some stuff from the old site not up there yet, but they now have the newsletters in html, ahhhh
Feb 4 2006 00:30
Feb 5 2006 03:32
i love prol-position
Feb 5 2006 12:13
Quote:
In these circumstances, those who sit at a table with representatives in order to discuss the social question make stooges of themselves. Away with historical costumes (‘the working class and its party’)! Where struggles happen today, be it in Argentina or France, such concepts have long since been superseded: people are organising themselves, and no longer allow themselves to be treated like children
[prol-position news #4, 12/2005]
I would love to sit and agree with this editorial, and certainly I don't doubt it holds true of some countries, where the struggle is much more advanced, but the here and now what I see in Glasgow and the wider UK is that the working class is not superceding its previous organisational forms to make way for a new more radical force, but is instead merely losing the ability, or historic consciousness if you like, to adopt organisational forms to defend itself.
I'm constantly coming across people who, in a defensive situation, know what to do - form/join a union, form a tenants association, fight back etc. - but they are, all of them, getting old and are increasingly disheartened.
I spoke to a man the other day who was 69 - he said he'd been 'waiting all [his] life' to see a revolution and was now involved solely in New Labour 'community groups'. He told me that we live in a capitalist world and, in his experience, nothing was ever going to change this, so he had to be pragmatic and accept that the best thing that could be done for his community was to endorse and accept the building of Scotland's 2nd largest Tescos, as part of the masterplan for Inverclyde area in which he lived. It was a deeply disheartening comment, but it underlines the total implosion of all sections of the left in this country.
There isn't a new generation of class conscious workers in this country coming to the fore to take that jaded guy's place. There are a few hippies, politicos, anti-war kiddies, SSP voters from the Southside of Glasgow, and IWCA voters in Oxford, as well as some stuff that I could embarrass London comrades with. But that is it.
We're increasingly a long way from upper Clyde and the miners'/dockers' strikes, as much as class antagonism is growing as a result of the total collapse of social democracy. As much as I am actually increasingly hopeful about the future, I think it is totally off the mark and quite irresponsible (at least as far as the UK is concerned) to talk about that level of militancy and class struggle.
That said this isn't really a comment on that article because it was intended as a synopsis of the situation globally, so I'm kind of arguing with a straw man, but I wanted to make the point anyway coz I've wound myself up. [/i]
Feb 5 2006 12:22
Yeah I know what you mean. I think their total anti-union approach is also far less valid here... but still they have great coverage of european strikes n things
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