Regroupment Interview 4: The Anti-Capitalist Initiative

1) What is the idea behind your project and what are it’s political influences?

The Anticapitalist Initiative (ACI) is an attempt to bring together the new political activists who have been inspired by the Occupy movement, the uprisings in the Middle East and North Africa, anti-austerity campaigns and the fractured groupings of the revolutionary left. We are making a conscious effort to take time to debate and discuss what politics we collectively wish to pursue. Instead of declaring a platform decided on by the initial supporters, we want to draw in a diverse range of views from across the movement. The Initiative currently has supporters who consider themselves communists, many from a Trotskyist tradition, as well as more libertarian traditions including anarchists and those who draw on Autonomism as a guide to action. Many in the movement will see the ACI as an attempt to set up a UK franchise of the French Nouveau Parti anticapitaliste, but this isn’t accurate. We have much to learn from similar processes but we ideally want to circumvent the damaging dissolution of previous projects by not repeating the same mistakes. That means taking our time to consider where our movement is and through common work and discussion attempt to articulate a credible anticapitalist alternative.

2) Does the UK need another anti-capitalist initiative? What makes yours different?

We have had several anticapitalist initiatives in the UK in the last two decades; the larger projects were crushed by bureaucratic control of this or that group. For example, the Socialist Labour Party drew in many militants from the Great Miners Strike and the anti-Poll Tax movement, yet under Arthur Scargill and his supporters the possibility of a significant left force emerging in opposition to the Labour Party was lost. The almost inevitable collapse of attempts to unite the left demands that we need to begin at the beginning. From the very start of previous initiatives a bureaucratic and sectarian tumour slowly but surely killed those projects. We want to go a different way: the ACI is not the plaything of this or that Trotskyist grouping but an open space for all of us in the movement to create a new left. We are not urging the left to repeat previous initiatives with a few democratic tweaks; we are asking the left to question the basis of its politics, activities and ultimately its existence.

What makes the ACI stand out from previous initiatives is that we have prescribed no set outcome on where we will end up. The debate over what kind of organisation we need so that we can participate in struggles in a useful fashion is completely open. Some of us would like to see a new party emerge, others a network or a united front organisation. We hope to avoid making decisions too quickly with too little variety of opinion. Where previous initiatives were rashly defined, often by confused reformist politics, the ACI is more concerned with listening and learning first.

3) What are you hoping to organise around and how are you hoping to move beyond the current limitations of the Left?

The Initiative wants to organise spaces for those of us coming from the Marxist left to learn from the new movements, libertarian activists and from our shared experiences of struggles. Our current goals are to organise in campaigns to strengthen them but also to break down the barriers of mistrust of decades of factional separation and fighting. We will also be organising forums to debate the immediate problems the movement faces but also its strategic and political problems. The left has been stuck at a dead end for over 80 years by generalising the strategies and politics from an era of political retreat when the revolutionary processes unleashed by the the October Revolution were reversed. The best way to consider the Initiative is as a reboot for the revolutionary movement, not just a democratic upgrade.