The signifigance of this simply cannot be ignored.
[Snip list of a few good results in council elections in a few wards nationally]
But what actually is "the significance of this?"
The IWCA has proven that if a group does a huge amount of community activism in a small area over a period of time it is possible to get a good vote in a council election or two. That's not in doubt, but to be honest I don't think it was ever in doubt.
Quite a lot of organisations have experience of doing a lot of community based activism in particular areas. Even leaving aside as you seem to want to do, the SP experience in Lewisham, Coventry or Huddersfield, we have the prior examples of Scottish Militant Labour in Glasgow or the Socialist Party in Dublin or Cork. These experiences have sometimes led to larger scale electoral successes than the IWCA has managed. It's also a tactic used by mainstream parties - it was even a cornerstone of Lib Dem strategy when they are serious about making a breakthrough in a particular area for quite a while.
The idea that by concentrating resources on community activism in a small area that you can get a good vote in a local council election in that ward is not a novel one, or even a particularly insightful one.
What the IWCA have now run into is something that other people have discovered a while ago. Such a strategy has serious problems. Community activism, if carried out seriously, and in particular if it's radical class based community activism, requires a huge amount of effort over a significant period of time. Really, a huge amount. And, the results are limited. You can certainly get a good result in a council election in a ward, but then what happens?
Recruitment from community work is tough. Votes are easier, at least locally, but recruitment tends to be slow and difficult. So slow and difficult for instance that for instance almost all of the IWCA "pilot" branches have faded away. They haven't even been able to recruit enough people to sustain themselves even in one tiny area where they have been working and are locally known.
Believe it or not, that wouldn't come as a surprise to some of us. I was in an Irish SP branch some years ago the activity of which was almost entirely community based. Over a period of years, the branch worked in one area, knocking on doors multiple nights every week. The issues that were being pushed were things like the bin tax, local school cuts, council housing waiting lists, that sort of thing. Our local candidate got 1,400 or so votes in a local election and just missed out on a council seat. Here's the thing though, in all that time the branch recruited one, maybe two, people through that work. If it wasn't for people joining for other reasons and being assigned to our branch, the branch would have fallen apart even while it was raking in votes locally.
There's a second and even more significant problem. Even where local work can be sustained for the long haul (something the IWCA has managed precisely once in a significant number of attempts), local success is extremely difficult to spread. Winning votes in a local council ward, on this sort of basis, has little effect two wards over and none at all in the next town up the road.
Let me give you another Irish example. The Workers and Unemployed Action group is a local organisation in South Tipperary in the Irish midlands. It has been plugging away for 25 years, based in Clonmel a large town there. It has become a really major force in that town and is sometimes the largest party on the town council. This month, after
25 years of solid activism, it has won its first seat in the next big town over. What they've managed in their town is more impressive than anything the IWCA has managed in electoral terms. And 25 years on, they are just beginning to make an impact in a second location.
To generalise, or even spread, community activism, you need generalisable campaigns. The poll tax, the bin tax, those sort of things. When there's an issue like that available, organisations can build a base through community activism more generally. When on the other hand you are knocking on doors and talking about speed bumps or a particular bus route (both things I've done) you may be doing something useful and important but you are not doing something generalisable. And worse still if it is all you are doing you are in serious trouble in the long run because you won't even be able to replace your existing numbers as people inevitably drop out.
Joe Reilly said:
But largely as a result of the Labour Party regionally making them their three main targets in the 2008 election as a Green Party Cllr on here correctly predicted they would do, the IWCA lost a couple in the last election.
I'm not particularly interested in scoring points against the IWCA on this. Council elections are less than reliable and while solid activism can guarantee you a solid vote it can't always guarantee you a win. However, the point about the IWCA becoming a bit target for the regional Labour Party doesn't surprise me at all - Labour customarily put vastly more resources into trying to get rid of Socialist Party councillors than they do into trying to compete in areas which have Tory or Lib Dem councillors.
Joe Reilly said:
The fact that some branches didn't sustain the effort is hardly important in terms of looking at a national strategy.
This is, in my view, exactly the wrong way of looking at the issue. The fact that every branch bar one couldn't sustain the effort is perhaps the single most important thing you need to come to terms with in looking at a national strategy, fighting it out for top spot with the problem of spreading localised success.
From the point of view of the Socialist Party, we have a very strong record of community activism. We also have experience of building a local electoral base through it. And we also have experience of its limitations, particularly in periods where there is no generalisable community based issue. I have no hesitation in agreeing with you that serious and intensive community activism will be "one of the building blocks" of a revitalised workers movement and a revitalised class politics, but it isn't THE ANSWER for a number of reasons.
Firstly, there are the issues of sustainability and generalisability I've already mentioned and won't go into again. The IWCA experience does not provide much comfort on that score.
Secondly, what about all of the other stuff in the world? I know that the IWCA is customarily dismissive, bordering on aggressive, about international issues, but even leaving those issues aside for a moment, there are workplace issues to be considered. Assuming here that you haven't abandoned a Marxist view of class for an entirely sociological one, the workplace remains the central place where workers are exploited and a key location of their potential power.
The IWCA does not split its resources into things outside of its community focus, which is fair enough on a tactical level. A small group can't do everything and it's perfectly reasonable to concentrate on doing one thing well. The problems is that the IWCA and its members seem to think that this is a virtue rather than a necessity and tend to be aggressively hostile towards other forms of activism that don't fit into their single approach. This didn't look entirely unreasonable when industrial struggle was at an all time low, but now that there are some important struggles going on in the workplace it looks a bit silly.
The Socialist Party has played an important role in the Linamar dispute (where the convenor was already a member), at Visteon (where two of the convenors joined the SP) and in the building industry (where two members of the strike committee at LOR were in the SP). The sort of role the Socialist Party plays in these disputes simply would not be possible without the long term work we do in the unions and in various workplaces (the two not being exactly the same thing of course).
I am using this as an example, because presumably not even the IWCA thinks that builders and car workers are useless middle class students, but there's a wider point here. Other forms of activism often have better returns in terms of recruitment than community activism. People are, in my experience, more likely to actually join a political organisation over an issue of "high" politics, local, domestic or international, than they are over community style stuff. You aren't going to build an electoral base in most parts of the country by talking about Palestine or capitalism, but you are more likely to get someone to join your organisation over such a thing than you are over speed bumps on the street.
This is related to another point, which is the general lack of clarity about "high" politics in the IWCA. It's not, as far as I know socialist, it's not as far as I know committed to anything in particular as a final goal. Which makes it pretty difficult to recruit people on such grounds. You are offering people an approach, not quite a strategy yet but an approach, but you aren't offering them a goal to achieve with that approach. But this part is probably best kept to an other discussion.
Joe Reilly said:
As for the myth of '15 years and getting nowhere' - the first ever seats the iwca contested were in 2002. The IWCA wasn't even registered as a party until 2001.
Well, seven years of discussion and preparation followed by eight years of implementation if you like. It's long enough to draw some conclusions at this point - both positive and negative.
