13/02/2008 by admin.

The Manchester “Convention of The Left”, from the 20th -25th September, will bring together opponents of New Labour’s neo-liberal warmongering to discuss how we can develop unity in action - just a stone’s throwaway New Labour’s party conference. 

We want an entirely different world. One built by the working people for the working people, not based on profit, environmental destruction and oppression, but a socialist society.  We bring together people from different radical traditions - greens, lefts, internationalists and communists, civil liberties campaigners, anti-deportation fighters and trades unions, peace and public service campaigns – but united in our determination to combine our strengths and open a debate about how we can rebuild the left today.    

The Manchester Convention steering group invites anyone who wants to participate in, shape or promote the event to join us in Manchester on Sunday 24th February, at the Friends Meeting House, Mount Street Manchester between 3.00-6.00pm. 

There is obviously no final agenda as yet, but the loose proposal is that through the course of the Labour Party conference week, the Convention will organise a counter conference and actions.

The Convention will start on Saturday with a full day for discussion and debate between activists to see how we can work together better and co-ordinate our struggles, followed on a week of discussion possibly themed around;  

Peace – how we organise our struggle against imperialist wars and support the just struggles of peoples against national oppression  

People not Profits – how we oppose the privatisation of public services – and how we would run the services of the future  

Planet – how we can fight global warming and environmental destruction  

Power and Politics –how the struggle against oppression means fighting for power to change our lives  

If you would like to attend the Convention Organising Group, then feel free to come along, all welcome, individuals and groups or groups of individuals, or if you can’t make it on the day, then get in touch with our e-mail (john at conventionoftheleft.org) and we will be happy to facilitate your involvement in any way we can.  

Over the next weeks and months in the run up to the Convention we will be trying to shape a debate around the issues that face the left today.  

Yours, John Nicholson 

Convenor, Convention Organising Group 

Posted in Planning | 11 Comments »

13/02/2008 by admin.

By Richard Searle

The economic system we all live under was born, as Marx succinctly put it, ‘red in tooth and claw’. The arms trade, the defence industry, security interests, national interests, which every way they call it,  they  are all prefaced on killing.   

There’s no polite way of putting it: for this economic system to succeed, continue and renew itself, others must die. The wars of the 20th century have killed millions. We have turned it ‘art of war’ into an industrial process   

In the eight short years of  21st century, and estimated one million more have joined the tally of war dead, from Central Africa and the Middle East, to the Caucuses and the Andes    How far we come from the slaughter of the trenches of WW1?

We now have high-tech wars in Afghanistan and Iraq where missiles fired from pilotless drones are directed from thousands of miles away in command rooms in the USA.  Those who fire the missiles never have to step foot in the country of those they kill. This is the iron fist of globalisation.

We can now turn on our televisions or Log-on and see wars being fought in real time.   Our society puts its best brains to work finding more efficient ways of killing people. Our governments subsidise the arms industries, gives bribes to the purchasers and justify this by saying it’s protecting jobs.  There exists an absurd and obscene contradiction at the very heart of capitalism. It provides the potential to extend life but is driven to end life. The combined defence budgets of the world for one year would eradicate world hunger, provide clean drinking for every person on the planet, an education for every child, could provide the medicine for every person with HIV and still have plenty of change left over.   Resistance to this logic, this drive to destruction, has always been there. It has been resisted by passive and active means. There have been those who have refused to fight and those who have turned their guns on their masters.  The 15th February 2003, turning point in modern history.   The convergence of global protests on one day in 2003 marked a first in human history. Protests moved through 12 time zones around the world, Those protests were organised from the grassroots up. They combined differing forces, movements and traditions. Those protests joined up the world as never before This is our immediate heritage not an event from another era.  It showed how far we have come together, our potential, our ability to communicate with new technology but it showed us how far we still need to go.    

Those protests were at once a victory in mobilisation, but within short space of time some participants read the 15th February as a defeat. The threat of war that had brought them on the streets had gone ahead. ‘We had marched in our millions but the bombs still fell’.   

Un-ravelling all the lessons, layers and contradictions of the 15th February 2003 provides the key to developing our strategies to stop the masters of war.   

What is the impact of 15th February ? Is it too early to tell?  

Discuss

Posted in Peace, Statements | 1 Comment »

13/02/2008 by admin.

By Declan O’Neill

When Labour dumped its formal commitment to “common ownership of the means of production, distribution and exchange” it was the final straw for many in the Labour party who still regarded themselves as socialists.    

In practice, of course, Labour had never challenged the dominance of the market or the supremacy of private property but few, would have predicted how quickly new Labour would rush to privatise those bits of the economy still in public hands. 

 In opposition it was “our air is not for sale” and a commitment to renationalise the railways; in government it was selling off air traffic control and cuddling up to Virgin Rail. Private good, public bad became the new mantra.  As Mark Steel has written in their worship of the market today’s politicians “sound like ancient pagans expressing fear of a bad crop brought by angry gods. And once it descends, all we can do is offer a sacrifice, of a few million jobs and lives ruined and thousands made homeless until the gods are satisfied with our gifts and we can start all over again.”  

New Labour is so desperate to avoid anything that smacks of” old- style nationalisation” that Gordon Brown would rather give Northern Rock to his mate Richard Branson than contemplate taking it into public ownership.  The latest obscenity is the Virgin group’s attempt, responding to the government’s “reform strategy” for the NHS, to move into Primary Healthcare.  

So what is the alternative?  What is wrong with running public services on the basis of peoples’ needs not private profit? Decisions about how and where we use those resources should be made by the people themselves through democratic means.  This does not mean a return to old style nationalisation. In practice the old nationalised industries aped the private sector: their management boards were composed of the great and good – neither workers or users had any real say in the day to day running of public services, never mind strategic direction. 

Yet even at their worst the old nationalised industries were a thousand time better than the privatised chaos we now face. 

The society we aim to build is not one built on ever increasing production and consumption but one democratically run to meet the needs of all humanity. Reclaiming our public services is an essential first step in this process.  We have the resources to do this: our task is to build a movement to transform the system from one built on private greed to one that meets the needs of all humanity.   

Posted in People not profit, Statements | 1 Comment »

13/02/2008 by admin.

By Peter Allen

In the last two or three years a near consensus has developed around the view that something dramatic needs to be done to ensure the survival of the planet. The few remaining “climate change deniers” in the scientific community increasingly have the near pariah status of “holocaust deniers”.

However although there is an agreement that “something needs to be done” there is far less agreement about what and how. In particular there is a recognition that our consumer society and individual prosperity is based on resource intensive production and an assumption of never ending growth. How can living standards be (at least) maintained in the relatively rich economies and societies whilst reducing, minimising or ideally eliminating the risk of environmental destruction?

At least as importantly how can those economies/societies (most of the world’s population) be given the chance to enjoy the benefits of advanced industrial society if the planet’s ecosystems are so fragile? The question raises issues for socialists as well as for supporters of the free market.

Socialist orthodoxy, starting with Marx, holds that socialism cannot be built in conditions of poverty, and that rational economic growth(democratically controlled perhaps and planned rather than left to the free market, but growth nevertheless) is necessary to provide abundance for all. If the finite resources of our planet mean that notions of never ending, resource intensive growth need to be questioned, and yet most people remain poor, then What is To Be Done?

We might have come to the view that we can’t have socialism without saving the planet .Our task is to persuade others that we probably can’t save the planet without socialism. By socialism we probably mean a society based on co-operation rather than competition, production for need rather than profit and a system of government based on genuine participation and democracy.

We need to engage others in a debate about the best way of distributing what we have, distinguishing between what we really need and what we have been persuaded that we might want and deciding things for ourselves, individually when appropriate and collectively when necessary.

Such a debate needs to involve discussion not just about the way we produce electricity or solve our food and transportation needs but about the way we live our lives and how we can ensure an equitable sustainable future for our planet.

Posted in Planet, Statements | 3 Comments »