Workers Power’s short cuts

Submitted by Anon on 13 August, 2006 - 4:13

Mark Osborn discusses the recent split in Workers Power which was covered in detail in Solidarity 3/96

I suppose the split is no big surprise. For a long time after the invasion of Iraq I had a copy of Workers Power on the wall above my computer. It is the issue from March 2003, following the big Iraq march of February 2003, and the anti-war headlines read: “Global general strike. Blockade the streets. Build social forums to take power”. The editorial claims that blockades of the main roads and motorways, together with a global general strike, of course, would “force the government to sit up and take notice”.

Undoubtedly Mr Blair would “sit up and take notice” at such an event. So would I.

The way to stop the war was, if necessary, “strikes without [the union leaders] backing.”

Without pausing to ask how many workplaces they had brought out during March 2003, their manifesto, From Protest to Power, written in October 2003, suggests, “great opportunities to struggle for power have emerged in recent years and will occur in one country after another, with increasing frequency, in the years ahead. The vast mobilisations of February 2003 herald still greater days to come. Revolutionary crises and the chance to take power will emerge all over the world.”

Workers Power were off on another binge: some believed it, maybe others went along for the ride hoping for some young recruits, maybe others were ordered along under “discipline”.

Anyway I had a good laugh at their expense — joking that some hyped-up kid around Revo had found the keys to the Workers Power office and run off an issue by themselves. I added a fourth slogan to my copy of their paper: “Be rude to your parents”.

Maybe that half-thought wasn’t so far from the truth, and the “kid” involved might well have been long-time Workers Power organiser Richard Brenner.

Good old Richard Brenner. Maybe I should have put two and two together. I’d seen him in the middle of a group of Revo people at a demo outside Labour Party conference. His behaviour, and that of the group, was so deranged I started a loud chant: “Mao Mao Mao ZeDong! Mao Mao Mao ZeDong!” — it’s a long time since Red Guards had been active in Brighton. Brenner growled at me, in the manner of a cartoon dog.

Okay, so Richard got carried away, and will no doubt lead his band of youth into some serious scrapes from whatever solicitor’s firm he’s currently employed by.

But the question is really to the other side of the split. How come you let this happen?

The chronology appears to be this: during the 1990s Workers Power lost a number of older members and they stopped recruiting.

Then someone had that light-bulb moment: They set up a youth project and found they could recruit some youth. But they did so on a thoroughly opportunistic basis, accommodating to the Zapatista-style anarchism of the anti-capitalists. Worse, sufficient numbers of half-baked youth were admitted to membership to allow the most extreme and unhinged of the leadership to use them as a battering ram against most of the old guard.

Beyond a certain point Brenner and Co. could use ridiculous “Trotskyist” rules of ‘discipline’ against the old leaders.

Careless? Yes, I think so.

And the lesson: there’s no short cut out of the current period. We might be in similar conditions for a while and there are no get-rich-quick routes for the left, to get out of our isolation: the SWP have tried sucking-up to political Islam and scum like Galloway, WP tried similar with soft, anti-capitalist anarchism. Either way, it leads to a political mess.

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