Followers of A Very Public Sociologist 1.0 may recall something by the name of A Reflexive and Value-Added Analysis of Contemporary Trotskyist Activism in Britain. This was my PhD thesis, which I completed just shy of three years ago. Since then it has gathered dust on Keele Library's shelves and basically bummed its way around the shabby furnishings of my house. So it's about time the work I laboured on for four years got a bit of an airing. For those unfamiliar with previous postings on the subject, my research basically involved interviewing individual Socialist Party and Socialist Workers' Party activists about their lives, how and why they got involved with their respective parties, and have remained committed during a time that wasn't exactly bountiful for any kind of socialist politics (the final interviews took place in summer 2007). These were then analysed in relation to key theoretical contributions to social movement scholarship, and I then developed value-added constructs to make sense of processes around political recruitment and commitment. Sadly, the meat of this analysis will have to wait to be worked up for publication in a seldom-read sociology journal, or perhaps a book if I can ever find the time to sort it out. But a little bit will soon be available. One chapter was given over to the key features of the Militant/SP and International Socialism/SWP tradition and their political history since the final collapse of the Revolutionary Communist Party (1944-49). A lot of this will be rewritten for a collection of essays on Trotskyism since 1956 due to be published soon, and this is what my contribution will look like:
Marching Separately, Seldom Together: The Political History of the Two Principal Trends of British Trotskyism, 1956 – 2012
Abstract: The Socialist Party and Socialist Workers Party and their antecedent organisations have, since 1956, proved to be the most durable and high profile of all of Britain’s Trotskyist tendencies. This paper is concerned with providing a political history of their development within the context of the changing fortunes of the British labour movement and the significant reconfiguration undergone by British capitalism. It will argue that both organisations’ history can be divided into ‘open’ and ‘closed’ periods of work that were/are conditioned by the traditional vanguardist political practice of Trotskyism and the changing political opportunities open to the two traditions.
Left watchers, nerds, and trainspotters will know there are a small amount of journalistic and scholarly books out there (John Callaghan's two books, and the hatchet pieces by Michael Crick and Blake Baker spring to mind), but none are what you would describe as up-to-date. Therefore my piece will focus on how the two organisations have developed since the Cold War. Unfortunately, a certain violence will be done to the convoluted roots of shifts in strategy, fallings out, and splits because of the tight word count - so apologies to the nitpickers in advance!
I haven't been filled with blogging inspiration lately, probably because my mind has been consumed with writing a paper called 'Movement Relevancy vs Open Surveillance, or, The Problematic Ethics of Social Movement Research'. This is spun out from a major chunk of my PhD, which I'm pleased to say is available for viewing at Keele Uni's library. Here's the abstract:
Bevington and Dixon’s (2005) call to redress the relationship between social movements and social movement research in terms of providing assistance to them over and above academic and professional concerns is an attractive one, and should be seen as part of the recent movement in Anglo-American sociology toward public sociology: a ‘popular’ sociology that speaks to non-academic (but mainly activist) audiences outside the academy. However, regardless of the worthy aims of movement-relevant research, exposing social movements to the ‘open surveillance’ of the sociological gaze raises the possibility of providing useful information to opponents and enemies of that movement. This raises dilemmas that appealing to professional or movement-relevant ethics cannot resolve, as this paper’s interviews with Trotskyist activists testify. Therefore social movement researchers must pay heed to potential conflicts between the production of sociological knowledge and protecting the interests of the social movements they study.
For those not familiar with Bevington and Dixon's paper, 'Movement-relevant Theory: Rethinking Social Movement Scholarship and Activism' (which will probably be nearly everyone), their argument - while certainly moves in the right direction - is symptomatic of the divergence between academia/sociology and any kind of political practice. But there's the legacy of neoliberalism in higher education and the (passing) dominance of postmodernism/poststructuralism for you.
The good news is this paper has had an impact and is oft-cited by the upcoming new generation of social movement researchers. But as my abstract hints and what my paper discusses in more depth is how movement-relevant research is an ethical minefield.
At 11 o'clock this morning I had a very important appointment. It was the moment four years of PhD work had been leading up to - the end point, the oral exam, the viva voce. And, thankfully, it went very well. The examiners spent the next 90 minutes quizzing me about my thesis, A Reflexive and Value-Added Analysis of Contemporary Trotskyist Activists in Britain. It's very difficult to remember the detail of their queries, but I can recall them asking why I settled on this topic, why the thesis drew on the sociology of social movements rather than political science, the relationship between the work and Marxism, the role of emotion and ideas in processes of radicalisation and commitment, the senses in which the work could be described as scientific, the importance of relationships, the contributions of Marxist anthropology and no doubt a few more things I've left out.
About half past 12 they sent me out the room to confer over their final verdict. When I walked back in it was crunch time. Had I passed? Or would I have to return to the coal face and resubmit after a substantial rewrite? There was no need to worry - the verdict was positive! I passed only with the need to undertake minor corrections - a few font size errors here, a couple of grammatical howlers there, and the addition of a short paragraph to flesh out what I mean by 'value-added'. But that's it. I'm a doctor. I can put the initials PhD after my name should bourgeois respectability demand it.
There are many people I need to thank for this. But most of all I'll forever be in debt to the 16 comrades in the Socialist Party and Socialist Workers' Party who very kindly sat down with me for up to four hours and told me about their lives as socialist activists. The thesis would never have got off the starting blocks without them freely giving their time.
So what now? Sort out the corrections ... write a few papers ... work the thesis up into a book ... try and find a job ... think about new projects ...
The PhD may be finished. But in many ways, I'm only just starting.
Here's the text of a talk I gave this afternoon at Warwick University as part of a joint presentation on the 'sociological' uses of blogging and Twitter, and how it intersects with activism. In the subsequent discussion a point was raised about the ethics of writing about academic seminars, which are simultaneously public but are often quite informal and sometimes represent ideas/research that is not fully formed and/or ready to be opened to wider public scrutiny. This raises wider issues about having 'permission' to blog without 'consent' and ethics of responsibility one has to those who are named in blog posts. I'll revisit this topic in a future post.
A Very Public Sociologist has been active for over three years. Since the start of 2010 it has been averaging 496 unique visitors a day, which places it in the mid-rank of British political blogging. It is relatively well known among the so-called Bloggerati - in 2009 it was voted number 12 in Total Politics magazine's top 100 left-of-centre blogs, and 41st in the overall politics top 100. Also I'm number 64 in the list of top 100 political bloggers on Twitter (though, hands held up, I did compile that myself). But none of these figures are bad for a blog that is more or less pure comment. I do not break exclusives and audience boosts from the big mainstream UK politics blogs - particularly right wing bloggers Iain Dale and Paul 'Guido Fawkes' Staines - are not a regular occurrence.
What has this got to do with sociology and the theme of today's talk? Despite having a reputation as a political blogger, the blog's name suggests I very clearly identify myself as a sociologist. I even began the blog thinking it would be a sort of online diary of the remainder of my PhD - though very quickly (perhaps even straight away) I couldn't resist blogging about politics and wider issues. Nevertheless I do try and make sure the 'sociological' strand of my blogging, if you can call it that, isn't entirely eclipsed by postings on other matters.
So how do I 'do' sociology on my blog? In broad terms, there are three ways I've gone about it:
1) Blog reports on research seminars I've attended and other academic-related activities.
2) Using my social science training to offer fairly unique perspectives on issues that are exercising the media and blogging commentariat.
3) Disseminating/reflecting on my previous academic work, and my (recently completed) PhD thesis.
I'll talk about these in a little depth.
As well as blogging, one of my favoured methods of procrastination was (and still is) the attendance of research seminars at Keele University and elsewhere. After I started maintaining the blog I realised that very often these seminars were perfect material to blog about. I try and present the positions of the presenters as fairly and as accurately as my note-taking skills allow me (things are not helped by my not knowing shorthand) and give a flavour of the subsequent discussions. For example, I did this with a series of seminars on the theme of publicsociology up the road at Birmingham University a couple of years back. And last year's day symposium on Pierre Bourdieu here at Warwick received similar treatment. Perhaps I'll do the same with today's proceedings?
Blogging about research seminars does two things. In the first place it demands an extended reflection on what is being presented. I have to think through and understand concepts and arguments almost to the same depth as a paper's discussant. This is a useful exercise in itself in terms of broadening one's knowledge. Second, and perhaps more importantly from the point of view of our discipline, blog posts on research seminars introduces their topics to a wider 'non-professional' audience.
Second, because UK political blogging is very crowded (Total Politics magazine links to approximately 2,000 blogs in its directory). To attract an audience you need, to borrow a horrible phrase from marketing, a unique selling point. One of mine is to offer a slightly different take on the issues of the day. For example, with regard to the interminable plots and rumours of plots to bring down Gordon Brown as the leader of the Labour Party, this week I posted a piece drawing on an old political science paper written in 1994 to see if it, along with our would-be Blairite assassins, believes political leadership has decisive effects on the outcomes of elections. I've also written blog posts that have used Pierre Bourdieu to look at high-profile spats between leading bloggers, used Althusser's understanding of ideology as a lived relation to see if pornography can be treated as an ideology, and Marx for everything from the 2008 stock market crash to the economics of chicken sheds.
Thirdly blogging has been an essential part of self-clarification and self-reflective practice with regards to my PhD work. Just to quickly tell you about it, my work uses life history interviews to make sense of the processes at work in the radicalisation and continued commitment of a sample of Trotskyist activists. Some were drawn from the Socialist Workers' Party, but the majority were members of the Socialist Party (formerly known as the Militant Tendency). This was complicated by the fact that I am too a member of the Socialist Party, which led to all kinds of access issues and problems of sociological knowledge production, power relations, and reflexivity which I don't have the time to go into here. But I have blogged about these issues and received feedback from other activists, which affected my thinking about these subjects. Blogging's also been a useful arena for trying out certain ideas too, even if only to see how they work written down. For example a rough of a section of my PhD's methods began as a blog post and was then worked into the thesis. Probably about half a dozen posts made the transition as well as a number of other ideas that first appeared on the blog.
In addition to this blogging has enabled me to dust off old pieces of work that have been sitting on my hard drive for years and wouldn't have seen the day otherwise. This includes texts of old presentations, recycled bits of masters degree essays as well as an old dissertation comparing Marxian and Foucauldian approaches to power. Again these have reached an audience who are unlikely to open a political science, cultural studies or sociology journal. So you could say the blog manages, albeit very modestly, of taking sociology to the "public" and justifies the name.
But there are problems with my approach to blogging. Like every political blogger should be I'm not backward about being forward with my opinions, and I understand that my particular brand of socialist politics are not to everyone's tastes. So from the outset I have assumed a level of relative anonymity. This is partly for personal security reasons - I do receive visitors from far right blogs and forums, especially if I'm writing about the BNP. Other friends of mine have appeared on Red Watch for simply attending a demonstration or having themselves pictured in a socialist newspaper. And there are career reasons too. Even today with Trotskyism in Britain a shadow of an already marginal political tradition it's not a useful strategy to advertise your activist record to potential employers in higher education.
By way of a conclusion, like all user-generated content on the internet, blogging is what you make of it - whether you write about sociology, kids TV or needlework. It can be incredibly useful as a tool of ongoing self-reflection for all sociologists of whatever level, and it can be addictive too. But beware of the pitfalls - blogging might get you into scrapes that could impact negatively on your career, especially if you're early career. So, as my mum used to say, if you can't be good be careful!
In his comment on my PhD Abstract, Steve Cooke asks "if you had to re-write this for the Plain English Campaign, what would it say?" The comrade has a good point. The thesis title, 'A Reflexive and Value-Added Analysis of Contemporary Trotskyist Activists in Britain' doesn't exactly roll off the tongue, so what the hell is it about?
The thesis makes three contributions to the sociology of social movements (or four if you count the case I make for British Trotskyism (principally the SP and SWP) being important mainstays of radical politics).
I've talked about sociological reflexivity on this blog before in the context of a talk I've given a couple of times. It's worth quoting a relevant passage at length:
The second part of my discussion looked at the tension between the larger far left political field the two organisations share, and the academic field. In other words, the contradiction between producing work socialist activists might find interesting and useful, while simultaneously meeting the requirements demanded of a PhD thesis. Here, I sketched how the presentation of my findings as sociological knowledge can harm the interests of the activists who took part, via a brief discussion of my concept of liberal surveillance. This refers to the knowledge effects of social science work on marginal groupings and social movements. I came up with the concept while reading Bourdieu on the scholastic point of view, and after hearing a paper on Hungarian anti-capitalists where the author failed to ask basic questions about why sociologists should study radical social movements, and who benefits from putting the knowledge out there. I quoted from transcripts where I asked comrades what they felt about liberal surveillance, about how public access to sociological knowledge built on their experiences of Trotskyist activists could be used by friend and foe alike; and the possibility they've provided me the scaffolding around which I could build a career in academia. There was a near consensus that enemies such as the state or the far right wouldn't get much from data of this character, and provided I was sensitive toward the life histories they had provided me with, no one saw any real problems with the data being used to play my disciplinary game.
Sociological reflexivity therefore does not have to be a whinge about the "guilt" a researcher feels for "exploiting" the life histories of volunteers for careerist purposes. As far as I was concerned reflexivity is about acknowledging the contradictions of being a Trot studying Trots to produce knowledge for a specialised but non-Trotskyist audience. The discussion of how my partisan affiliation shaped the thesis, the setbacks arising from being a SP activist looking to interview SWP comrades, and the problematic character of sociological knowledge of social movements (which I re-named 'open' surveillance on account of it being in the public domain) were necessary to avoid objections relating to bias and ensure the research was as rigorous as qualitative research can be.
What's all this 'value-added' stuff about? These relate two the other two contributions the thesis makes. Firstly, we need a bit of contextualisation. Generally speaking scholarship has variously identified and analysed key aspects of social movements. For example, some have used rational choice cost/benefit analysis to identify the points at which collective behaviour emerges. Others have explained how movements go about gathering the requisite resources to fuel their take off. Some scholarship has looked at how movements "frame" issues and attract people to its banner, and a lot of contemporary work has looked at processes of collective identity formation. The problem is these contributions have found and fallen out of favour because they are partial explanations of the emergence of social movements. For example, resource mobilisation theory stresses the importance of the availability of resources to emergent social movements and discusses how they are gathered and used, and what role (if any) they play in conditioning the subsequent development of a movement. What it cannot to is explain the processes that spur on the formation of a movement in the first place.
My thesis represents an attempt to overcome this problem. It uses a model first developed by Neil Smelser in his 1962 book, Theory of Collective Behaviour and then recast 40 years later by Nick Crossley in 2002's Making Sense of Social Movements. Smelser offered what he termed a value-added model as a way into explaining how social movements emerge. The short description of the model from Smelser's Wikipedia page is a fair description of what it's all about:
Structural conduciveness - things that make or allow certain behaviors possible (e.g. spatial proximity)
Structural strain - something (inequality, injustice) must strain society
Generalized belief - explanation; participants have to come to an understanding of what the problem is
Precipitating factors - spark to ignite the flame
Mobilization for action - people need to become organized
Failure of social control - how the authorities react (or don't)
For Smelser processes containing these general characteristics all have to be present for a social movement to emerge. The elements or moments of the model can combine in any order, offering a holistic way of approaching the origins of all kinds of movements. What Crossley did was make the case that social movement theory and research in the intervening 40 years have developed partial perspective that can be slotted together in Smelser's model. For example, resource mobilisation theory explains what's going on at the level of 'Mobilisation for action'. Frames and collective identity approaches describe what's going on in 'Generalised belief', and so on.
What I did is adapt this model to the level of individual Trotskyist activists to make sense of their paths to Marxist politics. Of course, there are as many paths as there are socialists, but nevertheless the modified value-added model was able to make sense of the (sometimes very different) life history data and provide a way for understanding how people become involved in so-called non-conventional forms of political activity.
The final contribution is a further adaptation I made to the Smelser-Crossley model of mobilisation. In social movement scholarship generally there is a relative paucity of research on commitment. For some reason the hows and whys of mobilisation have attracted most attention, not why activists stay the course. Drawing on some of the comparatively few studies about I formulated my own value-added approach. Many of the concepts in the mobilisation model acted as pointers to how commitment might work, but generally all had to be reworked. For example, as we know Trotskyist organisations spend a lot of time selling papers and raising fighting fund. This is a form of resource mobilisation and offers "basic" form of activism old and new members alike engage in. In the model of mobilisation this always-available activity helps intergrate recruits into the politics and practices of the organisation. But for veteran activists it's different - it can organise them around a regular cycle of activity, provide a means of assessing the efficacy of their politics, offer a way of engaging the general public, and so on.
The value-added model of commitment is used to explain the processes going on that sustain activism in the same way the Smelser-Crossley model does for radicalisation/mobilisation. Each of its elements can combine in any order. There is however one significant difference. Whereas Smelser argued that all the moments of his model have to be present for collective behaviour to occur, it is not necessarily the case for my commitment model. For example, say a comrade drops out of activity and no longer attends branch meetings - to all intents and purposes they're cut off from regular physical contact with the party. However, supposing they still read party publications, plugs away in their union branch, remains pissed off/angry with current political developments, etc. the activist won't necessarily completely drop out. They may still identify with the party and return to activism in the future. My value- added model suggests that if one of the elements are no longer present, the others to an extent can take up the strain of sustaining commitment. However, the fewer elements are present, the more brittle the commitment becomes. It's also true not all elements are of equal strength. For instance, it's easier for a party identifying but otherwise inactive comrade to retain membership and renew commitment than an active comrade who 'goes through the motions' but, for whatever reason, has views that increasingly diverge from the party's perspectives.
In sum, the thesis makes the case for sociological reflexivity in general (and with regard to social movements in particular); modifies an existing theory of collective mobilisation to model individual radicalisation, and lastly a value-added model that views (individual) commitment as a many-sided complex process. All of these arguments were formulated in conjunction with the analysis of Trotskyist life histories, but have more general applications for the general sociology of social movements as well as sociological practice itself.
When you open a copy of my thesis, 'A Reflexive and Value-Added Analysis of Contemporary Trotskyist Activism in Britain', this abstract will give you a snapshot of what it's all about.
Though neglected by social movement research and the burgeoning popular literature on global justice activism, Trotskyism is not just a persistent presence across a wide range of social movements but has often played an important role in initiating them. Nevertheless contemporary British politics has remained stubbornly resistant to widespread far left influence for a number of years, unlike France, Germany and Italy. This thesis explores Trotskyist activism in this largely unfavourable context by examining how Trotskyist activists became radicalised and how they have remained committed for long periods of time through the use of life history interviews with members of the Socialist Party (formerly Militant) and the Socialist Workers’ Party.
This thesis has three objectives. Addressing ongoing debates around the production of sociological knowledge, this thesis positions itself as an act of reflexive sociological practice. It locates sociology and sociologists within the configuration of prevailing power relations, discusses the positions in the relevant debates the discipline has adopted and, following Pierre Bourdieu, argues it is necessary for sociology to be open about the interests it has in the research it pursues. This is especially the case when one is studying social movements as some powerful interests may be (unwittingly) served by opening them up to public scrutiny. Conflicts between sociological interest and the interests of the movement are further illustrated with reference to the author’s position as a doctoral candidate and partisan of one of the organisations under study.
Secondly, intervening in current debates around the mobilisation of social movements the thesis develops a value-added model of individual radicalisation. This model ties together a number of processes identified by social movement research as being crucial for collective mobilisations, which in turn are modified and applied to the radicalising experiences of Trotskyist activists. This produces a non-linear but unified model that does not sacrifice detail and specificity to a single, overriding organisational principle.
Thirdly, a related but modified value-added model is developed to analyse individual experiences and strategies of Trotskyist commitment. This draws on existing social movement literature to a degree but involves some theoretical innovations of its own. It retains the non-linear and non-reductive advantages of its radicalisation counterpart. The thesis then interrogates the two models with general questions about their relationship to each other, the extent to which they can be applied beyond Trotskyist activism, whether they can be “up-scaled” for meso- and macro-level analysis, and the conceptual limits of the models.
In just over a week's time my magnum opus, 'A Reflexive and Value-Added Analysis of the Life History of Trotskyist Activists' will be handed in. I won't say it's been an easy beast to write - but by far the hardest part has been overcoming a sense of directionless and keeping motivated. Occasional bouts of writer's block didn't help any either.
But all that's in the past. At this very moment I am half way through the final draft. Approximately 45,000 words lie behind me. A similar amount are still waiting revision. In addition I have to re-do the introduction and conclusion, put together my appendices, join it altogether in one giant document and then print the jocker. The final act is more traumatic than it sounds. The powers that be want THREE copies.
As there's still a bit of a distance to go, I imagine blogging's going to be very light this week. Which is a shame as there's plenty I want to talk about. I quite fancied saying a few things about Stoke BNP quaking in their boots because Assed Baig, the president of Staffs Uni Student's Union, in a little-read article linked to a site listing addresses of local fash. According to local gauleiter, Michael Coleman, the home addresses of political opponents should be sacrosanct. Perhaps he should try telling that to BNP'ers all too happy to supply Redwatch with addresses and phone numbers of socialists and trade unionists.
There's also been a very interesting debate on a couple of blogs about the relationship of socialism to feminism. Harpy and Dave have got the goods. I would have weighed in with some reflections on this debate in the classic Beyond the Fragments. I still might when all is done and dusted.
Well, I leave you with a slice of music from 1999. IMHO this is probably the best dance track ever. If you have an aversion to trance, turn away now.
Last week marked something of a milestone in the interminable struggle with my wretched PhD. For the first time ever a draft of the thesis lies about my hard drive in a very scattered and chaotic form, but at least it exists! All that remains now is to hew something legible out of the 95,000 words or so and get it in before the end of November! Simples.
My remaining plan of writing goes something like this. First job is to return to my four year old MRes dissertation on the contemporary history of British Trotskyism and take a huge axe to it. Out goes the extended theoretical discussion of neoliberalism and how it has affected the labour movement in this country, and in comes a discussion of the distinctive characteristics of Leninism and Trotskyism. This will lead into revised histories of the International Socialists/Socialist Workers' Party and Militant/Socialist Party up to the point of my final interviews (summer 2007 - just before the split in Respect). There will then follow short 700 word anonymised biographies of each of my interviewees.
When that is done I'll return to methods, which at the moment is a stitched-together corpse of a chapter closer to Robert De Niro's Frankenstein's Monster than a seamless discussion of in-depth life history interviews and NVivo. I am hoping most of the discussion there is up to scratch and won't entail a massive rewrite - but it has been two years since I last looked at it!
Then comes the biggie. Starting with the first chapter I systematically work my way through to the entire thesis, responding to my supervisor's suggestions and corrections and making sure all arguments reach their logical conclusions. This will be topped off with a revised conclusion and rewritten introduction and hey presto - a fully coherent first draft! Then it's a matter of getting my supervisor to reread it, revise, rereread, revise and then maybe ... just maybe it will be ready to submit.
I can almost feel the relief and elation bubbling through the quantum foam from two months hence. And after that I suppose I'd better look for a job!
The end is near. Not for this blog, but for my PhD. In less than three months time it's looking like my thesis will be bound and submitted to the gatekeepers of academia who will then decide my fate after the dreaded oral exam. Will they give me the right to take up an abode in an ivory tower somewhere? Might I only be allowed to call myself Dr Phil after a number of corrections? Or am I likely to be laughed out of the room? Time will tell.
It does however mean I'm more or less withdrawing into myself. Political activity's only going to be allowed in the context of Socialist Party, Keele UCU and North Staffs Trades Council meetings. It means blogging's going to be more sporadic too. Instead of jumping on the computer at night as soon as I get in to throw a post together I'm going to have to wind down with a good book. So when blogs do appear they will tend to be short, but hopefully sweet.
But it's only going to be for about three months. I just hope those months are going to be relatively quiet.
At the moment I'm still working on the penultimate chapter of my PhD. The thesis is, among other things, looking at how a sample of activists from the Socialist Party and Socialist Workers' Party got involved and remained committed in what were tough times for socialist politics. That's not to say things now aren't difficult, but there are certainly more openings for our activism today than was the case for most of the 90s and a good chunk of this decade. I digress.
I thought I would share this short extract from an interview with one of my SP comrades. I asked what it meant to him to be a socialist and a member of our party, and I think his reply is possibly the best answer to the question I received. It might be of interest to readers:
I heard this question earlier on and I still haven’t prepared myself for it. Two different questions. What it is to be a socialist – I don’t think there’s an answer to it because often socialists come from different backgrounds and can have very different ideas and methods, principles, and come to them from very different places, so I’m not going to answer that. To me what it means to be a socialist ... it’s a difficult question to answer. It’s about not giving an inch. First and foremost not letting anyone else dictate where your life goes. It’s about taking responsibility for yourself. It’s about not letting yourself be exploited or being taken advantage of. About sticking two fingers up to the man, it’s about taking responsibility for your own life, where it’s going and not letting anyone get in your way or dictate where you’re going to end up ...
Whenever I hear quotes is something that brings to mind something said by Trotsky, which said “every revolutionist is a soldier in the proletarian army” Every time I read that I smirk. It’s about the place you have in the movement and the class struggle, and I think my place will change year in, year out. At the moment I seem to have designs on being the young, sharp Bolshevik who tells everyone else where they’re going wrong, but I’m sure that will evolve and change as I evolve and change. The reason why I’m not a soldier in the proletarian army … you know those guys who work for noodle houses, who stand in the street pointing signs in the direction of the nearest one, that’s me. My sign says ‘socialism: this way'. Being a SP member for me is quite similar to my first answer, the difference is being a SP member means taking responsibility for the party. I know it’s been a red thread through this interview. It’s every member’s responsibility to build the party, maintain the party, to recruit, educate and integrate new people, and most importantly at the moment, to develop themselves so all these things can be best achieved. Comrades who don’t so that, and so-called socialists and Marxists who don’t take any responsibility for the party have no grounds to dictate to the party how it should be built, or how things should be done differently. If every young comrade in the organisation develops themselves into an organiser, a cadre within the next year, we would double at least the number of capable, grass roots organisers. The number one attribute of being a party member is responsibility.
Back in February we were visited by Molly Andrews of the Centre for Narrative Research at the University of East London. Her presentation was on the problems of interviewing activists about their politics - a topic of interest to me because my PhD thesis is based on interviews with fellow socialists, most of whom are also members of the Socialist Party. What is a researcher supposed to do when they're investigating contentious political issues and get asked by research participants for their opinion? Should one pretend no opinion and claim the high ground of objectivity? Say what you think they would want to hear? Be honest?
There's long been an counter-current in sociology that favours the latter option. The celebrated American sociologist, Howard S. Becker diagnosed the problem 40 years ago. He argued fence sitting in sociology is impossible because it is an irreducibly political discipline. To demonstrate the functionalism that dominated American sociology in the middle years of the last century conceptualised society as a vast, cohesive organism. Each element of society existed because it functionally contributed to the existence of the whole. This mean phenomena such as social conflict like strikes, racism, crime and deviance, etc. were symptomatic of dysfunctions and social breakdowns, which could be corrected by social engineering. Though it coveted value neutrality it's not difficult to spot how easily one can draw conservative conclusions from functionalist positions.
This perspective has long since fallen out of sociological flavour. Sociologists not beholden to postmodern nihilism most would agree describing society as an interconnected system rent by internally generated antagonisms and conflicts is not only the wellspring of the most sophisticated and accurate models of society, but it is also an inescapably political act. Talking about conflicts and the groups and classes who profit from them is do not tally with ruling interests, even more so if the argument and data are rigorous and stringently validated. In a society so constructed, the logic of choosing neutrality in the struggle between slave and slave owner becomes operative. Not taking a position is still taking a position, and it is one that benefits the status quo. Sociologists cannot avoid taking a side, and in sociological research contexts one should be open.
For Andrews, in politically sensitive research settings those being studied often suspect a researcher has an agenda beyond the disinterested pursuit of knowledge. To affect neutrality is to compound suspicions, which can lead to respondent reticence and non-cooperation. It's better a sociologist is up front, and so shouldn't be afraid of answering questions about the work's intended audience, why this particular group is worthwhile researching, what use is going to be made of the data and why these people should give you their time. To illustrate, Andrews recalled her work with elderly CPGB activists in the late 80s, and some of the problems she encountered. She initially wrote letters and phoned up activists to see if they were interested in being interviewed. Unfortunately, when she turned up on the doorstep of one prospective interviewee he took exception to her American accent and vowed not to have anything to do with the research. Another woman asked if she was from the CIA. The point is unless one is explicit about research aims (in Andrews case she set out to discover how political commitment is managed as one ages) these sorts of complications are bound to arise.
There are problems with being explicit. For example a fellow PhD student at Keele is writing a thesis on political extremism and how it deals with the banality of everyday politics. For this his chosen subjects have been the BNP and Hizb ut-Tahrir. Surprisingly considering he’s a man of the left he had no problem accessing BNP activists, following them during their political activities and getting volunteers to take part in interviews. Hizb on the other hand did not want to know. Perhaps if he had lied about his research he might have gained access to the latter, but maybe at the cost of the BNP’s cooperation.
My PhD experience was fairly similar. The SP comrades I spoke with either knew me beforehand, had seen me about at party activities and events or, because I was a fellow member, were able to check my ‘bona fides’. During the interviews I asked if they would have still taken part had I not been in the SP or a member of a rival organisation. About half said no. This probably sheds light on why most SWP comrades I approached either declined or ignored my interview requests. Because I was upfront about my “side”, and despite assurances it wasn’t going to be employed for “sectarian” purposes, I’m reasonably sure for a lot of people their interest evaporated when they read ‘member of the Socialist Party’. Hence the comparative element of my thesis has had to be dispensed with. But lying about my affiliation was not an option. Not only would it have been unethical, if the comrades had found out I'd been fibbing, which is likely thanks to the number of SP actions I’ve taken part in since, it would have done my reputation no good and contribute to further distrust between our respective organisations. Deciding to be upfront was the right choice from a moral and political standpoint.
However, it should be stressed being up front about one's positions was particularly suited to the work above. There are other politically sensitive contexts where covert participant observation might be necessary - for example from my point of view I have absolutely no problem with sociologists who might go undercover to study fascists, religious extremists, bad employers and criminal gangs. They do not have to justify their covert research to their subjects, but to satisfy the academic and political audiences of this work the need to be explicit about their position remains.
This kind of reflexivity is good practice for the rest of sociology too. Why study this? Who is the knowledge for? What stake do you have in it?
The royal road to scientific sociology is littered with the rusting wrecks of failed projects. If this aspiration is a viable one - and I believe it is - its starts from acknowledging whose side we are on and what interests are served by putting our work out there. Sociological fence sitting is neither plausible or desirable.
It was handbags at noon on Thursday's Daily Politics as two mainstream bloggers took their feud onto our TV screens. In the blue corner sat the corpulent self-styled enfant terrible of the libertarian hard right, Paul "Guido Fawkes" Staines. His pointy-finger opponent in the red was LabourList supremo and new kid on the block, Mr Kate Garraway. The ensuing slap fight did no one any credit and probably left "normal" people outside the blogging world scratching their heads in bemusement. Just see for yourselves:
Epic fail.
But speaking as a sociologist Derek Draper's entry into political blogging and his subsequent feuds with Staines and Iain Dale are very interesting. It serves as a model case study for Pierre Bourdieu's concepts of cultural capital and capital conversion.
Bourdieu argues it is useful to conceptualise social space in terms of fields. A field is much like a game, with its own rules, objectives, strategies, stakes, actors and forms of capital. Think about the economy - firms "play a game" by developing strategies to accumulate capital and turn a profit. Non-economic fields operate in more or less the same way too. This is not to say the economy determines what happens in its non-economic counterparts, but that the interactions and interrelationships animating fields resemble the structures and dynamics of capitalist economies. For instance, take Sociology as a discipline. Whichever way you look at it, my PhD represents a strategy for accumulating the cultural capital specific to that field. My work is an intervention in current debates within social movement research on mobilisation and commitment, and has certain things to say about sociological reflexivity, paying particular attention to the thorny issue of activists studying activists with whom one shares substantial political agreement. The first function my thesis will fulfill (with luck) is achievement of my PhD, which will become my pass into the academic career structure. Depending on how my work is received by the sub-field of social movement research and the wider sociological field, I will accrue greater or lesser amounts of cultural capital, which will then be added to and deployed over the course of my subsequent career in terms of research opportunities, interests, etc.
There are ways in which cultural capital accumulated here can be converted into other forms of capital. One is economic capital - the more successful one's strategy the greater the chance of landing better paid and prestigious academic jobs. There are other ways of converting it into economic capital; securing consultancies of various stripes and writing popular sociology books are two avenues that spring to mind. There's political capital as well - for some on the left a well grounded professional background in the social sciences can give one standing as an 'intellectual'. In the wider political field academia can be married to political capital in terms of expertise. For instance, some MPs had been voicing concerns about the debt-fuelled boom for years, but it is Vince Cable whose reputation as a trained economist has allowed him to hoover up most of the kudos for foreseeing the bust.
What's all this got to do with Derek Draper vs Guido and Iain Dale? If you recall Draper shot to notoriety in the late 90s over the 'lobbygate' cash-for-access scandal. He then disappeared from the New Labour firmament until resurfacing in 2008 as a "campaigns advisor" for the party (as a close associate of Peter Mandelson, it seems Nosferatu's return to favour opened the way for Draper's comeback). Among his brief was the setting up of a rapid rebuttal unit that could respond to the latest mud flung around blogland by the big Tory blogs. Several "new media" breakfasts later Draper midwifed LabourList into the world.
Because Draper is a New Labour insider his activities in putting the blog together attracted high profile attention from the blogging world. Seven posts appeared on Staines' blog about Derek Draper prior to LabourList's launch, variously mocking his efforts and attempting to discredit his psychotherapist credentials. There are even more on Dale's. Using Bourdieu, Draper's move into blogging can be interpreted as an exchange of his political capital for the (subcultural) capital of the blogging field - and that's even before writing a single blog post!
But being a name doesn't necessarily mean big audiences - who really pays attention to June Sarpong's politics blog? Here Draper showed an intuitive understanding of how the blogging scene operates. He made sure there was just enough content on the fledgling site - some of it all right, most of it spin - and then went after the big blogs. Staines was called out over his toleration of the racists and sexists that infest his comments boxes. Dale was upbraided for his soft apologetic for Carol Thatcher's racist outburst. Because their previous actions had invested Draper with a certain amount of blogging 'capital' they had to respond to the provocation - driving audiences LabourList's way and sparking off a secondary layer of commentary on smaller blogs.
Add to this voices critical of the government's record in office and an overall improvement of content, Draper's sacralisation by Dale and Guido has helped LabourList's accumulation of blogging capital become self-sustaining. Like the aforementioned it has become a must-visit destination for anyone who follows the developments in mainstream blogging. However whether the capital the site has built up will translate into economic capital (via advertising) or political capital for the Labour party remains to be seen, but it's certainly done Draper's wider political profile no harm.
By treating political blogging as a field in its own right we can identify the rules of the game and the hierarchy it sustains. It enables a blogger to be conscious of the position they occupy in the blogging scheme of things and can help them understand why certain posts on certain topics pull in the numbers and others do not.
It's about time I did some proper sociology on this blog again. At the moment I'm mulling over a paper on social movements that touches on the relationship between academia and activism. This has been something of a recurring issue as, some of my previous posts (here and here and here, for example) testify.
What is striking about the sociological sub-discipline of social movement studies is the relationship researchers have with the objects of their studies. In my experience those who work in this field manage to have their feet in the activist and academic camps. But if you were to examine contemporary social movement research, there is no qualitative difference between its conventions and those governing other academic sociology journals. Academics write for academics and their insights and findings barely touch the social movement communities. Activists are more likely to subscribe to the literature produced by social movements themselves than Mobilization and Social Movement Studies. Books by influential academics like Doug McAdam, Donatella della Porta and Sidney Tarrow are less likely to be read than Noam Chomsky and Naomi Klein. Therefore a disconnect between the study of social movements and the practice of social movements exists, so, as one of the Russian old beards once said, what is to be done?
This is the problem Doug Bevington and Chris Dixon seek to address in their 2005 paper, 'Movement-Relevant Theory: Rethinking Social Movement Scholarship and Activism'. Their starting point is an argument made by Richard Flacks, who called for the recasting of the social movement theory rolling off the academic assembly lines so it is relevant for activists outside the ivory tower. And the criterion of relevance would be its ability to assist activists in their endeavours. Bevington and Dixon run with this. They argue activist-focused theory offers scholarship a number of advantages. It avoids the theoretical disputes and problems academic theory can get caught up in over what variable to privilege or what moment in a social movement's life course should demand analytical attention. Instead, movement-relevant theory is in a reciprocal relationship with the demands of a movement. The tying of theory to practice "disciplines" theory and stops it from over extending itself in unproductive directions. And also it demands the academic leaves behind their office and gets stuck in with the movement's work.
But there has to be balance. If it is to be credible from an academic point of view it cannot adopt an uncritical tone or regurgitate the movement's ideas. Such an approach would be useless to academic and activist audiences. So there has to be a proscription against confirming preconceived biases - instead one's connection to a movement should act as an impetus for producing the best possible research. And this applies if one is studying a movement one is opposed to: the onus is on providing accurate analysis on its activities and strategic trajectory so it can best be countered.
A lead could be taken from the literature activists do read. Bevington and Dixon show that activists have an appetite for non-academic social movement theory. Their conversations with global justice movement participants found they were reading movement histories and biographies to learn about practical organising and the problems of motivation, emotional conflict and burnout - issues that, in their opinion, are overlooked by academia. Works cited by the activists included treatments of European autonomist movements, the building of movement visions in African-American mobilisations, and Jo Freeman's famous piece, The Tyranny of Structurelessness. Also academic movement-relevant theory should take the discussions activists are having among themselves as its cue, rather than deciding from the outside what the research priorities should be. Lastly engagement should not end once the period of research is over - the criterion of relevance is whether it is read by activists and used in their discussions. If it is not, the researcher can only refine their contribution by remaining involved and discovering what the issue is: are things being overlooked? Is feedback being incorporated into the research's conclusions? Are the findings accessible to the non-academic audience?
It seems a simple task to re-orientate the concerns of the social movement research community. But as yet, it hasn't happened. Why? It is because research and activism do inhabit separate universes. As we saw yesterday, the division of labour creates highly specific specialisms and expertise. Sociology and its sub-field of social movement research are an outcome of this division, with its own laws, forms of capital, specific profits, etc. Activism and social movements belong to an entirely different field (analytically) outside of the division of labour. It is difficult to straddle the boundary between the two because movement-relevant theory produced by activists and theory about social movements by academics are produced in different contexts for different audiences and are governed by different principles. There is a qualitative difference between them.
But movement-relevant theory by academics is not necessarily a forlorn hope. It just means researchers have to be honest about the pressures that bear down upon them. True, the desire to get involved in social movements is a good thing, but conflicts between its needs and those of academia have to be negotiated by the researcher - therefore it is best to have these out in the open. As I noted previously, sociologists have to turn the "sociological gaze back upon ourselves. It follows that if all social phenomena are bound up in ... struggles ... so are we. There's no Mount Olympus from which sociologists can observe the social space below, we are as much part of the fields we study as anyone else. [This] is not for a 'sociology of the sociologists' because it's a jolly excuse for academics to churn out more papers no one is likely to read: it is the condition of scientific sociological knowledge. By looking at our own trajectories, positions and interests in academic and other fields we control for the distortions and biases that are the inevitable outcome of a sociology operating in a society stratified by class and cut across by fields and their species of capital. This can only strengthen the claims our research makes."
Activists who participate in movement relevant research expect it will assist their work in some way. But also, the researcher has to simultaneously convert the knowledge produced into sociological capital, which will involve a certain distortion of the findings to pass the peer review process and help the researcher's advancement in the field. If one is an academic this cannot be avoided, but it can be controlled for provided one is conscious of the positions occupied and likely trajectory, and it is good practice generally (not just for movement-relevant research) to make research participants aware of the effects it will have in the academic field, effects that may not be entirely conducive to a movement's ends.
The production of "engaged" research is far from an unproblematic task.
* Got to university at about nine, climbed the three flights of stairs and settled down at my comp.
* Sent emails to Stoke Socialist Party comrades with the weekly reminder for the branch meeting tomorrow. The topic? The BNP - who they are, what they represent, and how to fight them.
* Had a couple of university admin types drop by who are supervising our removal from this cold hole of an office and our dispersal to the four winds. Turns out I'm not going where I was led to believe and, I was snootily informed, my boxes of stuff have "no place" in the hot-desking continuation office I'm ending up in. But then one of the guys piped up and said he'd be happy to get the porters lug my boxes over from where I can slowly remove my crap back home.
* Met with Keele's finest bolshevik, Brother S, for a cup of tea. He went for the peppermint option and I experimented (somewhat unwisely) with ginger tea, and both of us were scandalised by the 19 pence price hike.
* Both of us paid a visit to a fellow UCU branch committee member to sign a retirement card and find out how the land lies teaching-wise. Doesn't appear to be much going for those who have to depend on part time teaching.
* Had lunch (home made bread with quorn slices and a banana, in case you were wondering) while checking out those blogs who've been updating more regularly than I. Added the new blogs Excuse Me While I Step Outside, Pink Scare and Tendance Coatsey to the blog roll.
* Fired off more emails about job applications and next week's Socialist Students stalls.
* The porters turned up to move my office mate's boxes, and I was told they wouldn't be able to move my stuff after all - an immortal up on high had decreed it. Swore a bit.
* Determined the day wouldn't be a total waste regards my PhD, I read a paper about the (unintended) biographical consequences of social movement participation. It was a bit pointless - existing literature suggests that activists, whether "core" cadre groups or those who more casually dipped into it tended to marry later, less likely have children, more likely to define themselves as leftist and retain some degree of "non-conventional" political participation. These results were gathered at least eight years after the mobilisations that piqued the researchers' interests. Problem was the narrow range of the sample, i.e. all were involved in US New Left movements and from a similar birth cohort. The problem then can their different lifestyles be ascribed to their activism, or the rapid social and cultural change of the 60s? In the absence of research into right wing movements and/or more contemporary mobilisations, the question at the time of the paper's writing (2004) was unanswered.
* Returned a pile of library books and met up with one of my now ex-office mates in her plush room. Nice new computers, looks quite cosy too. But not enough room to swing a cat.
* Boarded the bus to Hanley to meet up with A for party-related activities. We went contact visiting. Unfortunately only one of the four was in but we had quite a jolly chat. And we managed to recruit a new Stoke comrade yesterday :)
* A dropped me off in Hanley - the supermarket beckoned as C didn't fancy cooking this evening. Luckily there were two six packs of potato croquettes going for 75 pence apiece, so bargain! I unwisely awarded myself with a kitkat crunchy and wandered home.
* Sat down and had my tea (a vegetable chilli and rice) in front of Channel Four news. Then lazily began watching half of an old Voyagerepisode about some rogue torpedo or something.
* Dragged myself upstairs to phone the very healthy contact list we've built up. Had some very, very encouraging responses. Spoke to one bloke who was a teacher keen to encourage a bit of political awareness/engagement among his kids. He said he had one lad the other year who supported the BNP because they stood for "giving white people £40,000/year and kicking out all the foreigners". Indeed.
* Came back down, started writing this, and then realised the cat has left me a nice, brown present in his litter tray. Better stop this and sort it out.
You may have noticed it's been a bit of a slow week on the old blog this last seven days. This is because Brother S has been busy organising the founding meeting of Stoke NSSN and I've been writing my PhD. Yes, that's right, I'm actually working on the blighter. Problem is my funding has run out so I now have to get by on an income that makes the paltry wages paid to Socialist Party full timers look a right princely sum. The sooner the thesis is done, the sooner I can be granted my doctorate and the quicker I get a decent job. At least that's the plan!
So, regrettably, that means this fine figure of a blog will be on a go slow for the forseeable future. AVPS is not being abandoned, far from it! But just expect the posting rate to be more sedate and measured. That said, I remember making a similar pledge at the beginning of this year, a pledge I didn't strictly adhere to. However, as seductive a post on the latest self-inflicted difficulties of the SWP is, I must resist and devote my efforts toward my model of radicalisation and commitment instead.
But there's plenty going on this week. There's Socialist Students stalls to be had. Leafleting to be done. Comrades to drink with. Meetings to go to and fascists to combat! I'm sure all this will be reflected in some bloggage somehow!
When you're engaged with research on small political parties, such as the Socialist Party and Socialist Workers' Party, concepts drawn from political science can be a hindrance. According to S.L. Fisher's 1980 paper, 'The Decline-of-Parties Thesis and the Role of Minor Parties', research in small parties tends to be neglected because researchers are more likely to be attracted to parties about which information is more readily available. Undoubtedly this observation does carry weight with regards to the media coverage large parties enjoy and the sheer weight of past academic research that has been carried out on them. This is reinforced by an assumption that small sized parties with small electoral bases mean a negligible impact on government policy.
Take Giovanni Sartori's seminalParties and Party Systemsas an example. In his discussion of what parties should and should not be counted as part of a party system, Sartori rules out those parties unable to secure parliamentary representation. All that really matters are the relative strengths of parties, measured by the number of seats they hold. But even crossing this representation threshold is not enough: party system actors are counted only if they possess enough seats to have ‘coalition’ or ‘blackmail’ potential. Coalition corresponds to parties who have formed a government in the past, participated in a governing coalition, and/or is perceived by other parties as a potential coalition partner. Blackmail potential on the other hand covers all other parties who retain substantial representation while refusing to participate in government (usually on ideological grounds). Lijphart (1999) suggests that while Sartori is useful for determining the significance of parties in a system his classification is blind to the number of parties present within it. An alternative measure proposed by Blondel (1968) looks both at the numbers of parties present in the parliamentary system plus their size. To illustrate, using the present UK Parliament, ten parties currently have representation - but only two are significant in terms of government participation. The Liberal Democrats and their historical antecedents have since the early 1920s only had occasional blackmail potential in exceptional circumstances, such as significant backbench rebellions or during periods of minority government. The same applies for the loyalist parties of Northern Ireland and the SNP.
The problem with this political science approach rests on the conceptualisation of significance. By bringing the analytical focus to bear on small parties the assumptions underlying significance become visible and begin to unravel. What is clear is that significance, regardless of measure, is narrowly conceived in terms of a party’s relationship to office. By extension the privileged field of analysis is parliamentary activity, which is taken to be synonymous with the party system as a whole. In turn this serves to reinforce the hegemonic view that politics in parliamentary democracies is properly the business of vote gathering. The view of politics as something that occurs outside sanctioned elected bodies is simultaneously ignored/suppressed. Parliamentary politics is the unmarked term. It is the assumed norm.
Significance acts as a conceptual gatekeeper. But by diligently performing its duties of defining, measuring, and excluding parties, by upholding and policing the party system concept, it paradoxically undermines its explanatory efficacy. In fact there are a number of ways parties invisible to the significance criteria can have impacts on party systems. Herzog (1987) argues small parties assist in the articulation of new political norms, that such parties are guinea pigs for new ideas. (The oft-cited example in this context is the impact Green parties have had on the mainstream policy agenda, despite their lack of “significance” in terms of the UK Westminster party system). As Carty (1997) observes small parties can “set in motion a set of responses from other parties that [transform a] country’s competitive politics” (p.97). Similarly (though writing about parties who tend to fulfill significance criteria) Capoccia (2002) and Abedi (2004) argue anti-system parties can affect a system’s legitimacy and stability, and its functioning by pushing it in a polarising direction.
For example, despite being micro-parties of no relevance under the significance criteria, both the SWP and SP have had at one time or another an impact on the party system. The SWP played a leading organisational role in the anti-Iraq War movement by helping mobilise a constituency that it later benefited from electorally via Respect. Thanks to its efforts for keeping it a live issue it can be argued that it (inadvertently) assisted the growth of the Liberal Democrat’s parliamentary support (4,814,321 votes and 52 seats at the 2001 election to 2005’s 5,981,874 votes and 62 seats). Similarly in its Militant heyday the SP had three MPs sitting as Labour members, and its role as the organisational backbone of the Anti-Poll Tax Federation was a significant contributing factor to the resignation of Margaret Thatcher and the declining electoral fortunes of the Conservatives in the 1990s.
What this suggests is the necessity for a conceptual reworking of both significance and party system to put them on a sociological footing, so the impacts of very small parties and/or social movements can be properly theorised.
This was shown prior to the awful Indiana Jones movie at my local cinema and was by far my highlight of the whole experience. It was as if I was the guy in the skit:
I wonder if any of the old beards had this trouble?
I won't have the time to write a lot of the next few days - my wife's hogging the computer for her dissertation. So, with election fever still in the air, here's a vignette from the Burslem doorsteps. Mini-ethnographic accounts of this sort will pepper my PhD when it gets converted into book form.
“Hiya duck, very sorry to bother you. I’m from the Socialist Party and we’re going door to door this morning to get signatures on this petition. Royal Mail are planning to close the mail centre on Leek Road and transfer the sorting work that takes place there down to Wolverhampton. What this means for Stoke is the loss of 200 jobs and more of a chance your mail could get lost in the post because of the greater journey it has to make”.
“I’ll sign that”.
She takes the clipboard off me and begins signing her name followed by her address. The pen then wavers pregnantly over the donation column before finally writing down 50 pence.
“I’ll just go and get a donation for you”.
She returns with the money, and I hand over a copy of the paper to her. I also get out the second election leaflet the branch had printed.
“Also, are you planning on voting in the local election?”
“I don’t know yet, I haven’t decided”
“Well, we, the Socialist Party, are standing a candidate in this ward”. I unfold my leaflet and use my pen to point out its headline and the picture of our candidate. “Jane’s a postal worker at Burslem, and part of her round is in this ward. She’s here every day and knows the people and the area very well. Also she along with her workmates took six weeks of strike action over Christmas and New Year. Whether you agree with the strike or not, at least you know with Jane you’re getting someone who’s prepared to stand up and struggle, instead of sitting on the council benches and watching the allowances and expenses flow into her bank account. Do you normally vote?”
“Yes, always voted Labour in the past. I don’t know now”.
“Well we used to be in the Labour party but we left and set up the Socialist Party because we could see which way it was going. Jane also left the Labour party because she was fed up with what it’s doing nationally and locally. The abolition of the 10p tax band, bailing out failed banks with taxpayers’ money … and locally, the attempted closure of Dimensions, the demolitions, schools’ closures, the mayor’s stays in five star hotels at public expense. It’s not really a labour party any more”.
“Okay duck, I’ll have a read of the leaflet and see”.
“Thanks for your time, take care”.
I marked a P for paper sale against her name and looked down the street. A was still standing at the house he’d been at for the last ten minutes. “They must be good, he never usually spends very long with someone”.
The next door that opened was by a small guy who had no qualms in signing the petition, but no money was forthcoming this time. I asked if he was voting this time and he replied “Liberal”. But he agreed to take a leaflet and have a read through. A heavily pregnant woman clad only in a cream dressing gown opened the next door. I explained again what the petition was about, which she signed and I asked her about voting.
“I don’t normally vote, I hate politics”.
“I know all the parties say this, but our kind of politics are different. You can watch them down at parliament waving their bits of paper and scoring points, but that politics is boring and puts people off”.
“Yeah”
“For the Socialist Party, our politics is about street activity, about talking to working class people and finding out what they want”. I took out another leaflet and handed it over, giving the same spiel about our candidate.
“My husband will enjoy looking at this, he does take an interest in politics. Oh yes, we’ve had one of these through before. My father-in-law said he was going to vote for you”. Just then another woman came out her house at the same time a dog darted out from the living room of the one I’m at. I managed to grab it by the collar and ushered it back inside.
“Thanks for your time, duck”. She closed the door and I turned to the woman standing next to me.
“I’d like to have word. I’m sorry for how I look; I was just about to get into the shower when I heard you talking to my husband. I couldn’t believe he told you he was voting Liberal - we’re both socialists. I was hoping one of you would call when I saw in The Sentinel that you were standing in this area. I used to be a member – A knows me. We moved here from Newcastle six years ago. How’s the campaign going so far?”
Because she was an ex-member I felt it best to be open and honest.
“It’s difficult to say. We’ve put out two leaflets so far, but because of limited activist numbers we haven’t done all that much canvassing, so it’s hard to draw any conclusions from the responses we’ve had. Very few people have admitted they’re voting Labour and a lot of people are angry about what’s going on. Whether we’ll benefit from that feeling remains to be seen. I’ve spoken to a couple of people who said they would vote BNP if they were standing, but would now vote for us instead”.
“It’s strange how you could have supporters of something socialists stand against happy to support socialists."
“I know, but generally a vote for them is a protest. They pose as defenders of the white working class and often they are the only ones who articulate the issues working class people care about. Their vote isn’t a solid racist vote by any means. Plus when I was down Abbey Green a couple of years ago it wasn’t too difficult to talk BNP voters around by showing how they scapegoated immigrants for Stoke’s problems, and how they themselves have consistently failed to stand up for working class people of any kind, white or otherwise”.
The conversation continued for about another 10 minutes. We talked about the branch, our candidate, the sitting councillor and the local anti-fascist campaign. I sold her a paper and she told me we could count on two votes from her house at least. I marked the P and two stars against her husband’s name for votes. Because she was so enthusiastic I decided she would be someone worth revisiting once the campaign is over.
A few doors down I came to a house next to an alley, with the door in its side as opposed to the front. I knocked on it and a middle-aged woman opened. I started speaking but it quickly became apparent she was Polish. She started talking to her husband who was watching a dubbed American drama on TV. They beckoned me in. He shouted upstairs. In a few moments a 12-year-old girl came down and was asked to act as our translator. Her English wasn’t very wide ranging and I had difficulty conveying to her the post office issue and standing in the local elections. Her father looked at me and said “jobs?” I nodded and he signed the petition, and gave me a pound. I handed him a copy of our paper, wondering if they will be able to understand any of it.
Eventually A caught up with me and I asked him whether the guy he’s spent so long with was any good. He shook his head.
“Not really. He’s an Iraq war veteran so I thought it might have been worthwhile spending some time talking to him. He had some good ideas and others that were very funny. Once he started it was very difficult for me to back down. I get the feeling if you spent a long period of time with him he would come round to our view”. He then knocked on another door.
I felt an element of trepidation as I started on the next row of terraces. The house on the corner had a company car outside, emblazoned with adverts for one of the local lap dance clubs, so I wasn’t expecting a warm reception on that doorstep. This was compounded when the door was answered by a skinhead wearing what I could only describe as standard issue Nazi bovver boy wear – heavy black boots, black trousers and a loosely-fitted black bomber jacket. But as is usually the case with canvassing, first impressions can easily be confounded. I rattled off my patter about the post office and he was more than happy to sign our petition. I then told him about the local election and who the Socialist Party were standing and he said he’d have a read and think about voting for us.
Not long after we finished the row, and decided to call it a day so A could catch that afternoon’s crucial Stoke City fixture.
