>>2868534i don't necessarily think it would change anything in and of itself, but having the organisational capacity to pull it off would be essential and "win a local election seat" is a good externally testable goal (e.g. the victory criteria are not set by the party itself, you either win a seat or you don't, and you can't rig the election.) so you can reward success and learn from failure, rather than retroactively going "wow, comrades, 1200 communist members managed to round up as 2,622 votes across 14 candidates, our best vote count yet" at a result inferior to that achieved by random old people with nothing better to do than form a local interest party or run as an independent.
though i think you're too dismissive of the merits of holding some form of elected office. one seat obviously isn't going to change the world, but if you look at the SNP, scottish independence basically wasn't taken seriously at all until 2014. the SNP got it taken seriously by going "look how competently we run the country, now imagine how good it could be if we controlled
everything rather than just the devolved areas", by making it imaginable and by running figures with enough stature that you could imagine them as leaders of a real country (unlike Scottish Labour who kept putting up local authority tier people.), and part of the reason they had that institutional skill level is because they worked their way up. (In 1974 they had just 80 councillors and one council under their control, and that was probably a high point because this was during the "it's scotland's oil" era + general disillusionment with Labour and Conservatives. In 1951 they could only pull in 7,299 votes) the grassroots pro-independence movement
mostly sprung up during the 2014 referendum campaign, once people realised it was actually happening. (hence the sudden surge towards "yes" as the "wait, better things are possible and i can campaign for them?" moment hit home.)
even in terms of detoxifying the idea of communism, being able to put leaflets around going "hi, it's your local communist, you're probably wondering why the streets look like shit. here's our budget: now here's our budget minus statutory obligations set at westminster: as you can see, we're not spending all your money on LARPing seminars, actually we're doing much better than [cherrypicked lib/lab/con/ref councils], here's how we'd re-arrange things if we had more power. you should send nagging e-mails to [local MP] telling andy burnham to give us more money. all power to the councils!", having people go "oh yeah, the only person who'd help with my bins / school / care / etc was a communist" is a good way to build goodwill.
(not that i recommend any of this as an
end, merely as a means of basically training people to complete tasks with something approaching set failure standards. you aren't going to build communism or indeed much of anything at the british local authority level, but you can build a party around succeeding at that level.)
i can't accept that bourgeois democracy is built to keep communists out of the running at the council level. at the westminster level, sure, its designed to keep basically everyone out, but it's insane that running as an independent makes you substantially more likely to win than running with communist party backing. that speaks to a totally dysfunctional party apparatus. if a communist party cannot round up ~1000 votes for a council seat or find a candidate to run in one of the small number of uncontested wards (and so get in by default), basically any other task will be beyond it.
at the risk of appearing contradictory: i also think that electoralism is a waste of time for communists and that they should do all those things, although in that case i think they schould eschew the party form entirely (hell, maybe even at the council level people should run as "independent communist", though that might encourage some more ego trips.) because having a party creates too much reason to LARP, to draw up the "party line" on Iran, the nationalisation of the top 200 monopolies, the necessity of combatting anti-stalinist revisionism, whatever, despite there being no purpose to this "Line" because it is tied to an organisation that cannot even round up 1000 votes in an inconsequential contest and so has no business talking like it will one day govern 70 million people.
>>2868621for the WPB i wouldn't count them just because they don't call themselves communists, although i suppose i have to credit the CPGB-ML for helping him out without fucking the whole enterprise up. (although their line, oddly, is that he's a socdem.)
having some leaders like the ones you describe would be desirable, but there's the secondary problem of getting a platform for them to actually engage with the public. There's no point having a second Lenin if the best he can do is post on leftypol.org. This is one area where a party apparatus and a little bit of electoralism would be helpful: the party can get you invited to all sorts of public events, and if you can get into local election debates then being the most sensible person there (easy early on if everyone's expecting you to go "all these people should be executed by the cheka, praise stalin" and you actually go "none of these people's proposed budgets add up, none of them can explain how your bins are going to be collected, all of them answer to their westminster parties and don't really care about this area")
i think you're wrong about idpol though. if you look at the demographics who abandoned Labour between 2017 and 2019, they're mostly the anti-woke pro-Brexit archetype. (old, poorly educated) while (despite getting most of the propaganda aimed at them specifically) younger and more educated people still voted Corbyn in Blair-1997 numbers. Some more numbers:
21% of Remain voters thought Labour was institutionally antisemitic versus 44% of Brexit voters
44% of Remain voters thought Labour was
not institutionally antisemitic versus 19% of Brexit voters
26% of 18-24 voters thought Labour was institutionally antisemitic versus 40% of 65+ voters
34% of 18-24 voters thought Labour was not institutionally antisemitic versus 20% of 65+ voters.
25% of Remain voters thought Corbyn was personally antisemitic, vs 48% of Leave voters
19% of 18-24 voters thought Corbyn was personally antisemitic, vs 45% of 65+ voters.
now, personally, i would be fine with every communist party fudging these issues (which, because of the level of institutional capture, is a little easier than usual. "do you agree with the supreme court judgement?" "i don't think we should have a supreme court at all, in a country where parliament is supposed to be sovereign, this should've been decided by MPs", "do you support the EHRC guidance", "i think we should abolish Quangos like the EHRC, where board members are paid £500/day to set us all against each other btw") because it'd be a big improvement on the status quo and because the only thing you'd really be forgoing is the ability to use pride as one of the many public events where you can promote the party, but it's important not to led superficial narratives cloud your judgement of how public opinion actually moved or of who is more vulnerable to having their opinions manipulated by the UK media apparatus.