You don't matter and other adventures in socialism

Sometimes when a lefty argument has been going for too long without any real progress or indeed any sort of relevance, I get a bit tetchy, leading to an outburst of 'We don't matter, this doesn't matter!'. I think this is true. Lefties (as in members of leftwing parties or similar) generally do not matter. We are a minute proportion of the population and the size and relevance of any single leftwing party or organisation will be even smaller. So in a very real sense, arguments about intricacies are irrelevant. Our discussions should really have a concrete goal (which can include getting a better understanding of a situation) or just be pursued for pleasure. Either way there's no point beating our heads off a table over issues that are not relevant if there's a fundamental disagreement.

Lenin commented that “Politics begin where the masses are, not where there are thousands, but where there are millions, that is where serious politics begin.” We in Ireland are probably never going to be able to engage in serious politics by this definition, but we can at least hope for tens of thousands, even hundreds. At the moment, we are handfuls, a couple of hundred at the maximum, and the Left has only been able to mobilise those tens of thousands when it has cooperated across party lines to organise on relevant issues. Campaigns like those against the Water Tax and Household Tax have shaped Irish State policy in a real, measurable way. Operating alone, a good day for a Left party is when they get their spokesperson on the radio.

Despite this, the organisational boundaries remain set in stone and the United Left Alliance is neglected. I think this is contrary to the purpose of the left organisations. A party should be formed that has a smaller program than those of the existing parties and organisations, open to the bulk of Irish people to the left of Labour. Following the partyist mentality will not make lefties matter.

What will become of the micro-sect?

So, if there was a dissolution into a larger party, what would happen to the existing parties and formations? In my (limited) experience, small leftwing parties tend to be think-tanks with organisations attached. My suggestion is we hive off the think-tanks into intra-party policy groups which can compete for support for their ideas among the members.

In existing parties, think-tanks may be executive committees or informal cliques (the former is more democratic) but the effect is the same; a small minority come up with policies, the majority vote on and implement them. This can be identified as a problem of engagement or a problem of fact; most people do not want to get involved in policy-making. If the latter, then members should at least have the chance to choose between different policies. If the former, it seems that engagement is probably hindered by the narrow spectrum of debate; if everyone pretty much agrees, what's the point in getting involved in coming up with ideas?

But I think the narrow policy spectrum actually masks internal division; members may actually agree more with members of other organisations then with some of their comrades, they may have misgivings about direction which are not articulated by a explicit alternate policy. If a member disagrees with the organisation's policy, they are faced with a dilemma: get involved in a faction fight to advance their own intellectual leadership (difficult and appealing to few people), put up and shut up (alienating) or leave. To a certain extent this is a problem caused by the need for discipline (i.e. doing political activity that you don't fully agree with), but it is compounded by the small scale of organisations and the zero-sum game in contests for power.

From this perspective, it would make sense to have a larger party with a greater diversity of intellectual leadership, via policy groups that come up with ideas for activity. These would have the same characteristics as a faction leadership; small, with a shared analysis and strategic orientation. Having many of these groups co-existing in a large party would allow members to hear a diversity of views on a subject, make it easy to change their mind or support positions from different cliques and a greater freedom for developing their own policy group if needed.

So the idea here is of a lot of different policy groups coming up with ideas and motions which are then voted on by the membership. This leads to the question of the relationship between legislative and executive branches within the party; is it possible to separate the two? If so, won't this give the executive informal powers to decide what policy is implemented?

Escapism or Immortality?

A friend recently commented that the heightened interest in supernatural fiction is a result of a fascination with overcoming death simultaneous with a lack of belief in the possibility of achieving this via the progression of human technology and society. Vampiric immortality, then, is of interest because it offers a convenient deus ex machina, resolving the desire without confronting the obstacle. I’m not quite sure about this, but I can’t really offer a strong argument for why this is not the case. Instead, I have a suggestion about how supernatural immortality figures in a larger cluster of desires that vampire fiction embodies. Immortality is a mechanism rather than an end-goal.

Popular contemporary vampire novels such as Twilight and the Sookie Stackhouse series basically offer escapist fantasy. The protagonist is a normal everyday girl, with normal everyday concerns, until the romantic interest of a vampire lifts them out of their relative banality and into a world of intense drama and danger. They are inducted into a hidden world, where their struggles and challenges are important to the fate of the world, revealing the mundanity of their everyday vicissitudes.

There are a few different elements to this. For one, the fantasy involves inversion of the character’s place in the social hierarchy. Sookie Stackhouse is a lowly bar waitress, socially ostracised due to her telepathic gift. Bella is a bit of a social reject, isolated and bullied at school. But their new lives allow them to transcend their social environment, so that those who remain mired in such can be identified as the petty fools that they really are. The characters have a new strength and, occasionally, social cachet due to their involvement in the hidden supernatural terrain. In other words, who cares if I don’t have the nicest shoes, I’m going out with a centuries-old hunk!


The lives of vampires are high-stakes affairs, where conflicts will determine the lives of many. Funnily enough, the vampires of the Sookie novels do have serious struggles, but they’ve been highly keyed up for the transition to TV. Instead of the witches being engaged in a petty fight over money, Fiona Shaw wants to destroy vampire-kind in general. While Russell Edgington is an undead gay Hugh Hefner in the novels, in the show he’s a genocidal maniac, intent on destroying/enslaving humanity with his army of trashy nazi-werewolves.

It’s interesting to note the differences here with previous vampire fiction, such as that by Anne Rice. Her stories do not involve the vampires in world-shaping conflicts, except in the dire Queen of the Damned. Instead, she focuses on the sociopathic hedonism and anomie that result from their detachment from human society. Her vampires are tragic figures, who tend to regret their isolation.

This might indicate a deeper point: the fear of meaninglessness is a fear of the inconsequentiality of our life’s work. Immortality might offer an escape route, but evading death produces its own ennui. How can we engage in meaningful work when we are detached from society? Does meaning exist only in the context of mortality? For Rice, the answer is No, However, True Blood makes being undead really cool, giving vampires their own highly developed social systems and institutions, over which they can have plenty of power squabbles.

So escapism seems to be the dominant impulse in the contemporary vamp-dramas that I’ve read. They serve to soothe the nagging sensation of inconsequentiality and mundanity that afflicts us in our everyday lives. People live their lives to benefit others and, denied a share in the wealth of society or the shaping of its direction, they are oppressed by banalities: the need to pay the bills, the boredom and indignity of low-paid work and the petty gossip of peers. With such concerns, who wouldn’t want to roleplay as a normal girl, whisked into a life of drama, iintrigue and danger (not to mention gorgeous men)?

Distributed Participation vs Incumbent Power Structures

A nine-year-old Scottish girl who attracted two million readers to a blog documenting her school lunches, consisting of unappealing and unhealthy dishes served up to pupils, has been forced to end the project after the council banned her from taking pictures of the food in school.

Girl banned from blogging about school lunches The Internet, as we all know, is an unrivalled technology for enabling mass participative communication. Sometimes this is put to major, world-changing uses, as in the role of social media in the Arab Spring. Sometimes it is a little more prosaic. Personally, I find the prosaic uses as interesting as the revolutionary ones. The small, incremental ways that communication technology enables people to affect the social organisation of the world seem to indicate major new possibilities. In my own small project, the Bike Accident Reporting site, the technical side has only been one element, the easiest of all. The wider picture - getting city planning to be more responsive to cyclist needs is much harder, impossible without the integration of the system into municipal decision-making, itself requiring the support of people inside. This means that we have, on the one hand, a participative mechanism for people to indicate issues of concern and, on the other, a hierarchical structure that has its own concerns. How does the hierarchical structure respond? This basic point is also found in the above case. A young girl starts a blog to talk about the quality of food served in canteens. She gets popular and is told to shut up. The council has no interest in public participation or scrutiny. Perhaps they could be challenged in a court (freedom of speech?) but it doesn't seem that that's on the cards. Either way, for partisans of participative democracy, this raises some questions (in no particular order): 1) How can we push for incorporation of public participation into extant governmental structures? 2) Should we do this at all? Is it better to focus solely on building participative democracy outside of the established institutions? 3) If we do get some levels of public participation in governmental structures, how do ensure that this is not merely window-dressing? 4) What are the advantages of public participation for ordinary people? What are the disadvantages?

Spreading Santorum

I think it's important to highlight the good work done by the website Spreading Santorum, which helps warn against the nasty byproducts of anal sex and a certain prominent Republican politician. If you have a blog, link to spreadingsantorum.com!

Further thoughts on the balance of power

The concepts need further definition, Economic and Consciousness particularly.

Economic power is the capacity of a social actor to provide the goods it requires. At it’s most basic, capitalism relies on the economic weakness of the non-capitalists; the bulk of the population can only get the goods they need through wage labour. This is the basic principle behind the offensive strategy of the lock-out (on the part of the capitalists) and the union strike fund. If one’s opponent is starving, then it is easy to dictate to them the terms by which they can get food.

Other goods are also crucial, of course. The Spanish situation indicated that economic power is the cornerstone of all other power. With the gold reserves of the Madrid bank, the Spanish revolutionaries could have purchased arms rather than relying on the USSR, which had a hostile agenda.

But economic power is not simply money, it is the capacity to supply oneself with necessary goods. If a revolution was successful in one state, but did not spread, it would need to protect itself from imperialist counter-revolution, i.e., it would need to arm itself. But if this hypothetical country does not have the productive capacity to produce arms, it must buy them, which means it relies on the willingness of corporations to sell and of other nations to allow their corporations to sell. So this is obviously a major vulnerability.

In a less dramatic example, any mass movement in contemporary Western society would have the priority of developing its political and moral power. It would need, respectively, the capacity to make its own decisions, to act as a unified body and it would need moral power, it would only be effective if its individual members saw themselves as part of it, united by the movement. Political power requires a political infrastructure; meeting halls, communications, etc. Moral power has similar requirements; media, social gatherings and so on. All of these rely on real goods and services. A labour movement would need to acquire these both through purchasing power and voluntary labour. Either way, this is economic power, it is the capacity of the movement to provide for itself the goods and services it needs to survive and develop.

Moral power is similarly crucial and similarly underlies the other types of power. We can think about moral power as legitimacy and support. The moral power of a movement is its capacity to call on the support of its members. If people see unions as alien they are unlikely to do the needed; attend meetings, respect picket-lines, protect demonstrations from attack.

So what we see is that each type of power connects to others. We should use this analysis not only for the power blocs that we support, but also those we oppose. That way we can develop strategies for furthering the power of popular movements and disrupting and reducing the power of reactionary forces.

The Balance of Power - Arenas of Social Control

This is an attempt to develop an analytic toolbox for assessing the balance of social power, whether contemporary or historical. It is developed for the purpose of revolutionary strategy, i.e., assessing and identifying the relative strengths and weaknesses of progressive and reactionary actors. It should be tested for its utility with reference to historical struggles.

The Four Arenas of Social Power

1. Military/physical force

2. Political/decision-making

3. Economic/production

4. Consciousness/moral

Trying out the Assessment - Haitian Lavalas
(I need to do more research on this movement, this is an sketch to indicate the potential of the model.)

Military
Haitian Lavalas movement had massively inferior military strength than the dictatorship, the bourgeoisie and their allies. Some use of force was employed for movement self-defence (necklacing, most infamously), but these became less favoured. Once in political power, Aristide was able to disband the army and decrease the disadvantage somewhat. This was undermined by the reactionary infiltration of the Haiti National Police, the under-resourcing of the HNP, the imperial support for brutal raids along the Dominican border, etc.

Economic
The movement had inferior economic strength due to the parlous state of the Haitian economy and high unemployment. It achieved some strength in factory and peasant organisation, but not much. Dependence on international aid meant that donor nations could exert political power through this economic weakness.(Not sure about this, mainly a guess)

Political
The movement used its massive support to gain political power through the various elections. This was hampered by the economic power of the bourgeoisie and the US (through its agencies) and the threat of military force, which disrupted the capacity for taking effective political action.

Consciousness
The movement had massive legitimacy and support in popular consciousness. This was transformed into political power through the Lavalas parties (OPL & then Fanmi Lavalas). Consciousness was affected through popular radio stations, sermons, etc., which spread the Lavalas message. The bourgeoisie made little attempt until the coup (and especially the 2000 coup) to fight for support among the people.

Conclusion
Ultimately the movement made a pragmatic decision to limit fighting where it was massively inferior and try to increase its strength through political action. This latter was insufficient, as the opposition were quite happy to disrupt the democratic process and maintain military dominance through other means. Both economic and military weakness are a legacy of imperialism, and cannot be solved easily.

Machiavelli

For this reason a republic has a fuller life and enjoys good fortune for a longer time than a principality, since it is better able to adapt itself to diverse circumstances owing to the diversity found among its citiens than a prince can do. Fo a man who is accustomed to act in one particular way, never changes, as we have said. Hence when times change and no longer suit his ways, he is inevitably ruined.