Solidarity Steve

We have witnessed in the last decade a sea change in our politics, the far rights influence has crashed waves over the political landscape, the SNP parted the red sea and for a brief time socialism shone like a beacon across the land.

In the immortal words of Bob Dylan Times They Are A Changin’.

The old orthodoxy is dead, the old way is dead and the left need to adapt or it too will go the way of Labour and die.

I will set out a strategy on how a marginal left wing organisation can with the people walk the long road to socialism.

Before we can walk the road of victory, we must understand why we have hitherto walked the road of defeat.

The go-to strategy has been establish a party or marginal faction and fight elections. The work has been built around a party organisation and attaining election success and it has thus far failed.

This is a fundamentally flawed strategy, you cannot impose your will on a community, you cannot demand fealty from a community just because in your opinion you are in their best interest. You must earn it, and you cannot earn it by starting at the end goal of a party and election success – these things come naturally and later.

By setting up a party or organisation outside that of the community, you are creating a differentiation between the people and yourself, the party, the organisation it is the people or it is nothing.

The people are the power, solidarity is our strength – never forget that.

Any marginal left wing organisation in this country faces four key challenges in gaining power these are:

1) The Electoral System
2) Public Awareness & Attitudes
3) Public Support
4) Establishment & Public Hostility

The strategy seeks to solve one, two and three while neutralising four.

These taken together might seem momentous to overcome, but it is actually quite simple, and one of the problems with the academic left is they like to make things complex, when simplicity is always bliss.

The four principles that underpin the four point plan are;
1) Aid your Communities
2) Learn with Communities
3) Stand beside Communities
4) Fight for Communities

What is to be done?

1) You need a core group of committed activists and organisers, the numbers are not important and quality is always superior to quantity – it will be tough to begin with and there will be times you will want to quit, so you need people around you that you can rely on. The only requirement is that the majority of the group are part of the community they are organising in, that you shop, shit, eat breath in that community.

With that out the way the real fun begins, identify the needs of the community and address them, identify local campaigns and get involved in them.

Do everything you can to aid your community, at this stage you want to be fostering a sense of solidarity with your neighbours and reigniting the extinguished sense of community that historically burnt bright.

Each community is different and each community has different needs so it would be a waste of time for me to give you examples, just follow your communities lead and build upon a cornerstone of solidarity to create in roads into the community.

2) While aiding your community you should be building relationships, friendships, creating comrades through your actions of solidarity. Once you feel your network has organically spread throughout your area and you are doing good work you can begin implementing step two.

It is time to begin educating and learning with your community, not educating the community – at no stage should you set yourself above your neighbours. The learning has to be horizontal, reciprocal and built upon the foundation of solidarity established in step one.

There should be a political element to the education but there should also be a practical one too – teaching valuable life skills, communities skill sharing and providing each other with their specific knowledge bases.

The community sharing, learning, growing together so that the skills and knowledge they possess can be used to help each other.

This step is when the political framework should start being debating, importantly don’t seek to impose a framework, seek to formulate one as a community.

3) Through the previous steps you should have built up goodwill, trust and created political awareness among your community, ideally you will have a created or have relationships with the community leaders and there should be a sense of community and shared identity.

If this is the case the seed of socialism should begin to germinate and you can begin thinking about standing beside your community and formulating a party, in my opinion this should be more a loose coalition of independents at first but ultimately those needs should be decided by the community.

Whichever route you decide to go down, you should identity the areas where you are strongest and if the community feels there is a need in those areas put up candidates for the local elections.

Ideally you will have some level of organic reach throughout your community and you can utilize that to disseminate your literature, while the many relationships you have built up through your work, should be able to carry you over the finish line.

I would suggest you organise on the most local level possible, street by street if you can – with each street having its own coordinator and port of call for local residents.
At every level you should seek to always work from the bottom up, alongside and with your community.

This step should be replicated until you have built up local political strongholds.

4) The final step and by now remember the four problems I mentioned? Well you should have the support of those you are helping and have helped, the awareness of all those that are involved or on the periphery of your network and have changed the attitudes of all those that have been involved in one step or another. These people will be less inclined to buy into the establishment hostility, and more prepared to fight off any public hostility they encounter.

Now would be the perfect time to formalise the coalition into a party and build upon the work of the previous three steps in order to fight for your community in a general election. Seek to replicate the organising methods that were successful in the local elections and utilize your organic reach and good luck.

There is no time limit in how long this will take it could take five months, it could take five years or more, it is a long road to socialism – just don’t jump the gun and advance to the next stage before your community is ready. If you rush, you risk undoing your good work.

Rome wasn’t built in a day – there are no shortcuts to socialism.

This is a process of years and years, undoubtedly you and your community will have evolved and grown in ways that would be impossible for me to lay out, living by the creed of socialism and furthering it within your community will have an unknowable effect upon you and it.

Every step of the way you will be doing beneficial work that is saving communities, spreading socialist ideals and furthering the goals of the people – so even if in the end you fail at achieving electoral success, you will have transformed hearts and minds.

You will be fertilising the fields with socialism every step of the way, meaning even if you fail, socialism will grow. You might not personally light the fire of revolution but you will create the spark.