SWP expulsions and squabbles
- Thread starter Nigel Irritable
- Start date
brogdale
Coming to terms with late onset Anarchism
Ok, 'it's right' not 'he's'
Pickman's model
Starry Wisdom
it's all in the files. and you thought we were joking.How the hell do you remember that?
He's got it all cross referenced on index cards.How the hell do you remember that?
Pickman's model
Starry Wisdom
it's not on index cards, that's auld hat
it's on punch cards and butchers uses an auld hollerith machine.
sihhi
Tyranny, like hell, is not easily conquered
Ignore everything he says. Cohen has a reason why he's doing that
http://normblog.typepad.com/normblog/2009/02/the-normblog-profile-282-max-dunbar.html
"Can you name a work of non-fiction which has had a major and lasting influence on how you think about the world? > What's Left by Nick Cohen – I think Cohen taught me the value of intellectual honesty."
"Can you name a major moral, political or intellectual issue on which you've ever changed your mind? > My mind's always been torn in two about the Iraq war."
"Who are your cultural heroes? > Irvine Welsh, Salman Rushdie, Stephen King."
"Who are your intellectual heroes? > Christopher Hitchens, Aayan Hirsi Ali, George Orwell."
"If you could have any three guests, past or present, to dinner who would they be? > Christopher Hitchens, Kim Cattrall, Marjane Satrapi."
imposs1904
Thread Killa'
How the hell do you remember that?
well it was Butchers first (and probably last) lol.
I think they did, but there was a sound reason for it. The government was about to pull the plug on the finances for Liverpool Council because it was refusing to impose cuts. By issuing the redundancy notices before that happened it meant that the sacked workers would at least be entitled to redundancy pay and the government would have to finance it. Not a great result however but a last throw at the government.
Oisin123
So Much for Subtlety
Do the SP regard their brief control of Liverpool as an inspiring model then? I don't think history has been kind to the hyperbole about that period that was in 'Liverpool: A City that Dared to Fight'. Anyone remember Degsy? The coming Lenin according to that book. Where is he now? Sorry to drift off topic but it's the quiet hour and run of SWSS protest letters have probably ceased for the weekend.
cesare
shady's dreams ♥
90 day consultation period. Which, incidentally, the government are getting rid of ostensibly because it's perceived to be unnecessary and burdensome for businesses but in reality because it provides sufficient time for workers to organise.
Yes I know the difference between the Section 188 notices which is what were delivered by taxi, and the final redundancy notice which gets issued after the 90 day consultation period. Essentially the process once begun goes through to completion and the consultation only allows the details of the redundancy to be worked out with the unions. As for a tactical disaster, the war was already lost by then.
I have read about how Liverpool Council was run by Militant and if you ignore the character assassination of some of the leaders in the gutter press (Hatton was not as pure as the driven snow to be fair) the decisions on spending priorities were in support of the working people of the city.
The real point is whether Militant were cunts and wrong or trying their best for the workers and wrong - I go with the second option: Liverpool was a brave attempt to build a working class fight back in one city and the experience demonstrated it doesn't work.
Indeed something I presume the SP agree with as I don't think they seriously argue for the capture of city councils by them and allies any more?
articul8
Dishonest sociopath
6,300 families rehoused from tenements, flats and maisonettes
2, 873 tenement flats demolished
1,315 walk-up flats demolished
2,086 flats/maisonettes demolished
4,800 houses and bungalows built
7,400 houses and flats improved
600 houses/bungalows created by ‘top-downing’ 1,315 walk-up flats
25 new Housing Action Areas being developed
6 new nursery classes built and open
17 Community Comprehensive Schools established following a massive re-organisation
£10million spent on school improvements
Five new sports centres, one with a leisure pool attached, built and open
Two thousand additional jobs provided for in Liverpool City Council Budget
Ten thousand people per year employed on Council’s Capital Programme
Three new parks built
Pickman's model
Starry Wisdom
Are you saying 'pathfinder' was a great success?
The39thStep
Urban critical thinker
Simon Hardy! We would be better off with Laurel and Hardy
dennisr
the acceptable face
So you haven't read the book then
dennisr
the acceptable face
We didn't then either
dennisr
the acceptable face
It meant getting two months money for the council workers if they had gone ahead with their plans (they were balloting for all out city wide general strike). Liverpool was isolated and then defeated by the Labour and Trade Union bureaucracy not by the Troy government.
The39thStep
Urban critical thinker
For those ,like the author of this blog ,who have nothing better to do with their lives:http://www.jimjepps.net/?p=273
Yes, that was a deal clincher for me too.
Bakunin
I am Noodle's bitch.
I can see the advertising jingle now, complete with politically-correct picture of bloke doing the domestic chores:
'He does the the Snake'n'Vac, before the wife gets back...'
***Does jazz hands***
'Thank you, that'll be 20,000 payable to Proletarian Advertising Service (Cayman Islands Division), please...'
Oisin123
So Much for Subtlety
I have it still. If you want to argue about Militant's building up of Hatton as a great labour leader I'll dig out some quotes when I get home. But it's not the SP's finest moment. Incidentally, I had the pleasure of being on Hatton's TV show long after he turned celebrity lefty.
The39thStep
Urban critical thinker
no wonder there were few takers.
The39thStep
Urban critical thinker
Must have been the kiss of death
Random
Ethnic nalgocrat
Right now I can't see any movement that's ready to replace Leninism as an organised left wing movement in Europe. Part of the reason is that Leninist groups, and other Social Democratic parties have been very good at squashing their rivals to the left. But now that the Trotskyist Leninists are falling apart, and the Communist Parties have stopped pretending to be anticapitalist, there's no other movement that's near to being coherent enough to grow in their place.
My instinct is that the reason the Trotskyist parties have done so well in the UK, compared to other groups, is that they come from a sectarian and semi-militarised Leninist tradition, and so they're able to hold themselves together despite the hostility of the mainstream labour movement. In other parts of Europe there's bigger radical labour and social democratic traditions for revolutionaries to be a part of, but in the UK the unions and the labour party have been very right wing for a long time.
You can see an even more extreme version in the USA - even worse unions, no socialist movement to speak of - leading to Maoist groups to be some of the more successful far-leftists.
Plus there's the fact that in the last 20 years of extreme neo-liberalism general solidarity and community has been undermined. So the groups that keep the flame alive in this environment tend to be ever more inward-looking and cultish. My experience of anarchist and eco-activist groups is that they all had a very strong in-group feeling, that helped people involved to feel righteous, despite the fact that wider society was often hostile or couldn't care less.
So my fear for the future, is that in this increasingly alienated world, what will organise radicals in the future will be some even more cultish form of group. Some kind of Anonymous on steroids, based on loopy conspiracy theories and a general disdain for wider society.
So you may say - why do we need these kind of cultish radical groups anyway? Well like it or not, it was trotskyists who put a lot of the work into getting the antiwar protests going, just like it was trots who pushed forward other campaigns, like the original ANL, and anarchists have been the driving force in various other campaigns. And many of these campaigns have resulted in the world today being a better place. So I'd say that,e ven if they don't make revolution, revolutionary groups are still a healthy thing for our society.
What I cannot understand, though, is anarchist and trotskyist groups' failure to grow during times of genuine mass mobilisation, like during the anti-war protests, when the extreme radicals (and the Muslim Brotherhood!) were some of the only groups articulating what the majority of the UK felt. And this thing that I can't understand is also something that makes me hopeful. Because it basically hints that what is holding the far left back is something inside the far left. And so groups need to own up that they have no real answers, that they've got it wrong and they're failing to connect with what people want.
Then we need to be open to learning, and trying to help some kind of genuine popular working class radical movement take shape. Myself I'd like to see a mass "union" movement rooted in workplaces and communities, which wins basic working class victories and that offers a home for all sorts of political groups, all arguing and talking over their politics, but which is also based in direct action and is strong enough to resist any political party's attempt to take it over, or an attempt by the state to domesticate it.
But that's just me. I have to admit that the future will look very different, and I'll probably not like it!
I think it's a good example of the limits of a localist strategy, local councils (especially these days) are not a really effective platform for challenging the political consensus on a national level. It's the number of seats in the House of Commons that matter in the system we've got, that's the bottom line.
People should also remember that the City of Liverpool in the early 80's was being earmarked for "managed decline" and on the recieving end of Thatcher's wrath, they were being systematically attacked by the govt, in such a situation I think Militant deserve some credit for actually organising to fight back, even if it was ultimately doomed.
chilango
Hypothetical Wanker
Council communist stuff is interesting. As is a lot of the non-Leninist, libertarian communist stuff (the Sits, autonomists, etc etc. others are better placed than me to make suggestions though..). Not a blueprint or answer by any stretch of the imagination, but at its best good food for thought. But equally plenty of dull, irrelevant, inaccessible dogma too.
ViolentPanda
Hardly getting over it.
That's not a problem, it's generally a benefit IME. You're somewhat less likely to think you "know it all" and to go beyond the "official narrative" of a subject as an autodidact.
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