14th November Movement for Left Unity
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barney_pig
Po-cha-na-quar-hip
Yesterday on the way to work there was a stall in the town centre from the reading trades council. I went over, but having organised a stall, they seemed to have no idea what to do with it. There was no campaigning literature, no leaflets, nothing but a few tuc pamphlets, and a whole pile of back issues of communist review.
The men on the stal weren't particularly forthcoming either, but at least nobody tried to sell me a morning star.
They got quite peed off when I asked about left unity.
The men on the stal weren't particularly forthcoming either, but at least nobody tried to sell me a morning star.
They got quite peed off when I asked about left unity.
sorry to hear this
nino_savatte
No pasaran!
I went to a LU meeting last week. There were only 10 of us. Early days though and this is the YBF Tory-controlled London Borough of Hammersmith & Fulham after all. 
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On second thoughts I realise class revenge is not Marxist in any real sense, or there would be blood running through the streets and that would serve no purpose whatsoever. However, dealing with fascists is another matter. The Italian partisans for example took a disciplined stance towards Mussolini et al. The execution was carried out by Italian Communist members under the command of senior officers and was neither slow, nor depraved. The hanging from the petrol station was done post-mortem and should be seen in the context of atrocities committed against the Italian population in a vicious partisan war. Similarly, the execution of his inner circle elsewhere was also carried out in a disciplined manner.
Ian Duncan Smith et al will be stripped of all titles, their wealth and homes distributed to the people. Then they will be sent on a work program and will have a three year benefit sanction imposed if they refuse. For all other unemployed workers, this modern form of slavery will be repealed by an elected workers committee, voted in by their peers. A three day working week will be proposed immediately, with what is now the average weekly wage, so no one will ever again suffer (except the above) the indignation of "signing on" for a pittance no one can expect to live on in dignity.
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I went to a LU meeting last week. There were only 10 of us. Early days though and this is theYBFTory-controlled London Borough of Hammersmith & Fulham after all.
It would be surreal to see you as an elected MP in the House of Commons. If on your arrival to take your seat, will you be reading the oath to the Queen and what will you be basing your maiden speech on?
nino_savatte
No pasaran!
I'd do a Tony Banks and cross my fingers. In my maiden speech, I'd call for an end to the monarchy.
Nigel Irritable
Five, Ten, Fifteen Years
There already seem to be some quite significant disagreements between people amongst the core of "Left Unity", particularly over whether or not the new organisation should be socialist in character. On the "socialist" side there are people like Ken Loach and Nick Wrack, on the "of course I'm a socialist but..." side there's Socialist Resistance, Kate Hudson etc.
Nick Wrack:
http://www.independentsocialistnetwork.org/?p=2148
Terry Conway (of SR):
http://socialistresistance.org/5214/thoughts-from-the-first-national-meeting-of-left-unity
Conway's line of argument is essentially that of the SWP back in the Respect days.
Nick Wrack:
http://www.independentsocialistnetwork.org/?p=2148
Terry Conway (of SR):
http://socialistresistance.org/5214/thoughts-from-the-first-national-meeting-of-left-unity
Conway's line of argument is essentially that of the SWP back in the Respect days.
butchersapron
Bring back hanging
Of course i'm stalinist but.
So, fake up a potemkin party then enter it as some non-declared socialist faction.
What is the point - if people want a socialist party there will be one. The creeping around and infecting people by your presence (opposite effect if history is any judge model is dead.
So, fake up a potemkin party then enter it as some non-declared socialist faction.
What is the point - if people want a socialist party there will be one. The creeping around and infecting people by your presence (opposite effect if history is any judge model is dead.
Nefarious Moose
New Member
I've been generally impressed with the Left Unity Leeds group. I've not been politically active in years, 25 years since my student flirtation with the SWP but the anger has reached a point where spoiling my ballot every few years in disgust just ain't cutting it any more. Came across Left Unity just in time to get to their first official public meeting in Leeds mid-April, been to all the fortnightly planning meetings since.
We had the official Leeds launch May 22nd, the report on that's up on Left Unity main site here. Turn-out of around 90, all backgrounds / traditions, aligned and non-aligned alike. Alan Gibbons main speaker really fired everyone up with some straight, plain talking about the failings of the left in recent years that could barely be argued with, he was fucking great. Still waiting for the video of his main speech to come back from editing, this is him wrapping up at the end of the night following around 90 minutes of wide discussion from the floor on the back of his opening speech. Gives a good flavour of why I found him so inspiring, made me sure this was something I wanted to be involved with and make an attempt at. If we fail, we fail but it's gotta be tried. Otherwise we're fucked, these cunts in power will take every last bit of what the labour movement has fought to win over decades, whoever gets in next time, the existing left groups as they are are not a sufficiently united force to challenge it.
Remains to be seen what comes of the launch for us locally. The proof will be in how many of those 90 turn up at meetings in future or out on campaigns on the ground, but there's promise already. One of the guys is an organiser for KONP in Leeds. He usually has 5-6 out on a Saturday leafletting off his stall in town, 15-16 turned out for them last weekend. We have links with Hands Off our Homes, some of their activists have been turning out to our meetings, we'll reciprocate for theirs and have already for their demos. We have various trades union activists onboard, ex and current members of the usual suspects on the revolutionary left that will help us forge links there. We've turned out to the anti-EDL demos recently standing under our Left Unity banner. Some would have done that anyways through other groups they're involved with, some like me wouldn't have so in a small way we've already added to the ranks standing against them.
There are tensions, different traditions and approaches that we will have to reconcile or agree to put to one side so we can work together but we're working well together so far and have achieved a good bit in a very short time frame with no bloody budget on the launch. I'm quietly optimistic we can take this forward. Nationally, who knows?
We had the official Leeds launch May 22nd, the report on that's up on Left Unity main site here. Turn-out of around 90, all backgrounds / traditions, aligned and non-aligned alike. Alan Gibbons main speaker really fired everyone up with some straight, plain talking about the failings of the left in recent years that could barely be argued with, he was fucking great. Still waiting for the video of his main speech to come back from editing, this is him wrapping up at the end of the night following around 90 minutes of wide discussion from the floor on the back of his opening speech. Gives a good flavour of why I found him so inspiring, made me sure this was something I wanted to be involved with and make an attempt at. If we fail, we fail but it's gotta be tried. Otherwise we're fucked, these cunts in power will take every last bit of what the labour movement has fought to win over decades, whoever gets in next time, the existing left groups as they are are not a sufficiently united force to challenge it.
Remains to be seen what comes of the launch for us locally. The proof will be in how many of those 90 turn up at meetings in future or out on campaigns on the ground, but there's promise already. One of the guys is an organiser for KONP in Leeds. He usually has 5-6 out on a Saturday leafletting off his stall in town, 15-16 turned out for them last weekend. We have links with Hands Off our Homes, some of their activists have been turning out to our meetings, we'll reciprocate for theirs and have already for their demos. We have various trades union activists onboard, ex and current members of the usual suspects on the revolutionary left that will help us forge links there. We've turned out to the anti-EDL demos recently standing under our Left Unity banner. Some would have done that anyways through other groups they're involved with, some like me wouldn't have so in a small way we've already added to the ranks standing against them.
There are tensions, different traditions and approaches that we will have to reconcile or agree to put to one side so we can work together but we're working well together so far and have achieved a good bit in a very short time frame with no bloody budget on the launch. I'm quietly optimistic we can take this forward. Nationally, who knows?
nino_savatte
No pasaran!
Some people think that Left Unity is the finished product. It's still early days.
Nefarious Moose
New Member
Finished product? Fuckin' 'ell, give us chance people! For most of us it's only a few weeks old locally, nationally the 'party' exists only as a temporary steering committee formally, it doesn't even have members, as such. Not the card-carrying, subs-paying kind, we're more a coalition of the willing trying to build it, networking organically through unity in action on the ground. The 'product', whatever it is, is a work in progress we've barely even begun. That's precisely the point isn't it: we can all have a role in shaping a new, bottom-up, democratic party of the left. So long as we get involved, and stay involved. Democracy from below in action. 
The Sheffield one seems to be about reconstructing the elements of the left and at present is dominated by Trotskyists and Communists, no Left Libertarian input and with little new thinking(though it is early days) it doesn't seem at present to be involving the sort of people like yourself who are immersing themselves in other LU groups across the UK.
nino_savatte
No pasaran!
Miseryguts.
nino_savatte
No pasaran!
Do you really? That's not what it looks like. From where I'm standing, it looks like you're hoping for a stillbirth.
nino_savatte
No pasaran!
Eh? Maybe in your mind, it's a "fair representation" but it looks like abject pessimism.
nino_savatte
No pasaran!
Yeah, I know you don't care. I mean, how many LU groups are you aware of? You seem to be basing your view on the example of one group. Is that fair or reasonable? No, it isn't.
Nefarious Moose
New Member
No shit!?
Good question Treelover. I was pretty indisposed most of the 90s, up to about 2001, neither use nor ornament to anyone for reasons I won't go into at this stage. And I'd kinda trusted that once Labour had finally taken power back they'd undo some of the Tory's worst excesses and we'd see some real radicalism from them. Yup, I was that naive. What a dumbass! Thoroughly disabused of that by the end of Blair's first term of course.Thought about getting involved with Labour to fight from the inside, decided that was a dead end under Blair with the huge shift to the right pursuing the Middle England vote, PLP / front bench seemingly entirely disconnected from the bulk of the activist party members as I saw it, verging contemptuous of them even as far as direction went. Thought about getting involved with StWC to see where that went, but felt that doomed to fail and also wary of what I saw as an SWP front I wasn't sure I wanted to be involved with too much anyways once we'd gone to war, as seemed inevitable. No disrespect to good SWPers everywhere but I think their approach, and that of similar parties on the revolutionary left is doomed to fail, in the short to medium term certainly, possibly forever. It does not have mass appeal for the vast bulk of the working class they claim to represent, not in this country, such is the completely atomised working class in the main these days. That didn't seem to leave too many options not being in the kind of work conducive to trade union activism either. And then personal problems reared their head again similar to those that had left me neither use nor ornament to anyone previously. So that was that.
Like I said earlier, the anger is finally there enough to get me off my arse and attempt something, I can't not fight back against what this Govt are doing somehow. It may be too late to do anything much about it but this ruthless assault on the poor has to be fought. LU seems as good a vehicle as any at the moment to try and do that, better placed than some perhaps because it is new and trying to break with the past to a large extent I think.
existentialist
Tired and unemotional
I can't speak for anyone else, but your question probably applies to me, and maybe my answer will have some bearing on other people's motivation.
I've been fairly resolutely apolitical throughout my adult life, mainly because every political organisation I've looked at has been pretty comprehensively off-target from my personal philosophies - the naked greed of the Tory right is just as offensive to me as the (to me) extravagant idealism of the leftist groups. Where I have voted for a mainstream party in the past, it's usually been Liberals or Libdem, but even there I've been metaphorically holding my nose as I have done so, and the debacle of the Coalition has made me realise that I was probably only voting that way so as to ensure I was voting for a party that would never have the opportunity to let me down by actually getting into power. I guess, to most politically active types, I would probably be seen as enormously (politically) naive!
Looking at my views from a non-party-political perspective, I am definitely a small-s socialist, and an equally small-l liberal, and I care very much about the idea that government should, somehow, represent ALL of the people, not just a particular section of it. Left Unity at least holds the potential, given that it is unformed as yet, to be something that could be less representative of a "workers'" or a "bosses'" faction and more capable of sustaining an ideology that isn't essentially politically motivated. Of course, I could be looking back on this a year or more hence and bitterly regretting my idealism, but right now it seems about the only active force that stands a chance of not being hidebound by some kind of political ideology.
On top of that is a feeling that, unless I can say to myself that I at least tried something, I'm not really qualified to bitch about what we do end up with. At the moment, that looks like a Conservative party that has spent three decades fighting itself in order to find a balance between hard-right free-market capitalism (which is anathema to me) and some kind of electorally less suicidal moderate figleaf, a Labour Party which would like to claim that it is somehow representative of ordinary people, but seems to be having the same struggle not to end up in the pockets of those who seem to see society as a resource to be exploited wherever it's possible to get away with it.
I don't know if LU will become that. I think it is probably unlikely, given the prevalence of a lot of ideologically-driven groups within it already, but maybe the difference will be people like me getting involved who can help drive it towards an agenda that's less about ideology and more about people (and society).
Our local group (South West Wales) seems to be very inactive, and somewhat demoralised - I spoke to the local organiser who seemed despondent that the group had only 11 members, but bereft of ideas as to what to do about that. I think I could get quite a few people with a similar outlook to mine to join up, but I wonder if I would be better recruiting them to the existing group, or pushing my own ideas instead. I guess I'll at least try to gee things up a bit in the current group before I make any decisions on that score...
SpineyNorman
Inappropriate content removed
Apparently the left unity tweeted a link to this petition which seems to want to make it illegal for social services to take at risk children into care unless their parents have already been convicted with a criminal offence. I hope that's some kind of mistake, otherwise I think they may be taking this 'UKIP of the left' thing a little bit too seriously.
nino_savatte
No pasaran!
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