New Labour think gambling’s bad for our health… may be they’re right… may be they’re wrong (let the local people decide democratically)… but one thing’s for sure they’re always ready to gamble with our lives.

Yet more lies, yet more broken promises- it comes so thick and fast everyday day in day out day in day out no one is surprised or barely raises an eyebrow. They play poker with our lives? Tell us a new one!

Except we’ve had another promise of… wait for it…

“”alternative, but equally effective projects”.

Now that’s probably government-ease for f… off and die.. death by degrees, a thousand disappointments, they’ll hardly notice one more .

More endlessly deferred promises. It’s not the community that’s shameless- it’s the murdering ministers and their lying lapdogs.

But let’s try a new game! Pretend to take them seriously. Call their bluff!

So they lied last time. This time we’ll hold them to it- or should that be hold’em and we’ll raise you!

Put the money on the table and let us plan our “museums, theatres, retail, commercial and housing developments”

But what about taking them at their word?

Give us decent jobs, decent services, cheap housing under tenants’ control- get the privateers out and let working class communities decide through our own democratic committees.

We demand at least 3500 jobs- and at least equal funding as promised before.

East Manchester still has some of the worst deprivation in the country, with high crime rates, low health indices, low educational attainment and high rates of family and individual breakdown.

We’re used to glossy pamphlets and empty promises.

But let’s fight back- let’s get out on to the streets and DEMAND our rights.

Give us our jobs! The council are threatening legal action. Says councillor Sir Richard Leese. Lame or what? Jobs for the boys.. well the Cambridge educated elite anyway.

More money for the lawyers then and long months of wrangling and arguing so they get rich and we get… nothing

As the government clearly can’t be trusted to deliver on regeneration and its promises give us the money and we’ll design the services and decide how they’re run under local democracy where people make decisions through votes not councillors and business lobby lash-ups.

Forget the legal action.. let’s take to the streets.

And come to join the festival of ideas…at the Manchester convention of the left…

Join all of those left out of the new Labour circus… and let’s make some noise … and get some real f..ing action!

Some interesting questions here.
I think Clause 4 did in a certain sense involve “a recognition, buried in labour movement history that democracy is something more than parliament”
However, the operative verb is buried.
It was deliberately worded ambiguously and vaguely to mean different things to different people
The original text is as follows “”To secure for the workers by hand or by brain the full fruits of their industry and the most equitable distribution thereof that may be possible upon the basis of the common ownership of the means of production, distribution and exchange, and the best obtainable system of popular administration and control of each industry or service.”

But what can this mean? Nationalisation in a predominantly capitalist economy? Worker co-operatives? Employee shareholder schemes?
It could mean all these but could also mean the working class ruling itself- particular industries being run by the workers and users of those goods or services as part of an overall democratically planned economy.
It was meant to mean both, I’d suggest, to bamboozle and distract the newly radicalised workers looking to Russia and workers’ councils (soviets) which then still retained a great degree of popular democracy and participation.

It was meant, I am hypothesising, to distract them away from the necessary self-activity of the working class and its demands to abolish the role of private capital in the economy and say trust us. We’ll represent your interests.

Whereas revolutionary socialists would advocate direct democracy and workers’ control.

The rediscovery of working class participation in the shop stewards’ movements of the late 60s and rank and file movements of the 70s, also coming into contact with the radical politics of socialism, the new social movements, Black, women’s and gay liberation was another fertile period.

However, yet again our interests were co-opted and suppressed into the largely empty promises of politicians to tinker with the state, to have as Hilary argues a
“left have tended to be built around a benevolent version of the second understanding of power: around winning the power to govern and using it paternalistically to meet the needs of the people. This has meant a politics focused around legislation and state action.”
This is exactly the wrong sort of left. We want, I’d suggest, a left based on popular participation, of workers’ democracy and workers’ control that does of course make demands on the state – e.g. for more resources, for more democratic control- but sees ourselves in the broadest possible way- the working class organised into councils of action or peoples’ assemblies or social forums or whatever the new term will be (and it probably will be a new term)- as a new way of self-rule replacing the old government of the dictatorship of a small group of people over the many.
Brazil and Venezuela are also interesting. In the first, I get the impression Lula’s participation budgets stand exposed as a fraud- to co-opt the working class into managing aspects of the state without having real power. At the worst it can be foisting difficult decisions about cuts- whose services are slashed onto the people themselves and is about as democratic as asking a local population to vote to shut two libraries or half a school- whilst leaving the profits of the rich untouched.
In Venezuela, I think Chavez also plays a balancing act between the masses and the bourgeois saying one thing to one, another to the other, with plenty of deliberately vague, ambiguous statements meaning all things to all people.
However, I think there are potential popular organs of struggle meaning the situation there is more fluid and perhaps even does have the possibility of socialist transformation- it would mean though a political battle to win against the idea of the Chavista state real workers’ democracy.
I think it is good we are opening up these sort of debates in the Manchester movement for an alternative conference and an alternative politics.

There will be lots of different ideas within our movement and lots of new ideas if- and we must- we win new people to it.
A contribution on what sort of politics the movement needs with a lively comment thread is here
http://permanentrevolution.net/?view=entry&entry=1935
I am very confident that we can but we do need to really really focus on putting out national calls and national mobilisations for the event.

Hilary can you write an article for Red Pepper and an appeal for trade unionists, community action groups and the various networks you’re in to appeal for people to get to Manchester? And for funds. Let’s make this real!

Thanks once again for an interesting article

Jason

To post an aticle you will need to send it - pref as a word file - to me. I will then post up. I would assume that we will be setting up more explicit proceedures in the coming weeks.

How do you get to post an article on here- as opposed to a reply?

Jason