If you take the initials WAC (We Are Change) and rearrange them… or, I heard a rumour, it was just a rumour… April 18, 2008
Posted by WorldbyStorm in Irish Politics, Lisbon Treaty.trackback
Word reached me today from an extremely good source that We Are Change may well have some unlikely new supporters or members in the shape of former very very prominent personnel from the late and in some respects lamented Working Class Action. That doesn’t seem likely, at least at first thought, and then one thinks of the modus operandi, a sort of kind of direct action, a shared animosity to the EU (and by extension the Lisbon Treaty) and it makes a certain sort of sense.
Could it be?
It couldn’t… could it?
Incidentally I take my jokers hat off to the lads (and it sure seems to be just lads) down at We Are Change Ireland and their… ahem… ‘interview’ with Gerry Adams. Comedy gold…
No freaking way. Whoizit?
I cannot say – the remnants of WCA have left behind electoralism…
I don’t know, does it seem likely? Well, maybe if one thinks of the brew of populism and a sort of leftism… incidentally, I don’t want this to be construed in any respect as an attack on WCA. Some very good people were in it…
MG?
Ach, I thought the first line in number 2 was a good clue… but no more than that I shall say… sorry, I know this is a bit bold to repeat here, but it was so good that I sort of wished it might be true (I genuinely don’t know if it is or not)…
Incidentally I knew MG back in the day, a sound person…
I didnt think so anyway. Just the individual Id from WCA that I’d be most familiar with.
They’re organising a huge conference in Dublin this summer. I believe Mandel is speaking… In UCD too!
http://www.ucd.ie/wac-6/
Let’s organise now to fight the acronym!
I still run into MG from time to time. Still sound.
Doesn’t surprise me…
Worldy,
You have an unhealthy interest in the WCA. Is it because they wouldn’t let you join their little gang or is it because the “direct action” of the working class causes a little envy in the middle classes?
Actually the whole of the far left seem to share the same unhealthy interest in the WCA. Strange for a irrelevant microgroup, as the Shinners would describe them.
Poison Ivy, you have an unhealthy interest in my interest in WCA. Neither is the answer to to your two questions. Firstly, you have no idea as to what my class is, or my attitude to direct action, and the idea that I’d apply to join is simply laughable. What I will say is I’ve known a number of former members of WCA who went with various camps afterwards and always respected them as committed activists. But that doesn’t prevent me from seeing the error of certain of their public policy positions in WCA, or suspecting that dubious claims as to their lack of irrelevance in the broader scheme are well, dubious claims…
Ooh Worldy, touchy aren’t we? Maybe my comments were too close to the bone. On your class, being an ex sticky student and the self importance of your writings on this blog and formerly on politics.ie would lead me to believe that my assumption of middle classism is correct. Also, the time spent writing on your blog wouldn’t leave you much time for actual activitsm, another telltale sign of the vanguardist attitude of the arrogant middle classes.
Don’t take this personal, I am also a middle class ex student (mature). What prompted my initial comments was the pointlessness of this thread. If it was an attempt at humour it failed.
My comment about irrelevance wasn’t meant as a cheap shot at the WCA but a tiny group no longer in existence hardly warrants the attention you give them. A while back you had a long thread on the WCA which didn’t make any sense but still made it onto Indymedia (but strangely deleted since by that site). I don’t know the people who were involved in the WCA but some of their ideas were interesting. Maybe a little too quick to violence and their total support for the provos ignored the protestant working class but at least their ideas were original. What I would like to know is why they fell out with your mentor and their former mentor Tony Gregory?
Well, you’re the one chucking these propositions into the ether. Do I maintain a sullen silence or suggest you’re wrong?
Mind you, you raise some troubling thoughts. Self-important? I genuinely hope not. Everything here, and indeed on P.ie has been about listening to other peoples opinion and treating them respectfully (bar when people lie or misrepresent stuff, i.e. about Omagh etc, etc). Putting up Irish left-wing material is a labour of love, but it’s something I enjoy working on. People seem to enjoy it too, or at least find it useful. As regards writing. I write fast. I enjoy writing. It’s a pastime, something to while away a lunch hour more productively than just reading the Guardian or the IT. I enjoy seeing it spark off ideas in myself and others. And the CLR is always open to others to write and contribute as well. I’m as activist as I need to be which is as and when an occasion or campaign arises, but I’m not fetishistic about it. Still, not sure how that makes me middle class…
The reason for this thread, was because someone mentioned a possible WCA/WAC connection. I thought it worth seeing was there more to it than that. I find WCA interesting, in exactly the same way as I find IWCA in the UK interesting because they belong to a marginal but (to me) fascinating activist/left strain. I actually quite admire the IWCA.
As regards my mentor TG? I like and admire the man, while admitting of his numerous flaws, but trust me, he isn’t a mentor. Not even slightly when it comes to politics (except in the purely pragmatic sense that his ‘organisation’, such as it is in DC is another fascinating creature in itself) and that he points to a direction the IRSP might have taken had it been a tad more pragmatic. I worry that his approach as structured is going to lead to the loss of a left seat there, that his group will dissipate in the future, that the individual approach is fine but can’t link successfully to broader campaigns, etc. C’mon you’re probably thinking precisely the same as me. As regards the fall out there is no mystery there. It was centred entirely around the last local elections where TG’s supporters apparently didn’t see why they should row in behind WCA who they regarded as newcomers unless they folded into the Gregory machine. That said he appeared on CP’s election literature (and JM’s as well) in photographs. My own sense from the area was that he was practically supportive of JM for quite some time after, certainly if you attended meetings on any number of issues in DC as I did they more often than not were sitting together, and I know for a fact that they consulted each other fairly continually.
So perhaps my interest in WCA is simply borne of the fact that it was in DC, where I happen to live and belong to residents campaigns and various groups, that from the off I was intrigued by their literature (which in some ways was scarifyingly populist – to the point on reading it first I was convinced they were rightwing) and then as I got to know members and former members from meeting them at political events they struck me as seemed an exotic enough creature for the area?
Interesting point you make about Gregory. I agree with you. His left/progressive seat will be lost in the future. He has obviously fought his last election. If he retires through ill health before the next General Election Fianna Fail will easily take the seat in a By Election. If he holds onto the seat until the next General he has nobody capable of holding the seat and most likely either FF or FG will take it. SF would have an outside chance of taking it. A sad situation given the years of work he put in.
I also agree with you that the WCA/IWCA were an interesting crowd. Their uniqueness attracted my attention. Does your accusation of populism mean that you are doubtful that they believed in the ideas they put in their literature or that they actually held views which were popular with working class people?
You said that you were convinced that they were Right Wing when you first read their literature. Does this say more about the current left, with its middle class dominance, than the WCA? Or put another way, how come the left never seem to hold the same views as those they would claim to represent?
Your last point is interesting. I don’t think middle class dominance is the issue. It certainly wasn’t in the WP, and it had few concessions to populism on the law and order front. And again, in campaign after campaign the sort of ‘law and order’ approach that WCA took simply wasn’t that different from any other parties, FG, FF, Labour etc. So it’s hardly that that part of the waterfront isn’t covered already. And that’s why I’d tend to disagree the left doesn’t hold the same views as those they claim to represent (otherwise how would left parties be elected across Europe with some regularity). A further thought. To my mind it wasn’t the policies per se but the hard work by various candidates of WCA which garnered their not bad votes at the locals last time out.
Yeah. I agree re TG. I don’t see his vote transferring to SF, and I’d wonder if he’d even want that. Still, who knows who might emerge as a candidate representing his interests in the future…
Still, who knows who might emerge as a candidate representing his interests in the future…
… Is that the sound of the start of your election campaign? Deputy WorldByStorm TD, has a nice ring to it
I wouldn’t use the example of the Sticks as a typical example of the Irish left. Membership of the Sticks was largely working class (not the leadership of course!) as was the majority of SF members. Lets be honest, anti social behaviour and drug dealing weren’t as big a problem in working class areas in the Sticks heyday. In fact their outright opposition to the Concerned Parents Against Drugs was the beginning of the end of the Sticks and the beginning of the rise of SF.
Gregory has a personalized vote and it will go all over the place when he stands down. It certainly isn’t a left wing vote. Mick Rafferty barley scraped in in the last Local Elections even though he was sold as the Gregory candidate. When Gregory goes the independent experiment is over.
On mainland Europe the left has greater links within the working class than either here or England. So my question remains, why does the Irish left appear to be constantly on a different side of the argument than those they would claim to represent?
Interesting that you consider the WCA and FF/FG/Labour to have similar law and order policies. Maybe that’s because the issue of anti social behaviour and drugs dealing (law and order to you) is a real issue in working class areas. Maybe FF/FG/Labour are using the issue as a “populist” vote getter, considering that all three had a chance in Government to address these issues. Do you believe the WCA were doing the same?
“In fact their outright opposition to the Concerned Parents Against Drugs was the beginning of the end of the Sticks and the beginning of the rise of SF.”
I’d suspect that given the record vote of 1989, and that the crisis of The WP had precisely nothing to do with this issue, that this is nonsense.
Poison Ivy, I’ve been involved in Garda forum meetings for years and have a personal understanding of how crime impacts not merely the community but myself. Read this http://cedarlounge.wordpress.com/2006/12/19/defending-ones-property-nally-gangland-violence-and-the-media/
to see how burglary directly affected me and mine. Badly.
But the point regarding the left having greater links with the working class unlike here seems to me to be essentially meaningless, since I’ve sat in many a front room where the only local reps and TDs and councillors were from the left parties with the occasional representation from FF. So, no disrespect, but on the ground it’s pretty much only the left parties and independents who get down and dirty with this sort of stuff. To then argue that they don’t understand the issue of crime is simply wrong. And I’d point out that Gregory, like most other left parties gave guarded support to ASBOs. So which elements of the left are you talking about precisely. If it’s the further left, well, that’s their business, but they’re hardly in a hegemonic position on these matters and their influence is negligible. SF, Labour, the GP, TG and others sing pretty much off the same hymn sheet. To be honest it’s more the implicit resort to the most tabloidesque ’solutions’ to a raft of social problems which irritated me. I discussed this with a leading light in them a number of times and pointed out that their policy amounted to effectively moving problems on rather than tackling them headfirst, to which the response was ’so what?”. That ain’t a socialist response. Nor is it pragmatic or sensible.
Incidentally, you seem to read me as some sort of libertarian on drugs. That is entirely incorrect. I am profoundly antagonistic to the dynamics surrounding them in our society as currently structured and have no problems with strong measures to prevent both dealing and consumption (dependent upon the drugs – and no, I’m no fan of cannabis either). However, frankly, I think the legal framework is there to tackle it, it’s social interventions (including community and forensic policing) that have the most impact, and even then we live in a globalised drug trafficking that weakens such interventions.
And the idea that CPAD and the WP approach to same led to their downfall is an odd one.
Damien, nyet…
To be honest it’s more the implicit resort to the most tabloidesque ’solutions’ to a raft of social problems which irritated me. I discussed this with a leading light in them a number of times and pointed out that their policy amounted to effectively moving problems on rather than tackling them headfirst, to which the response was ’so what?”. That ain’t a socialist response. Nor is it pragmatic or sensible.
Come on WBS, this is hardly an honest assessment of WCA policy . Perhaps the “so what” response was due to your patronising and ill informed comments and not actually a deeply thought out position statement? The so called leading lights in WCA were at the forefront of anti drug actions in communities across Dublin and were prominent in CPAD and later, COCAD . Tackling problems head on was never their failing , I would think.
However, for all your accusations of tabloid solutions, you are the one with the tabloid inspired mentality. In your mind anti drug activist = vigilante, now where did you get that idea from? Of course, strong, independent working class activity always invokes a prejudiced fear of “the mob” in the middle class.
CPAD and COCAD did tackle drug dealers head on, and forced them out of working class communities. By being active across the City (and some other counties) the progress of the dealers was monitored by the groups. Their identity was always made known to residents in areas they moved onto and assistance offered to help tackle them there. Hardly a “so what” attitude, community self help in action.
The anti drugs movement was not just about this either. Much of the progress we have seen in drug prevention, rehab, youth facilities and community development is directly due to this movement and the strong community based campaign. This may not be immediately obvious to you. Unfortunately the middle class liberals, opportunists and the professionals now claim responsibility for all of this, and the working class contribution is limited to victim hood and vigilanteism. If you choose to believe this your analysis is hardly informed.
Your response to Drug, crime and Anti social crime issues seems to be that the solution is best left to those who know best. Are you calling on activists to step back and let the State get the job done? This is hardly a good Left wing socialist stance, as you would say yourself!
And on a final point, being a victim of crime does not make you an expert, and using it as validation was a bit sad.
The assumption that left activists must agree with what popular sentiment wants is I think a flawed one. After all, anti-immigrant sentiment is often strong among working class communities. Or, for example, in working class areas of Belfast of all types, possibly a majority of people would like to see punishment beatings and shootings and exilings brought back for the most egregious offenders. Yet this is not a socialist response. To think that leftists must automatically follow popular sentiment is infantile, and to ignore the fact that conservative politics of all types relies on significant support from people within the working class.
As for moving problems on, it’s not a permanent solution. Around 10 years ago, the Provos in west Belfast were moving joyriders down towards the Markets. Good for the residents of west Belfast, a bigger headache for the people of the Markets. Naming and shaming and ostracism can by helpful – and have an honorable tradition within Irish politics – but not if it is NIMBYism.
Dorothy B. I’m simply recounting what I was told by a number of people inside WCA. Now I can either take their statements on face value or not. Re vigillantism, that is perhaps a bit unfair on my part, but it is true that the sort of pressures that WCA supported actively against dealers or former dealers, and again I have this straight from the horses mouth, were such that they implicitly meant shifting people say from Cabra or East Wall to other points. And again the response was, we’re looking after ‘our’ community and it’s up to the state to look after everyone elses. Now I share that to some degree in theoretical terms, but when the reality is offloading one community’s problems onto another, where the actual infrastructure as regards activists may simply not exist, and come on this is Ireland, organised working class groups aren’t exactly thick on the ground, that de facto is NIMBYism.
Let me put you straight as regards some other points. I’ve been politically active since the early 1980s. I never joined a student section of the WP, there was no such animal where I was after community school. I joined in my own geographical area of Dublin North East and remained there for the duration. Due to that my experience of activism is entirely within working class communities, so ‘prolier than thou’ stuff about the middle class doesn’t impress me (indeed to be honest it seems to me to be the obverse of the old right wing arguments about the left… but there you go).
Finally, and here’s another example of you having your cake and eating it. Poison Ivy argued that I was presumably middle class (not sure how s/he could say one way or another) and had no experience of crime. I wasn’t pointing to that story to indicate a validation for my viewpoints, merely that as I live in a working class community I also experience the good and the bad… and have complete sympathy with those stuck with crime, drug dealing, etc because I’m stuck with it too.
On a broader point I genuinely don’t feel I’m in a competition about working class credibility – and I see that as a diversion to progress. What class background people have if they’re progressive and left wing and want to work together on moving things forward should be irrelevant. Nor do I fetishize the working class, or any class. I’m not much of a fan of vanguardism because it tends to ignore the reality of working class people, but working classism, to coin a term, seems equally facile…
WBS,
I think you are being very disingenuous in claiming that anti drugs activists simply evicted drug dealer from their own areas and didn’t give a shit where they went. I can’t speak for your friends in the WCA but knowing some people involved in CPAD I don’t believe that they would just dump drug dealers in another working class area. I think that this is just another middle class theory to explain away the fact the working class could organise themselves without their leadership.
I wouldn’t claim that the Sticks attitude to the anti drugs organisations was their downfall but if they hadn’t imploded it would have done them serious damage. Remember the huge vote for SF in the 1999 elections was on the back of their anti drug work. Areas like Ballyfermot and Finglas, which were strong Sticky areas, elected SF councilors. Prior to this SF had never pulled a significant vote in these areas.
I’m afraid we will have to disagree on your classification of Labour or the Greens as left wing. I would consider Gregory as left wing personally but certainly not in his politics. I would also consider SF as left wing but that could change any day depending on what Belfast decide! Incidentally, your local Labourite Costello is an ex-student and teacher, all the Greens are exclusively middle class and even SF are getting in on the act by off-loading Nicky Kehoe and replacing him with the more acceptable Mary Lou. Who will represent the working class when Gregory is gone?
The increased vote the Provos received in the south after the ceasefires were much more about the presence of their leading spokesmen on the TV every night talking about the North and decomissioning than any work on the ground. And the 1999 elections were nearly a decade after the split, so to say that the anti-drugs attitude would have done serious damage is hard to say. Especially given the activism of someone like Sean O Cionnaith, who was extremely active on the drugs issue. People turned to PSF in part due to their work on the ground, but also because the lack of an alternative and their media profile. Robbed of the media profile with things being sorted out in the north, we can see the setbacks they are taking.
Joe Costello an ex-student? My God, he’s clearly a running dog lackey of the reactionary capitalist classes. Surely this, if nothing else, confirms the need for a political test which determines an individual’s left-wing credentials based on the extent to which they enjoy eating coddle.
Seriously, though, this kind of prolier-than-thou oneupmanship really is pathetic stuff. It seems to view left-wing politics as less about political ideology or positions and more as a kind of working-class identity politics, in a strange blend of the views of the Khmer Rouge and Charlie McCreevy, who used to make the facile argument that he was more left-wing than any ‘pinkos’ simply based on the fact that his family were poor. Sad to see certain people who self-identify as left-wing endorsing this view, but at least we now know that Marx, Engels, Lenin and Trotsky can’t be considered left-wing either.
I can’t really understand the problem anyway, because surely the working-class, who need no outside leadership, will recognise and reject these bourgeois interlopers?
i’ll get back to this later, work ironically intrudes, but surely “working” and “worker” are verbs not nouns – just like parent? Otherwise people are condemned to lives where whatever they do that is progressive or otherwise is judged simply on a class position of whatever sort which may just reflect that of their parents and has no capacity for change? Isn’t that just the inverse of the snobbish elitism of capital towards those who are of the wrong class or ‘déclassé’?
The supposedly late (lamented/unlamented ?) WCA have actually been highly active in the no to Lisbon campaigning . Their self produced leaflet has gone door to door all over Dublin Central a few weeks back. The front page had a pretty good image , and the slogan was catchy – “Dont gamble on your future – vote no ” . It would have been a good poster if they’d bothered . The content was what you would expect , covering their pet topics : bin tax/water charges , privatisation and the E.U. led two-tier health system. All the political partys and the trade union leaders got slagged off too. Funny enough , while there were contact numbers for some of the leading lights , the main contact details seemed to be for the Peoples Movement .
From what I can see they are also a big part of this , getting the literature out on a regular basis, and speaking at some of the public meetings. While obviously putting the campaign work in, they don’t seem too be bothered about putting their own names to the fore , or getting any credit or attention in the media. Does this mean that they have gone back to pure campaign work and have indeed put the electoral route behind them, as some have suggested ?
Going back to the original point of this thread, I’m guessing that they have nothing to do with the WACo crowd , and that was a silly joke to start with ? And thankfuly, the WACos seem to have been a one hit wonder , and quickly forgotten.
DB, yeah, a couple of my acquaintances were involved with their campaign, although the WCA tag seems to be finished. I think the ex-WCA people were putting up PM posters as well. So, perhaps this does represent a shift back to campaigns. Mind you, May 2009 will tell.
Yeah, WACo’s did vanish fairly fast…