Nigel Irritable
Five, Ten, Fifteen Years
To expand on the part about the demographic above while horribly mixing some metaphors:
The plankton soup of ex-group member independents is getting smaller and older, slowly but surely, as the number of primary sources of sustenance goes down - ie the number of well organised groups with an ability to recruit and an orientation towards the general public rather than "the left". That negatively impacts on the parasitic groups, and in turn on the number of "independents".
There has been an infusion of new blood into that milieu in Britain, due to the SWP's disaster, but in the longer run the SWP's slow death will cut off one of the few remaining arteries. There has been a much smaller recent boost in Dublin from the WSM hitting the rocks and from a half dozen people leaving the SP, but not nearly enough to balance out the ageing of the milieu as a whole.
It's the combination of an ageing demographic with timeless repetition of naive formulas for unity based on soft lowest common denominator politics and cynical burn-out hostility to the existing groups that makes dealing with that milieu for a prologed period of time so depressing.
In Ireland, much of the hostility to the existing groups boils down to a desire for the SP (and also the SWP at a pinch) to build them a political home, providing the resources and infrastructure and the young activists but crucially not providing the politics. A refusal to build them that home is "sectarianism". Any group insisting on arguing its politics rather than soft left unity platitudes is "sectarianism", as while admissible in theory actually arguing your particular politics is in practice deemed unhelpful and dogmatic. Anything that enables a group to actually recruit in the first place is sectarianism. And of course pointing any of this out is particularly rabid sectarianism.
In Britain, Left Unity represents a decision not to wait around moaning, but it also ends up as the worst of all worlds, with the negative features of the existing groups and the ineffectuality and political softness of the plankton soup.
The plankton soup of ex-group member independents is getting smaller and older, slowly but surely, as the number of primary sources of sustenance goes down - ie the number of well organised groups with an ability to recruit and an orientation towards the general public rather than "the left". That negatively impacts on the parasitic groups, and in turn on the number of "independents".
There has been an infusion of new blood into that milieu in Britain, due to the SWP's disaster, but in the longer run the SWP's slow death will cut off one of the few remaining arteries. There has been a much smaller recent boost in Dublin from the WSM hitting the rocks and from a half dozen people leaving the SP, but not nearly enough to balance out the ageing of the milieu as a whole.
It's the combination of an ageing demographic with timeless repetition of naive formulas for unity based on soft lowest common denominator politics and cynical burn-out hostility to the existing groups that makes dealing with that milieu for a prologed period of time so depressing.
In Ireland, much of the hostility to the existing groups boils down to a desire for the SP (and also the SWP at a pinch) to build them a political home, providing the resources and infrastructure and the young activists but crucially not providing the politics. A refusal to build them that home is "sectarianism". Any group insisting on arguing its politics rather than soft left unity platitudes is "sectarianism", as while admissible in theory actually arguing your particular politics is in practice deemed unhelpful and dogmatic. Anything that enables a group to actually recruit in the first place is sectarianism. And of course pointing any of this out is particularly rabid sectarianism.
In Britain, Left Unity represents a decision not to wait around moaning, but it also ends up as the worst of all worlds, with the negative features of the existing groups and the ineffectuality and political softness of the plankton soup.
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