CONTEXT/logistics
YES HQ has no organisers; this is by far the most serious strategic error of the YES campaign. Since the start of the campaign it has had no organisers. It has been the ever present absent of the campaign. YES staffers have responded to queries about the lack of a steer from the centre by saying it is not their job to provide a steer from the centre; this is spad talk for "I don't know what the Hell I'm talking about" - any serious social movement REQUIRES organisers, and providing a steer from the centre was YES HQ's ONLY JOB beyond data entry and the messaging they've largely failed to get anywhere with due the Unionist media hegemony. They have been explicit about this abrogation of duty to organise the movement. Whatever the cause of this or the rationale it has certain implications.
There are many hundreds of thousands of commited YES voters who remain inactive, when a bit of "pushing" would activate them. The actual YES movement could easily by twice the size it is now, with organisers, and a year of work.
Much of the actual existing movement is a bit inert; this is why we can dominate facebook and twitter and yet fail to canvass Scotland a bagillion times over.
There are something like 200,000 YES activists, or more - if that number is wrong it's because it's too conservative. (By activists I mean people who are doing something for a YES vote; in my immediate area there are dozens of YES activists; if I were to split my burgh of Glasgow up into branches of YES activists I could form a dozen very solid branches within the mile and half or so radius that covers). I can go anywhere in the country and I will find a YES activist. My entire immediate family is a YES activist. Most of my friends tell similar stories. My immediate family and theirs are usually politically inert. I constantly meet people who have never given a shit about politics in their lives, and now they are card carrying YES activists telling their neighbours the good news.
Let me repeat I believe that 4% of Scotland is a YES activist. The movement remains chronically disorganised, due to poor leadership decisions taken by the political adepts who understand elite politics, PR, data, and winning elections, but not running mass movements like trade unions or huge community coalitions. Otherwise we would by now have completely overwhelmed the Establishment enemy. Five really good trade union or community organisers would have done it
Just to underline the point the last count released on signatures for the YES declaration put the number at 789,191 at the start of June.
More than 1 YES activist in 10 has joined the SNP.
--
'DEFEAT'
If the movement is defeated with a narrow NO victory in September, then it will suffer a terrible harrowing. We can expect that at least 75% of it will drift away should it be defeated, and we have not "innoculated" or hardened the troops in some way.
So if nothing else happens there will be a movement of 50,000 people, half of whom will be in the SNP.
IF we 'lose' the referendum because of fear and elite media hegemony we will have a national liberation movement of 1% of Scotland. Organised, this is a movement that could inflict greater damage on the Establishment enemy and the Unionist Government than this disorganised 4% of Scotland has. But organising is the key.
[A word to the sniffy political adepts. Excoriating people for spontaneously supporting protests and not canvassing is not the same as organising; it's actually disorganising, as it's Holy Willie stuff that encourages passivity. Organising leadership is leading by obeying, leading out, encouraging, coaxing, and social pressurising. It isn't being more morally upstanding and shouting that everyone else should be.]
--
VICTORY
To the victor the spoils. 200,000 people are now an establishment frame, now fighting a challenger frame which was once the corrupt Unionist elite. The SNP will hold directional influence, but they can't count on hegemony should they try and hold the movement back.
The trouble with popular politics for elites and political parties is that you can't put the genie back in the bottle. Some of us don't want the genie back in the bottle: we want our three wishes.
--
For the record here are mines:-
End the colonial ruling class: utterly smash them - no mercy;
The Keynesian social democratic state that reindustrialises at pace;
Economic, political, cultural, ecological renewal. An end to Welsh knots, Super Ponticums, Anglocentricism, and fawning elite defeatism; no more 32 'local' councils, and above all real politik in the actual national interest. If we can "afford a God-damn supercarrier" then, why not a colossal fleet of diesel hunter killer subs and the world's largest drone strike fleet, and a quid pro quo with Germany to regain complete control of our fisheries - our reindustrialisation requires a very real military counter-threat to the Russian navy, and we need to save our environment from Spanish trawler Keynesianism;
The left cynics will note that only in Scotland does a form of Northern European bourgeois normalism constitute a revolutionary manifesto, but that is reality.
YES HQ has no organisers; this is by far the most serious strategic error of the YES campaign. Since the start of the campaign it has had no organisers. It has been the ever present absent of the campaign. YES staffers have responded to queries about the lack of a steer from the centre by saying it is not their job to provide a steer from the centre; this is spad talk for "I don't know what the Hell I'm talking about" - any serious social movement REQUIRES organisers, and providing a steer from the centre was YES HQ's ONLY JOB beyond data entry and the messaging they've largely failed to get anywhere with due the Unionist media hegemony. They have been explicit about this abrogation of duty to organise the movement. Whatever the cause of this or the rationale it has certain implications.
There are many hundreds of thousands of commited YES voters who remain inactive, when a bit of "pushing" would activate them. The actual YES movement could easily by twice the size it is now, with organisers, and a year of work.
Much of the actual existing movement is a bit inert; this is why we can dominate facebook and twitter and yet fail to canvass Scotland a bagillion times over.
There are something like 200,000 YES activists, or more - if that number is wrong it's because it's too conservative. (By activists I mean people who are doing something for a YES vote; in my immediate area there are dozens of YES activists; if I were to split my burgh of Glasgow up into branches of YES activists I could form a dozen very solid branches within the mile and half or so radius that covers). I can go anywhere in the country and I will find a YES activist. My entire immediate family is a YES activist. Most of my friends tell similar stories. My immediate family and theirs are usually politically inert. I constantly meet people who have never given a shit about politics in their lives, and now they are card carrying YES activists telling their neighbours the good news.
Let me repeat I believe that 4% of Scotland is a YES activist. The movement remains chronically disorganised, due to poor leadership decisions taken by the political adepts who understand elite politics, PR, data, and winning elections, but not running mass movements like trade unions or huge community coalitions. Otherwise we would by now have completely overwhelmed the Establishment enemy. Five really good trade union or community organisers would have done it
Just to underline the point the last count released on signatures for the YES declaration put the number at 789,191 at the start of June.
More than 1 YES activist in 10 has joined the SNP.
--
'DEFEAT'
If the movement is defeated with a narrow NO victory in September, then it will suffer a terrible harrowing. We can expect that at least 75% of it will drift away should it be defeated, and we have not "innoculated" or hardened the troops in some way.
So if nothing else happens there will be a movement of 50,000 people, half of whom will be in the SNP.
IF we 'lose' the referendum because of fear and elite media hegemony we will have a national liberation movement of 1% of Scotland. Organised, this is a movement that could inflict greater damage on the Establishment enemy and the Unionist Government than this disorganised 4% of Scotland has. But organising is the key.
[A word to the sniffy political adepts. Excoriating people for spontaneously supporting protests and not canvassing is not the same as organising; it's actually disorganising, as it's Holy Willie stuff that encourages passivity. Organising leadership is leading by obeying, leading out, encouraging, coaxing, and social pressurising. It isn't being more morally upstanding and shouting that everyone else should be.]
--
VICTORY
To the victor the spoils. 200,000 people are now an establishment frame, now fighting a challenger frame which was once the corrupt Unionist elite. The SNP will hold directional influence, but they can't count on hegemony should they try and hold the movement back.
The trouble with popular politics for elites and political parties is that you can't put the genie back in the bottle. Some of us don't want the genie back in the bottle: we want our three wishes.
--
For the record here are mines:-
End the colonial ruling class: utterly smash them - no mercy;
The Keynesian social democratic state that reindustrialises at pace;
Economic, political, cultural, ecological renewal. An end to Welsh knots, Super Ponticums, Anglocentricism, and fawning elite defeatism; no more 32 'local' councils, and above all real politik in the actual national interest. If we can "afford a God-damn supercarrier" then, why not a colossal fleet of diesel hunter killer subs and the world's largest drone strike fleet, and a quid pro quo with Germany to regain complete control of our fisheries - our reindustrialisation requires a very real military counter-threat to the Russian navy, and we need to save our environment from Spanish trawler Keynesianism;
The left cynics will note that only in Scotland does a form of Northern European bourgeois normalism constitute a revolutionary manifesto, but that is reality.
