General Election
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So now Robbo thinks out future strategy is to target the disillusioned Labour Party supporter who trusted in reformist promises as the way forward.
It still leaves the question of how.
What should be our tactics in attracting those Labour Party supporters who thought Corbyn and McDonnell and Momentum could deliver a friendly welfare state?
UK is still polarised between Brexit nationalists and Remain Euro-nationalists.
The SNP intend to step up their Scottish nationalism.
What should be our core message, our key to opening up some sort of dialogue about our socialism?
Do we claim to be the possessors of “true” socialism against all these heretics and non-believers? Are we intending to become evangelical socialists, proselytising our “true” socialism to convert the beliefs of left reformists?
We need to know what style of campaigning we will embark upon if you now think you have settled my earlier question – which section of the people we aim to recruit.
Disillusioned Labourites. Or as others suggest, Deluded Ecologists.
Both need to be imbued with new hope and the realisation that the impossible is possible, to echo one of our slogans.
How are we going to do it? Surely not by persisting with our previous approach. So what have we to actually change to fit the conditions and circumstances we face?
As I am forever saying, this needs the collective group-think of the Party to resolve. A special conference of all the WSM companion parties. That in itself would be a major move forward for us.
My self-enforced exile has ended with the end of the dreams, hopes and aspirations of the Left Labourites.
It is time to assess our response to the politics of today and to make it relevant to what may now be a more receptive section of audience. I’m open to all suggestions and proposals.
I am convinced that things have changed…but not so much because of the defeat of Labour. Nor am I convinced that it has changed for the better.
Perhaps our prospective constituency has shrunk… and so it might be easier to identify.
88 + 69 votes.
Well, as Oscar said, if you tell the truth, you’re bound to be found out.
Alan
I think this election has had and will continue for a long time to have, a truly devastating and demoralising impact on people who felt the need to identify with Labour, even though they might have expressed some support for us. I think their resolve to identify with Labour might now be weakened somewhat as a result. Particularly if Labour begins the process of seeking to capture the middle ground by moving to the right as I fully expect it to do.
For Labour this is a worse result than even what happened under Foot (“the longest suicide note in history”, according to Kaufman). And of course as we all know Foot led to Blair.
The Left outside the Labour Party has been dying on its feet for some time now. The Left inside the Party – many of whom used to be outside the Party but were persuaded to join it by the rise of “Corbynmania” (now a fast receding memory) – has now been delivered a massive body blow. So where does it go to now? Is this the end of the line?
Time and time again the impossibilism of the SPGB has been passed over in favour of the possibilism of Labour reformism. Perhaps what was once perceived as impossibilism may now seem a little more possible whereas what was once perceived to be possible may now seem rather impossible.
My suspicion is that Left wing supporters of Labour are now likely to be one or two notches higher in their receptivity to socialist ideas. As ever we have to be careful about how we approach such people, not just dismissing out of hand what motivated them to vote Labour in the first place but at the same time trying to encourage and coax them to think outside the box and move on politically speaking
Its not going to be easy but if we strike the right tone and say the right things, there is good reason for hope
“My suspicion is that Left wing supporters of Labour are now likely to be one or two notches higher in their receptivity to socialist ideas.”
But the problem has always been what do they mean by “socialist ideas”
They have always had this view that it was state ownership and control. Lately, they adapted this state-socialism to include the co-operative-model ownership.
With Sanders and the progressive wing of the Democrats, socialism means the welfare state and wealth re-distribution through some taxation reforms government regulation.
The concept of socialism as understood by even the gradualists of the 19th C /early 20thC and continued by ourselves no longer exists as a movement.
Our task is to re-build it by once more giving it again a concrete form, to make it something tangible to experience now and give it an immediacy and not some far-off distant ultimate goal.
Do we do this by returning to Marx and “real” socialism?
Or do we re-start all over again and begin afresh?
Can we pix and mix the best of both?
It occurred to me that Marx and Engels were not so fixated with labels. After all the rejected the word socialism on the grounds that there were just too many variants of it being expressed so they opted for the term “communist” manifesto and got the League of the Just to change its name to the “Communist” League to single themselves out as different.
If we already must spend a great amount of time to define our terms to make clear our politics, disassociating our case from all others claiming to be socialist, will it be any more harder or complicated if we chose an entirely new name that we have to explain.
Some already in the Party think we are on a losing battle to retain even our own name “Socialist Party” from SPEW’s theft of it.
Shall we perhaps extend this surrender to the much wider aspect of socialism/communism?
Or do we become accused of dogmatism and sectarianism by engaging in theoretical polemics to regain possession of socialist ideas.
Much of what I am saying is based on the belief that we have not made any progress since 1904, that we are even further away from socialism than ever before and if it does arrive, it will be as that old saying …it’ll sneak up on us in the middle of the night without us knowing. We won’t be responsible for establishing it.
Just some random thoughts for what must be a lengthy debate by ourselves. People are fickle. Views and attitudes swing wildly especially when it comes to voting. Shouldn’t we be endeavouring to seek out what principles are held constant by our fellow-workers and build upon those.
I would imagine that the Corbynistas will now play student politics to keep control of constituency Labour parties and that that will keep them occupied. Labour at least had one success — they saw off the potential LibDem challenge in the South. The LibDems are not going to be the new centre party they hoped to become and are irrelevant again in national level politics.
Do we do this by returning to Marx and “real” socialism?
Or do we re-start all over again and begin afresh?
Can we pix and mix the best of both?
I do not think we should in any way dilute an uncompromising message as to what socialism is and is not.
I appreciate this is not your suggestion, but I got a reply the other day to one of my posts on another forum, to say in effect that most Americans “are trained like Pavlov’s dogs” to react negatively to the language which I use. “Your post is not very effectively communicating your message. I suggest that we need to design for a post capitalist/socialist economy. So there is room for discussion”.
It is basically saying ‘don’t scare the horses’ in my view.
But if we are not doing this, then no one is.
The problem we have had with elections is contacting those who voted for the socialist case. However, with very few make an enquiry on the socialist case we have to find another means for them to contact us. This is where the street stalls provides the means for them to step forward and say ‘I voted for socialism’.
We’ll be back on the stall tomorrow expecting this to occur, or at some time in the future.
The SPGB will continue doing what it has been doing for more than 100 years which is to spread the idea of a new socialist society . There is not such thing as disillusioned workers, they real thing is that they are still believing that capitalism and capitalists leaders is their only solution. Most workers around the world are marching behind nationalists leaders and right wingers. In England the workers are divided between nationalists and pro-European union. At the present time most workers do not care about socialism, their main concern is reformism. In the USA probably workers are going to elect Donald Trump because he is a nationalists and that sounds good to their ear, and for a long period of time workers will continue fighting against each others
“Your post is not very effectively communicating your message. I suggest that we need to design for a post capitalist/socialist economy. So there is room for discussion”.
It is basically saying ‘don’t scare the horses’ in my view.Or is it saying ‘the description is fine but the definition of the design is insufficient to persuade me to become a socialist’?
We knew this was going to happen. The voting British working class hate immigrants and love the flag more than they want to eat or not freeze.
The Socialist Party laid its case before the emerge of Leninism, Bolshevism and the Soviet Union, and most workers in Europe ended up supporting the reformists, and the same conception was spread around the world, even more, workers around the world never knew what socialism is, and up to the present time most workers are still following the reformist cause, and it is getting worse, because nationalism, Ethnic nationalism, and anti-communism is spreading around the world like an epidemic. and workers are moving toward the right-wingers,
The so-called socialists which are emerging now, they are like the old reformists from the Social democracy movement, they want the workers to fight for better medical service, free education, and more taxation for the rich, the same group of reformists that pushed Roosevelt with the New Deal, they are new dealers, the old welfare state conception which was also a failure, and others are fighting for the favourite little toy known as Neo-liberalism. The SPGB is the only one laying the case for a post-capitalist society but the socialist party can not grab the workers by the hair and force them to become real socialists
Those workers who voted for the European Union they are nationalist, ethnic nationalists too, because they want a Europe for Europeans, or white peoples only, and they want all the others workers to leave, where is the so-called internationalism of the working class? It went thru the toilet, the movement that existed during the time of Marx and Engels is gone. during my young generation, most peoples loved the ideas and the conception of Marx and Engels, but in this epoch, nobody cares about them, and they are not reading about advanced ideas, libraries and bookstores are being closed, they are just repeating like parrots whatever the rulers are saying.
In the USA workers want a white buffalo in the White House, they do not even care about social democrat reforms, they do not care if they lose the reforms obtained from prior years, such as medical benefits, free education, free transportation, civil rights, and high taxation for the rich, they want all the workers including the natives to leave and build a nation of white nationalists, they do not care if children are placed in cage-like animals, they do not care if those children die, or others human beings are killed by wars, there is not an anti-war movement, that movement is already gone. Where is the so-called class consciousness? without class consciousness a socialist society can not be established, those groups talking about the emergence of socialism in the USA, they are just making noises like empty cans, that movement does not exist.
The political commentator Jonathan Cook’s insightful take on the result
“…We lost our last illusions. The system is rigged – as it always has been – to benefit those in power. It will never willingly allow a real socialist, or any politician deeply committed to the health of our societies and to the planet, to take that power away from the corporate class. That, after all, is the very definition of power. That is what the corporate media is there to achieve…”
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