Party time...
new short course, what is radical politics, and a couple of thoughts on where to start
The whole Your Party thing is a kind of shit show and people have been quite pissed off about that, with good reason. There was, briefly, a strange moment of excitement that something ‘left wing’ might arise in the UK. For that brief moment the election campaign of Polanski in the Green Party, and the initial sign up call from Zarah that led to talk of 800k people interested in a new left party, produced a lot of chatter about change. Then the shit show and people went back to our default position of ‘fu**ing useless politicians’. Which is a default position for a reason. It reflects reality, politicians are fu**ing useless, for the most part. But just because someone is useless doesn’t mean that someone better is waiting in the wings. Our options are never quite our own choice.
I’m not a fan of electoral politics, and generally try to avoid getting involved in that sort of thing. I don’t like seeing canvassers at my door just before an election, people I’ve never seen before playing out some game and knocking me up like a chugger. Since I don’t like these fly-by-night canvassers I don’t have much interest in doing it myself.
I’m interested in a left wing party that starts somewhere else, not at election times. Once you’ve started somewhere else then I can see that election work can sometimes be both unavoidable and even, to a degree, useful. The reality, though, is that if you frame your political activity around elections you’re kind of a sucker cos the games rigged from the get go. You first need to be a real thing, an actual thing that people know about, see doing stuff, that can show that change doesn’t come through a ballot box. Change comes through … many different means. Breaking the spell of the ballot box is kind of key to anything that actually might work.
A lot of this comes down to trying to shift our understanding of where power lies. Yes, elections make changes, but too often these are re-arrangements rather than changes. Bored of one set of supposed main characters people try out another. Nothing changes other than the faces and we get bored again. Or horrified, or pissed off.
Power is a complicated thing no doubt but I like to work with a pragamatic approach. Power is found in my capacity to do stuff. Being able to change laws is one way of doing stuff and the power to do that is important but even there it depends on the laws that are changed being able to work. And that capacity for a law to work doesn’t just depend on the politicians and judges and cops. People break laws all the time, and for the most part quite harmlessly. We ignore stupid shit that makes no sense as long as we aren’t going to get caught. The drug laws are probably the most obvious example of stupid shit people ignore, but there’s a whole boatload of examples. Laws pretend to be solutions to problems.
Often real solutions to problems are much more low key, small scale, local, intimate and involve changing relationships and connections as much as anything else. These kind of changes need to be where any new left party starts. The question needs to be, what difference can we make? If the only answer is ‘give people an option at the ballot box’ then it’s not much of an option, nor much of a change.
I’ve no idea whether this new left party will get off the ground. I’ll try and chip in where I can. There’s some positives around, not least the whole mass of people who are, despite the shit show, trying to see if they can get something to work. I was listening to someone from a Your Party group up in Stoke who had gone out door knocking, doing the whole canvassing thing, but not to get people to vote. They’d gone out in a listening exercise, to ask people in a local area what they thought about their space, what changes they thought were needed.
On the doorstep one of the first responses from a lot of people was ‘we can’t vote, so no point talking to us’. When they were told we’re not here for your vote but to organise this came as a shock. Then they chatted. It might seem small, but making this change, not going out to get someones vote but to help organise, to help make a difference, this is the kind of starting point a new left party needs to use.
Aside
So I’m trying to use what I have to chip in, and I teach free education courses, so makes sense to try and add something in from that capacity. I chatted with the local Your Party people and they were looking to do some political education. I don’t really do political education, as it’s usually more like a kind of training I find, which has its place. So I’m putting together a short radical education course, kind of like political education but we don’t have a truth to deliver, just some space for developing our critical thought on a subject. In this case the subject is ‘what is radical politics’. If you’re around Brighton the course is free and on a Wednesday evening. Four weeks long, starting mid November. Free, but limited spaces so I’m asking people to register if they want to attend. Here’s a registration link: https://whatisradicalpolitics.eventbrite.co.uk
