Podcast: Play in new window
Subscribe: Apple Podcasts | RSS | More
Moore Holmes is a Loyalist and a member of the advocacy group Let’s talk Loyalism.
*****
You probably think that you’ve never heard of the WSM, the Workers Solidarity Movement, but you probably have heard of them, even though you don’t remember it; most people don’t pay much attention when they are offered a leaflet from one of the various fringe political associations that set up stall at the pedestrian pinch-points in our city centres.
The Workers Solidarity Movement aren’t to be confused with the Workers Party, the Socialist Party, the Socialist Workers Party, the Solidarity Party or any of the other small and sometimes minuscule groups on the far left. I say that, but in reality they are often confused with each other, which makes all the more ironic the ferocity with which these tiny groups sometimes dispute the most esoteric distinctions between each other.
The WSM, for example, was a Platformist group. I would think that almost nobody outside the far left has even heard of that ideology, let alone have any idea what it is. In case that’s not you, platformism is, in short, a particularly puritanical version of left-wing anarchism, although I’m sure as I speak someone somewhere is drafting a motion of condemnation of me for misrepresenting the movement.
The WSM never stood any candidates, though they did regularly campaign for people not to vote in elections, they even argued for people to boycott the referendum on the Good Friday Agreement for reasons argued in a leaflet so densely typed that I suspect nobody who had it thrust into their hand even read it, let alone understood it.
But the curious thing about the WSM is that they were so strict about their ideological correctness – there are articles online where they describe the steps they took to prevent people who didn’t hold all the right views from joining – they were so strict that they ended up being one of the smallest of these fringe parties, and a few weeks ago got so small that they announced that they were winding up.
That’s kind of an unusual thing for these groups to do, usually their core activists are so strongly attached to the cause that they stay with the party through thick and thin, and their statement does talk about the individuals remaining committed to the cause, but it’s clear that they have given up the ghost.
I sort of feel sorry for these guys – these groups are overwhelmingly male; I don’t agree with much of their ideas, but their criticisms of contemporary society are often on point. It’s been said that the definition of a crank is someone who won’t change their mind and can’t change the subject.
It’s difficult not to apply this to a lot of these groups, but I think that their motivation comes from a good place, and nobody is really in a position to critique the psyche of people who are trying to do good as they see it, least of all me.
The common criticism that these groups are in sympathy with repressive totalitarian regimes abroad is often just wrong, but to understand that takes an intimate understanding of the minutia of the differences between the various factions, these minutiae are often hugely important to the groups themselves, but totally impenetrable to most outsiders.
The other obvious thing to do is to compare these groups with the micro-groups on the far right that have made a bit of noise, though not much political impact, in recent years. I don’t think that is fair either; superficially they are all small and politically extreme, but groups on the right have a much greater tendency to swing wildly from one political position to another, often totally contradictory, in an effort to make their general misanthropy appeal to the cause of the day. Groups on the far left tend to cling fast to their beliefs, for better or worse I don’t have any big gotcha to say here, I just thought it was worth marking the end of the WSM; most people’s political beliefs are a mile wide and an inch deep. It’s interesting … it’s sometimes interesting to listen to the beliefs of people whose politics are an inch wide but a mile deep.
