Atlanta to London

I started writing this on the Eurostar from Brussels, and I'm finishing it up the next afternoon at Marxism 2007 in London.

The US Social Forum was enormous, and as usual there is the feeling of about a dozen conferences going on in the same place and overlapping only slightly. I mostly went to talks on socialism and the labor movement. Probably the most interesting one (which I'm still chewing one a little) was the one I already mentioned about minority (or "pre-majority") unionism. This is basically a matter of figuring out what to do when there is an organization of workers which is not legally recognized as a union nor likely to be in the immediate future.

I am of course one of those who believe that the labor movement is what workers get together and do rather than the organizations the government chooses to recognize, and who think that the biggest problem with said movement is how few of the people in it realize that. I myself, although I'd been told it before, rally realized how true this was when I found myself a member of a union with a solid institutional position but huge gaping holes in its actual functioning, which is a bit depressing. It's very encouraging to see people come into it from the other side.

Although it was more diffuse, spread out over several other workshops, I was also very pleased to see that Solidarity and Labor Notes seem to take the matter similarly seriously. One or the other hosted a big proportion of the workshops I attended, and for the most part I liked what I heard a great deal. I was particularly glad to see that they at least seem to be thinking about some of the things that have been on my mind about how labor bureaucrats often use students and student groups.

I see that about half of the folks quoted in Socialist Worker's article on the forum were members of the ISO delegation, although of course none are named as such. But enough of that.I also had some less innocent fun contemplating the efforts of various groups which were present. I've already mentioned the ISO, whose tiny presence I found rather striking. The SWP (who thought Social Forums were a middle-class waste of time until there was one in Venezuela) had about half-a-dozen tables of the usual sort, and the RCP now seems to have enough Chairman Bob merchandise to leave everything else at home.

I had a related experience at a session on revolutionary organizing in the 21st century or something of that sort. This was an entirely stultifying experience for the 90 minutes or so I managed to get myself to stick around, which consisted of 40 minutes of corporate-training-style ersatz friendliness courtesy of Bring The Ruckus, an "anti-authoritarian cadre organization" descended from Love'n'Rage followed by a variety of Maoist soundbites from BTR, FRSO, and various study groups, with a few innocuous words from a Solidarity member. It was packed (at least at the beginning) and went on for another 3 hours so after my eyes glazed over.

Unfortunately I had to leave before the forum was over, so I missed a few interesting-looking workshops, particularly one to do with GI outreach which I'm hoping to hear about from a friend.

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Brussels, as usual, was quiet but very pleasant. It was a bit less grungy than I remembered, I'm not sure whether that's a good thing or not. London should be more exciting, again I'm not sure whether that's good or not. The trip over to London was quite nice, and I'm staying with two photography students in Peckham.

Marxism is good so far. I'll write more about the workshops later, but I should mention that I just had a fairly frustrating conversation with an SWP member who seemed to be trying to convince me that the ISO had missed out on the "anticapitalist movement", as though he knew what was going on their better than I did just because he'd read a couple of documents.

CWI loses Dáil seat

The CWI's Joe Higgins lost about a fifth of his 2002 vote and missed getting reelected to the Dáil (Irish Parliament) today.

I heard him speak a couple of years ago at a PSOL rally at the World Social Forum. He really epitomized the characteristic anglophone CWI speaking style, which is to say that he was boring, kept bragging about the CWI's dubious achievements and went on for about twice as long as he was supposed to. I'm surprised he managed to hold on to his seat as long as he did.

On top of everything else, Jack Barnes is boring

I'm afraid I'm writing this without consulting my notes on the event, so there are probably going to be a few slips here and there, but I'm confident about the basics. Yesterday I went to a big meeting with Jack Barnes and Mary-Alice Waters of the Socialist Workers Party. As a mentioned a few posts back I decided to go partly out of morbid interest, and I got about what I expected.

There were about 300 people there, and I suspect that I was the only one there who wasn't an SWP member or fellow traveler, I certainly got that vibe in all of the conversations I had and from how Barnes was talking. It was pretty nearly a national mobilization; most of the people I talked to had come from the Midwest. CPUSA = Communist Party USA; ISO = International Socialist Organization; YS = Young Socialists, the youth of the SWP. The mean age was probably about 40 (in between what it would have been for the CPUSA and for the ISO); that is, mostly it would have been people who joined the SWP in the time since Barnes was solidly running the party. For that, it was a surprisingly subdued audience. The chair seemed to think that it was worth mentioning from the podium that one person had joined the YS at the march in Washington.

Incidentally, Waters is entirely unable to pronounce Hugo Chavez' name correctly; she pronounces it CHAY-vez. Does anyone have any idea where she could have picked that up? Mary-Alice Waters was mostly talking about a book launch - a new edition of the first two declarations of Havana - and really didn't say anything interesting besides an anecdote which, as far as I could tell, seemed to be implying that there is no cult of personality around Fidel in Cuba, but sounded to me like a Cuban version of Anthony offering a crown to Caesar.

Barnes was not nearly as engaging a speaker as I would have expected, but perhaps part of that was that he didn't have very good material to work with. Even so - say what you will about Ahmed Shawki (and I've said plenty), but at least he knows how to get people fired up.

The speech was in a fairly conventional form, with a first part about global perspectives, and a second part about a reorientation the SWP is making. Most of the global perspectives part was fairly commonplace, but he did not disappoint entirely in the inflatedness department. Apparently the appointment of General Petraeus is a big step towards Bonapartism in the US, he and the Democrats are taking Bush out of the loop, and Bonapartism is on the march around the world.

He did not say a single thing during his speech proper about the antiwar movement, and only mentioned the immigrants' rights movement tangentially. This probably has something to do with the perspective he was talking about in the second part.

The short version is that the SWP is making a big turn towards "study", centered around what he called an "unprecedented" effort to - wait for it - add indices and introductions to all of Pathfinder's back catalog. In passing he mentioned that no one should so much as reschedule a study group without permission from the Political Committee, and that people could be expelled for missing study groups.

In the discussion he did come around to the antiwar movement, and I can absolutely confirm that the SWP has not gotten even slightly less sectarian about the antiwar movement. Among other things he accused UFPJ of blatantly lying about the size of the protest over the weekend. He then followed that up with an almost incoherent rant about Noam Chomsky. The thought that Hugo Chavez complemented Chomsky when he could have quoted from the minutes of the Tricontinental Congress or god knows what seems to send Barnes into a rage.

It's always fun having one's prejudices confirmed, and I guess like everyone else there that's the main thing I got out of the event.

The big march

I went to the big antiwar march in DC today. It was great, and it really got me psyched about the next few months, The student contingent was a little bit of a mess, perhaps owing to a culture clash between the Campus Antiwar Network and Students for a Democratic Society, and it was pretty hard to get chants against congress going, but it was still exciting. We got a lot of folks from Rutgers and from the other schools around here, and a lot of them are psyched to do something with us.

I won't try to say anything else serious about the protest (I'm sure you'll find that in all the usual places). I was very excited to find two groups there that I've never seen before. One, the Workers' Party USA, seemed pretty nondescript. The other was the Communist league, a faux-clandestine group which apparently operates mostly over the internet (obviously real security conscious). One guy I was talking to was ridiculously eager to brag about the supposedly underground work they're doing. They're connected to the Worker-Communist Party of Iraq and they've set up a US branch of the Iraqi Freedom Congress (a WCPIraq front group); one of them was carrying a sign which was supposed to say I'm kicking myself for not taking a picture, but as best I can remember it said نحو عر العرق نموقرطلي و غير قومي, but I think I'm leaving something out. "for a democratic, secular, non-sectarian Iraq" but with every other word misspelled or bizarrely chosen.