Convention of the Left

[Editor]

Red Pepper has dispatched Tom Walker on a Stop the War bus to the Convention of the Left and he’s blogging the whole thing on a broken laptop with a dangling full-sized keyboard.  Are you at the Convention of the Left (or the Labour Party conference)? Is it worth attending? Will the convention help unite the left? Or will it be the usual story and  factionalise even before it's over?  Tell us what you think here.


http://www.redpepper.org.uk/Burying-the-hatchet

[Editor]

A place for the Left
Hilary Wainwright says that the pull of national and local identities away from Westminster is a vital clue to understanding and preparing for the unravelling of Labour
http://www.redpepper.org.uk/A-place-for-the-left

[CharlieMcMenamin]

Er...can someone explain (or just let me have a web reference to read up on) 'that stupid hand-waving thing' that Anarchists allegedly do that Tom praises in his post 'Do Socialists Need Structure?"

[Brigg57]

is it the Mexican wave of unity?

or is it like the hand playing the fiddle...Nero did that, as well

[Rabelais]

Never been to an anarchist meeting. Had no idea that they were waving their hands in the air. Sounds suspiciously subversive to me. I'll have to look into it.

I've been reading Tom Walker's blog and I thought I detected in the latest entry a slight waning of enthusiasm after a fairly up-beat start (although that may be just my own interpretation).

I like the idea of local left forums... but to be frank I have a feeling that my critical faculties are not what they once were. These days I can be enthused by just about any sort of left organistion and the forums maybe me just clutching at straws.

I've started to think of the left as being a bit like an alcoholic patient. I read somewhere that there is a school of thought that nobody can really help an alcoholic get over their dependency except themselves; and only then after they have reached rock-bottom, recognition of which inspires them to haul themselves back up.

Maybe the recent electoral debacles; organisational shambles and the encroaching economic crisis will instill a little self-recognition and humility with regards to just how bad things are on and for the left.

[CharlieMcMenamin]

Rab,
Well, it does depend on what you mean by a local forum.

I think I might regretfully find I had another engagement if it meant the chance to be treated as a 'contact' by the local representatives of the  57 varieties of organised Leftism in Friends House. Because we all know 'contacts' are there to be recruited, if not actually 'love-bombed' a la Scientologists or similar sects....

But meeting for a series of genuine political discussions -  and perhaps a spot of communal arm waving to keep the Anarchists happy -  sounds slightly more enticing...

[baslamak]

charlie

I know what you mean, the last time I gave my contact number out to someone at a left gathering, I ended up getting endless phone calls along the lines you mention, all pointless as whilst the guy in question failed to realize it, I new I just was not spartucus material, never again.

[Brigg57]

People should realise that if the evetns of last week are resumed, then it's wipe-out. If you receive a pensions or an income, it will be n danger, and your own personal situation may be very uncertain for a while. That could also be the case if the drama does not resume, because the shockwaves will take a while to reach their full extent.

The Convention of the Left, the Labour Left, party politics in general should be looked at in that perspective - at least for the moment. If it's just a storm in a teacup, then we can go back to playing games.

From what I see, the Convention of the Left is not providing answers for anybody or anything. I wait with baited breath for a miracle to emerge but politically, if the Labour Left are looking to Manchester, it may be more fruitful to be making demands on the union bureaucrats who will have to pick up the pieces after Grodon Brown's act of imitating Herbert Hoover is eventually brought to a decisive end. This is said with the same spirit of muted anger that others have been showing here.

I am still hoping that the prognosis of the US package which i beginning to emerge is wrong - I care very deeply for my family, and don#'t wish to see them hurt.

[rob9443]

Labour is so terrified of being accused of lurching to the left or being "statist" that it is incapable of defending itself against Cameron. There will be tinkering around the edges but no serious reforms. We face a seriously nasty recession and a Tory landslide. Cameron will do nothing to upset his City chums but will get away with blaming it all on the inheritance from Labour and once we emerge from the recession it will be business as usual for the spivs.

[footnote]

Found a useful description of "the hand-waving thing":
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consensus_decision-making#Hand_signals

My one experience of this, at climate camp, was that it worked quite well to keep things moving along.  Mainly because having people shout "yea", "nay", "point of order" is a bit chaotic and encourages the dominance of lusty-voiced old hands.  Giving the chair or moderator what you could call a monopoly on the use of voice, helps them to do their job.

[Brigg57]

I can hardly wait to see, but wiki is down.

bags I moderator! Or is (s)he going to be the one who smarms around the most,  oh sorry, the one who is trusted by people? Can I be chief friend of the moderator?

If I bring a scruffy dog, does that give me meeting cred?

[CharlieMcMenamin]

Welcome to RP footnote- and thanks so much for that weblink.

As a old style leftie, I'd  certainly be willing to give the old Anarchist hand signals method a try.  But, personally, what got me really intrigued was the IETF method:

"In the Internet Engineering Task Force , decisions are assumed to be taken by "rough consensus." ...One tradition in support of rough consensus is the tradition of humming rather than (countable) hand-raising; this allows a group to quickly tell the difference between "one or two objectors" or a "sharply divided community", without making it easy to slip into "majority rule".

Something tells me though in a traditional left group you'd first have to have a verbal punch up over whether to hum the Internationale, the Red Flag or La Bandero Rossa....

[Brigg57]

Sorry, I got to it and, I mean, are you being serious?

It sounds like an auction - wiggling of fingers on both hands, aka 'twinkling'' crossing both forearms with hands in fists??? making a T-shape with both hands to stop debate? the Fist of Five, with all the complicatons of numbers of fingers to indicate the action taken???

One sure thing to follow will be the fist of five to indicate a sound punch on the moderator's chin. I can't imagine a nastier way of than this so-called Anarchist ('forced to be free') way of what will in practice be squashing dissent. still, consensus and agreement comes first hey?

meanwhile, in the grown-ups world...

[Johnnywas]

the only hand signal I recall my anarchist comrades using involved either one or two fingers. I'm pleased to hear that they have discovered the other digits 

[Brigg57]

footnote,
I take back all. I think that hand signals may well be our only means of communicating with one another if things go on as they are.
many thanks for taking the trouble to get the wiki article..forgive my exasperation over it.

Jwas and others, we can all make fun of the far Left. They have got themselves into a state beyond pathos, and the energy whicc gave them such a dynamism after 1968 has long gone. Many like me are now greying and must doubtless seem a bit odd to younger people.

But there is one aspect which makes the state of the Left alarming rather than pathetic. They are the only ones to consistently and courageously continue pointing to capitalism as the fundamental problem facing us. Against all the sneers of the Kinnock brigade and the career 'suits' who moved into the Labour Party, they stood for the socialist alternative which is starting to peep out of Labour's conference now.

The reason why even the collapse of the banking system, a plausible scenario at this moment in time, will not lead to the end of capitalism is because the political classes, including the intelligentsia, turned their back on socialism as outmoded and irrelevant to a modern globalised economy. The state of the Left today is a consequence of that - the Left was deprived of a lot of much-needed thinking as well as numbers. Add to it the democratic centralist structures of the best-organised among them, consolidating power in a small clique, and you get the result of today - a huge number of people are talking about the collapse of western capitalism, and the Far Left is (I'm sure accurately) described on the RP blog as a motley crew discussing flashing red shirts at Manchester Town Hall in an attempt to stop global warming. The call in RP for cabinet places for Vince Cable and his mates wiht a democratically elected Senate is a genuinely sad declension from its early calls to stop the drift to the Right, with very little relevance indeed to what people care most about now - their security of income, private pension provision, home, family.

The tragedy is ours.

[Jonny Favourite]

Very disapointed that there are few youth at this conference.

[baslamak]

Tom's latest report from Manchester, which centers on the LP conference etc is great, at last the lad has found some fire in his belly, yet he has not yet drawn the natural conclusion about what we on the left should do, although to be fair he comes close when he writes that people would support a left reformist party.

If we fail to offer them this at the next election, even if it is only in a few key constituencies, then we will be nothing more than windbags.

Still all the same Tom, good piece.

[Brigg57]

I just read the blog referred to by baslamak. Somehow missed it first time around.

Well, whether you feel that Labour can be reclaimed or a British version of the Left Party is the way forward (I don't, though I would vote for it), I feel that the fire in that report is what the Left needs to rediscover. Baslamak has that fire in his blog. Without it, we will get nowhere, and I'm talking about people in general, not just the Left.

[Rabelais]

Jonny Fav,
I take it you're at the conference. What are your thoughts about it? Disappointing to hear there are few young people about.

[Brigg57]

I rely on Tom's reports from the Convention. Can't see anything about it in my press, though I don't read the Guardian.

It really doesn't sound like good news, if in the end we are relying on foreign climes for hope. A new electoral system which might get a few Left MPs elected (I doubt as many as we have now - in Italy the Left were wiped out under PR at the last elections). If people want that, and some do, then carry on. I would have thought that organising a Left Party should come first, or synonymously with it. I find the particualr electoral system - PR or what we have now - come to more or less the same thing in terms of govt.

Whatever your views on electoral system, I think that if the Convention fails to meet the near-universal feeling of economic insecurity and fear with a convincing economic programme, or the beginnings of one, then they will not only have wasted our time, but they will have done a grave disservice to the people of this country, and to the socialist cause.