Our local No War But the Class War meeting in Newcastle decided to talk about what a local group should do, and read an old article called "What does the communist left do?" to kick off conversation. The article was very specific to the CWO so I made a reduced or condensed short version (below). I think this is the kind of thing it is important to say at this point:
We are highly critical of headless chicken activism, which shifts from one "campaign" to another, latching on to the latest trends in academic discourse or tail-ending this or that popular movement. And we do not advocate endless reading groups and online discussions for the sake of intellectual point-scoring as an alternative.
A political organisation can be a great carrier of revolutionary theory, but, if it doesn’t root itself in the life of the class, its message, no matter how correct, will fall on deaf ears and it will not be able to play a role in the struggles to come. This is where practice comes in.
Get involved in struggles in the workplace and community - but without ever becoming paid organisers, union representatives, or struggle consultants... Where it's significant, we will report and reflect on our involvement... Then there are all the usual pickets, rallies, protests and meetings to which we regularly bring the internationalist message – encourage self-activity and promote political perspectives beyond the isolated struggle.
Inevitably, due to our size, these interventions are limited... At a time like this, when the working class is only starting to revive its struggles, the aim of our interventions is:
* to gain experience
* to politically present ourselves as a group which has the working class and its struggles at heart
* to involve contacts and supporters and, when possible, to start towards the construction of internationalist groups in the workplace or in the community
* to begin to root in the working class the consciousness of the need for communist revolution.
Get in touch:
email [email protected]
twitter.com/NWBCWTyne_Wear
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