My reply to Tim, for what it’s worth is as follows:

‘There is a lot to draw out about how best to ‘delegate’ the development of a social movement, and the relationship between political education and facilitation, and I think you’re dead right to critique the way Compass manipulates the notion of engagement and debate so that it is only on its own terms. The How to Live in the 21st century competition, and the way it’s been handled is a case in point.

Having said that, they’re not the only ones. I’ve also posted on the way the LRC’s 22 April ‘Their Crisis not Ours’ day is headed down the ‘Our expertise, Not Yours’ route, and I think the problem of education over facilitation, leading not joining forces, is systemic to the political class, of which I now couint myself one. In the end it’s about keeping power. This is a shame, because educational theory and practice has moved on a very long way since Rosa L was able to talk about spontaneity of movement amongst working class, but lefwing politics does not seem to have grasped many (any?) of the new methods or tools now available.’

We’re crossing conversations – on one level we can talk about how things are, on another we can talk about how we want them to be. As things stand, as I said, voters might not read never mind endorse the manifesto of their chosen party, but then as I’ve also said, as things stand, we don’t live in a democracy.

The Obama movement didn’t take place in a vacuum, with everyone making their minds up independently of everyone else. In terms of opinion-forming, we must consider the hegemonic terms under which we live every day, and how this is fed and related to by Obama when we read about it after it has been filtered by the vested, structurally manifested interests of Capital.

This is why Popper’s model doesn’t work, it has no way to take into account motivation. We can sit back and plan rational policies and then ask for them to be ratified, but they’re not going to be assessed, never mind approved or rejected, on their ‘rational’ merits. That’s not what elections are today, it’s not what democracy is today.

Democracy today is profoundly influenced by the state of class struggle, how organised the working class is, how united the ruling class is and basically the ideas, practices and traditions of the entire society in which the democracy is set. These ideas, practices and traditions express the state of class struggle at any given time.

My goal, then, is not to have a set of policies rationally approved, my goal is to win the class struggle. Only by doing so can we escape the ideological box into which we’re confined by the internal logics of the capitalist economic system and ruling class hegemony (=methods of thinking inspired by daily life, ideas, practices and traditions, the terms of which are all underpinned by capitalism).

In the course of winning the class struggle, we introduce new ideas, practices and traditions, overturning the hegemony of the ruling class and finally restore a genuine, free choice to people. Which is why Marxists counterpose “formal” or “bourgeois” democracy with the ‘democratic dictatorship of the Proletariat’.

For the theory behind that, there’s no one book you can go to – it’s drawn from Marx, Lenin, Gramsci, Williams and a bunch of others besides, over a hundred and fifty years of scholarship and writing.

That’s not actually a tangent, however it may appear so. Let me draw it back together: Obama talked about whether we “participate in a politics of cynicism or a politics of hope”, he lectured his activists on how “we [he and they] are the change we seek.” He has supplemented his free market rhetoric with populist pronunciations on how markets must benefit “the many, not the few” and so on.

In all this, having whipped up such a huge activist movement, having gone round the USA and demanded that people be engaged, what I want to know is – did he mean until the end of the election or did he mean properly and forever engaged with the political process? If he meant the later, then to keep people engaged with the political process, we need to step beyond elections. If he meant the former, then he’s not the progressive leader that Compass and others keep wittering about.

Moreover, engagement is not a linear process – engagement implies organisation, and organisation will lead to a clash between the leaders of the movement and the movement itself because the interests of the two diverge.

Whatever else Barack Obama might be, he’s still bought and paid for by we may casually call “the Washington elite” – it’s not just a Washington elite, it’s an elite that exists in all corners of the United States, it’s the elite that skims off the surplus value of our labour. His rhetoric often reflects this, but it is also (opportunistically?) welded to this populist notion of engagement.

The forms that this engagement should take is something we need to debate: Karin suggested Obama’s campaign was activist-led. I’m maintaining it wasn’t. Someone in her comments box suggested we shouldn’t prioritize activist-led over activist, I’m saying we should. And activist-led campaigns will in turn lead us to new and better forms of democracy, with the distortions of ruling class hegemony and our daily alienation from our labour removed.

This, finally, leads me back to workers’ councils. Democracy in a capitalist state means nothing without a democratic economy (at which point the economy and its appended state would cease to be capitalist). If you don’t have a democratic, planned economy, you leave the ability to accumulate capital, and the existence of a sub-class of wage-slaves, intact. This in turn provides the space for the reassertion of capitalist hegemony, which in turn limits the scope of democratic choice, since, as I said, choices at current bourgeois-democratic elections are not predicated upon rationally assessing competing manifestos.

In between times, activists have no power to control their elected officials.”

Also, don’t forget the New England town hall model, or the right to recall that a lot of states have for state government; and in the US, state Government controls a lot…

Moreover, where activists are well organised around a minimum programme, then they have a right to expect that the person they selected to run in their name should carry out that minimum programme. This doesn’t interfere with your notion of the elected representative as responsible to the whole people since where this situation pertains, the candidate has been elected on the basis of a manifesto determined by activists.

But that’s not true at all. Nowhere on the ballot forms for any US (or UK) election do we tick a box saying “I agree to the Manifesto”. We tick the name of a person, which might possibly also be suffixed with the name of the party that nominated that person. Activists certainly have the moral right to expect that the implicit bargain struck with the candidate(s) (that they implement the manifesto when in office) is kept, but there’s probably no enforceable agreement (which raises an interesting question of whether forcing candidates to sign such an agreement would work).

Your approach to these kinds of elections works if a) we assume that the electorate is engaged with the contents of the manifesto and that b) their vote for the candidate whose party created the manifesto equates to a vote for the manifesto (rather than a vote for the personal character of the candidate). I’m not sure that elections ever work like that, though they obviously must work that way to some extent.

This approach assumes that we should attempt to construct a set of rational policies ahead of time, then pass these through several stages of voting to ratify them, culminating in a general election in which the public ratifies the policies to be carried out over the next four (or so) years. However, voters may prefer an empiricist approach: elect the guy and see what happens. In this scenario, being elected is an almost random process, in the sense that you get elected when your opponent screws up, and you get to carry on until you screw up too (we could call this the “Just a minute!” model of democracy). It’s been a very long time since I’ve read any Popper, but I dimly recall him putting this forward as a not-awful system, on the basis that it at least has the merit of getting rid of the worst governments, modelled on his conception of science as a process of conjecture (“let’s see if these policies and people work”) and refutation (“oh god, they’re bloody awful”).

On the subject of workers councils (something I know next to nothing about), where would be the best place for me to find out more? I’m pretty poorly-acquainted with Marxist literature generally – the only vaguely Marxist thing I’ve read is The Society of the Spectacle, which was brilliant. My first instinct is to be dubious of the idea though, on the basis that I don’t like being told what to do by anyone, and a workers council sounds like something that would want to tell me what to do and might stand a better chance than government does of noticing if I don’t do it.

I’d say there is an exception in the employee free choice act though, which is pretty paradigm breaking given the one of debate for the last 3 decades…

At no point did we discuss how “activist” the campaign was, except in my summation – where I called for more activist-led campaigns (paragraph two). Karin subsequently brought up in her article some of the issues I’ve addressed here – particularly whether or not Obama can be considered an activist.

My opinion is that he isn’t, and that his campaign was far from activist-led, and moreover that in terms of accountability, Obama has exactly the same degree of accountability to the people who elected him as any of his predecessors – none. I’ve given plenty of reasons and arguments for this position above.

What people do during the campaign is all very well – and the carnivalesque is great – but how exactly do you imagine that this will shape the laws Congress passes and Obama signs? Or the Executive appointments he makes, orders he signs and so forth? It won’t – so in reality what the “decentralisation” of Obama’s campaign added up to was simply allowing pre-existent sentiment to mobilise itself and cashing in on it, without sacrificing any independence to political accountability.

I’m not denying that Obama was popular…but to say that because some events were independently staged the campaign was “activist-led” is a bit ridiculous.

Now you may have meant a lot of what you said here – about holding the President to account etc – but what you actually said in the very short space allowed you was about the campaign itself.

Deselecting Obama in four years time or accountability during the Presidency are new points (at least to my memory). The *campaign itself* was the most activist led that there has been in living memory and I think to imply that any disagreement with you was based on other arguments you didn’t make on this occasion, or that Obama had some big business backers is slightly unfair.

As Karin said there were large parts of the campaign that were completely independent and run by activists without any input at all from the centre. Likewise no one is arguing that the centre didn’t do anything – it shaped key themes and campaigns, but always with an eye to mobilising the maximum number and, crucially allowing supporters to be part of the movement.

More importantly it turned many people who in traditional camapigns would have been simply part of the voter base into activists and organisers – running the show at ground level.

The reason why Obama did far better in caucuses than the primary ballots was precisely because of the strength he’d been able to build up in this area against the far more deeply entrenched Clinton machine.

If you take something like Obama Girl this is something that “activists” would never have created but it was completely independent from the Obama Camp – it’s creation and, crucially, it’s popularity came from below. They then embraced it despite having nothing to do with its tone or message.

You wont be seeing anything even a little like this for Labour’s next election campaign.

With regard to local elections, however, a few different issues emerge. First of all, there are a great deal more independents because activists are better organised, whether Greens or candidates put forward as the result of a local issue.

Second thing, which isn’t so heartening, is that the heirarchical relationship still exists. For councillors, state legislature members and so on, there’s no accountability either. Now whether or not there should be is a different question.

I’m in favour of an electoral right of recall to begin with – which takes in some of your argument about accountability to the whole electorate. Moreover, where activists are well organised around a minimum programme, then they have a right to expect that the person they selected to run in their name should carry out that minimum programme. This doesn’t interfere with your notion of the elected representative as responsible to the whole people since where this situation pertains, the candidate has been elected on the basis of a manifesto determined by activists.

Were I to move the argument about accountability to activists in a different direction, however, I could rest it on my view of the illegitimacy of formal-democratic elections in Western states, the nature of the state not as neutral instrument of administration so much as a tool of class oppression and defender of private property, which is the basis for inequality and the dominance of one class.

What I would like to see is the replacement of these formal-democratic institutions with the democratic instruments of workers’ control: workers councils organised by workplace and living space, to the exclusion of the ruling class. As producers of wealth, it’s my view that we have that right. To organise that replacement, however, we have to move beyond the heirarchical relationship activists currently have with candidates.

In fact, more than that, we’d have to redraw how we view elections – not as means to win control of the State and thereby to redraw society as we wish, but as tactical interventions symptomatic of a much wider extra-parliamentary movement that would eventually take the place of formal-democratic government in the manner outlined above, to overcome the inherent disadvantages workers suffer currently – wealth, contacts, the media and basically all the institutions of bourgeois capitalist hegemony over society.

What I mean to say by the last three paragraphs is simply that I don’t view elected representatives as accountable to the whole people because we don’t live in a democracy. The ‘whole people’ include classes with fundamentally irreconcilable interests, where one of those classes exercises the whole machinery of society – from education, the churches and so on – to prevent genuine democracy.

The question boils down to this: how serious are we about devolution of power to a collective, grassroots movement? In the UK, everyone constantly bemoans the centralisation of New Labour; in the US, we’ve heard similar things about Bush. If we want millions of people everyone to grab control not just of the State but of the economy and to reorganise it, then we have to recognise that this isn’t going to happen due to the current electoral system.

Not to say that some beneficial things can’t be achieved of course.

Within American politics, there is no provision for government by the people except 2-, 4-, or 6-yearly elections.

Doesn’t this ignore state and local elections, and the fact that a great many more government positions (police chiefs, school boards, etc.) are directly-elected positions in the US? The federal government of the US does not yet hold the same relative power over its citizens (the ‘grass roots’) that the British government does over British subjects.

Totally agree that the idea of bloggers holding the government to account are, as yet, somewhat fanciful, though I could imagine a future in which a handful of demagogues might be powerful enough to influence government policy.

Additionally, I’m not sure how your idea of activists holding politicians to account inbetween elections would work. Politicians don’t get their mandate from activists, they get it from the electorate, and the wishes of the electorate may not be aligned with the wishes of the activists. If (and I really haven’t studied this in detail, so I may be wrong) the electorate always picks the centrist, what right do the left (or right!) leaning activists have to deny the electorate what they voted for, just because they feel that the newly-elected politician owes them something? The same argument, of course, has to apply to other vested interests who would try to influence politicians (corporate donors, etc.).