US RAPPER Kanye West’s declaration that he is planning to stand for the presidency may be a joke.

It is not clear that West has actually registered anywhere to run. Nor does his declaration amount to a policy platform or even a single-issue cause.

But West’s rebuke to an audience when he made a similar announcement last November – “what are you laughing at?” – seems fair enough given the current incumbent of the Oval Office. If Donald Trump, a TV celebrity with no background in politics, can be president, why not West?

The US presidential system has always allowed for celebrity as an alternative to a political record. Ronald Reagan made his name as a film star, while even Dwight Eisenhower, whose record as supreme commander of Allied forces on the Western front in World War II made him an authoritative figure, was approached by both the Democrats and Republicans to be their candidate for the top job – demonstrating that it was his fame and not his political convictions they were interested in.

We are not immune from the phenomenon this side of the Atlantic. It is not many years since the prospect of the clownish Boris Johnson, a disgraced journalist and bumbling host of political satire show Have I Got News For You, becoming Prime Minister would have struck most observers as preposterous. 

For Johnson the anteroom to No 10 was the London mayoralty. He was chosen for that role in turn because the Conservative Party sensed the need for a “personality” to take on Ken Livingstone, a figure of far more substantial political achievement but one who had also benefited from the sense that he was a maverick, a vote for whom was the equivalent of giving the middle finger to the political Establishment.

The drift towards politics as a popularity contest is in part the ruling class’s response to the increasing lack of public confidence in its institutions. 

It also reflects the erosion of local democracy through the removal of serious revenue-raising and policy-making powers from councils, with the newer institution of directly elected mayors providing the illusion of local control while facilitating the privatisation of services – a process detailed in Peter Latham’s books The State and Local Government and Who Stole the Town Hall?

These shifts are important because there is no road to real change that does not run through the hard work of organising at workplace and community level. 

The politics of celebrity has infected the left, as we saw to an extent when Jeremy Corbyn led Labour. This was not because his followers were a cult, as hostile commentators claimed; their enthusiasm for his project was rational and based on the policies he had spent a lifetime fighting for, while his tumultuous reception at rallies reflected the hope he inspired that “things can and will change,” in his own words. 

But on a number of fronts, from the failure to reform the parliamentary party to the failure to build Labour as a tangible presence rooted in working-class communities, the movement appeared to see electing Corbyn to No 10 as a panacea that could stand in for local organising.

No individual can lay claim to being the standard bearer of the left in Britain now, and socialists should turn their attention to the local struggles to unionise workers, protect services and community assets and defend those threatened with eviction or the sack, daily struggles which are the building blocks of our movement.

The amazing achievements of the Black Lives Matter movement in the US, which has forced real reform to police departments in many states, show us the tremendous power of a community-rooted, chapter-based network of activists. The battle against state racism may be distinct from the battle to save jobs, but both depend on our ability to organise and exercise power independently of state institutions.