What organisation of socialists does the left need?

Location

21 April: Red Deer, 18 Pitt St, Sheffield S1 4DD. 28 April: Rm 736, Institute of Education, Bedford Way, London WC1H 0AL

21 April, 12 to 5: Red Deer, 18 Pitt St, Sheffield S1 4DD

28 April, 12 to 5: Room 736, Institute of Education, Bedford Way, London WC1H 0AL

https://www.facebook.com/events/105599773610624/

https://www.eventbrite.com/e/what-organisation-of-socialists-does-the-left-need-tickets-43942448045

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The revival of the Labour Party with Jeremy Corbyn has increased interest in and the credibility of socialist ideas. Yet the new Labour leadership does not talk explicitly about socialism, except rarely. Nor does the biggest organisation of the Labour left, Momentum. Some even argue that any move to band people together to argue explicitly for and about socialism is to be rejected as "sectarian", "cult-like", or such. They argue that meetings, elections, committees, the face-to-face forms of labour-movement democracy, are obsolete, inflexible, boring, and inferior to an online democracy-of-clicks.

Elsewhere on the left, some groups operate as if designed to give credibility to those objections to socialists organising cohesively and on an activist basis. The SWP and the Socialist Party describe themselves as "Leninist" and "democratic centralist". But it is an issue for debate whether their organising principles are based on what Lenin and his comrades argued and did, or on methods developed later by the leadership of Gregory Zinoviev in the Communist International, methods which were not identical to Stalinism but opened doors for it.

This political day school will explore the possibilities for modes of socialist organising which can combine more informed, more civilised, and more fruitful debate than flame wars and more dynamic activism than a model based on paid staff in an office as the hub of a large scattering of supporters who mostly participate only online.

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Reading:

Witch-hunt tries to prohibit radical ideas

http://www.workersliberty.org/story/2018-02-12/witch-hunt-tries-prohibit-radical-ideas

The inverted pyramid of fake politics

http://www.workersliberty.org/story/2018-02-15/inverted-pyramid-fake-politics

Trotsky: "Revolutionary ardour in the struggle for socialism is inseparable from intellectual ardour in the struggle for truth"

A response to the leader of a left split from the French Socialist Party in 1938, who denounced the Trotskyists for having "factional methods": https://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1939/07/psop02.htm

Democracy and clicktivism

http://www.workersliberty.org/story/2017-07-26/democracy-more-clicks-online

Cannon, Shachtman, and others: The revolutionary party

Debate in the 1940s: "The Two Trotskyisms Confront Stalinism", p.589-636

Additional readings: Trotsky, Shachtman, Cannon, Matgamna

http://www.workersliberty.org/system/files/theparty.pdf

Selections from historic Marxist debates

http://www.workersliberty.org/system/files/party_300906.pdf

Notes on Lars Lih's Lenin Rediscovered

http://www.workersliberty.org/story/2012/08/25/lenin-rediscovered

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Agenda:

12-13:10 Should socialists organise as such at all?break