The Cedar Lounge Revolution is a group blog written by "leftists too stubborn to quit". There's a lot of good writing here - humourous, analytical, anecdotal - and there's a lot that strikes a chord with me personally. There's a lot to disagree with too of course. The latest post "The limits of activism: Sinn Féin, Independents, Socialism, Community Activism and Party" (cross posted on Irishelection.com) reminded me of something I wrote a few years ago. The topic I had to write on was "Idealism and vision without organisation is sterile. Organisation without idealism and vision is corrupt" - one of those topics you can write about anything you like. I took the opportunity to mix a bit of autobiography and political science and talk about my days in the Workers' Party and Democratic Left. It was written about five years ago and, if I were to revise it, the conclusion might not be quite so upbeat. Anyway, I decided to leave it alone. Make of it what you will...
The topics that one may cover under the terms of reference of this short essay can hopefully permit a mixing of the academic and the autobiographical. They concern the question of what political parties are for in an age of steadily falling rates of electoral participation, increasing financial corruption and growing indifference to the political process generally. This is an age of homogenised, content-free politics. We now witness a paradoxical combination of the widespread support for the principles of democracy, on the one hand, combined with a steep decline in confidence in its functioning, on the other. In Ireland, as elsewhere, mainstream politics has become stifled by an over-arching consensus on the main issues of economic and financial policy-a factor that makes electoral competition increasingly meaningless. It appears that those opposed to ‘the system’ can only find a voice in small groups of like-minded activists who come together to protest at venues like Seattle, Davos, Prague and elsewhere. Are such politically unconventional groups, aided by the Internet, the sole repositories of political idealism? Should those of us who still belong to political parties of the mainstream left stop deluding ourselves?
Perry Anderson, one of the founding editors of the New Left Review, has argued ‘that the only starting-point for a realistic left is a lucid registration of historical defeat’ (p.16). He goes on to point to the novelty of the present situation in historical terms as ‘for the first time since the Reformation, there are no longer any significant oppositions-that is, systematic rival outlooks-within the thought-world of the West…’ (p.17). It seems that there are two common ways of reacting to this ‘historical defeat’; either one capitulates and accommodates oneself to the new reality or one chooses to ignore it. Most of what might be loosely called the mainstream left has adopted the former course while the self-styled revolutionary left takes the latter option. The far left always look for evidence of counter-trends in what they see as the global class struggle in an effort to refute the defeatist, sell-out arguments of social democrats. For instance when it is pointed out that the industrial working class, the agency of historical transformation, is a rapidly shrinking class in advanced capitalist countries, a member of the Socialist Workers Party will direct your attention to the size of the working class in South Korea.
The other type of reaction-the capitulationist-can be seen in the fervour by which many leading European social democratic leaders embrace the values of globalisation and the outright superiority of private enterprise. All of them signed up for the Maastricht criteria thus greatly restricting what could be attempted in monetary and fiscal policy. Of course there is the logical possibility of a position that comes to terms with reality but that also avoids too many compromises with it. But what does that mean in practice?
At one time I believed that there was a cluster of political parties in Europe that were positioned to the left of the social democrats and were heavily influenced by ‘new left’ themes of Marxism, feminism and ecology. Some of them were transformed communist parties that had become thoroughly democratised. These parties were represented in their national legislatures and the European Parliament. Examples included the Left Party in Sweden, the Socialist Peoples Party in Denmark, the United Left in Spain and, most impressive of all the former Italian Communist Party now called the Democratic Party of the Left. As a member of Democratic Left in Ireland, I could take comfort from the fact that I was part of a loose family of new left, green left, post-Marxist parties that were intellectually respectable, politically radical but were firmly locked into electoral and parliamentary politics. How different it all was from the Worker’s Party.
I joined the WP in 1980 when it still had the Sinn Féin prefix and no Dáil representation. I quickly realised that there were people in the party whose Stalinist views I found abhorrent, but they were mostly members of other constituencies. During the 1980s the WP began to establish a firm, if somewhat limited, base in a predominantly urban, working class electorate. It seemed a reasonable assume that if the party dumped democratic centralism, and its Headquarters staff stopped trying to behave like the Central Committee of the CPSU, then it might grow even more.
The advent of Gorbachev in the Soviet Union was a help to those of us who considered ourselves to be party modernisers. The party won seven Dáil seats and one Euro seat in the 1989 elections, and, it was from this point on that differences within the party became irreconcilable. A power struggle developed between those who advocated a more open politics and the Head Office faction who were used to a much more clandestine and secretive approach. This relates to the question of organisation and idealism in a slightly perverse way. The sub-culture of the Head Office faction can best be understood in terms of people who have always lived the life of a full time revolutionary (many were former IRA prisoners) and were less subject to the usual influences of family, jobs and education.
For all its Leninism, the WP was basically a conspiratorial movement that had its genesis in the Republican Movement, only now it had a parliamentary party. The latter wanted to operate with greater autonomy and flexibility. Needless to say, the issue was one of principal opposing opportunism as far as the Head Office faction was concerned. It emerged that contrary to what most members of the party believed, the Official IRA was still in business. The people in the WP who were most opposed to the open politics line were those who had the highest contempt for what they regarded as ‘bourgeois legality’.
In early 1992, the reform wing led by de Rossa proposed a motion to ‘reconstitute’ the party as a democratic socialist entity. The narrow failure to get a two-thirds majority led directly to the formation of Democratic Left. An early evaluation from a political scientist was uncertain about whether the party had a future as ‘much will depend on its ability to express, and perhaps create a constituency for a post-industrial, anti-capitalist radicalism’ (Dunphy, 1992, p.38). He added that this was a dilemma faced everywhere in Europe. Democratic Left began to harness quite considerable enthusiasm in the early stage. It attracted a few dozen active young people who had never been in the WP, but overall membership in terms of quantity was unimpressive. Democratic Left had vision and idealism. It was never going to challenge Labour as the dominant force on the left, but with what might be termed a niche electorate, it could have been an influential force in Irish politics.
As far as DL was concerned, the organisation failed to express the vision and idealism that existed within its ranks. One of the reasons for this failure was that most of the membership came from the WP. The whole culture of the WP was corrupt in that it was tainted by a cynicism that was pervasive throughout both factions. I remained a member because I believed I was a realist and that things were going to change. DL never really developed into a party that had a life of its own, other than as the vehicle of a handful of dominant personalities. There was as inevitability that these ageing notables were never going to roll up their sleeves and build a political party .For them, the Labour Party seemed to hold out the promise of a quieter, more secure existence.
There is a certain cliché about the left being the visionaries and idealists while the right are the realists. In the case of Fianna Fáil, is it fair to say that, whatever idealism once existed, the party now exists for the sole purpose of exercising power? In the absence of detailed survey data of members of Irish political parties, one must hazard a guess. I suspect that most rank-and-file members are motivated by some sort of service ethic, possibly tinged with the knowledge that it won’t do them any harm socially or occupationally. FF has lost the distinctiveness it once had and has become like all the other parties. Indeed, one of the most telling indicators of how the perception of politics has changed in recent years is the increasing evidence of the voters making judgements about ‘the parties’ as such. In Ireland this can be seen in the impressive growth for the ‘others’ in recent elections and polls.
There is now a sense that political parties-or at least political leaders-constitute a ‘political class’. On the one side there is ‘us’: the voters, the citizens, the people. On the other side is ‘them’. There are a number of factors here which need to be taken into account (much of the following draws on Mair, 1997) including the fact that parties themselves have become more remote from the wider society in recent years. In all liberal democracies, membership levels of political parties have fallen dramatically. The popular identification with political parties has also eroded. Voters no longer see party political contestation as an arena for struggle between alternative social visions.
Not that this was ever the case in Ireland anyway. Political parties in the liberal democratic world are moving away from their moorings in the wider society and have come to forge stronger linkages with the state and political institutions. The importance of office holding (as opposed to vote seeking and policy implementation) becomes the number one priority. With more and more organisational resources now being accumulated around the party in public office rather than around the party grass roots, we see the parties as such becoming more or less synonymous with the parties in parliament or in government.
What all this ultimately means is that all mainstream parties are forced to become like each other in their pursuit of office as the primary goal, and this is a situation where idealism and vision are in danger of being squeezed out. Another trend that is observable everywhere is the loss of a separate partisan identity. As once distinct electoral constituencies have begun to dissipate, parties have begun to share voters with one another. With the decline of what social scientists call ‘affective loyalties’ they are now keener to direct their appeals into the once traditional heartlands of their opponents. If parties need in some sense to ‘share’voters, then policies and programmes cannot be allowed to vary all that much. In any case, all parties are locked into a fundamental consensus on the economy. If all these circumstances obtain, then political parties have a difficult time distinguishing themselves. They even campaign and present themselves in similar ways. The fact that so much of the media coverage is on ‘the game’ rather than on, say, different policy issues is something that reinforces those trends.
In Ireland every party in the Dáil, apart from the Greens and Sinn Féin, has had a spell in office since 1992 and pursued broadly similar policies. The lack of difference may well be the reason that every single pundit is predicting gains for independents and Sinn Féin. The issue of corruption is also something that will be a feature of the campaign. Ireland is not a particularly corrupt country. It is incidental rather than institutional, episodic rather than routine. The authors of a recent study have concluded that combating corruption is a matter of faith in the strength of the tradition of representative democracy. They maintain that despite examples of corruption among parliamentarians, the legislature is part of the solution rather than the problem (Collins and O’Shea, 2001, p.89). A good start would be to establish a code of conduct for its members and the banning of all corporate donations to political parties. Obviously the most effective way to combat corruption would be to restore higher levels of idealism in the public service generally, but especially among politicians.
Is there any point in joining a political party in the light of the above? I believe that political parties are still essential, as they are the only mechanisms we can use for establishing a legitimate basis of power in the modern state. I believe that one can have ideals and vision, which can be tempered by scepticism. Scepticism can be an important antidote to self-delusion. The disconnected utopianism of so many extra-parliamentary movements leads to nowhere. There is enough of the Marxist in me to be convinced that there is no point in presenting exotic models of future societies that have no connection whatever to present day social formations.
At the last conference of DL, I spoke in favour of the motion of merging with the Labour Party on the grounds that it was the ‘only show in town’. I had reservations about the Labour Party because, in a sense, the progressive-conservative divide in Irish politics cut right through the party until relatively recently. I believe DL could possibly have been a viable political entity if its leaders were committed enough to building the party. They chose not to, so that was that. There were some people we could not manage to persuade to join us, despite the strenuous pleas of de Rossa, Geraghty et al. Were these refusniks idealists?
I didn’t think so. It seemed to me that they wanted to opt out of politics altogether. There is no point in having idealism and vision without a suitable organisation to express it. Having your ideals and vision in the wrong organisation can also be corrupting. I spent twelve years in an organisation that was not the democratic political that party that I thought it was. For a long time I believed that the flaws that could be detected were due to a lack of political development, and to the intellectual poverty of the left in Ireland. In other words, they would disappear given time, especially If I and my like-minded comrades, steeped in Gramsci, Italian communism, western Marxism and the New Left Review, gave them a helping hand.
There is no guarantee that life in the Labour Party will be the answer. It is important for Irish democracy that alternative political and economic policies be put to the people. While politicians will always want to seek office, it is important that Labour is not just a party of government whenever the numbers stack up and the party is needed. It is difficult to combine uncompromising realism with idealism and vision, but such are the difficult tasks with which we are faced.
References
Anderson, P (2000) ‘Renewals’, New Left Review (II) 1 Jan Feb
Collins, N and O’Shea (2001) Understanding Corruption in Irish Politics Cork: Cork University Press
Dunphy, R (1992) ‘The Worker’s Party and Europe:Trajectory of an Idea’, Irish Political Studies vol 7
Mair, P (1997) Party System Change Oxford: Clarendon Press
Interesting piece. Interestingly enough I was talking to someone last night who thought that within the next five years some new left party will emerge to occupy the former space held by WP/DL and currently sort of kinda held by SF.
Posted by: WorldbyStorm | December 02, 2006 at 08:35 PM
Very nice to see mature, reflective writing on Irish politics.
re comment by WorldbyStorm, my own feeling is that the party which will emerge (nature abhors a vacuum) will be a blend of green and red, in part influenced by the techniques being developed by
The New Politics Institute
(http://www.newpolitics.net) in the US but only because the NPI is most visible manifestation of the new political zeitgeist to date.
Just a gut feeling...
Posted by: Philip | December 02, 2006 at 10:52 PM