as the legitimisation of our admittedly flawed democracy. And that centrality isn’t going to go away.
Taking an example, consider Éirígí, who eschew electoralism for campaigning. And then consider how they are entirely marginalised by not having any impact or influence on the current political events. Simply put they are off the radar and an opportunity to raise their profile is lost. The best they can do is stage a rather pointless protest at Stormont about the Iraq war (subsumed in truth into a broader Anti-War grouping). I can’t imagine any circumstance where Éirígí, who I respect considerably, could mobilise in a way which would for example to take your point ‘effect change’ in a more substantial way than ‘within the parliamentary system’. And that would be true whether were they vanguardists, which they appear not to be, or non-hierarchical socialists.
More to the point I think a non-electoral approach loses significant opportunities to establish links into the working class (for a start) by demonstrating the worth or otherwise of one’s activities and giving an opportunity for them to be validated or not as the case may be, secondly the opportunity to interface with both state and non state services and organisations (which yes can lead to clientalism, but doesn’t have to - and in any case fulfills a necessary educative or mediating role for those who find themselves unable to access that which is theirs by right and to generate pressures to extend those righss) and thirdly broadens the engagement politically.
Where I agree with you fully is that electoralism shouldn’t of itself be the end goal, and as one who like others here disagreed entirely with DL going into coalition in the 1990s that’s a lesson that was well learned.
On the other hand I think you also overstate the power of leaderships and their lack of ‘accountability’. Again taking DL, they didn’t take the majority of the members of the WP any where it didn’t want to go. It genuinely thought that DL was going to be an improvement on the WP. That it wasn’t was in part due to the leadership, but also paradoxically in part due to a looser party structure which lacked much of the rigid discipline of the WP and therefore was unable to motivate and direct the membership as strongly. And, it’s also fair to say that that is why DL failed, because of an inability to convince either the then existing membership that the project was working or to attract new members. Eventually the membership walked away from the party, voting with their feet. But in truth the membership didn’t have a clearer idea than the leadership (and it’s worth pointing out one shouldn’t overstate the concept of ‘leadership’ since the distance or even distinction between the membership and leadership being actually rather minimal in DL and many other such organisations) of what to do.
But there is another point. One way or another any programme must go before the people to be validated. Short of a revolutionary situation which seems unlikely that has to happen through electoralism.
“Simply put they are off the radar and an opportunity to raise their profile is lost.”
Quite. If you don’t take part in elections then all you achieve is invisibility at the very time that much of the population is most interested in politics. It’s your big chance to talk to people at large rather than just to people who already agree with you and it needs to be taken.
To me the implosion of the SSP is a real disaster. It was the single most promising development in leftwing politics in the British Isles for many years and to watch it go “boom” is enormously depressing. I’m really not interested in people saying “oh, it was always going to go wrong because of Sheridan / the SP / the SWP / it was an electoral project / the particular political obsession of your choice. Even the people who might ultimately be blamed for its demise were people without whose work and dedication it couldn’t have existed in the first place.
If there’s a lesson to be learned it’s about the stupidity of infighting and the vast unlikelihood that if you have a bitter split, your supporters will say to one side or the other “well done, you got rid of all the bad guys” rather than just saying “oh, bollocks to all of you”. Neither of the resulting factions seem to recognise that at all.
Incidentally Paul’s remarks abourt Rosie Kane seem to me to be hugely arrogant and snobbish.
“it strike me that taking your point that “democratic and socialist forces are just incredibly weak” and then eliding that with a view that electoral politics is less useful than most consider it is a sort of retrospective justification for that weakness.”
I’m not saying that the weakness is a consequence of electoralism, but that electoral weakness is a consequence of the weakness of socialist and democratic forces on the ground. I don’t think that we will ever see a strong electoral showing of the left until it is already strong on the ground. My disavowal of electoralism is a separate issue.
“it is considered (and arguably correctly) as the legitimisation of our admittedly flawed democracy”
That strikes me as a very good argument against participation. Why legitimise something so profoundly flawed?
“Taking an example, consider Éirígí, who eschew electoralism for campaigning. And then consider how they are entirely marginalised by not having any impact or influence on the current political events. Simply put they are off the radar and an opportunity to raise their profile is lost. The best they can do is stage a rather pointless protest at Stormont about the Iraq war (subsumed in truth into a broader Anti-War grouping).”
Actually, I think that the example of Éirígí illustrates the opposite of your point. They have grown from a handful of members to several hundred in the space of less than a year - there is no way on earth they could have achieved that had their goals been electorally focused, for a start they would have received a much more hostile reception from the sinners which would have hampered their growth significantly. Secondly, one of the obvious reasons behind their growth is that they were actually doing things - getting out on the streets and giving people a way of having a practical involvement. Contrast this with the other small republican groups who spend all their time developing fantasy programmes for government and infighting for power while doing nothing in practice.
Also, you have at least heard of their protest at Stormont. Had they been running for election chances are that you would have heard not a single thing that they did or said, unless they happened to knock on your door. How much coverage have the electoral platforms of People Before Profit, the Socialist Party, Finian McGrath, Joan Collins or any of the other left candidates got? Even when they manage to achieve the enormous task of getting elected, they have to go on effing reality TV shows to get noticed - it’s not exactly a huge platform for their ideas.
“I can’t imagine any circumstance where Éirígí, who I respect considerably, could mobilise in a way which would for example to take your point ‘effect change’ in a more substantial way than ‘within the parliamentary system’.”
Think about Shell to Sea. Beyond the local residents of Rossport, the campaign has been completely dominated by Éirígí and anarchists. While it may not have effected change, it’s at least continued to raise the issue before the public. Had they concentrated on raising an electoral platform, nobody would have heard of it beyond those in personal contact with them.
“More to the point I think a non-electoral approach loses significant opportunities to establish links into the working class (for a start) by demonstrating the worth or otherwise of one’s activities and giving an opportunity for them to be validated or not as the case may be, secondly the opportunity to interface with both state and non state services and organisations (which yes can lead to clientalism, but doesn’t have to - and in any case fulfills a necessary educative or mediating role for those who find themselves unable to access that which is theirs by right and to generate pressures to extend those righss) and thirdly broadens the engagement politically.”
I disagree entirely. Electoral support does not equal support for the ideas of the organisation. A vote for Joe Higgins does not equal support for the dictatorship of the proletariat no more than support for Labour or Fine Gael equals support for the occupation of Iraq. I realise that we are coming from quite different political backgrounds, but where I’m coming from nurturing participation and democratic inputs are the main goal - something that runs directly counter to the logic of ‘vote for us and we’ll implement a programme to change things”. I think clientelism is so deeply baked into electoralism that you just can’t avoid it.
“Again taking DL, they didn’t take the majority of the members of the WP any where it didn’t want to go.”
They took the votes though. All of the work over decades building up support by WP activists essentially went with the leadership into DL. DL’s activist base disappeared almost immediately, but they still retained the votes.
“But there is another point. One way or another any programme must go before the people to be validated. Short of a revolutionary situation which seems unlikely that has to happen through electoralism.”
If your programme’s primary goal is to encourage directly democratic participation in decision making, then electoralism is counter-productive. Your programme is validated by participation - bodies on the street, at meetings, in unions and so on.
“If you don’t take part in elections then all you achieve is invisibility at the very time that much of the population is most interested in politics. It’s your big chance to talk to people at large rather than just to people who already agree with you and it needs to be taken.”
Quite, but you don’t have to run in elections to use them as a propaganda tool. We in the WSM always run propaganda campaigns during elections that aim to question the limits of democracy in our parliamentary system, as do most anarchists. Of course we don’t have much impact, but that’s due to our tiny size and marginal position - we might be able to gain some votes if we ran in elections, but those votes wouldn’t mean that people supported our politics and, in any case, I am fairly sure that our ideas would have much less of an impact if they were the same old ‘vote for us’ ones.
“I’m really not interested in people saying “oh, it was always going to go wrong because of Sheridan / the SP / the SWP / it was an electoral project / the particular political obsession of your choice. Even the people who might ultimately be blamed for its demise were people without whose work and dedication it couldn’t have existed in the first place.
If there’s a lesson to be learned it’s about the stupidity of infighting and the vast unlikelihood that if you have a bitter split, your supporters will say to one side or the other “well done, you got rid of all the bad guys” rather than just saying “oh, bollocks to all of you”. Neither of the resulting factions seem to recognise that at all.”
That’s pretty much akin to saying “why can’t we all just get along”. It identifies the obvious problem, but says nothing about how to solve it. The simple fact is that there are sectarian groups out there and appealing to their better natures just doesn’t work. Many of them have internal cultures which render them imprevious to sense. You deal with that reality or you are destined to see the same disasters repeated over and over.
“It identifies the obvious problem, but says nothing about how to solve it.”
Well, this may be because the problem is harder to solve than to identify. Anarchists may think they can resolve it by not having parties at all, but not only does that not solve the problem of how to have a functional party, it rather avoids the reality that anarchists but be among the most sectarian and destructive of all. (I can think of no tendency, for instance, not even the single-figure membership Trotskyite groups, more dedicated than anarchism to the concept that anything set up by other people should be denounced rather than supported.) Nor is it any less vulnerable to fractiousness than any other segment of the left. Simply not taking part is not, to my mind, much of a way of dealing with the difficulties involved in, political parties, elections or the problem of leadership. You just end up with tiny grouplets of people who know exactly what to do but never influence anybody.
Of course the political culture of the groups that formed the SSP presented problems and contributed to its downfall: of course the flaws of certain personalities brought down the SSP just as their merits helped it do so well before. How to try and avoid the same thing happening again? Well, that is what discussion exists for and if that discussion were to be informed by the idea that we would like to do better next time, rather than the idea of trying to exclude other people, then perhaps there is a chance of learning from the process. Me, I’m sceptical.
“Anarchists may think they can resolve it by not having parties at all, but not only does that not solve the problem of how to have a functional party, it rather avoids the reality that anarchists but be among the most sectarian and destructive of all. (I can think of no tendency, for instance, not even the single-figure membership Trotskyite groups, more dedicated than anarchism to the concept that anything set up by other people should be denounced rather than supported.)”
Hmmm. If you’re basing your examples on Ireland, you’re just plain wrong. If you’re basing them on Scotland, I’ve no idea what anarchists there are up to, but wouldn’t be surprised if you were right (and also wouldn’t be surprised if you were equating complaining about a lack of democracy to destructiveness).
But, in any case, I obviously wasn’t trying to say that anarchists have the answer to this particular question, I was addressing the problems of the SSP from their perspective, not my own perspective. Instead of addressing the problem (which I explicitly said I didn’t have a solution for) you’ve decided to have a go at me for some sort of sectarianism that I’m unaware of. How principled and how delightfully consistent with your anti-sectarian stance.
Chekov, want to respond to your very detailed post, but electoralism has me out today
Will get back to you at the weekend.
I tend to concur with ejh to some degree in that we can readily identify problems ( something the left in it’s broadest definition ) is traditionally good at but we’re pretty awful much of the time at identifying solutions. That’s why I think that there have to be many solutions, not just one be it of the campaigning left or the electoral or party left… but I’m getting ahead of myself…
“you’ve decided to have a go at me for some sort of sectarianism that I’m unaware of.”
I’m not really sure what your gripe is here. I’ve made some measured comments to the effect that I don’t agree with anarchist responses to problems of political organisation and that the process of removing oneself from political organisation tends - in my long experience - to actually replicate and even amplify some of the problems of political organisation. You may disagree with that and of course you’re entitled to, but there’s nothing about a critique of anarchism that is inconsistent with an anti-sectarian stance.
“I’m not really sure what your gripe is here.”
On reflection, I was probably a bit touchy, apologies. Anyway, the below struck me as a tad dismissive:
“’m really not interested in people saying “oh, it was always going to go wrong because of Sheridan / the SP / the SWP / it was an electoral project / the particular political obsession of your choice.”
In particular the idea that political positions that you disagree with can be written off as ‘obsessions’. As it happens I have been having this same argument with members of the ISN for a long time now and there’s some temptation to say “told you so”, but I wasn’t really doing that, more wondering how they could avoid the particular problem that they came up against from their perspective. You see, I agree entirely with the below:
the stupidity of infighting and the vast unlikelihood that if you have a bitter split, your supporters will say to one side or the other “well done, you got rid of all the bad guys” rather than just saying “oh, bollocks to all of you”.
But the problem is that there are people out there who believe the opposite - that it’s better to be in control of a shell than it is to belong to something promising which you don’t control - our old friends the trots, who are often immune to sense. I reckon that, at the very least, those who believe in the SSP style approach need to take on board the fact that it’s not necessarily a good thing to allow groups who are destined to destroy you at the first available opportunity into the fold.
Just want to add a few points to this.
I’d like to back Chekov up on one thing. I’m not sure what Ejh’s experience of Irish politics is, especially the radical element of it, but Irish Anarchists are notoriously non-sectarian. Maybe it is in part because they’re electoral competition for nobody, but they work extremely well and constructively in a number of groups. Though small, they punch far above their weight.
I completely disagree with their approach to elections though. Accepting the criticisms of the limited form of democracy we have, the need to be able to recall representatives, have more ballots and initiatives and so on, the reality is that elections are the time when the people are politically engaged.
But that’s another argument. I want to take up the notion that electoralism, or voting for candidates, is by definition disempowering. I think you might be ignoring the ability of elected representatives to empower people. I work in the NGO sector and have a lot of contact with community development organisations.
Typically, these are groups of local people, overwhelmingly female and overwhelming from working class backgrounds who are empowering their communities, taking control of some elements of provision of local services, regenerating economically stagnant areas and generally making a major impact in their communities, all ona tiny budget.
In many cases elected representatives helped found those organisations, work in them, serve on their boards and so on. They’ve fought for funding, provided advice and support and things like that. This is real empowerment of a community that has made a genuine difference to those people, their area and the work that they do.
Now, this is not to say community development is perfect. It’s not. But it is empowering of people, and elected representatives, mostly of the left but also from other parties, play an important part in doing so, even when it’s not to their benefit. A key person in a community development project I know of in the Midlands is a Fianna Fáil cumann chair and for the last three weeks the project has been organising anti-Fianna Fáil initiatives over a local planning issue. Without him, the project simply wouldn’t exist. He built it up from three people who met in a shed in the back of a primary school.
Nor am I saying elected representatives are perfect, and I agree people vote less on policy platforms than on work done locally, but I think Anarchists sometimes have too easy a get-out clause in saying “We’re small, there’s not much more we can do.” The reality is that Anarchism in Ireland is utterly cut off from working class people and utterly disconnected from working class communities.
This is not to say that when an issue comes up in working class communities, like bin charges for example, that Anarchists are not there pulling their weight and more. When there’s a confrontation activists know we can rely on Anarchists to do their bit.
It’s that in the day to day work in communities, the less than glamorous work of organising local people and getting them to take ownership of their areas, Anarchists aren’t involved. And the very people they attack, are.
“In particular the idea that political positions that you disagree with can be written off as ‘obsessions’.”
It’s not a political position I’m talking about: it’s where another group (or groups) on the Left becomes an enemy who need to be exposed, rooted out, kept out of things and so on. The people who do this never recognise they’re doing it: to me it’s often like they’re saying “no, we’re not witch-hunters, they’re really witches”. But it’s that whole approach that’s the problem. When we start by working out who you want to exclude, we’re already doing exactly what the people we criticise are doing!
“I think Anarchists sometimes have too easy a get-out clause in saying “We’re small, there’s not much more we can do.” The reality is that Anarchism in Ireland is utterly cut off from working class people and utterly disconnected from working class communities.”
I think you’re being a wee bit unfair here. There are actually a fair few anarchists working in the NGO and community sector. You probably wouldn’t notice it unless you knew where to look. Also, until recently there really were a very tiny number of us. Until a few years ago, we never had more than a dozen active members in the WSM in Dublin and a handful of people scattered around the country. In such a scenario it’s really very difficult to have any impact at all, no matter how hard you try.
In the last couple of years this has started to change, there’s somewhat over 40 active members in Dublin and a few hundred other anarchists in the city who are more or less active. That changes things quite a bit and we are actively examining how we can come up with something of a coordinated approach to community work. A few weeks ago, we had a day-long ‘think-tank’ and flew over anarchists from across Europe who have been active in community stuff to share ideas.
Still, it’s not at all easy. We are starting from a position of having virtually no tradition in Ireland (and that makes a big difference IMO - no cultural memory, very little familiarity with our ideas, etc). We also now have a very young age-profile, meaning that there’s lots of transience and little experience of working on the sorts of things that are important in community work. We are also very wary of the dangers of incorporation - something that many bigger and stronger movements have fallen afoul of in the past. The Irish state is wonderfully skilful at taking oppositional community based movements and turning them into a cheap branch of the social services by providing strings-attached finance.
Finally, I don’t think that your defence of elected reps stands up. None of that stuff is particularly connected to the fact that the people are elected reps - anybody could do it. Of course, it’s much easier to do if you are paid by the state and have a personal motiviation for devoting your time and energy to it. Another thing that we’d like to find a way around.
Once again, as WBS noted, I’ve just outlined a load of problems without coming up with any solutions. But, you can’t address problems that you don’t understand and our motivation in bringing them up isn’t to dismiss the sector as unimportant, we really are trying to come up with answers.