Independent socialists and electoralism as a strategy

national | politics / elections | feature Tuesday May 29, 2007 01:48 by ronan - WSM - (pers capacity!)

Croutons, ninjas and posterboys, an anarchist's election '07

A Good Day For The Lamp-posts Of Ranelagh

As the dust recedes from the ballot box and the parties alternately lick their wounds and rest on their laurels it’s worth having a think about its consequences for the left in general and the radical left in particular...Sinking a lot of work into achieving an especially high soapbox isn’t that much use when people aren’t listening. If we want our arguments to be heard we need to make them from the furnace where our politics have been forged, the heart of the struggles of the people.

The small parties generally got a drubbing this time around, and of course, the left wing parties are all very much on the small side. The only winners are the centre right civil war parties of Fianna Fail and Fine Gael, if one is to judge political mood by elections then the left wing is in a sorry state all around. Despite anarchists talking up electoral non-participation this was one of the biggest turn outs in years, people turned up and turned right.

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Which is not of course to say they should have voted left, Labour the biggest party on the ‘left’ showed how much its left wing credentials matter to it by entering into a pre-election pact with Fine Gael, the law and order party, as in more laws, more orders. Even so, a high vote for Labour or Sinn Fein might have indicated some degree of dissatisfaction with the current state of things, not so.

What was probably most disappointing for lefties however was the failure of Joe Higgins to be returned to his seat in Dublin West and the non-election of a number of other ideological socialists such as Clare Daly, or Joan Collins (thankfully we’ve been spared the embarrassment of a SWPie in Dáil Eireann and the prospect of dealing with SWP activists with even more inflated sense of self worth). We all enjoyed and appreciated Joe’s never-ending one man stand against injustice and tyranny in Dail Eireann, the sole defender of honesty amid a cauldron of deceit, a crouton of decency in a thick soup of lies. It’s very possible that electoral district re-jigging is to blame for this defeat, but it throws into relief the difficulties of electoralism as a political strategy for groups who (theoretically) see parliament as at odds with the prospect of social change.

There are some purely practical problems that make socialist adventures in electoralism a slow starter, a lack of big corporate donations is probably the most obvious, but there’s also an unsympathetic media to deal with and an electorate seemingly bent on re-enacting the Civil War every four years. Low funding means no billboards, and few glossy posters or leaflets, it means no imported American consultants and no press handlers. But behind these practical reasons there’s a more basic reason why socialists are only rarely going to get anything but ulcers from the electoral process in this country. If you’ll let them, members of socialist organisations that promote electoralism argue for it principally as a tactic, they’re not deceived, real change comes from below, they’re using the Dail as a platform to destroy itself and so on. While such an argument might seem convincing the chance of getting your candidate in always has to be balanced against the vast amount of time and money spent in campaigning for him or her, especially when a constituency re-jig might toss them out again come next time round.

The crucial point however, is that in asking someone to vote for an anti-capitalist candidate you’re asking them to do so principally on an ideological level if the gesture is to have any meaning at all. But most people don’t want a purely ideological representative in parliament, any socialists who don’t combine their ideology with a lot of hard work for their constituents are unlikely to get the time of day next time around. So already there’s a trade off involved, a lot of work to get elected, a lot of work to stay elected and then you can have a platform to speak from. One’s tempted to ask how effective this trade off is: if the candidate is voted for not because the electorate identify with his/her politics but because s/he does a lot of constituency work this might imply that spreading socialism from above probably isn’t so effective. Perhaps I’m wrong, perhaps there is a sizeable cadre of Marxist-Leninist ninjas in Dublin West sharpening their knives and preparing to attack in a flurry of paper selling and shuriken throwing. Probably not though.

To be honest, I think that these socialists have got electoralism the wrong way round, in the ideological supermarket most people aren’t going to pick up socialism simply because it’s not very practical. Once most people have left college they’re not particularly interested in ideology, they’re interested in getting on with life and fitting as much fun as possible into the cracks between working life and sleep. Socialist (or anarchist for that matter) consciousness isn’t particularly relevant for the most part, it only becomes relevant during certain periods of struggle and conflict, in the workplace, in the community or even on a national level. Sinking a lot of work into achieving an especially high soapbox isn’t that much use when people aren’t listening, if we want our arguments to be heard we need to make them from the furnace where our politics have been forged, the heart of the struggles of the people.