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Workers Power have split

Random said:
There's no link at all, is there, between the German Spartacists of 1918-19, who later became the German Communist Party and the Trotskyist group calling itself Spartacist?
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Once upon a time (almost 30 years ago), I was visited in my squalid little flat in Bristol by two members of the Spartacist League who had come to sell me a subscription to Workers' Hammer and (their American paper) Workers' Vanguard. At one point in the conversation one of the Sparts became quite excited and declared, "We are the Bolshevik Party!" "You are looking very good for your age," I replied, but neither Spart so much as smiled.

If they consider themselves the Bolsheviks, I see no reason for them not also to think themselves early German Communists. And they did name themselves after the Germans, after all.

(To be fair to the Sparts, I must say that back in the 1980s they were the only people, as far as I am aware, who correctly foresaw the political direction of Afghanistan if the Communists were defeated. For that reason at least, Workers' Hammer and Workers' Vanguard were worth reading.)
 
have you heard the whole "workers hammer and workers anvil" story? the workers anvil was a split from the sparts and they for a while had a war of words with them. Their papers headline was "because the hammer will break before the anvil" :D
 
frogwoman said:
have you heard the whole "workers hammer and workers anvil" story?
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Was that taken from this revolutionary communique, scribed in blood and signed with sweat?

the workers and the bomb are one; the workers and the bomb are united!

a worker-bomber synthesis demonstrates a crux of clear revolutionary moment, one of brutal strength inseparably bound to the whirring sounds of industrial freedom. we must usher in this moment of reckoning -- the smashing of the class enemy through the final blow of the workers' hammer, ushered forward gloriously by the pure song of irradiation; the wrecking of the parasitic milieux upon the pure steel of the workers' anvil!
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It's not, but it'll have to do until someone less shit at this than me comes up with a proper semi-decent response to the scotchman.
 
Does anyone know anything about this group?

http://anticapitalists.org/about-us

Their 'about us' doesn't reveal very much.
X has told Y to be careful of them, because they try to affiliate groups to them.

I think they did that Up the Anti thing a while back, so have they left behind a Trotskyist model?
 
sihhi said:
Does anyone know anything about this group?

http://anticapitalists.org/about-us

Their 'about us' doesn't reveal very much.
X has told Y to be careful of them, because they try to affiliate groups to them.

I think they did that Up the Anti thing a while back, so have they left behind a Trotskyist model?
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They held a meeting in Birmingham on Saturday that I didn't go to but someone I know was planning to go so I can ask him what he thought of it. He's not always the most clued up guy and is looking for something new and not trotskyist/leninist after leaving socialist resistance though. I should see him later today. I looked at the website and was a bit :hmm: about it.
 
BigTom said:
I looked at the website and was a bit :hmm: about it.
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That's exactly my take on it :hmm: What's going on here, then?

There is this report of the Up the Anti Conference and the initiative itself from the CPGB which points out 1. it's studenty 2. the IBT don't like it 3. the CPGB don't like it. But that might be because they are stealing the CPGB's thunder in calling for open discussion and an end to Leninist practices:

http://cpgb.org.uk/home/weekly-worker/925/the-passing-of-a-liquidationist-scheme

http://www.cpgb.org.uk/home/weekly-worker/941/anti-capitalist-initiativeup-the-swanny


butchersapron, the first post in this thread quotes from Simon Hardy part of this AntiCapitalist Initiative thing disclaims Leninism


We came to the conclusion that a method of organising exclusively focused on building specifically Leninist-Trotskyist groups prevents the socialist left from creating the kind of broad anticapitalist organisations, which can present a credible alternative to the mainstream parties.

The post 1991 world presents new challenges to the left and the workers’ movement. Marxism is no longer the natural ‘go-to politics’ of radical activists coming into the movement today. The dramatic shift to the right by social democracy and the business unionism of the trade union movement all took their toll on the capacity of the workers to fight. Now the task of regenerating a movement that can overthrow capitalism is serious one, but in a sense the left has barely begun this task.

As a step forward, in recent months we launched a call for a new anticapitalist initiative in Britain as a way of uniting sections of the left around a strategic perspective whilst emphasising the creation of a democratic space that is so urgently needed to debate and test out our slogans and tactics. We did not want to simply declare a new organisation, but to carry out patient and serious discussions with broader forces about what such an organisation should look like.

We launched this initiative whilst we were in Workers Power, and although there was agreement that such an organisation was needed, there was growing disagreement on the role of groups like Workers Power within it. This boiled down to whether we saw it as a tactic to achieve a larger Workers Power, or whether the anticapitalist organisation that came out of it would look very different; more plural, more open, much looser, but still clear on the strategic questions.

As part of this perspective we drew the conclusion that there needed to be an open, ‘blue skies’ discussion on the radical left, involving matters of theory and history, drawing on the new as well as the old, but trying to come to practical conclusions on how we might go forward today. So, we increasingly rejected the model of democratic centralism that states revolutionary organisations should conduct their debates in private and only present their conclusions to the class. While, we don’t reject democratic centralism, our conception of it is unity in action around democratically determined goals, and free and open discussion. We showed in the course of the debate that this was the norm in the revolutionary movement in the decades prior to 1917.
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