Further comments on organisation

Further comments on 'organisation'

First of all, we think that the following comments don't merit an extra post, but we were not quick enough to reply while the original article and peoples' comments were still on the main page.

http://libcom.org/blog/workers’-organisations-–-general-thoughts-debate-30072014

*** General aim of our text

The main question we raised in the text was about how the form of capitalist production determines the form and scope of workers' struggles - or rather the dynamic relation between both. We claimed the question of revolution and the possibility of anarchism/communism relates closely to the objective conditions (how does the working class live and produce in capitalism) and the subjective experiences (what kind of social power do workers develop in struggles, how do they overcome the given boundaries of division of labour, are they able to re-organise social production/distribution as part of their movement)

The comments on our text in general did not relate to this question, but rather focussed on a single question, e.g. whether trade unions are restricted to the legal sphere or whether they (sometimes) break the law. We will try to reply to this particular question, but first want to re-emphasise the necessity to focus on the larger question: where do we see 'revolutionary tendencies' and how do our political and organisational proposals reflect this in practice?

If we want to raise the question of a social alternative to capitalism then we have to deal with two related (and hardly new) questions:

a) In the current crisis we see the contradiction between impoverishment and highly developed social productivity (how many workers are necessary to supply the world with food, garments, iphones) becoming much more blatant - there is an abundance of 'means of production' (abandoned factories, second-hand computers) and 'labour' (under/unemployed), but profit production and crisis means that despite these productive potentials for a life without drudgery people are getting poorer. This is not mainly a contradiction between those who have jobs and those who don't, but part of the production process itself: while they squeeze us out more, spend more on machinery to surround us, our working day (particularly as a household!) does not shorten, our life does not get better. While we can say that this contradiction is the main objective condition for a social alternative, the question of how the working class can overcome it is contested.

b) The related contradiction to the one above is the one between, on the one hand, the emergence of a global working class - the actual subject of 'social productivity' - during the last twenty years (globalisation of production, mass migration, industrial boom in China and India, emergence of global means of communication in workers hands etc.), while on the other hand, with the advent of the crisis, we see an increase in nationalism, regionalism etc. On a global scale conditions become more similar (between proletarians in China and US etc.), while regionally divisions are deepening. In recent movements proletarians 'took the streets and squares' (Arab Spring etc.), but as a mere mass of people opposing the state the movement could not go beyond the 'political arena' (the question of a different form of production/distribution was marginal) - while at the same time struggles and strikes in the sphere of social production and circulation remained largely isolated in their respective 'economic' spheres. While the global working class is getting more skilled over all, we still fight as victims of austerity.

The two contradictions above seem to confirm traditional left/Leninist concepts: workers are limited to their respective economic spheres (national labour markets, run-down or booming companies) and it needs a political force, which puts the question of a social alternative on the agenda (through political demands, through programs). This political perspective (workers as a segmented mass) then - consciously of not - keeps workers in their position of victims of powerful bosses and the repressive state, last but not least in order to justify the existence of its own political agenda and organisation.

Revolutionary syndicalism, such as (main sections of) the early IWW, opposed this perspective of the necessity of a political party, saying that in the struggle against the (individual) bosses, workers will be able to politically generalise their struggle against capital and state based on the solidarity between workers united in a revolutionary union and with the aim of self-management. In hindsight we can see that the IWW was weakened less by state repression (the official reason stated by revolutionary syndicalists) but by not being able to fully understand the political nature of the production process and its changes. What does that mean? Their political program of "struggle towards self-management" was undermined as soon as capitalist production became more spread out beyond company levels and when the large scale introduction of assembly line work questioned the individual skills of workers. The IWW was fascinated by Fordist production, they tried to analyse and understand it, but mainly saw it less as a political attack, but as a more or less neutral technological advancement, which workers should still run in "self-management". They still saw themselves as "the workers organisation", rather than asking how the actual basis for workers organisation - the production process itself - had changed fundamentally and therefore required new organisational efforts. This was the demise of syndicalism and from then on we either saw its marginalisation or move towards establishment - by accepting the framework of the respective state (labour) laws.

In the text we wanted to explain why we think that revolutionaries should re-focus their activities and start from what workers are already doing on a world scale, how they are already connected across company or national borders by the production process (supply chains etc.); how it is them who constantly have to deal with the fact that capital has to divide them for political reasons (subcontracts etc.), but at the same time depends on workers cooperation across these set boundaries. The main challenge will be to discover the social links that connect the working class in areas of development (either regions or bigger industries, urban concentrations) with those in marginalised sectors (which includes the domestic sphere). We said that the moments of discovery of the productive and global character of the working class are the struggles themselves - once workers in struggle refer to other workers who they otherwise depend on in order to work ('the collective worker' - see further below).

We hoped that the debate would focus on this question: how do we have to organise ourselves and how do we politically and practically engage with concrete struggles - and where do we see the connection between them and a fundamental social transformation? We now try to respond briefly to particular points raised in the comments.

*** As a side-note: Commonalities and differences

As a side-note at this point: Kevin S. said in his comment that our text reminded him much of other "left-communist and anarcho-syndicalist writings of late". We would dispute this, and not because we think that our thoughts are particularly original - they are not! Further below we try to say a bit more about our problems with anarcho-syndicalism - and our differences with left-communist positions (or rather practice) like the ICC should be quite obvious. This would leave bohemian-insurrectionist positions of the communisation tendency, e.g. positions of Endnotes or TC. We agree that there are some superficial similarities, e.g. the criticism of leftist efforts to explain the decline of cycles of class struggles by 'lack of the right program/consciousness' or the rejection of 'communism as a (post-transitional) policy'. But if we get to the heart of things we find that their rejection of a connection between a) how the workers produce capitalism (as a global, multi-skilled, both over-worked and under-employed class) and b) how based on this relation of production workers are not only able to fight against capital and state, but are also potentially able to produce a different society means that we actually have little in common.

Instead of going deeper into abstractions in order to clarify the differences, just taking a brief look at their interpretation of global supply-chains and logistics is sufficient to illustrate the point. Standing as a blockading Occupy activist in front of the cranes in the port of Oakland, California, the scope of global capitalist cooperation seems oppressive. "As an interface between production and consumption, between the US and its overseas trading partners, between hundreds of thousands of workers and the various forms of circulating capital they engage, the quieted machinery of the port quickly became an emblem for the complex totality of capitalist production it seemed both to eclipse and to reveal." Instead of trying to understand the global cooperation of workers within this 'gigantic machine', instead of analysing its internal contradictions and workers (limited) conflicts within - in short - instead of demystifying the 'capital fetish' the bohemian writers do the opposite:

a) they take capital at face value:

"Since the 1980s, business writers have touted the value of “lean” and “flexible” production models, in which suppliers maintain the capacity to expand and contract production, as well as change the types of commodities produced, by relying on a network of subcontractors, temporary workers, and mutable organisational structures, adaptations that require precise control over the flow of goods and information between units."

"But logistics is more than the extension of the world market in space and the acceleration of commodital flows: it is the active power to coordinate and choreograph, the power to conjoin and split flows; to speed up and slow down; to change the type of commodity produced and its origin and destination point; and, finally, to collect and distribute knowledge about the production, movement and sale of commodities as they stream across the grid."

"In this account, influenced by Fernand Braudel’s description of the origins of capitalism, and its revision by world-systems theory, capital is nothing so much as the commander of flows, breaking and conjoining various currents in order to create a vast irrigation and drainage of social power. Logistics turns solids into liquids — or at its extreme, into electrical fields — taking the movement of discrete elements and treating them as if they were oil in a pipeline, flowing continuously at precisely adjustable pressures."

b) they ignore the workers and focus on technology

"The digital and telecommunication technology of contemporary grammatisation is the final stage of this process, such that our memories and cognitive faculties now exist in the data cloud, as it were, part of a distributed technological prosthesis without which we are effectively incapable of orienting ourselves or functioning. In this largely persuasive account, which thankfully cuts against the optimistic readings of information technology as a progressive socialisation of “general intellect”, we are dispossessed not just of the means of production but the means of thought and feeling as well."

"Another problem, though, is that administration at such a scale [global supply-chains] introduces a sublime dimension to the concept of “planning”; these scales and magnitudes are radically beyond human cognitive capacities. The level of an impersonal “administration of things” and the level of a “free association of producers” are not so much in contradiction as separated by a vast abyss."

c) in despair and ignorance leave the sphere of socialised labour 'to capital'

"The whole is the false, in this case, not so much because it can’t be adequately represented or because any attempt at such representation does violence to its internal contradictions, but because all such global representations belie the fact that the whole can never be possessed as such. The totality of the logistics system belongs to capital. It is a view from everywhere (or nowhere), a view from space, that only capital as totalising, distributed process can inhabit. Only capital can fight us in every place at once, because capital is not in any sense a force with which we contend, but the very territory on which that contention takes place. Or rather, it is a force, but a field force, something which suffuses rather than opposes. Unlike capital, we fight in particular locations and moments — here, there, now, then."

d) and consequently despite their metropolitan existence and theory they end up in imagineries of local DIY revolution with a communist horizon as wide as your backyard

"Our prospects are such that, instead of propagandising for forms of workplace action that are unlikely to succeed or generalise, we might better accept our new strategic horizon and work, instead, to disseminate information about how interventions in this sphere might become more effective, what their limits are, and how such limits could be overcome."

"This would be a process of inventory, taking stock of things we encounter in our immediate environs, that does not imagine mastery from the standpoint of the global totality, but rather a process of bricolage from the standpoint of partisan fractions who know they will have to fight from particular, embattled locations, and win their battles successively rather than all at once."

(from: http://endnotes.org.uk/en/jasper-bernes-logistics-counterlogistics-and-the-communist-prospect)

We are sorry for the rather polemical tone but we find that there is a stark mismatch between a high degree of ignorance towards the inner-workings of global industries and logistics - and a half-hearted philosophical excuse for why they don't even have to bother trying to understand - and a certain arrogance of the 'theoreticians' towards workers when the communisation disciples maintain that the main shortcoming of past waves of class struggle was the attempt of workers to 'affirm themselves as workers'. Lacking the 'collective worker' as reference point, it is no surprise that finally, despite all radical insurrectionism, their theory is conservative, of small-scale exodus, which in the end boils down to becoming the barbary end of the two alternatives. Even on the most minute level: having worked in both transport offices and the connected warehouses helped us to question the capital fetish 'of the slick and flawless organiser of circulation' pretty easily. A suggestion perhaps to our communisation friends.

We don't proclaim the 'self-management of global supply-chains', the authors are right when they say that these mainly connect different wage regions, rather than actually increasing social productivity. But we maintain the importance of workers in global industries, their exchange and skills, for the prospect of a global uprising. This is no novelty, the sea or dock workers, the railway proletarians and telegraph operators, the migrant workers (who also only traversed different wage regions!) and fed-up proletarian soldiers were decisive for the inner connection of global revolutionary waves as early as in 1918. To disregard the importance of workers in a much more integrated global industry and supply chain for a revolutionary process today and to merely focus on 'external blockades' of the 'magic circulation process' is tragic. And if we talk about 'producing communism' as being something more than scrambling together (and killing each other over) things we find in our immediate 'environs', then the collective skills of logistics and transport workers will still play a significant role, even on an integrated world-scale: to dissolve the material basis of uneven development (re-distribute manufacturing capacities), to even out geographical disadvantages and to dissolve the division between town and countryside will require a fair bit of logistical effort!

*** The unions and the law

Here we refer to the points made by Kevin S., Fingers Malone and Oliver Twister. First of all, we don't want to boast with a proletarian CV or something, but we want to maintain that our criticism of trade unions does not stem from arm-chair ultra leftism ("theoretical groups"), and only partly from an 'historical perspective' (although if you look back on the Polish experience - very pressing/forming for some of us - the tragic role of trade unions in restructuring and political re-establishment over the last 30 years is a very dark shadow), but mainly from our (as wider part of the wildcat collective and Faridabad Majdoor Samachar - a collective in Delhi) experiences of working and organising in construction, railway and automobile industries and as - sometimes more, sometimes less active - participants in various struggles (e.g. wildcat strike at General Motors in Germany, Gate Gourmet in Germany, Visteon occupation in the UK, Maruti Suzuki struggle in Delhi).

There certainly are many examples of particular trade union struggles breaking the law - and we can say that the union leadership mainly accepts this in situations where the very existence of the trade union organisation is put into question by restructuring. The examples given by the comrades confirm this (miners' dispute, long-shore men strike etc.). But in general we think that it's only partly about the question of 'breaking the law' - more about the general character of trade unions. Again, in most places where we worked we were union members and actively looking for 'branch meetings' as places where workers would meet, even if it is under the official structure (we will continue doing this and would not discourage anyone from doing so). For example the railway in Germany is highly organised (over 80 per cent), but the union was not that kind of place of exchange - this does not seem to be an exception. What is this supposed to say? The social places to meet have to be rebuilt anyway, so should we still try to do this within the trade union framework?

Obviously, we could keep on making voluntaristic assumptions that official trade unions could be different if only the rank-and-file would push the boundaries more: if they would question internal hierarchy of representation (in most cases laid out by the law); if they would question that trade unions largely only represent permanent workers; that they are confined to a professional or sectorial basis; that they operate mainly within a national-framework, and so on. We would think that this would be a tedious task and we think that it would lead to a waste of energy and disillusionment on the side of co-workers - or ignore the fact that in defensive situations trade unions mainly represent the hope of workers to defend their standards by contracts and by protecting them in the competition regarding other workers (an understandable hope, but in the long run hopeless). In this situation trade unions are reduced to organisations which praise 'good work' for 'fair pay' - rather than being organisations of struggles for all workers.

We are not interested in keeping on bashing or blaming trade union structures/leadership for the limitations of workers' struggles, we leave that to the Trots - we think it is more fruitful to analyse where the actual weaknesses of workers' struggles produce the seeming strength of the 'trade union leadership' to 'betray'. We tried to do that in a quite detailed manner in our exchange with workers during the Maruti Suzuki struggle in Delhi - it would be good to discuss the question of organisation against the background of such concrete experiences. in this struggle in particular we found that the aim of fighting for a 'union' (somewhat like a slogan) definitely was something that brought workers of different categories together, while at the same time the formal establishment of the 'union' divided and isolated workers more than the struggle itself.

http://gurgaonworkersnews.wordpress.com/gurgaonworkersnews-no-950/
http://gurgaonworkersnews.wordpress.com/gurgaonworkersnews-no-951/
http://gurgaonworkersnews.wordpress.com/gurgaonworkersnews-no-961/#fn6

*** The collective worker

We agree, the focal point of the 'collective worker' can easily turn into a mystical figure as well. When we are in struggle and ask the question of how to find 'solidarity', we think that the first question we can ask is: who is directly related to us, because their work is necessary for us being able to work - and can we turn this mutual dependence which is created by capital around into the basis for struggle organisation. Often workers think that they have to address the media or the consumers or the general public in order to 'get solidarity'. We would encourage seeing e.g. how our conditions and struggles relate to workers in the companies which supply us with parts or services; how the conditions 'at home', where we reproduce our labour power, is affected etc. But also, how do out-of-job workers in our environment, who capital puts us in competition with (and who potentially replace us in case of a lost struggle) relate to what we are doing?

Here we have to ask the question: obviously, workers nowadays cooperate across national borders and there is cooperation e.g. between industries and university science departments - but to what extent is this cooperation palpable, an actual daily experience? To give an example, comrades of ours worked in fashion warehouses in Germany and UK and they were supplied by workers in garment factories in India, where we actually knew people through the local workers newspaper (FMS). To what extent can this link become the basis for practical exchange and struggle? For us this is not only a practical question, but a major political one: how can workers actually discover that 'they produce the world and that they can change it'? This touches also upon the issue of 'militant reformism' raised by Nate. The wildcat quote below might seem purist: there is no 'political program' necessary once workers actually overcome the division of labour. Obviously it requires 'political arguments' to encourage us to get interested in conditions of workers we have only mediated relationships with (e.g. workers at suppliers in other countries), but the relation between 'solidarity with/for others' and a 'self-interested' 'long-term strengthening of our own position by linking up' is not based on 'external' political values.

"Once we assume that the path towards liberation proceeds through the 'turning around' of productive cooperation (in other words, in the process of turning the enforced and atomised cooperation within the social production process into a weapon of organisation), then the question of power and the question of revolutionary subjectivity are closely related: From a class position there is no (revolutionary counter-) power without content. Collectivity is the substance of counter-power and it is its content. We don't have to teach workers from the outside for which goal they are supposed to use their power. They only have this power once they develop a collective subjectivity which breaks with the individualistic and privatistic subjectivity of each class member - if they break the political atomisation within productive cooperation. In this process workers understand that the social character of labour developed by capital cannot exist independently from them and that they create this social character on a daily level through their cooperation."
(from: https://libcom.org/blog/invitation-workers-inquiry-logistics-warehouse-london-04092013)

*** The capitalist state

Nate mentions the question of how the capitalist state figures in all this. This is an awkward question. Sometimes it seems naive to think that under modern capitalist conditions workers can fight the state and its politics mainly as workers in struggle, because the state itself is a major capitalist. This view opposes leftist views that workers have something to gain as citizens, e.g. through parliamentary participation. But then the state is not only a capitalist, but also a warmonger and an organ of repression. Maybe we have to question, e.g. the position of the IWW during the First World War, which was largely: we continue fighting and going on strike and this will affect the state's ability to wage war - rather than politically denouncing the war. This abstention from the 'political arena' was not only due to fear of repression. In current times (new war in Iraq, Ukraine etc.) we probably need an organised internationalist camp which clearly denounces nationalism - but this will remain toothless if we don't manage to undermine workers' current experiences of capital using international labour markets and global supply-chains to increase competition amongst them. Or on a more daily level, of course we have to denounce the current state politics of austerity, e.g. when new benefit laws for EU migrants forces our co-workers to accept the shitty conditions at work, because they will have more trouble to get unemployment benefit. The state in this sense is actively present on the shop-floor - and this is also the main place to fight it.

*** The question of todays revolutionary syndicalism

We agree with our anarcho-syndicalist comrades that there is a need for 'organisation and propaganda'; but we think that the organisational efforts and propaganda should rather relate to the fragile existence and experiences of a global working class within the global system of production, migration, communication than to or for one's own external organisation. Let's not create illusions that workers' can be powerful (in terms of emancipation) as members of organisations - even if they are called unions. They are only powerful in their collectivity as social producers AND if they coordinate actions beyond their immediate sphere of this daily collectivity (work- and other places) - which requires organisation. Some people might find this a pedantic play with words, but each perspective actually translates into quite different practical and political efforts.

Our main concern/disagreement with anarcho/revolutionary-syndicalism, related to the short-comings of analysing the concrete changes of production to find new forms of organisation and revolutionary perspectives, is the tendency to develop 'organisational interests' separate from the interests of the working class. This is not because of a bureaucratic apparatus or hunger for power, but because of the well-meaning view that one's own organisation should strengthen and attract other workers. There is a tendency to 'proclaim victories' in order to bring more workers into the organisation. In order to make this point clearer we want to present some general and concrete examples.

Nate mentions the Solfed book "Fighting for ourselves". We appreciate the effort to write a comprehensive historical book which relates experiences of the past to organisational proposals for today. At the same time we can see that 'Fighting for ourselves' is largely depicting the history of political tendencies within the working class movement (anarchism vs. Marxism-Leninism), rather than the history of how workers fought and developed organisations under specific historical circumstances - and were undermined by capitalist development (the chapters on 1968 and post-war UK are more insightful in that regard). The following passage is quite telling: while the authors are aware of the fact that to explain shortcomings of historical struggles by assuming a lack of political consciousness would finally reduce the outcome of class struggle to the battle between different political currents, they finally present not an internal criticism of the historical movement of 1968 (objective conditions, subjective limitations), but resort to conclusions not much different from traditional Marxist-Leninist conceptions:

"This is not to say everything would have been fine in the winter of discontent, France 1968 and the Hot Autumn 1969 if there had been well established anarcho- syndicalist unions. The point is that there were not, and there could not have been, since World War II had all but destroyed the independent organisations of the working class, and the social democratic settlement had limited the space for their re-emergence. But in all three cases, a lack of an organised revolutionary perspective on the shop floor was one of the factors preventing these struggles pushing beyond the limits of capitalism. Compare them with Spain, where decades of revolutionary agitation meant workers and peasants knew what to do immediately when the chance presented itself for expropriation and a push towards libertarian communism."
(from: https://libcom.org/library/fighting-ourselves-anarcho-syndicalism-class-struggle-solidarity-federation)

So much for historical explanations, which in the end we don't find satisfying in order to understand the potentials and pit-falls for struggles today. On a more concrete level we experience that anarcho/revolutionary syndicalist organisations and their focus on their own organisations often bars the way for an open debate about limitations of struggles and of our own organisational efforts. With the following examples we don't want to bad-mouth the efforts of our comrades, but they are part of an explanation for why we decided to work with comrades of Solfed or the IWW, rather than joining their organisations.

* we found that some of their 'work-place' organising strategies are rather schematic and sometimes problematic, e.g. when they say that as part of 'work-place mapping' we should look out for 'leader workers', without questioning much that 'leader workers' are often leaders because of community-internal hierarchies, gender hierarchies etc. Here, work-place organising is seen as a 'tool' towards some 'success', rather than a political process in itself. It would definitely be important to bring 'young' workers together with workers from previous generations of struggle. This would not happen spontaneously, this requires organisation.

* related to this is the focus on particular struggles and campaigns which become a kind of competing place between different organisations, e.g. during the cleaners dispute at London universities. We went along to various meetings and actions, but not to 'internal strategy meetings'; from our maybe rather external position as supporters it is difficult to understand why there seems to be a certain repetition in the struggles: the IWW or IWGB tries to (or tries to help to) establish a more or less official recognition of certain workers as representatives, management reacts with victimisations and the following actions mainly relate to this victimisation; we don't know whether there were discussions of how to circumvent this dynamic, but if so, these debates were handled as 'organisation internal issues';

* during one of the meetings we asked some of the cleaning comrades and their organisers to what extent they think the campaign (tres cosas) depends a) on the fact that they have major backing of 'activist organisations', b) on the fact that they happen on highly public terrain (prestigious university campuses) where management can be more easily blamed morally for not paying their workers well. We asked these questions in order to understand to what extent the experiences of this struggle are applicable e.g. to more isolated cleaners in small food-processing units in the outskirts of the city. We found the reply "with a proper organisation you can achieve everything" slightly disingenuous, because the specific conditions were ignored, also in order to credit the organisation with the success - this gets into the way of an open debate about potentials and limitations of workers' self-activity

* again related, the political motivations for the split between IWW and IWGB were officially handled as a formal matter ('faction union'); there was little open debate about political differences (libertarian dominated vs. ex-Leninists), which we don't find very honest; this again, may be in order to keep the face as 'One Big Union', which does not need a particular political position

* we met various IWW comrades during visits in different towns and we asked them whether there is an active debate on a national level of organisation about 'general tendencies' of struggles or even an attempt to draw some type of general conclusion from various local experiences (how does the crisis impact on a local level, what are workers doing, what have we tried) - and most comrades said that this is not really happening; we have witnessed similar things in other bigger organisations: the national meetings are mainly about 'running and promoting' the organisation, much less about a political debate of workers' experiences; we are not aware of efforts like 're-composition', which try to overcome this tendency

* with the focus on conflicts that 'a small organisation can win' smaller disputes (small in regards to the general development within the working class) are sometimes inflated (also due to media savvy activists); this does not harm the rest of the working class, but the political debate about what is the general condition of the class, what are the main potentials and limitations of struggles gets a little side-lined by these 'campaigns'

* we are only on the fringes of Solfed, but we guess it would be fruitful for the wider class struggle milieu if the internal debate about 'should we present ourselves as a union' would be out in the open; there are obviously different political positions within the organisation (some tending towards more formal recognition as a trade union), but the debate happens mainly behind closed doors

* similarly, (individual) criticisms towards our decision to collectively move to West-London and to get jobs in warehouses were formulated only internally although we addressed the organisation directly (here again, on an individual level we had many good discussions and got good support from others); this criticism could be helpful (they said something about 'salting'?!); we don't want to blame anyone, we just think that with too much focus on 'the organisation' these types of closed- rank situations are pre-programmed

What instead? An organised effort of collectives in international coordination which demonstrate that practical support and a ruthless criticism of the limitations of the struggles of our class can - and have to - go hand in hand. Nothing is easier, nothing more difficult…

For us there are two main issues (amongst many smaller ones) where we feel urgent need for further debate:

a) how to develop a visible international anti-statist position which can intervene in the current scenario of war and which is at the same time connected to the sphere of actual struggles (a big one!)
b) what kind of organisational forms do we see and can we imagine which connect the experience of 'workers as collective producers' to the, as prevalent, experience of proletarians in more isolated (rural, domestic, 'informal) conditions

To repeat to our comrades in the UK, we will meet face-to-face in Liverpool end of September, if you are interested in the debate - we will send out a proper invite/reader shortly - please get in touch:

[email protected]