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BlogNation 2010; packaging and practicality
Paddles! 20mg Epi! Stat! Get this social movement on its feet!
What follows is a summary of the ten pages of notes I took at Saturday’s BlogNation event, organised by Sunny Hundal under Liberal Conspiracy’s banner. On a personal note, it was great to meet Paul Sagar, Paul Cotterill, Carl Packman, Kate Belgrave, Cath Elliott and Sunny himself, as well as seeing a bunch of other blogoland people I’d met before. Especially gratifying was the piss up afterwards.
There were four main elements to the conference; over the first two, six people spoke from the front of the room about upcoming battles for the Left and how we should address them. After three speakers had their turn, each table discussed the issues, what they thought they could add to what the speakers said and threw out ‘strategic’ ideas.
Part three was much more traditional – there was a full panel of high-profile individuals (which, to the mirth of several of us at the back, was described by Sunny as containing individuals from all across the Left – liberal to socialist), each of whom offered a contribution on Left co-operation, followed by contributions from the floor. For the last part, the conference divided into two – a forum for London bloggers and a forum where anyone could pitch any idea.
Parts one and two – coming battles and how we prepare
Individually, the ‘coming battles’ issues are well known and there’s no point in my only rehashing what the speakers said. Instead I’d like to view what was said – both from the platform and from the floor – through two categories: packaging and practicality. The first was by far the most dominant, which was perhaps expected in a roomful of bloggers and actual or aspiring journalists.
In this regard, some good ideas came out – though not anything that hasn’t come up before. One idea repeated multiple times in multiple contexts was the need for some means whereby to get out anecdotal evidence as well as statistical evidence, something that was also a feature of the stillborn Left New Media project. The immigration debate stressed this; it was noted than when communities were confronted with those who were likely to be deported, or with the realities of Yarls Wood and other camps, opposition developed fast.
What to do with such collated information ranged from the broad and insubstantial (e.g. Anthony Painter’s ‘be positive and passionate about the contribution of immigrants’) to the very specific and activist (e.g. Kate Smurthwaite’s desire that details of sex education in schools should be used to arm a campaign that could provide speakers and organise protests against faith schools and other educational bodies which deviate from basic science).
Only one of these responses moved from ‘packaging’ to ‘practicality’, and the failure to make this transition was a key feature of the contributions of many of those at the conference.
Tim Ireland phrased this problem quite well with his adaptation of the 1-9-90 equation. His argument was that we’re the 1% creating content, that the audience we write for is only another 9%, those who feedback, those who we engage with as activists etc, and that it’s the remaining 90% we need to bring on board – which we can do by appealing to technical wizardry like SEO or more skillful use of comedy and emulation of the soundbyte style of the Right.
Quite clearly these are solution to how the Left ‘message’ is packaged. It doesn’t address the more specifically political questions of whether or not that message is the right one, and what sort of political practice it is that our ideas demand. That the political practice of Right and Left will be different is essentially a Marxist idea predicated upon a class analysis that identifies more fundamental reasons behind the bias of the media than merely the Right being good at PR.
Packaging was also at stake when conferees argued that one of our key strategies should be to change the content of debate. On anthropogenic global warming, for example, it was argued by Leo of Climatesock that we should move the debate from whether or not AGW is for real to “what do we need to do about it” and the policy options. I’m not clear as to whether that means we bloggers should stop engaging with the Climategate controversy.
If so, I think that fundamentally misunderstands the relationship between the junk science that people like Nadine Dorries and fellow Tory nutters spout and the currency it has amongst the certain layer of the public. It is my view that it fulfills a social function which is not adequately addressed simply by putting out the opposite story, and especially not by trying to move on to some later stage of the same question.
In fact I would go so far to say that it’s the attempt to move on like this which produces a dangerous disconnection between government and people (an inevitable disconnection under capitalism).
All of that said, from different parts of the hall as well as from Kate Smurthwaite on the platform, there was a serious attempt to address practical measures and not just the packaging; the need to build definite organisations which could organise communities and workplaces. Sunny suggested that the conference should not address ‘movement’ issues, but should speak as bloggers and journalists about issues specific to us.
My view, though I didn’t make any contribution beyond at my own table, is of course that we don’t have any relevance beyond our our movement. Getting people to agree with us is great – but if the only people we’re appealing to are those who are already listening to us, we’re still hitting the thin end of the 1-9-90 wedge. Moreover, we’re failing to appreciate the dialectical relationship between argumentation and organisation.
A key part of the debate Saturday should have been what form that organisation should take, under which aegis all of us bloggers could stand. That would have exacerbated all the tribal divisions – Labour, Liberals, Socialist – but importantly there was a wide swathe of people as yet uncommitted to a party, community organisers and such. Of course there were also the anti-party crowd, but they’ll never amount to much and can be ignored.
Part three – scope for co-operation on the Left
From the get-go this discussion wasn’t going to be the one people wanted. The key mistake, I suspect, was involving James Graham of the Social Liberal Forum. He was meant to introduce the discussion and instead spent his time sermonising the hall on why we shouldn’t regard the Lib-Dems as liars and traitors to a Left ideal lest we drive them into the arms of the Tory Right.
Claude Carpentieri has already addressed this at Lib-Con and Dave Osler did so from the floor of the conference, rubbishing Graham’s contribution as partisan self-justification which glossed over the fact that a large part of ‘the Left’ don’t believe the Lib-Dems deserve that soubriquet. This received loud applause and cheers from the floor, stretching far beyond the Labour members present.
One of the most egregious comments Graham made was to suggest that while we need to guard against the Tory Right, Labour must rein in its own ‘headbangers’ (and mention was made here of those who ‘sabotaged’ a Lib-Lab deal). Evidently the conference wasn’t willing to stomach denunciation of Neil Kinnock-like proportions when hiding behind the remarks is a political party quite happy to sustain Tory attacks on workers, the disabled, pensioners and the unemployed – basically every disadvantaged group.
Beyond this, quite a proportion of the speakers kept their remarks focused on Westminster and the happenings there – on what one faction should do to woo another faction, on what ‘compromises’ must be made to stop further inroads being made against the issues we consider to be vital. Perhaps this was to be expected when members of the panels are MPs or former MPs (Evan Harris, Michael Meacher) or commentators on parliament (Graham, Alex Smith).
There was also room for comments that could be filed under the “bloody stupid” category – such as Rowenna Davis’ statement that since joining Labour she’d felt more ‘tribal’, more willing to defend policies she didn’t believe in simply because they were being evinced by her own party. While that’s useful for all readers of Ms Davis’ future contributions, her attempt to generalise this is of course nonsense – clearly she’s never met a real Labour Leftie, because as I can attest, smacking about Labour policy takes up a large part of our time.
Another stupid comment came from the floor, that it should be ‘disinterested groups’ who we look to, to campaign against the budget etc as the trades unions look too partisan. It’s in the interest of workers to campaign against cuts, therefore their motives are suspect. That one was beautifully shot down by Justin Baidoo, a community activist from Peckham. Implicit to a lot of this liberal dithering is the Aristotelian golden mean – which is a worthless concept in a society that cannot be anything other than dominated by particular interests. All we need to do is decide which.
Where things did become interesting (briefly, before wandering off again) was in the discussion around what Evan Harris said about Labour party democracy. His statement was clear; if Labour wants to win back the Left, they should give members a say again. I couldn’t agree more – though Harris’ subsequent elevation of the Lib-Dems to status of ‘people’s party’ by virtue of their internal workings is rather a laughing stock bearing in mind what the parliamentary party subsequently decided to do – i.e. go into coalition and toss out half the ‘member agreed’ manifesto.
Alex Smith’s view that we need to ‘build institutions to re-wire the progressive architecture’ drew plenty of attention – particularly his addendum that this means ‘more than just parliament’. Yet it was clear from subsequent remarks that what this means is up for debate – Alex appealed to a MoveOn.org style solution, returned to time and again by his queries, “How did the Americans do this?” and “How did the American Left win?”
The twists and turns of the Obama administration should give us pause for thought – as should Obama’s complete failure to articulate a relationship between politicians and popular movements beyond the wish that they should come when called and otherwise twiddle their thumbs. It’s this very factor which threatens the credibility of the Democrats at this year’s mid-term elections, especially given that the Dems have adopted policies hostile to the very movement which pushed them to a landslide victory in 2008.
It was left to Michael Meacher to say that he had no truck with ‘aspirational views’ as regards the Con-Lib coalition. He rightly said that it was this year’s disastrous budget which was likely to dominate politics for the next 5-10 years. Judging by IDS’ (less blunt) repeat of Tebbit’s “On yer bike” outburst against the unemployed, Meacher’s assessment seems bang on. Meacher said our only response must be to line up with the popular movement that develops to oppose the Tory agenda.
Where Meacher went completely off-beam, I thought, was his remark that, “Vince Cable and all the rest are decent people, but are completely overruled by the Tories”. No doubt Meacher made this comment in response to a clear tension between the Lib-Dem elements to the room (though several Lib-Dems, such as Linda Jack, proclaimed their alienation from their own party) and the rest of the conference – but the reality is that such a view merely obscures the real problem – that policies like supposed equidistance from labour and capital cut the Libs off from the Left.
This is why the Liberals found it so easy to go into coalition with the Conservatives. Lib-Dems who want to quibble with the Left about the ‘good’ the Liberals are doing in office are basically performing the political equivalent of sticking their fingers in their ears and singing “Lalala, I can’t hear you”. Thus Evan Harris’ comment that the ‘budget is not a Conservative programme” – reassuring ammunition for those of us on the Left who can point to the £11bn cuts and only £2bn in new tax revenues.
As a last note, probably the scariest and most reactionary part of the conference came whenever Alex Smith pontificated for several minutes on the need for a new “national narrative” as a means to restore the pride of being Left-wing. By this he meant a “chronology” about how “we” (presumably the British, though possibly the English) “built the NHS” and “defeated dictators” and that we needed to stress “Labour’s place in that”. All I can say is yikes.
The contributions concluded with Michael Meacher denouncing careerism, and the disengagement from communities, and his call to reinvigorate the Left at a local level. James Graham then summed up with another self-righteous justification; that he remembered similar talk about ‘localism’ in 1997 but that here were are, 13 years later. He said that “so long as most spending is decided in parliament, the daily parliamentary grind must be central to our concerns” – thus completely missing the point of Meacher and others that this means nothing without a popular movement.
Part four – 5 minute pitches
Since I’m not a London blogger and am thus spared having to listen to people angling to endorse Oona King or Ken Livingstone (and I’d prefer Genghis Khan to Oona King), I attended the session which permitted anyone to make a five minute pitch. Paul Cotterill made his expected presentation on the need for a local media effort, in print, that could take information to the masses and be a focal point in resistance efforts – especially important in light of current events.
There was a pitch for a MoveOn.org style organisation, to bring pressure to bear against individual candidates – and again the American example got cited. Amnesty International made a pitch about involving people in corporate responsibility campaigns. Reclaim the Pubs pitched something that sounded like speed-dating for politics; meet ups in pubs, open to all, designed to encourage political engagement, advertised to anyone who wants to come.
People around the Labour Values website announced that they’d be holding meetings of those outside Labour, to try and garner ideas from that angle, and that they would be establishing a blog with case-studies backing it up. David Babbs outlined the reach of the organisation 38 degrees and pressed everyone to tell his group what they should campaign on. One P. Casey argued for a British version of American groups like Factcheck.org.
A particularly interesting pitch was by the chap behind Political Scrapbook, in response to recent cases of left bloggers facing nuisance lawsuits, for a collective fund to fight such cases. This proposal was the ‘ultimate development’ of co-ops which could start small, by inviting bloggers to bunch together to purchase high quality hosting, and later premises in London with video editing facilities and access to subscription-based databases – as a lot of the mainstream media is about to become, online.
If anyone is interested in any of those, they should contact the relevant organisation or website. More can be read about the event at Liberal Conspiracy and on the pages linked to.
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Overall, I was happy to attend the conference. Even where someone disagrees with what is being said, it’s important to meet people outside of the controlled environment of the internet, where people can’t pre-vet what they say. Our little group of activists is only ever relevant based on the roots we put down in social movements – and what roots I have exist offline. But what to do with those roots – what tactics we use – is debated everywhere, online and off and it’s always good to get a fresh perspective. I look forward to Blog Nation 2011.
In memoriam, Howard Zinn, 1922-2010
I am shocked and deeply saddened to learn tonight of the death of Howard Zinn; my thoughts are with his family and his students.
He was one of those academics who made a lasting impression on me. His prose, in his famous People’s History of the United States, was incisive and his flair for exposing hypocrisy in modern American political rhetoric was unsurpassed.
Bush-era jingoism enraged the socialist academic and, in his interviews, he never failed to cut through the revisionist invocations of American history, of that great country’s ‘freedoms’.
Zinn argued instead for a redemptive politics of activism that could never be uniquely American, that would be shared by peoples and activists all over the world.
It is in this context that his opposition to the Vietnam War, and subsequent US military invasions can be set.
For me, he stands in the first rank of American heroes, like Eugene Debs, Helen Keller, Emma Goldman, Jack London and Upton Sinclair, all of whom he himself looked up to.
Noam Chomsky once paid Zinn tribute in the following terms: “When action has been called for, one could always be confident that he would be on the front lines, an example and trustworthy guide.”
My last thought is that Zinn’s actions and words can be a lesson to us to be like him, to never give up fighting for our ideals. “Small actions, when multiplied by millions of people, can change the world.”
See also: Virtual Stoa, Raincoat Optimism
Owen Jones’ Five Point Plan and our Left New Media project
Owen Jones emailed me last week to ask if I’d look at his article, “Left out of the picture”, which is over at Socialist Unity. Owen describes a basic plan for left-wing reorientation, another Future of the Left-type article, and I figured that the least I could do was to examine what Owen’s suggesting and see how I think it measures up.
Let me begin with this, though. Since the mid-1980s, the Left has been having a debate about why we were beaten. That should emphasize just how traumatic our defeat was, how utterly routed we all were in the face of aggressive neo-liberal reforms, backed by state sanctioned stong arming.
Twenty five years later, the Left is still pretty disorganised but both over- and under-estimating the extent to which this is the case have real dangers. The only way to correct such over- and under-estimation is a hard, historical look at the state of class struggle in the 20th Century UK.
Whilst I understand the dangers of seeming like the pub bore, earnestly wittering on about the same few topics, I cannot overstate how important a sense of proportion is. For example, we might speak of the death of the Labour Party from the grassroots upwards – but we can’t know that this is the case without looking back to see how many people were meeting in constituencies ten, thirty or fifty years ago.
How many workers are on strike, year on year? How have patterns of unionisation and union density shifted and why? What are the dominant types of work and how might this affect our organisational plans? What do full time union staff spend their days doing, while on the union payroll and what might they otherwise be doing, or what are they doing wrong, to leave trades unionism numerically stagnant?
What goes on at Socialist Party, Socialist Workers’ Party and Labour Party branches? What are the dominant forms of activity and how might these be better orientated so as to improve organisation? What do the ‘leaders’ of the Labour Left, like John McDonnell, or the union Left, like Bob Crow, do with the time and resources they have by virtue of their positions?
There is an empirical element of all of our pontifications, on the Left, that is often lacking. I am as guilty of this as anyone – but it can be rectified. It must be rectified if the endless debate on the ‘future of the left’ is ever to bear fruit. So here is my first proposal, which I think runs concurrently with some of the things Owen has suggested. We must have this empirical information and it must be accessible to everyone.
That was the space, as I conceived it, for our attempt at the Left New Media idea under the auspices of John McDonnell MP. Coupled to that, the impressive number of academics tied to socialist political parties, from Professor Callinicos right down the line, must help by directing their time, skill and energy to creating a picture intelligible to the evidence and the theory of socialism, of where we stand and where we might go. All too often it does not feel that this is what is going on.
For it is all very well to say “We need more trades unionists” or “We need more party members” or “Recruit to support X against the Labour bureaucracy!” but we’ve been doing the same thing for years and it evidently hasn’t got us anywhere. Why? Is it because our attempts to organise are isolated and uneven? Are they unsystematic? Basically, what is the problem?
Any Leftist could come up with these questions, which are important. And a facility should exist to help us draw together evidence from all around the UK and synthesize it. This facility does not exist. The knowledge and institutional memory of the organisations of the Left is partial only. This is not step one, a prerequisite. It must be done continually alongside everything else we do, conditioned by our experience of class struggle, or it is useless.
Now, on to Owen’s points, of which there are five.
[1]…All too often the left is preoccupied with issues that appeal to middle class and student activists. Generally speaking, these are things happening thousands of miles away or abstract theoretical questions. We shall never win mass support if these continue to be our obsessions at the expense of issues that actually concern our base. We need to establish a presence in working class communities.
This is something I say all the time. Most recently I said it with regard to the Kent Socialist Students’ meeting on Afghanistan. The working class are concerned about Afghanistan and Iraq. That is pretty clear. Here in the south east, no few people are parents or relatives of soldiers who have been sent to fight. So it’s wrong to proscribe all anti-war work, for example, as something which is happening thousands of miles away and about which only students and the middle class are concerned. There is a clear class element to the war.
However, equally, since we only have a limited number of activists in a given area and a limited amount of time to spend on given campaigns, we must choose carefully what to organise on. Plenty of shops – even those employing several dozen people – are completely un-unionized in Canterbury, for example. Jobs are being threatened by the council, not to mention our posties are out on strike but our student group is not making the argument that, if workers don’t oppose cuts, their jobs are likely next. This demonstrates a disconnect.
This is the trade-off which Owen describes, though again I would emphasize that it’s not so stark as that. A strong anti-war movement has provided support to workers and influenced consciousness – as during the FBU strike, where soldiers had to man the Green Goddesses. I would simply contend, as Owen does, that we need to push both issues of national import, like the war, and issues of local import, like unionization – because these apparent opposites are actually the same thing and will feed off each other if we work them both.
Coming back to my earlier point, however, are we not doing this? We only have sporadic reports from individuals who choose to publish their activities online and our own experience to use as evidence on which to judge. Insufficient data.
Second, we have to start talking about issues of concern to working people that we have not traditionally been comfortable with. Take immigration: it regularly tops opinion polls as one of people’s main worries. We can’t just dismiss this as primitive racism that simply needs to be fought. [...]
Third, the left has ceased trying to appeal to the working class as a whole. All too often we focus almost exclusively on small minorities instead. Part of this is the legacy of the New Left of the 1960s, a movement which essentially felt that the working class had lost its revolutionary potential. They replaced it with oppressed minority groups like ethnic minorities, gays, or even students
Owen is right in that we need to talk about immigration. Yet I don’t really think that we ignore it. The problem is that the proposals of the Left are not simple, and are based off a radical critique of the State and capitalism that is not self-evident. Indeed terms such as “capitalism” have fallen off the radar of Joe Public to the point where leaflets handed out by Socialist groups, which may have been easily intelligible in the 1970s, are not quite so intelligible now.
Here is another issue over which understanding the practice of groups across the UK would be useful. Do we have sites sharing a selection of socialist leaflets, details of what type of activities produce our desired ends? Not really. We simply print stuff off, guillotine it into A5 and hope for the best. Which is fine and dandy, but we need to know that if we put out a message blaming the bosses for trying to import cheap labour, and damage the lives of ALL workers, immigrant or indigenous, that it hits home.
Additionally, an issue like immigration is hard to organise over. We’re not calling for it to be banned, we’re calling for workers to be paid decent wages – all workers. So maybe the problem isn’t at all that our explanations go over the heads of a lot of people, but that standing on the street handing out leaflets is a shitty way to organise. Instead, perhaps, we should be going into workplaces and handing out leaflets to workers directly, with the goal of organising for local negotiations and potentially strikes to improve wages etc.
That way, when somebody says “I want to get those fucking nogs out of here”, we can say “Actually they’re treated shit too, and if they work while you’re on strike, you’re fucked, so why not bring them on board and we’ll all help each other?” We may not convince the most outspoken of anti-immigrationists or win every battle every time, but we’ll make sense to some people – and having some people in each workplace is vital. These are the questions we need to address when talking about how we approach immigration as an issue.
It is my belief that the soft Left shows its true colours over issues like this, where it prefers a touchy-feely approach to simply pointing a metaphorical gun at the head of bosses and demanding money and concessions with menaces, which in turn is likely to bind together all ‘races’ better than all the multicultural guff in the world. Which links to Owen’s third point; we explode the question of focussing on minorities by focussing on issues that confront the whole working class – dissolving identity politics into broader struggle, whilst still recognizing the importance of anti-homophobia battles and so forth.
Fourth, when the left does talk about working class issues, our target audience is generally unionised public sector workers.
Owen is bang on here too. The problem, of course, is that a vast number of private sector workers are not unionised. And they need to be. One of the greatest tricks by General Motors in the US was to declare bankruptcy and then sue to void all the collective bargaining agreements made with unions about things like pensions, wages and so forth. So essentially the company escaped its obligations to the workers who were the lifeblood of the company, both then and for generations past. This is what private companies do to workers.
So why aren’t we pushing for unionisation? Buggered if I know. I don’t understand the inertia. Is it because workers don’t want to listen? Is it because the existing union bureaucracies aren’t actually trying? A lack of information kills this debate dead – and whilst we have a lot of promising trades union sites growing up on the web, and while we have our own experience, and while we can try ourselves to see what works, we’re overstretched as it is trying to fight fifteen other campaigns. So we need to find out what works and target our efforts.
Finally (and perhaps at the root of the problem), the people who make up the left are simply not representative of today’s working class. Most British workers are employed in the service sector. To say these workers are under-represented among the left’s ranks is an understatement to say the least. Put simply: the left has too many people like me.
I feel this problem keenly. Whilst I am technically working class in that I sell my labour for wages, I’ve been to Oxford and it’s like a disfiguring disease – you can really tell. Not to say I’m not personable and good at recruiting, because actually I am. And I don’t talk about Habermasian public spheres and dialectical negations of the negation when I’m knocking on people’s doors. But I’m hardly representative of the concerns of the broader working class – essentially I have to guess what might work.
Owen is right that we need to correct that. Sometimes, actually, I think that the SWP had the correct approach when it ordered some of its cadres to enter certain occupations in order to organise them all the better. This requires a supreme dedication, to give up whatever job you really want to do, in favour of a revolutionary activity in a job you may not be all that bothered about. But maybe this is the sort of thing we need, because full time union organisers and lecturing people on the high street evidently aren’t getting the job done.
Yet to conclude on a key note, I do not know nor can I guess whether these five points make up the primary problems with socialist organisation in the UK. I can see ways to address each of them, and I can see how doing so would improve socialist activism across the country. I can see how doing so would improve our chances of actually emerging victorious from a few fights, or at least being defeated but through each defeat laying the organisational basis for future success. No doubt there are other things beyond Owen’s five point plan.
Personally I feel a bit let down by the Labour Representation Committee, of which Owen is a member, that an organisation with such radical potential to appeal to a large chunk of the socialist Left, not to mention to engage a lot of unionised workers, has been such a dismal failure hitherto. Besides having the only decent parliamentarians in the country, and doing some really good work when it comes to immigrant workers and youth wages and so forth, the LRC is no further on now than it was when I first joined back in 2006/7.
It is entirely possible that this feeling is as a result of not living in London, where the LRC, like most socialist groups, tends to have its strongest base – but the isolation of the regions in British politics is something else that the Left will simply have to overcome – and while people likeVice Chair Susan Press do good works, it’s not nearly enough. Truthfully Owen’s five points should have been in operation years ago, and someone like John McDonnell and his sterling team of assistants should have been holding people’s feet to the fire to get every available individual involved in organising.
I’ll be happy if that is what comes of Owen’s proposals, made as they are a few weeks in advance of the LRC national conference.
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