Though Cowards Flinch

Reading over a blog that has recently been brought to my attention, called Solomon’s Mindfield, I came across a poster for a protest outside SOAS which was due to take place today. The protest was about the war in Afghanistan, which is in the news a lot at the moment because commanders have been saying things about the need for a surge there, because of a few fatalities and because Al-Qaeda might not be quite as beaten as the military establishment wanted us to believe.

Entitled, “Die-in on the steps of SOAS”, the poster called for the participants to come as dead people, to properly represent the victims of Allied bombing and military action in Afghanistan. This got me thinking. Over the last number of years, the carnivalesque element of protests seems to be increasing. There was a feminist protest not too long ago and it too involved people turning up with tampons, and another which involved falling down every few steps, though I know not what for.

Without disrespecting the people who actually have the energy to turn up to these things, one has to ask, is it really achieving anything?

Particularly on an issue such as the Iraq war, where the movement has died away from its February 15th height in 2003 to a mere murmur, might not the time of even such broad bodies as student unions be spent on something else? I understand that because it is an emotive issue, socialist groups can recruit from it but I also shudder to think at the number of pamphlets and branch meetings of the SWP or SP that have been devoted to this matter.

I cannot really answer my own question as to whether or not it achieves anything, though back when I was a member of the Socialist Party, the anti-war work did very well up until the invasion after which momentum began, inexorably, to decrease. In fact, the parallel campaign which the SP was running, which was a lot harder work and got more traction, as I saw it, was the campaign against water charges. This involved going into communities, door by door, and building a campaign.

A couple of things have recently made me think about this division; the hard slog of fighting on issues important to local communities versus the ‘sexy’ issues which attract young and impressionable types, most of whom will drift away from the movement when the media stops covering whatever issue brought them on board. Dave Osler, for example, rightly salutes the SSP and their campaign for free school meals, even though it may not be part of the Transitional Programme.

Similarly, while reading of Labour’s attempt to break Tory control of their flagship Westminster City Council, the old tactics and the good-natured élan show up the modern carnivalesque protests (and even their more staid counterparts on the issue of the war) in an ill light. Andrew Hosken’s book, “Nothing Like a Dame” recounts how Ken Livingstone, Iltyd Harrington and the usual suspects put such effort into campaign work that they turned up in neighbourhoods to leaflet and ‘offer help to local residents’.

Their strategy worked very well; droves of voters turned out for the Westminster local elections and put their X in the box marked Labour. They didn’t win the council and oust Shirley Porter, more’s the pity bearing in mind what she did to Westminster in the following years, but they surely laid the basis for further campaign work. Far from being merely about elections – although no doubt certain activists would prefer it that way – such an open attitude can beef up membership and unionisation.

People become more willing to listen to the complex arguments.

As Campaign Co-ordinator for Canterbury CLP, one of my greatest challenges has been to puzzle out the issues which most concern people and to determine how Labour might best help with them. I think part of my problem has been my own transition from student to resident: having lived a life hitherto focussed on the Students’ Union and student land, it can be hard to fit back into the real world of school runs, litter issues, high council tax and homeless people.

It is my instinct that more people focus on what I’ve perhaps glibly labelled the ‘sexy’ issues because it is a lot more work to investigate and find out the real quid pro quos of privatisation at a local level, to give one example of something that do concern people. Some of that is going on here in Canterbury, where part of some local playing fields are being used to create a pay-per-play beach and volleyball court. Even young socialists should be getting involved in such a campaign.

Having said all that, there is a danger in taking things to the other extreme. A relentless focus on local issues can create a parochialism inimical to recruiting young members. We should be able to go about political matters with a vigorous spirit and it has to be said, in an ageing Labour Party, we need young members to help with that. Moreover, a narrow focus on local matters rules out productive and vital discussion of issues with a wider political relevance such as war, feminism or capitalist crisis.

That the root of these issues lies in the division between revolutionary and evolutionary socialism is a seductive idea. Evoes are more likely to take each issue as it comes, because they realise the world won’t be fixed in a day. Many Revoes act as though the mass mobilization of the global proletariat is around the corner. This would be incorrect however, because Evoes think matters will be fixed without a titanic struggle for the mastery of everything that propels our world forward. Revoes know better.

Alternatively, it might be suggested that the Left simply hasn’t ‘moved on’ from the era of powerful trade unions which could make the shake Establishment tree and at least watch a few coconuts fall. Yet a new generation of activists and full timers has grown to political maturity since the Miners’ Strike (the year I was born) and many outside the Labour Party have a sensible approach. Besides, the ‘new’ campaigning methods of Generation X+1 aren’t fullproof, regarding the demo as the alpha and omega of political dissent.

Actually I think the answer is much simpler: because of the fall in popularity of Labour and its gradual loss of position as a focus for the Left, the carnivalesque and the more staid have become divided. Those more suited to routine campaign work and the long-haul challenges to specific policies, where opposition begins at a local level and must be grown, have either been lost to old age or have stayed in a political environment that has lost its carnivalesque element. Labour campaign work is poorer as a result.

Of course, the carnivalesque element, free to roam, has taken on some bizarre attributes such as the SOAS “die-in”.

If the declining political centrality of Labour really is the key issue, then the answer needs to deal with how we reclaim that. The conclusion which needs to be drawn from all this is not a simple one for a Labour Party member in the current climate.

As socialists, we need to hold to our political principles.  As activists within the local community, we need to give people a reason to trust us. We’re part of a broader political programme, set far above our heads, and this constrains us dramatically in a way that the batch of far-left councillors of the 1980s never faced. Often we can find that, though we oppose a move, it’s being driven through by central government. As now, this can mean our very own Party!

To what end, therefore, can we put the trust we need to establish by our good endeavours? If it is straightforwardly to support a national Labour government, then eventually through the timid or outrightly hostile agenda of that government, our work will be dissipated whatever we do. These questions don’t have to be asked while the Tories are in power because we’re not fighting against ill-opinions of concrete Labour policies that we never supported anyway.

Instead, those of us who see the deficiencies in current Labour policy need to be advocating not simply the Labour Party but a faction within the Labour Party. My view is that we should be advocating to those people we’re in contact with via campaign work that they join the LRC and that, slowly but surely, we begin to reclaim union branches and CLPs off the back of the often common sense arguments that need to be made on the door step and in the workplace.

For example, when confronted with someone who opposes the Iraq War, we can point out that we didn’t support it and that our MPs voted against it. This harmonizes our broader opposition to the Tories, our broader sympathy with the aims of the Labour Party but also allows room for our specific objections to the road that wider Party is being forced to take. I think it is an attitude explicitly legitimized by the lack of democracy within the Party and at National Conference.

Though I might say that “only through such methods might Labour regain its former position as focus of the Left”, I am open to other suggestions. This is, however, the only route that I can see open to those of us who are on the Left but have chosen to remain within the Labour Party. By it, we might reunite the two divergent strands: carnivalesque and of solid campaigners. Then, together, we might reclaim some of the initiative which Red Labour opened for itself in the 1980s.