the dog shit politics panacea

Nazis do it. Greens do it. Even socialists do it sometimes. Every day graft, listening to people, asking them what they want, and putting in the work to try and get it for them.

The dog shit politics of making sure the little things are dealt with, and that groups set achievable targets, winning things that non-activist people are actually interested in. It helps build a rapport between people and political groups, and keeps people grounded in everyday life.

Left-wing or pro-working class groups should be at a natural advantage in this arena. In the first place they´re supposed to have a deeper understanding of the forces that are behind attacks on working class communities, so should have a better understanding of how to fight back. They don´t have the big disadvantage that far right groups do, in that they aren´t trying to peddle racism and they don´t have quite the pariah status that Nazis do.

Groups that have tried taking this approach have had varying degrees of success.

The group that made it the center of its political outlook, the IWCA, had a few early victories. It established bases in two London boroughs, Glasgow and Oxford, producing creditable results in the first three places, and steadily increasing their councillors to a high of four on Oxford city council.

Over time though the number of outposts shrank, as Glasgow withered away, Hackney left the organisation and Islington went quieter (is it still functioning?) and short-lived flurries of activity in Harold Hill and Thurrock seemed to disappear over time.

The IWCA´s trajectory seemed to prove that outposts could be built and people engaged, with good day-to-day community work, but that it was difficult to expand from that kind of base and that small-numbers of activists could become bogged down in electoral work and community campaigning.

The Socialist Party, a bigger, national organisation, has usually orientated itself in its day-to-day work towards the ´dog shit´ end of politics, whether that be in the trade unions or in community work. On the other hand it does have to wear its other hat as part of the Committee for a Workers´ International, being the historical consciousness of the entire international working class and all.

Over the past two decades they built significant local bases in Coventry and Lewisham, as well as picking up the odd councillor as opponents of NHS privatisation. The SP´s approach differs substantially from the IWCA, in that rather than seeing themselves as a sort of political wing of their communities, they have their own very tightly defined ideas on policy and theory, whilst still trying to attract adherents through practical everyday work.

Although the SP have had a degree of success where they´ve applied themselves in this way, the last year or so has seen them increasingly drawn into high-level trade union work in pursuit of the real long-term project - The Campaign for a New Workers Party.

Straight old-fashioned British Trots, the SP want a bigger sea of reformist workers to swim in, in order to win them over to socialism. Yet, as their rubbish attempt to stand in the last election shows, people won´t vote for you just because a workers´ organisation is involved. Their years of community activism, just like their trade union work has been unable to propel their wider ambition, and they remain restricted to historical footholds.

Which probably goes to show that whilst community activism can build a modest platform, it doesn´t expand your organisation dramatically unless you´re actually selling an idea that people want to buy into.

Meanwhile, a handful of anarchistically-inspired groups have also been doing similar sorts of activism, trying to engage people in everyday politics in a way that attracts them to the idea of a radically democratic society. Groups like Haringey Solidarity Group argue that they can make a real difference to people´s lives through campaign work and engage people in a different kind of political action.

I heard that the people behind HSG have maintained some sort of consistent organisation since the old Poll Tax Unions, which in itself is an achivement for a community group. The question is expansion. Community work is an end in itself, and on some level you´d certainly be happy to devoting your time to improving what you can for yourself and your neighbours. But there is still the question of putting yourself in a position to challenge things.

Groups that focus on elections often get sucked into to the constant, exhausting cycle of winning and maintaining representation, to the detriment of other work. However, groups without that focus often seem to spend much of their existence looking for things to get their teeth into. Without something to campaign on, activity can often dwindle and leave the same small group of people keeping the thing ticking over until the next significant issue.

Much of the energy that was going into groups like HSG has re-directed itself into the London Coalition Against Poverty, which with a broader focus and direct action case work to get stuck into, seems to be better at keeping people involved and occupied.

In terms of sustaining a permanent large-scale organisation capable of advancing the big aims though, the municipal anarchism model still seems to have a missing ingredient that prevents it from pushing on to the next level.

Another category of ´dog shit´ activists has emerged out of the disintegration of the Labour Party in the last few years. In Barrow-in-Furness, a 1997 splinter group led by the former constituency party chair stood in a by-election and lost their deposit. Subsequently they´ve taken a number of borough council seats and currently hold four, it might be more if they hadn´t had their own falling out and lost a load of seats to another independent splinter from the group. The all-women shortlists debacle that led most of the Blaenau Gwent CLP to leave, resulted in one MP and a bundle of councillors for People´s Voice candidates in the last elections (though many of them seem to have left for independent status subsequently) and school protesters took Gwynedd council off Plaid Cymru.

In the leftie news reccently were the Community Action Party, a mash-up of various political backgrounds, which until recently held 18 seats on Wigan borough council. They´ve split (obviously) and recently formed a People´s Alliance with the local SP and the Respect Party. George Galloway even came up to shake everyone´s hand.

The trouble these organisations seem to have is that being formed over local issues, they tend to subsequently split over them. They´ve also got very limited horizons, as well as an M.O. and a structure (in most cases semi-clientalist) that limits them in that way. The lack of resources is exposed in the homely, 1997 style websites.

They´ve got a lot of advantages though. Clearly they show up out of a need, and are identified with something that resonates with their electorate. There´s a meaningful and organic connection with the communities that throw them up, rather than trying to manufacture something out of nothing (and the ¨Save our XXX¨ campaign style doesn´t work if you haven´t got the links or the issue spot on - Colchester Save Our Bus Station did abysmally in local elections a few years back for precisely that reason).

But without broadening their appeal nationally, these groups will eventually outlive either their campaign or the particular local political figure that gave them life. Longer-term, only by broadening their appeal and linking with other groups can they sustain themselves.

The groups that are currently profiting out of community campaigning (the BNP and The Green Party) have a few things in common (aside from a shared love of rural idylls :P), firstly they have a significant national organisation that can sustain local groups all year round, stimulate new groups with resources, produce professional campaign material and maintain attractive, well-used and well-updated websites. This gives the outward impression of being permanent and modern organisations. They combine an organisational focus on the ´dog shit´ stuff, with the ability to intervene on national issues and throw out ´dog whistle´ sound-bites and policies to get new people involved and build up new groups. The two things necessarily compliment one another.

No group can have a national impact without both these elements in play, and that is the key to building something meaningful and permanent.

this was cross-posted from the awesome new meanwhile at the bar blog.

Europe moves right aka social democracy´s death-throes

The marquee social democratic parties in Europe are all fucked. The Party of European Socialists lost nearly a quarter of their seats in the last election and they were already a small minority in the European parliament. Look a bit deeper than that and you see that the big guns just fell apart; Labour Party 15.7% Parti Socialiste 16.5% SPD 20.8%.

In the three biggest European economies, all of which have governed their country (more or less) independently in the past, not one could convince in excess of a quarter of the electorate. The party still clinging to power in the UK did the worst, but the PS (in opposition) and the SPD (a junior partner in the governing coalition) did no better.

In fact, almost no PES affiliate Europe-wide actually came out of the Sunday as the largest party in their country (Greece, Malta and Denmark being the only exceptions), and only in a handfull did any of them poll more than 30%.

Now if it were in a few countries, then maybe I might think these had political explanations, just the usual toing and froing between the mainstream parties. But as a Europe-wide trend then it looks like the social democratic centre left could be going extinct.

Beneath the individual afflictions of different parties is their an underlying reason in our society for these parties to be drowning in the sea of history?

What sustained these parties over the course of the 80s and 90s was a mixture of things; the persistence, emotionally if not socially, of their historical base - the mass industrial working class - and the main other one was an ability to appeal to liberal-minded centrists in some sort of opposition to social conservatism and the worst excesses of neoliberalism. They succeeded by being a nicer version of the conservatives and hoping their traditional support didn´t notice.

Eventually of course their traditional support was going to notice that they were doing very little (if anything) in their interest, and either desert them, or (in the case of the younger generation) never turn to them in the first place. And the thing about all those centrists is that they´re fickle as hell, so they wander off as soon as something nicer and shinier comes along, or whenever it looks like this lot aren´t managing capitalism very well.

In the midst of a recession the problem gets exarcebated, because it´s their support that´s suffering, and they´ve nothing to tell them. Once you sign up for neo-liberal consensus there´s not a great deal you can do to support working people in a recession. So when it´s obvious the system isn´t working and you refuse to help people in any significant way, they start to leave you in even greater numbers.

With conservatively-minded people, especially economic, their support stands up even under globalisation and recession, because basically it doesn´t challenge any of their core beliefs. The problem are scrounging shower at the bottom, or, the mass of impoverished people who have now stopped voting. Your support base stays in tact and just asks that you do the same things only harsher. They wait for capitalism to sort itself out.

THE SKY IS FALLING!

The BNP get two MEPs and the whole political establishment wets itself, and Left starts hysterically throwing blame around for whoever may or may not be responsible.

Let´s get a bit of perspective here. Nobody really gives a shit about European Elections, hence the 34% turnout. It´s an insitution with fuck all power, that´s very far away and that nobody ever pays attention to. Unless it´s doing something we don´t like. Of that 34% turnout, the BNP managed to muster 6.4%, giving them the support of wopping 1 in 40 of those eligible to vote.

And the truth is, no-one who wasn´t a fascist yesterday, became a fascist today. Putting a bit of paper in a box doesn´t fundamentally change who you are. So, there´s no point wailing now about people actually voting Thursday, the views that they held on Wednesday. The problem didn´t happen when people put their hands up and said "you know what, this anti-immigrant/foreigner/asians party is for me", it happened over whatever the hell is wrong with our country.

Nor would swamping it with other ballots change anything. So let´s say that a higher turnout sends someone less nazi to the European parliament. It doesn´t make this country any less racist, it doesn´t mean that we´ve changed even one mind about how our society is or should be. It just means we´ve drowned it out with someone desperately clinging to some establishment party to show how they personally, aren´t racist, or are bothered by racism or something like that.

The sky doesn´t fall in because the BNP have MEPs. It changes nothing, other than re-iterating what people have been saying for years, the real job is making our country less of a breeding ground for those kind of views, and until people take that seriously then they´ll continue making headway.

building sandcastles

In the midst of a global economic recession and not one left-wing party, Europe-wide, makes a significant breakthrough.

Am I the only one currently thinking that you might be best off just giving up?

Europeos al español

If it weren´t for the major parties habits of flyposting every available surface, and hanging flags from every tree, then you might struggle to work out that there was an election in two days time. In all my travels around the city I´ve managed to see a grand total of two stalls (one PSOE, one PP) and a van from one of the random "EUROPE´s fantastic, they give us loads of money" parties.

You can´t escape the idea that aside from the Europhile cranks, no-one really gives a shit round here. And if no-one cares here, where the EU is largely credited for making Spain a developed country after years of Franco, then no-one is really going to care anywhere.

As for the results, it´ll be as you were as the PSOE and PP both hold onto their votes, the former because Rajoy is one of the most unpopular opposition leaders in Europe and the PSOE is actually trying to help people through the crisis (being on balance, the most left-wing government in any major Western European country), the latter because Zapatero is, despite all that, a pretty uninspiring human being.

The Izquierda Unida will once again tread water, managing not to deteriorate as badly as their Eurocommie cousins over the water in Italy. Which, with the exception of Nouveau Parti Anticapitaliste seems to happening all over Europe. The reality is, for all the wailing and gnashing of teeth in the UK, the Spanish left is taking no more advantage of the crisis than they are.

Though the IU´s high tide was a good deal higher than any UK equivalent (for a variety of reasons, both historical and relating to the two countries electoral systems), the proof of the pudding in the Left-wing alternative pudding is in how its fortunes are changing in the face of the recession. Now, I´ve never said that it logically follows that economic depression equals a swing to the left. In fact often recessions produce a sort of stoic fatalism that makes people wait it out until the next upswing. If the consequences are global enough, local polite elites can avoid blame for them, even, as is the case in Spain, the effects are stronger locally than the global average.

More than that, if the recession really exposes the instability of global capitalism, and reveals how little it serves the general population, you should still expect a better hearing for those with an alternative. But not any old alternative. Preaching old-style social democracy seems to be no more convincing in bad times than it is in good ones. Neither do these parties seem to be able to articulate a fundamentally different vision of the future that appeals to anything more than the usual groups.

For years I´ve wondered whether I would join a functioning left party in the UK, if one existed. Well, the answer in practice seems to be no. The thought of desperately flyering for the bright mixed-economy nationalizations of the future makes me feel a bit queasy...

A history of Spain in stickers (part 2 The Left)

One of the funny things about Spanish Stalinism (and there are very few funny things about Spanish Stalinism) is how dramatically its experiences affected the rest of its European sister parties. The legacy of its time in government during the Civil War was that the party ended up full of middle-class lefties, who wanted a Republic of order, stability and well, whisper it, capitalism. These people were also the core of the party´s elite in exile, and when they came back they behaved in the same way. Despite brief flirtations with guerrilla expeditions after World War 2 (Tito´s exploits evidently got them over-excited), they generally stuck to pretty moderate stuff when opposing the Generalisimo, even to the extent that their present trade union the CC.OO derives loosely from their infiltration of the old Franquista state-sponsored trade unions. It´s not surprising they invented Stalinism-lite aka Euro-Communism (a sort of social democratic cheerleading squad for third world revolutionaries), which then spread around Western Europe. These days they´re light on street presence, but are the largest component of third biggest party in national elections (Izqueirda Unida). You can still find their wee ones (the Unión de Juventudes Comunistas de España) running around putting up stickers like this one about the Battle of Berlin. Of course when you´re a minority of the government, nothing attracts the otherwise disillusioned kiddies like your "glorious" antifascist past and some nice red flags.

Also unsurprising, that they spawned some "return to real coke" communists (err... anti-revisionists maybe?), who go around being all early 30s sectarian. Welcome to the Partido Comunista de los Pueblos de España (PCPE) and their especially charming youth section the CJC (Colectivos de Jóvenes Comunistas). They´re loving their hammer and sickles too, but not in the Reichstag planting way, but in declaring whole neighbourhoods their territory. This was in Lavapies, the city centre´s most mixed and most proley barrio. It reads Antifascist Workers Neighbourhood. Bolshier and much less mainstream than the PCE/IU, the PCPE was founded back in the 1980s, when everyone registered that the PCE weren´t going to take over, and some people got nostalgic for the idea that Marxist-Leninism might actually mean challenging capitalism. They´ve a few thousand members apparently, but never poll anywhere near six figures nationally. The kiddies website is full of affection for all sorts of noxious third-world dictatorships and other such third worldist crap that gets Rage Against the Machine fans excited.

As a interesting sideline they also seem to fish quite effectively in the pool marked ´antisocial punky squatters who are confused about what they want´, through various ´independentist youth groups´. The fact that Spain is more or less four or five different countries shoe-horned together by historical coincidence, means that some kids get terribly excited by the idea of liberating their socialist homeland. Like these funny Jaleo!!! kids (and yes, the exclamation marks are in the name). Who were busily plastering Cordoba with these smart looking posters for a free and socialist Andalucía. You see the same thing in other cities, youngsters who live in squats and want to break off pieces of Spain (almost every CSO - Occupied Social Centre in Bilbao has a flag of the Basque homeland on it...), and aren´t really sure whether they´re Anarchists, National Liberationists, Guevarists or some unworldly mix of all of the above.

Finally, there´s my lot, who probably on balance who got more material stuck to walls than anyone else in the city. I don´t know if there´s more of us, or just that we love stickers (anarchists looove stickers), but they´re everywhere. It´s a reassuring feeling to know that one of yours has already been past here recently. This one says (I think ... wasn´t sure about the expression, any Spanish speakers want to explain that one?), "Working week of 65 hours? We will see the faces!!", part of the campaign against a proposed sixty five hour working week. The CNT in Madrid these days is a couple of thousand ish I think, they´ve a nice office in Plaza Tirso de Molina (you can´t miss it there´s a big banner on the 2nd floor), which I presume was paid for or given in recompense for, all the stuff that the Francoists took off them. The CNT is apparently in a period of moderate growth after dropping first from the Civil War high of 2-3 million, to the post-Franco opening of maybe as much as 500,000, to a modern union of 10,000 members with a lot more people influenced by it. The split from the 1980s is a bit more moderate and has about six times that ...