United Kingdom local elections, 2014 - London - SPGB campaign

United Kingdom local elections, 2014 - London - SPGB campaign
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United...lections,_2014

The SPGB are standing in four wards in London
The campaign blog is here
http://spgb.blogspot.co.uk/

In North London;
- Junction (in Islington, North London)

In South London;
- Clapham Town (in Lambeth, South London)
- Ferndale (in Lambeth, South London)
- Larkhall (in Lambeth, South London)

Campaigning as follows;
- Thursday 1 May - North London - Literature Stall at Marx Memorial Library (Clerkenwell Green - from 12 noon)
- Saturday 3 May - South London - Election/Literature Stall (South London - 12 noon)
- Saturday 10 May - South London - Election/Literature Stall (South London - 12 noon)
- Saturday 17 May - South London - Election/Literature Stall (South London - 12 noon)
- Tuesday 20 May - West London - The European Elections 2014 (West London - 8.00pm)

If you can come along and help out and unite for socialism, please do or for any other enquiry or just to wish the SPGB support then contact the SPGB.

Hi The Idler,

Can you please explain (at least somewhat detailed) what would happen if the SPGB won a majority? What is their plan? And what if they won some seats only?

Thanks.

Because it worked so well last time around...

Well, the SPGB are trying to hasten a significant majority of the working-class to want and understand socialism, not a majority of parliamentary seats in any particular parliament.
With a significant majority of the working-class wanting and understanding socialism, there would be many reforms on offer from the ruling class with the caveat that workers stop supporting socialism.
With the working-class in political power and consciously wanting socialism, the SPGB will have performed its function. The working-class could take the productive capacities of the world and begin producing for use not profit.

Assuming a parliamentary minority of seats and minority of support, the SPGB could continue to advocate for socialism with the new parliamentary platform. The SPGB delegates would not abstain on all votes in parliament. Instead judgement would be used on what is of benefit to the working-class and what is not.

The case for revolutionary socialism was put to large numbers of people, they rejected it peaceably. Nobody was bayoneted and nobody was shot. The object was not achieved, but there's no need to be sniffy about efforts at trying. If there's a better way of capturing political power for socialism then I'm sure the SPGB would be interested in hearing it. Or if you think you can do better at campaigning, then you're welcome to come along and put the case for revolutionary socialism to the electorate.

I don't know what a better way might be, maybe posting another five threads about these sub-reformist election campaigns, maybe one for each borough of the United Kingdom.

I recall elections where the SPGB got how ever many hundred votes and called it a success because you came above TUSC or the Lib Dems: it's completely deluded.

I don't have an answer on 'capturing political power for socialism' at the moment but neither do SPGB, however I'm not repeating the same tactic that has failed for the last 100+ years in the vain hope that this time it will be different. What's that quote about insanity again...

I don't think they rejected it, but rather were tricked, had a lack of knowledge, or were caught up in one of many efficiencies of the electoral system: "but they won't get any votes so it's a waste to vote them, etc.".

I posted this topic, then one about the SPGB campaign in local elections, and one about Euro-elections generally. Contesting elections for the capture of political power is not sub-reformist. The last time Orthodox Trotskyism was put to workers, was the Communist League standing in London local elections a few years ago and workers rejected it.
Success in an election is winning not losing one but if the SPGB got more votes than TUSC that means TUSC are even less successful. As I said in the other topic on the debate with UKIP, the SPGB say that the SPGB has not been successful in achieving its object.
So when the SPGB debate, they're called a debating club, when they contest elections, they're accused of having no answer on capturing political power for socialism, when critics are asked for other more effective tactics, none are forthcoming.

So why continue with the same strategy?

As it happens, I think it is necessary to maintain a presence, as a party, at elections. After all, what does it say if a party has no presence during an election period?

But the obsession on the voting aspect of the election seems to be self-defeating and indeed, as the SPGB has itself admitted, defeated.

Why isn't the SPGB campaigning in different areas? It really says a lot about the party's lack of size and capabilities that it can only contest 4 local wards. It's almost pointless.

Which hardly counts as any kind of achievement.
Beating TUSC is not hard.

At least you can admit that.

I'm asking you to consider why, having been debating and contesting elections for over one hundred years no more workers have been drawn to the SPGB's ideas of socialism than when you started. In that light I'm suggesting that the tactics *might* not be working.

And without seeming too pretentious, I always like a parable here: For years the dominant treatment is medicine was bloodletting, pretty much whatever was wrong with you you had some blown drawn. Sometime in the 19th Century people started realising that bloodletting that it didn't work and that it had no real demonstrable results, the problem was they didn't know what else to do. So, out of fear of 'doing nothing' and with a lack of 'something' people kept bloodletting. It was better to do something, anything, even if you knew it didn't work but especially if that thing was the thing you'd been doing for so long, than have to take a step back and come up with something else. Like I said, maybe a bit pretentious, but it seems to be where a lot of us are right now.

As Engels put it 'in order that the masses may understand what is to be done, long, persistent work is required, and it is just this work that we are now pursuing, '. But its also worth mentioning the SPGB does not restrict itself to talk, debates, rallies, lectures, contesting elections, hustings, festivals, events, demonstrations etc. Its a myth that one tactic is being pursued alone.
Are you criticising voting, elections, parliamentary elections or measuring SPGB support on any of these here, I'm not sure?

It's a shame workers don't support socialism, but the SPGB is one of the biggest parties describing itself as Marxist and working hard (particularly in the simultaneous Euro elections) in the hope that other workers will join the SPGB and help.

It's not a case of *might* not be working, I'm saying they *ARE NOT* successful at achieving the object of socialism. The party is a merely a means to an end, not an end in itself.
I understand the parable and you might have used this in the UKIP thread where the SPGB were accused of offering nothing as an alternative to forcibly censoring fascists.

Right. And, for the first time since the enthusiasm for Sawant thankfully died down (which reminds me - how would you like it if the ciwis posted separate topics for every election campaign they participate in?), anyone using the "New Posts" function was assaulted by - elections, elections, elections.

No, taken for itself it is, in fact, reformist - because reformism, as the term is used by every group except the SPGB, consists precisely in attempts to use the bourgeois state "for socialism". Of course, most reformists imagine a gradual transition from capitalism, whereas the SPGB claims that they want an immediate transition to the higher phase of the communist society. The thing is, though, the SPGB clearly doesn't have any sort of strategy for this transition. They want to win the elections - then something will happen - then socialism. In fact, if I were a malicious person, I would heartily wish that the SPGB win one of their precious elections.

What makes the SPGB campaign sub-reformist is that most reformists at least participate in the class struggle, albeit in a confused and counterproductive manner. The SPGB limits itself to passive propaganda.

Oh, are we playing the "well my sect is not any worse than yours" game? That might be the case - certainly the SL have been a bit disoriented ever since the Soviet Union fell to capitalist restoration - but that doesn't mean that your sect is any good. However, hilariously, almost every statement in the above paragraph is incorrect.

The Communist League - I assume you're talking about the split from the Marxist Party - used to be Healyites. Now, the old Healyite organisation, the SLL/WRP, maintained a sort of literary orthodoxy, particularly in their dispute with Pablo, Frank and later Lambert. But their practice, like the practice of many ostensibly Trotskyist parties, had nothing to do with the Trotskyism of Trotsky or Cannon.

And the Communist League, at this point, were no longer Healyites, although they still worshiped old Gerry. Like the badly misnamed Workers' Power group, they turned to the "anti-capitalist" and "anti-globalisation" movements, and pretty much abandoned any kind of Marxism, even the most degenerated.

Now, obviously the Communist League didn't do very well in the elections. But this doesn't mean the workers rejected them - it means the voters did. Many voters are not proletarians and many proletarians don't vote. In fact the constant conflation of voters and proletarians by the SPGB really accounts for a lot of their strange positions.

In fact, "a couple of years ago" couldn't have been later than 2005, since the Communist League dissolved into the fairly formless "A World to Win" in that year. I just had a look at their site - "no to corporate power, yes to people's power". It's a good thing Marx is dead or these populist kiddies banging on about "corporations" and "the people" would give the old man a heart attack.

Well aren't you proud. This really reeks of the lowest sort of politicking - "so, how many votes did you get, Dave?"

I mean - we can't state how the SPGB might help the seizure of state power because the SPGB, as an organisation, is incapable of helping. For the SPGB to help it would have to abandon pretty much everything that makes it distinct. In general, though, it's not that we don't have a strategy - our strategy has always been the same. Building the revolutionary workers' party, agitating for rank-and-file militancy in the unions and similar organisations, fighting for reforms from a revolutionary perspective, eventually building organs of dual power and smashing the bourgeois state.

Posting two topics about two campaigns in two major nationwide (or continent-wide) elections to parliamentary legislatures is not excessive, same goes for CWI campaigns such as Sawant in elections. Elections are not necessarily a bad thing, there are plenty of topics about very small protests and small strikes. Why should election campaigns be any different?

Again, the myth is repeated. How does aiming at capturing political power including by contesting elections to legislatures count as passive propaganda? It doesn't. How does contesting elections prove no strategy? It doesn't.

Also could you point out where the SPGB have been in favour of 'immediate transition to the higher phase of the communist society'?
Your assumptions are completely incorrect. I'm not talking about that Communist League which started in 1990, I'm talking about the Communist League which started in 1988 and which stood in general elections in 2010 and 2012.


I'm not proud, but bricolage was saying the SPGB claimed beating TUSC was a success. I'm saying in terms of a first past the post election, success is winning the election, losing candidates are degrees of unsuccessfulness.


What makes the SPGB distinct is the SPGB strategy is building the revolutionary socialist party, agitating for trade unions to represent their members best interests in respect of wages and conditions, fighting against illusions in futile reforms from a revolutionary perspective, immediately capturing political power so that the state (bourgeois or 'workers') can wither away. Trots have been spectacularly bad at building the revolutionary workers' party and in militant unions.

No, the myth-making is yours and is contained in the sentence, "How does aiming at capturing political power including by contesting elections to legislatures count as passive propaganda?"

The SPGB does not aim at capturing political power. How can it, when it fields such a small number of candidates (1? 2? 3?) in general elections? It is clear that the SPGB's electoral strategy is merely symbolic rather than a serious attempt to contest power. It is, as its critics lament, abstract propaganda. The SPGB never wages serious political campaigns but, rather, pride themselves on stepping back from such grubby affairs.

Because strikes and protests - some forms of protests at least - are examples of proletarian militancy, which election campaigns, by themselves, are decidedly not. I have been just as critical of people who post threads about nonsense like liberal-led marches, or hashtags trending on Twitter.

This is, interestingly, the second time you insinuate that the SPGB aims to capture political power through legislature, which is somewhat at variance with the usual pious SPGB line about using parliament merely to safeguard the spontaneous uprising that will coincide with the SPGB winning an election.

Anyway, it isn't the commitment to winning elections - as bizarre as it is for an ostensibly socialist party to adhere to the parliamentary road after the events in postwar Germany etc. - that makes the SPGB propaganda passive and sterile, it's the SPGB approach to the dissemination of the propaganda - election campaigns and debates - and the content of the propaganda (which, to be honest, often sounds like a used car salesman trying to sell a particularly dubious vehicle).

Again, I don't claim that the SPGB have no strategy because they contest elections, I claim they have no strategy because, well, they have never outlined any sort of strategy for the seizure of power beyond "winning an election", unless you count the fact that they sometimes make vague noises about some sort of uprising - in fact they don't call it an uprising, that would probably turn off many SPGB supporters (uprisings are usually violent affairs, with people getting shot and bayoneted, and we can't have that, no?) - that would coincide with an SPGB victory. Which is a more polite equivalent of saying "it's going to happen, but fuck it, we have no idea how it's going to happen".

Perhaps tomorrow - I don't feel like going through the somewhat broken SPGB site now. It really doesn't matter either way. The SPGB can proclaim themselves in favour of immediately abolishing money and giving everyone free ponies and throwing all accountants into the sun, the reality of the situation is that, in the unlikely event that the SPGB won an election, they would have to manage capitalism.

Ah, so as an example of orthodox Trotskyism (hey, it's a pretentious name, but don't blame us, that's how third-campists and others call us), you give... the British affiliate (or rather, clone) of a party that renounced Trotskyism.

Fair enough.

The point was, of course, that the failure of the Communist League in the elections doesn't mean that the workers rejected their deluded Castroism, but that the voters did. Voters and workers aren't the same group.

In fact bricolage claimed that certain SPGB members considered beating TUSC a success, an impression you have done nothing to dispel.

No, the SPGB strategy is building the SPGB, as one of the parties participating in the bourgeois democracy, not a workers' party as the political, revolutionary organisation of the class-conscious elements of the class.

I think you're deluding yourself. Even the erstwhile WRP had more of an industrial base, including after the departure of the WSL, than the SPGB. In fact the industrial fraction of the SPGB numbers precisely zero people.

But, as per all of the above, no group can be called revolutionary that calls for working through the bourgeois state, instead of smashing it. The SPGB doesn't fight against reformist illusions, it engenders them by insisting that any fight for reforms is reformist - and conversely that reformists are the only ones that fight for meaningful reforms. In fact the SPGB presents a picture of sterile, academic, semi-religious socialism, with nothing to offer to either the proletariat or those minorities that are the natural allies of the proletariat, that would send any sane man running to the reformist camp.

That one sentence alone shows how loose the SPGB's grasp of Marxist theory is. You equate the bourgeois state with the proletarian one and then suggest that it will wither away because the SPGB won an election. This is no longer idealism, this is sheer lunacy, or rather, dishonesty.

The British Trots, who never made a serious study of the French Turn and who still follow the suicidal policy of Healy's The Club group, haven't. Things were different in e.g. Ceylon or Vietnam.

This doesn't answer the question. As you yourself have said, the SPGB has admitted that its current strategy has failed. Why are they continuing with it? An out-of-context quote from a 150 year old dead guy doesn't change anything!

There's a phrase people use sometimes: 'practice makes perfect'. But by itself it's not necessarily true. Rather, 'perfect practice makes perfect'. Continuing to practice the same strategy for hundreds of years makes it no more likely to succeed if it is the wrong strategy, which the SPGBs strategy clear is, as it admits itself.

I'm criticising the way in which the SPGB interacts with parliamentary elections. Elections are an opportunity for exposure of our propaganda, they are not some sort of ends in themselves, nor are bourgeois elections a genuine measure of support, so it is wholly idealistic to expect a country like Britain to ever be in a position where anywhere near a majority of workers vote for a revolutionary party.

This just won't do. It's not 'a shame workers don't support socialism'. That's no analysis. We can't just shrug our shoulders and say 'oh, it's a shame'. There are material and organisational reasons socialism isn't a popular idea; material insofar as capitalism is still able to buy off a critical mass of the working class in developed countries (and to adequately control and dampen the political instincts of those who it cannot buy off), and organisational insofar as the revolutionary aspects of the 'left' lack size, credence, and skills learned from experience.

That the SPGB is one of the bigger parts of this lumpen aspect of revolutionary politics is not really a positive. Indeed, the SPGB has existed for over a century now and, honestly, is it any less irrelevant than when it came into existence?

This looks like a case of useless irrelevant criticism by what are probably arm-chair so-called revolutionaries.

The SPGB has a few hundred supporters, and they're trying to do something. There's no need to throw these useless arguments of but nobody likes them, they're not successful, or whatever at them.

I suppose I'm going to get some angry reply of how you guys are so involved in politics and raising class conciousness. :laugh::laugh::laugh:

If you guys have a better method of achieving socialism, then by all means support it, but I'm sure that the SPGB is being much more successful in supporting socialism than you currently are. It's one of the few parties which are still truly socialist and don't just devolve into some state capitalist or pseudo-communist party.

If workers aren't prepared to do something as little as (waste their) vote for socialism, how can we expect them to do something more onerous? Elections provide an excellent information gathering resource, so the social forces in play can test one anothers strength. I think it was Otto Neurath who defined democracy between enemies as being like an encounter between military forces where they count up one anothers guns, and decide the biggest side would win anyway.

The fact that the working class don't give their voting support to socialism is as valuable to know as finding the numbers who will. Any movement/idea/organisation that refuses to avail itself of this simple information gathering device is frankly foolish, and even more frankly seems to be more about avoiding having delusions protected by ignorance rather than upholding any significant strategic or ideological principle. It's easier to believe in silent majorities than to realise that radicals and socialists are utterly outgunned by the working class' rock solid support for capitalism.