OK, Let's consider this idea of "controlling working class areas" with a real world example. Take, for instance the Stoke area (because the problems of this area and the attempts of its Labour-led council to "manage" the incredible level of ever accelerationg Central Government ordered and controlled funding cuts was the subject of a good BBC4 documentary recently). Firstly Big Capitalism , as with so many previous industrial heartland areas, has pretty much abandoned the Stoke area. The Potteries have mostly been shipped to China. The working class in Stoke are living in an impoverished post industrial wasteland. Local funding for swimming pools, libraries, health centres, nurseries, the NHS, is no longer available. Even a honestly socialist, pro working class, party can no more magic up additional funding to create new jobs on Stoke, or reverse the centrally sourced funding cuts , than the New Labour rabble currently "managing" the death of Stoke by a thousand cuts . Nothing wrong with local self-organisation, in fact it's crucial, but the context of organisation in communities cannot be the illusion of "replacing state services via local collaboration/co-operation" - the communities are too poor to replace the resources stolen via the "austerity agenda" or capitalism generally. To combat that, and deindustrialisation, the looming collapse of the NHS, the robbery of national wealth by the capitalist class, requires a revolutionery, internationalist socialist agenda. Only by placing the local struggles against the cuts in a wider political framework can the local community be deterred from falling either into passive hopelessness at their sheer local powerlessness in isolation - or falling into scapegoatism against easily accessible minority community victims. Always easier , without socialist politics, to blame the local ethnic minority for a shortage of housing or a lack of jobs, or blaming a few grants given to local ethnic minority projects , for their own poverty.
The IWCA have (I say "have", but in fact the IWCA as an organisation with significant membership or local councillors is all but completely dead today - a completely failed initiative - which tested that varient of a localist campaigning and electoral strategy to destruction ) specifically abandoned socialist politics , and indeed regularly denounced socialist politics and the Left generally as having "no relevance to the needs of working class people", for a strange mix of localist campaigning and co-operativist, self-help, ideas - aimed at a very narrow subset of the overall UK working class - mainly the poorest, mainly white, unorganised, poorly educated, working class living on a few big housing estates. This group is actually, for well known solid political reasons usually characterised as the marginalised "Lumpen Proletariat" rather than as a potential key actor in the class struggle. It is traditionally the recruiting ground for fascism, and will always be a hard recruiting ground for the revolutionery Left. Organised workers, and better off, less demoralised, workers (many of them wrongly labelled as "middle class"), most not nowadays living on huge housing estates, are still the core target grouping for work by revolutionery socialists wishing to build an effective mass party.
Prioritising political work amongst the Lumpen Proletariat, particularly encouraging them to seek to" replace" failing state provision by their own volunteer efforts, , indeed dealing with any subset of the working class purely as residents, as citizens, as service users, is actually a distraction from the central task of building co-ordinated working class resistance to the cuts in localities, which requires local mass organisation/mobilisation making demands on the state and capitalism - guided by socialist analysis and explanation . Remember that even the Mondragon Co-operative Movement in the Basque Country have been hard hit by the world wide capitalist crisis, and have , unbelievably, actually outsourced some production to China at the cost of lost local jobs ! Localist, self-help politics are a reactionery dead end. Separating the struggle in the local private and public sector workplaces from these local anti-cuts struggles is also a dead end. The working class really only has any "power" , short of actual physical insurrectionery struggle on the streets, at work, creating surplus value - or via strikes - REFUSING to create surplus value and run services. As a resident, a consumer of services, a citizen, the working class person is pretty powerless. No trendy denial of the centrality of the working class struggle TO THE WORKPLACE , can change this basic fact. The poor and workless can generally only riot, in isolation,whilst the working class AT WORK can potentially close down the entire society. Just because , in the UK, it is proving difficult to build a mass radical socialist movement today, at a very early stage of the capitalist cuts process in the UK (compared to, say, Greece, Spain, Portugal) , doesn't mean that this task isn't the only one that leads to any joined up, politically viable, alternative to the world capitalist crisis.
Don't be tempted to abandon your socialist politics now guys, for some localist, self-help, mirage. The impact of the 2008 world capitalist crisis will take some time to mature into new political structures. It's happening in Greece, Spain, Italy, Portugal - and it'll happen here too. A bit of patience needed, not despair.
