decision making in an organisation

. "So for all my criticism of the approach of the Sol Fed and the IWW this would not stop me from working with them in some specific circumstances on a particular practical workplace activity (unlike the ICC)".

This doesn't clarify very much. For a start we are not talking about Solfed or the IWW but out and out bourgeois groups like the SWP. Secondly, there's a big difference between working with individual fellow workers who may have all kinds of confused or bourgeois ideas, including leftist ones, in a situation of struggle on a class basis (eg a strike in your workplace), and the direct, organisation to organisation alliances with the left wing of capital that the WSM seems to be inextricably tangled up with.

Furthermore, while bourgeois campaigns often get involved in issues of profound concern to workers (a good example is the Stop the War Coalition) there is a huge differnce between a class movement against war and a bourgeois/pacifist mobilisation around the issue of war. Equally, while questions around sexuality and reproduction can be raised in the context of a class movement, I don't think this is what we are talking about in the campaigns that the WSM is involved with.

There it is. The obsessive quest for clarification simultaneously renders communists indecisive and ineffective. Their inclination towards this mode of thought is proportional to their adherence to the historical determinism. Their inclination away predicated on sentiments on “social justice”. Never the less, the trait is expressed across all vaguely left wing thought from the national liberationists to the Internationalists. This is at odds with actual working class values, in our world only losers constantly argue and seek clarification over abstract beliefs, we’re interested in real things happening in our lives, not “ideas”. We’ve got plenty of those already.

That comment about anti-Shell middle-class NIMBYism shows just how divorced from reality his politics are. I'd suggest a visit to the west of Ireland and have a look at just who these "middle class" NIMBYs are.

I think he means it has the character of middle class nimbyism rather than actually being it. It's just a method for keeping an argument going for the sake of clarification. It’s not that he’s more divorced from reality than your lot, he just measures it up with regard to a different set of values. That is to say, historical analysis rather than social justice.

It is a clear sign of the political development of libcom posters that everyone ignores Carousel. I think this counts as 'praxis'.

Protest harder justice boy. Thanks for the kind words.

Are the liberal left anti-abortion now? Wow. Wouldn't surprise me.

The Shell to Sea campaign is being led by local landowners. Three of the Rossport Five own land in Rossport. Now, do feel free to correct me if I'm wrong, but you can't get much more of an interclassist campaign than that!

What a fucking joke. I take it you hold this analysis when public sector workers go out on strike alongside their managers over pensions and the like, yes?

The fact that some landowners (and they are most likely small holders) are also opposed to the building of the onshore plant doesn't makes it an interclassist campaign per se, nor does it rule out a class approach to the issue. Unless of course you think the health, safety and environment that working class people live in is irrelevant to class struggle.

true, although to a newcomer to the forum it probably looks fairly mental, so we should just ban him

While its fair enough to criticise the WSMs at some times slightly activist mentality and approach to things this sort of ''its all cross class'' schtick is just the sort of tired line that the SWP used to bang out in the 90's about any old campaign which had a ''community'' basis or which they didn't tightly control. Its just rhetorical sectarian nonsense that avoids actually tackling the issue at all.

In a period where the working class is weak, it finds it extremely difficult to assert any kind of class autonomy or even seeing itself as a separate class. This kind of campaign is based on fictitious concepts of community which bundle up workers with other classes. Where are the working class demands here, i.e. the demands that distinguish the workers from the small-holders, farmers, local bourgeoisie or whatnot?

I'm not saying that these things are irrelevant to workers but that it's difficult for them to oppose them as workers and that, as a result, they tend to be absorbed into the agendas of other classes.

Alf raised the point about the Stop The War coalition. The issue, war, is of the profoundest importance to workers but STW doesn't oppose it on a class basis. The same seems true of the campaigns that WSM advocates.

I'd rather talk to Carousel than a slimely union careerist in the making.

I really don't see how this campagn has to be based on some mythical community, rather it is a straightforward response to a threat to peoples healt, safety and their environment.

As it is workers find it extremely difficult to oppose attacks on them even in their workplaces, instead what struggle there is tends to be co opted and mediated through self serving bureacracies in the "labour " or union movement, that retard struggle just as much as any mythos of 'community'.

They’re no weaker than they ever were. It’s just the chasm between the working class and their benevolent ideologues that’s in sharper focus.

The SWP will get into bed with anyone, so the idea of them calling anything "cross-class" is a joke anyway. And, like all leftists, they measure the value of a campaign by how much they control it and their analysis is geared precisely towards that aim. I'm not approaching the question with a desire to control anything but from how best to advance the class struggle.

Sectarianism is about placing the interests of a particular group above the movement as a whole. The SWP's behaviour is definitely sectarian in that regard, even if you were going to be charitable and think that they were part of the workers movement rather than a bourgeois presence within it.

But it's not sectarian to refuse to support bourgeois campaigns because they act to contain and stifle the working class struggle.

What would stifle the working class, if they were paying any attention that is, is the notion that they’re weak and owe anything to some historic struggle.

No in real life you don't always get such a clear cut class differentiaion, if your opposing cuts in council mobility services, a nuclear power plant eing built down the road or live exports being driven along the road theres not always a simplistic us vs them about things. Of course in all these instances, as with rossport, the poorest in society will be most hard hit because they have no recourse to an alternative and you should get that across in your agit prop but ignoring the issues because they odn't fit into your porrly nuanced idea of class interest is just abstract theoretical nonsense.

Of course its often difficult, its often equally difficult to see clear cut class differences in the workplace, things can be complicated, nobody said these campaigns were going to be easy.

To me thats just as much a question of action as it is theory, the WSM are in ireland so their ability to oppose the iraq war is fairly limited as is the political impact such a war probably has on most people, however, that said the WSM were still involved in mass direct action against the war and in anti-militarism, now i'd have to ask have the ICC/WR been actively involved in either of these things over the last five years? I would assume your particular brand of purism probably prevents you from doing so. So yeah i think the WSM are guilty of losing their way a bit with HOPI and its worth criticising them for it, but they are/were active against the war on a class basis.

I think the WSM porbably are a bit overly sincere and activisty and so on but firstly the way in whih your criticising them is just over the top theoretical nonsense which has very little bearing on reality and secondly i wouldn't claim to be stanidng on a great pedestal to criticse them because no-one in the UK can really claim that anarchism is really taking off either.... Anyway can an admin split this, its gone way off topic and the early part of the thread was a lot more interesting.

But this is exactly the point! If the working class can't even assert itself as a class in the arena where its class nature is most obvious then what possible hope has it got to do so in community actions where it is even more diluted? Having said that, I'm not saying that there aren't class standpoints that can be taken on these questions. I think the working class has rather a lot to say about the environment, war, health, etc.

But is the WSM really taking a class line here? Its position on oil is "When we judge that a campaign for nationalisation of a given resource has a realistic chance of increasing local working class power over the use of that resource then we will support that campaign on that tactical basis but always accompanied by the advocation of our ultimate goal, which is neither privatisation nor nationalisation but communisation." They are most explicit that "The campaign is not set up as a rival or competitor to Shell to Sea".

The idea that nationalisation can be a step towards real communisation is totally consistent with Trotskyism. What sort of state do the WSM think is going to nationalise Shell?

And yet you still haven't shown me how the working class can assert itself through these campaigns. The aim isn't to stop this or that nuclear power plant but to destroy capitalism and reorientate production on a basis that serves humanity - then we can put all nuclear power plants in sensible places or even do away with the things altogether! How does such a campaign allow the working class to experience its own class identity (which is not the same as being "poor" and having a "we're hardest hit" victim mentality) in society?

As far the point about the war is concerned, I used STW as an example of a bourgeois campaign about an issue that is vitally important for the working class. As for what the ICC does, you are taking exactly the same line as the SWP take towards their refusal to participate in STW!

I'm not a member of the ICC but I know for a fact that they haven't been sitting on their collective ass. It has distributed a leaflet in many different languages in most of the countries where it has presence. I personally assisted them in distributing that leaflet to workers in the largest factories in the local area where I live. I have accompanied them when they have gone to STW public meetings, to put forward a class perspective. I have also accompanied them on the major STW demonstrations in London, distributing leaflets. The ICC has also run its own public meetings on the question of the war.

The indecision displayed here around how organisations face the working class and how they relate to historic processes demonstrate Tack’s original problem.

well get on with it then.

Note the baiting invective is one sided. Little wonder these organisations don’t thrive. What with their magical beliefs on top, they're done for.