Workers' Liberty

Feminist Fightback conferences (Midday to 1pm)
Over two hundred people attended the 2006 Feminist Fightback conference, which brought together feminists from a wide range of perspectives to debate ideas and to develop practical strategies for fighting women’s oppression. Initiatives resulting from the conference included the March 2007 demonstration for abortion rights.
The second Feminist Fightback conference will be held in London on 20 October, with a Feminist Fightback meeting also planned for Edinburgh in early October. What’s the thinking behind the Feminist Fightback initiative, and how does it compare with earlier such initiatives?

The politics of class struggle, and the politics of the SNP (1pm to 2pm)
Since May of this year an SNP minority government has been in power at Holyrood. Its long-term goal is the creation of an independent capitalist Scotland, with cut-rate corporation tax serving as the bait to attract multi-nationals to invest in Scotland.
Arguably, the response of much of the Left to the formation of an SNP administration tells you more about the state of the Left and the narrowing-down of its political horizons than it does about the politics of the SNP. Does the SNP’s support for independence, or the existence of a leftist current within the SNP, have any significance for how the Left organises in response to an SNP government?

Class struggle and cultural struggles (2pm to 3pm)
In the early twenties Leon Trotsky argued that there could be no such thing as a “proletarian culture”, and that a large amount of what passed for “proletarian culture” was no more than “a jumble of concepts and words out of which one can make neither head nor tail.”
And yet most literary historians agree that the years immediately after the October Revolution were a second Golden Age of Russian literature. The same period also witnessed attempts throughout Europe to integrate class-struggle politics with cultural productions. Did this amount to a refutation of Trotsky’s basic arguments?