Report from the WSM conference
- Thread starter sovietpop
- Start date
montevideo said:
Seeing as you couldn't be bothered to get out of bed to 'facilitate' the debate on anarchist assemblies at the Anarchist Bookfair this is very faint praise indeed!
montevideo
New Member
sovietpop said:ah now Chuck, don't be harsh, there were extenuating circumstances
yes THE IRISH!
sovietpop said:ah now Chuck, don't be harsh, there were extenuating circumstances
perhaps you are right, it's just that the very high standards and expectaions I have of Monty are increasingly being questioned.
montevideo
New Member
come on chuck you know the size of my marrows
montevideo said:
It's not the size its the principle Monty.
www.guardian.co.uk/uk_news/story/0,3604,1605072,00.html
fishfingerer
sultan of cringe
Because all the evidence shows that Ireland is an increasingly conservative bourgeoisified shitehole populated by a shower of deluded passive peasant cunts whose attitude to left wing politics hovers between indifference and outright hostility.Antrophe said:
Dark days indeed but at least there was the garden of earthly delights and the Hope people and you could go for a pint without being assailed by idiots blabbering about property prices.sovietpop said:
fishfingerer said:
Oh you were involved in the Garden of Delight? So was I. The left has always been tiny in Ireland, the libertarian left even smaller. GOD burnt brightly, but not for very long, in part because there just wasn't enough of a libertarian mileau to sustain it (in part we were a victim of those rising property prices). Now however there are much more people who describe themselves as anarchists - and you'll probably be interested to know, some of them are setting up a new social centre - the spirit of GOD rises again.
Nigel Irritable
Five, Ten, Fifteen Years
sovietpop said:
The second part is certainly true but the left as a whole has not always been tiny. It seems a long time ago now but the Workers Party was once a genuinely large organisation - thousands of members, seven TDs, a national apparatus. Even now I don't think "the left" in Ireland is any smaller than it is in Britain (outside of Scotland). In proportional terms the main Trotskyist organisations are larger than their British equivalents, as are the anarchist groups - there's no British anarchist organisation with anything remotely close to to 260 or 280 members.
sovietpop said:
As far as I am aware the seomraspraoi project isn't anarchist, although many of those involved are anarchists.
Idris2002
Stay Alive in '25
On the general subject of Ireland and the prospects for the left in our benighted mother country, the last issue of Newsweek I saw has a cover story 'Ireland Dark Side of the Boom', which ends by advocating an even greater dose of neo-liberalism, but which does depict a society slowly waking up to the crisis it's got itself into.
So far it's mainly the Shinners who have cleaned up politically thanks to that (and yes, the argument about SF's fake socialism still stands) but there might be chances for the left all the same.
Don't forget that Declan Bree managed to build an organisation in Sligo in the old days, there's Seamus Healey in Tipperary, and these are both cases of a left turn in parts of the country where anyone sounding vaguely left-wing would have been driven out at pitchfork-point in our parent's time.
It would still mean going up against a wholly corrupt and entrenched business/political/media class - but it's something nonetheless.
So far it's mainly the Shinners who have cleaned up politically thanks to that (and yes, the argument about SF's fake socialism still stands) but there might be chances for the left all the same.
Don't forget that Declan Bree managed to build an organisation in Sligo in the old days, there's Seamus Healey in Tipperary, and these are both cases of a left turn in parts of the country where anyone sounding vaguely left-wing would have been driven out at pitchfork-point in our parent's time.
It would still mean going up against a wholly corrupt and entrenched business/political/media class - but it's something nonetheless.
Nigel Irritable
Five, Ten, Fifteen Years
JoeBlack said:
It's hard to tell. The claimed membership of the SWP in Britain was about 3,400 at their last conference. The last time the Irish SWP made a semi-public membership claim it was 500 at their 2004 conference. Now obviously both of these claims are much larger than the real figure but taking them at face value the Irish organisation is proportionally larger.
If I had to guess a "real" membership for each - people with some level of actual involvement in their structures - I would guess that the figures would be roughly in line. Maybe a little under 200 versus a little under 2000?
Nigel Irritable said:
You reckon there are 200 active SWP members in Ireland? I'd have thought half that (actually less). Maybe 40 or so in Dublin, a handful in Cork, a couple in Galway which would leave Belfast, Waterford and Derry to make up the balance. I'm not sure of figures for those three but would be very surprised if it was more than 20 so my real best guess would be closer to 60. Of course there is an annual fluctuation to this figure so I guess depending on where in the college calender you are it might be as high as 80 or as low as 45.
I was in the Teachers Club for something else when their last national conference was on and from the image on the monitor behind the bar from the security cameras it looked like attendence was less than 40.
Also I thought the British SWP was still claiming in the region of 600 - your figures make your case better.
Nigel Irritable
Five, Ten, Fifteen Years
JoeBlack said:
It depends what you consider to be "active". I'm pitching this at a very low level of activity - a little under 200 people with "some level of involvement in their structures". The SWP claim 11 of their mini-branches in Dublin and I think I would accept that all of these exist at some level. They also have some kind of organisation in Cork, Galway, Waterford, Bray, Belfast and Derry plus individuals scattered around places like Gorey, Drogheda, Dundalk, Clonakilty and the like.
Some of these branchlets would be very small indeed with two or three core members but even these would have a periphery with varying degrees of involvement and activity. Cork, Galway, Ballymun and Dundrum for instance would be of that variety. But others would be more substantial. They are certainly in decline, but if we are talking about less than say 170 people with some bare minimum level of involvement then there must be an absolute collapse going on in those parts
JoeBlack said:
I think this is a somewhat outdated view of them. The one place where they really have collapsed is in the universities. I don't think they have one substantial university group anywhere on the island.
JoeBlack said:
You could very well have seen a low point in proceedings to be fair. Their conferences go on for what, three days? They claimed that around 100 people attended, which I believed mainly because I thought it was shockingly low for a conference in Dublin. We get substantially more than that to a residential conference in the middle of nowhere.
JoeBlack said:
They claimed 3,400 at their last conference - not publically but to their members. It was leaked from there and various SWP members effectively confirmed it by arguing on various forums that it was a realistic figure reflecting actual active members.
Nigel Irritable said:
Yeah but from what I've seen these not only can be based around just two or three people but the same two or three people may be the base for more than one branch.
Nigel Irritable said:
Nah i was there for all of Saturday which should have been the highpoint. Actually I think I saw the claimed figure of 100 afterwards and wondered how on earth they had managed to get that.
Nigel Irritable said:
Sure but from what I've heard you find it much easier to get many of your members to 'a residential conference in the middle of nowhere' then in to the city centre - the 'community member' thing.
Anyway what are the figures for the SP these days?
Nigel Irritable
Five, Ten, Fifteen Years
JoeBlack said:
I don't think that it's quite that simple. Their fulltimers seem to move about to shore up branches but each of the branches that I've had any contact with seem to have a core of their own members. Often that isn't very many people but they do normally have something of a periphery. Their local branch where I live - which I gather would be considered weak by them - looks to have three core people and at any one time a small periphery. That periphery may not be particularly active or it may have a very high turnover but it is there.
JoeBlack said:
Fair enough but unless you were keeping tabs on people coming and going I'm afraid I suspect that there is a little wishful thinking present on your part here. People do come and go over long events - look at something like the Irish Social Forum. I was at a recent public meeting of the SWPs which must have had more than the 40 members you are talking about at it.
JoeBlack said:
There's an element of truth in that. There is a layer of Socialist Party members who are willing to work their arses off in their branch activity but who are slow to come to routine city centre marches and the like. So we can deliver 60,000 copies of the Fingal Voice or thousands of copies of other community leaflets in a very short period and then the next weekend have a showing at a demonstration which would be little short of pathetic without Socialist Youth to shore it up.
We try to convince all of our members to get involved in every aspect of our work, but our success in that isn't always total.
JoeBlack said:
I could tell you but then I'd have to kill everyone who reads this message board.
Nigel Irritable
Five, Ten, Fifteen Years
JoeBlack said:
No. Well OK. We are the biggest organisation on the Irish left, but we are still some distance smaller than Fine Gael. That should narrow things down for you a bit.
JoeBlack said:
I have more contact with them than the bulk of Socialist Party members, because I do things like turn up at a random public meeting to see what they're saying, but I still don't see them around much either. They are just much less visible than they used to be. Part of that is definitely shrinkage - which is why I'm fairly confident in assuming that we are a good bit bigger than them these days, while we were probably smaller than them when I joined - but part of it is down to a real reorientation. They just don't do things in their own name anymore. Even the stalls have disappeared.
All of the papers are now online on our web site but if you want to comment the WSM position paper on 'Building an anarchist international' agreed at the Conference is online at http://www.anarkismo.net/newswire.php?story_id=1701
fishfingerer
sultan of cringe
No, I bought stuff there. I know people who used to brag about just walking out with books, what was the story with that?sovietpop said:
Was Seamus Healey a single issue water charges guy or what? I find it hard to believe that the burghers of north tipperary could elect a crook like Michael Lowry by a whopping margin while south tipperary would deliberately put in a socialist independent.Idris2002 said:
fishfingerer said:
Yes there was a lot of shoplifting - it was one of the many problems that GOD faced. It's part of the problem of having a 'social space' which provides a service (bookshop, coffee shop, pub, club, whatever). People end up treating the space just as they would a service provider which is a private enterprises.
Nigel Irritable
Five, Ten, Fifteen Years
fishfingerer said:
South Tipperary includes Clonmel, which is a sizeable and slightly grim partially industrial town. That's where the Workers and Unemployed Action Group is based and they have a shower of town councillors there. Healy's background is in or around the League for a Workers Republic, a now extinct Trotskyist group led by his brother.
Nigel Irritable
Five, Ten, Fifteen Years
Idris2002 said:
I'm not sure that Mayo would be much improved by the addition of a sizeable and slightly grim partially industrial town.
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