I am starting to wonder if I was at Left Unity’s first national meeting
Comments on reports of our first national meeting on 11 May from Richard Brenner, a delegate from Southwark Left Unity
The first national Left Unity meeting last Saturday
It’s one week since the first national meeting of Left Unity, and after reading some of the more hostile reports and comments I wonder if I was at the same meeting.
A shambles, one report called it. What? 100 delegates assembled from more than 80 local branches, more than half of them elected from a minuted meeting of more than five people, and all from a standing start in little more than a few weeks? Try it. Then tell us this was anything other than a huge achievement.
No major political decisions? Apart from one, of course. The meeting decided to set up a new political party to challenge Labour from the left. No small matter that! And to do it in November this year, on an accelerated timescale that made even congenital optimists like me gulp a bit.
Badly chaired or disorganised? On reflection, no, not really. After all it was complex. The delegates’ pack contained not just a Statement setting out the views of some leading members like Kate Hudson on what Left Unity should stand for, but a lot of amendments submitted from branches and delegates, and a last minute procedural motion that was always going to be a challenge to deal with.
Huddersfield sent in a thoughtful proposal for a kind of manifesto and wanted it debated. Southwark had adopted an amendment and a proposal from Nick Wrack of the Independent Socialist Network that aimed to strengthen the Statement by committing Left Unity explicitly to an anticapitalist, socialist and working class project (it was clear that Ken Loach supported this view, as he called for a clear socialist orientation in his address to the meeting.) Dave Stockton from Lambeth, a Workers Power supporter, proposed an amendment focused on what we could be fighting for in the here and now over the coming months.
Admittedly it was a tall order to expect people to discuss and vote on all of this at short notice. But there was no need to abort the process altogether. The procedural motion from Nick Wrack and Simon Hardy, which said we should not vote on the motions and amendments, took so long to discuss that it prevented any political discussion of the documents, which in turn meant we didn’t really discuss the political situation in Britain today and what we could do to stop the Tories.
Hindsight is 20-20, but looking back there would have been a much easier way of dealing with it. We could have begun the discussion, and if people felt unable to decide , someone could then have referred the vote to the next national meeting. That could have happened after the political discussion, not instead of it. Oh well, tomorrow is another day, and there will be another meeting in September.
Nor, I have to say, did the meeting ‘firmly rebuff’ the involvement of existing socialist groups in Left Unity, as one article claimed. Yes I’m biased because I’m a member of a group, but I think some ex-members of groups might be being a bit biased too. For example, while many delegates understandably feared sectarians and opportunists moving in and taking over or breaking up Left Unity, there was a definite and legitimate trend in the meeting arguing for a less defensive approach. Everyone agreed members of the SWP or the SP can join as individuals. So why not make it easier for them to counter the discouragement of the sectarians in their ranks by issuing a public appeal to them and making them welcome? That was why I voted for the proposal to give the groups observer rights, though I accept that it was clearly defeated. But:
– Two members of existing socialist groups were elected onto Left Unity’s national coordinating group directly from the meeting: Terry Conway of Socialist Resistance, the British Section of the Fourth International, and Tom Walker of the International Socialist Network, which recently left the SWP
– Several speakers including Will McMahon from London, Pete McLaren from Rugby, Leander from Birmingham Communities against the Cuts and Kris Stewart from the International Socialist Network spoke in favour of Left Unity making approaches to and working with the rest of the left including the largest socialist groups.
Of course it would be ridiculous to imagine that Left Unity can actually ‘unite the whole of the left’. At the same time it is self-defeating to exclude socialist groups that do actually support the project, like Socialist Resistance, Workers Power, the International Socialist Network and so on. I know some comrades won’t like it, because of all manner of concerns, some of which are understandable given the SWP’s behaviour in the Socialist Alliance and Respect. But we should take care not to tar every group with the same brush. And we should avoid like the plague beginning with exclusions, condemnations and a hothouse atmosphere. After all, we want to build a mass party open and appealing to new people. We want to transcend the sects, not add to their number.
Finally, on the debate on women’s representation. The delegates who support Workers Power (five of us on the day), were not all agreed on how to vote on the quota system of assuring at least 50% of women on the national coordinating group. Some us, myself included, voted for; others voted against. But one thing is for sure. The fact that the discussion took place had its effect, and even without operating the quota the coordinating group we elected on the day had 60% women on it. That means Left Unity begins without reproducing the gender imbalance that capital imposes on most organisations, including on the left. And that is a very good thing.
I’m looking forward to the coming months. I hope we can have an excellent discussion, and that we get to debate out not just the motions and amendments submitted to the 11 May meeting but many more contributions from across the network. I hope we continue to draw in hundreds and hundreds of new people. And I hope our September national meeting can lay the basis for a deep policy discussion that results in the founding of a new, mass, socialist party in 2013-14.
Richard Brenner, Southwark Left Unity (personal capacity).
14 comments
14 responses to “I am starting to wonder if I was at Left Unity’s first national meeting”
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Nice to see a positive report of the meeting. :)
I’m all for encouraging members of the SWP, the Socialist Party, Respect, etc. to join. We are suppose to be trying to unite the left!
With real party democracy the greater the likelihood we can all remain working together, even when decisions go against our own individual preferences. This means one member one vote – already established. But it also means letting members vote on as many things as possible, not committees ‘steering’ the membership the way they want.
People today expect to participate in decision-making, not just to be told to sell a paper or recruit. Indeed, the more they are given a say the more motivated they are to do the hard work that is necessary.
At our meeting this week we decided to use our Facebook page (see Left Unity Huddersfield) to start a debate about what our policy should be. People at the meeting agreed to take one policy area and start a thread on the site, even if the opening shot was as little as: ‘What do you think about education?’.
The topics we agreed to discuss as individual threads were: housing, welfare, education, economic policy, crime/law and order, immigration, how LU should organise, ecology/environment, the EU and internationalism and last but not least ‘How can the left win?’.
Hopefully this will attract new people and we can use these FB discussions as the basis for debates at meetings, focussing on say a couple of issues each time, so we don’t just talk about organisational stuff.
Perhaps it be good if all groups did something similar if there is to be a meaningful debate at the next national meeting. In Huddersfield we are finding the discussions very positive and people have come up with some great ideas. Could the steering committee set up something similar on a national basis? Let’s get on and start making policy!
Melanie I think that is an excellent idea and I’ll raise it at our next meeting in Southwark. But yes, ultimately I think it would be great if we did it nationally!
I am also going to use this in our meeting of Wandsworth Left Unity. Thanks.
Thanks for your thoughts Richard, I think I went to the same meeting as you #enthusiastic, #optimistic #LeftUnity
just to clarify is left unity now definitley going to be an electoral party by which i mean the liberal definition that it will stand in elections in addition to any other work that it does. i guess that this is where left unity starts to lose members who are commited to other electoral projects or who just didnt think strategically or ideologically that it is currently right to contest elections. my hunch is that standing in elections at this stage will drain this intiative of its current energy. in the meantime i look at the soft left organistation compass and wonder if a more free thinking grass roots democratic far-left version open to greens/tusc/pirates/ anarchists/social movements and trades unions might have been a better use of time for this project.
I think there are problems with this analysis. Firstly there is no recognition of the hostility to the SWP and SP by many regular contributors here and elsewhere in cyberspace. Richard is turning a blind eye to the foaming-at-the-mouth brigade who demand mechanisms for excluding the SWP. This is particularly important for these people because the endorsement of one-member-one-vote would help the SWP to take over the organisation at an early stage (or very nearly take over it) if they wanted to do that. And this is one reason why the SP in particular is keen on some kind of federal structure. I don’t think the first national meeting thought through the consequences of all of this. Richard does make the case for using individual recruitment of SWP members, which I have no problem with. It is definitely better than the sectarianism of many members. Nevertheless, there are a few problems with this ‘solution’. Firstly, just because Left Unity may endorse dual membership we don’t know if the SWP will reciprocate. Until we get reassurances on this, recruiting SWP members individually is akin to the Stalinised KPD’s united front from below ultimatism. Left Unity has to bring aboard merely a few handfuls of SWP members, but them – all en masse. The same goes for the SP. Unless Left Unity agitates for this, then it is going to degenerate into just one more sect. This will be inevitable because it will force the SWP and SP into standing candidates against Left Unity, either as TUSC or under some other banner. Richard probably agrees with my enthusiasm for recruiting the SWP. At least I hope he does. But if he doesn’t he needs to say so, so we can debate the pros and cons. And if he does agree with me, he will have to say so explicitly because a huge section of Left Unity opposes the SWP, and the SP, joining. These sectarians only agree to SWP members joining so long as they don’t do so in significant numbers. And that, to be frank, is sectarianism.
That almost sounds like a threat. Your own “analysis” is “incorrect”, because you’re forgetting the institutional conservatism within the SWP and SP that means it’s extremely unlikely these two groups would ever join whole-heartedly into LEft Unity. The SP’s position is to create a New Workers’ Party but still remain seperate from it, and I presume the SWP is the same.
The biggest problem with the 57 Varieties Left is not actually sectarianism per se but simply the conservatism of the established group. It’s actually easier for the SP/SWP to take over if it’s federated because actually these mgroups don’t have the time or manpower to flood a group but do have the uncanny ability (based on long experience) of taking over a threatening group and murdering it at birth. Which is why these groups must be taken with an extra dose of caution.
David Graeber in The Democracy Project gives a good example of how horizontalists flooded an WWP meeting and ended up creating Occupy Wall Street. Actually the big threat to you Tom and the SP is that normal people interested in consensus will take over the far left scene and make it viable. And that isn’t a threat- it’s a promise. :)
@ Emnil
Oh god, not consensus. At least not in its pure form. It only works if you have a small affinity group made up of people who know each other well. Or a group like the Quakers.
If you don’t have that, what you end up with is a handful of people obstructing any meaningful decisions. At best. At worst, you end up with conspiracists hijacking every discussion to talk about the Bilderberg Group/Illuminati/Lizards and refusing to give consensus to get stuff back on track. Or “you can’t expel me for randomly punching people because I don’t agree with that decision!”
All pure consensus ends up doing is dragging everything down and stagnating a group. That’s really not going to attract anyone to a group, at least in the long term. It also falls down as soon as there’s a serious disagreement about tactics.
What’s far more important is to make sure that as many people as possible get to have their say, that discussion and disagreement is free and open and that any minority opinion still gets its rights to hold that view respected.
I do genuinely wonder how many people who think consensus based decision making is the way forward have experience of working in that way politically.
*Emil
My apologies for spelling your name wrong.
Things seem to have started well in Leicester. i think it helps that nothing similiar existed up to this point and there is definetly a groundswell of people who want radical social and environment change and are opposed to the fundamentally undemocratic monopoly capitalism and all forms of exploitation of ordinary people. i have every faith in what has happened so far to move us further down the road to where we want to go. i have only been to one meeting but i have read most of the posts for Left Unity i can access and its nice to for once to read the views of people you are in most cases entirely in agreement with.
THe only thing that worries me is if too much time is spent on deciding on what our relationship should be with existing groups on the left and not just the SP OR SWP. THere is time for that later surely. If you already in one group i cant see a problem with that though sooner or later you would have to decide which group you preferred but its common sense that you would have to throw your lot in with who you chose to join and not keep looking over your shoulder? THe other issue we could spend time debating is trying to pin down a rigid definition of what we stand for very early on. Surely no one is still reading these posts if they think that capitalism can be managed better and all we need to do is accept the status quo. Debate is healthy. For me personally i can debate most things but the recent history of the labour movement or socialist parties i cant discuss because apart from being a student over 30 years ago i have not been following it. Its not just the structure of society thats needs changing but from where i stand i feel that most radical or alternative movements have been moribund for some time. We have been weak for some time that is the mass of people who have been junked on by the tories over and over. again. We saw an outpouring of long held anger about the thatcher years and its legacy recently. THat is why i think that Now is the right time for something like this but i bet it ends being not only different but better than marxist leninist theorists (are there many left does it matter?) envisage.
Something that transcends what we had before maybe or maybe not sufficiently different from what we had before but surely it would be in broad ideological agreement with generations of workers or people intellectually opposed to the core values of monopoly capitalism. i can see a bit of conflict between those who have a lot of experience of groups on left and others but if LU seems to be working in time that wont matter. i cant speak from experience. I hope it will incorporate both ideas and people who are influenced by Green politics and Anarchism because they were influences on me when i was involved in the peace movement which was an international movement. (its no good defining Green politics by the activities of one Green Party outpost or thinking that only the Green Party matter regards GReen politics). i hope it succeeds. it is also an educational process and for me personally i have also learn a lot even though this as come at a time when i have been very busy doing end of year assessments. Best wishes everyone and solidarity, peace and love – tony walker (student/ artist)
This is the best report of the day that I’ve read.
It properly appreciates the scale of the achievement; understands just how positive it is that people want to move so quickly to creating a party; puts in context the reservations many people understandably have about the organised far left and is clear about the significance of the election of a leadership that is 60% women.
Thanks Richard.
“And we should avoid like the plague beginning with exclusions, condemnations and a hothouse atmosphere. After all, we want to build a mass party open and appealing to new people. We want to transcend the sects, not add to their number.”
What on earth is the matter with you people? how naive are you? if you don’t bar the cults at the outset you wont win over ordinary people which this party claims to want to represent. Many people have left Labour for obvious reasons, but to think SR, SWP, WP and all the other loons somehow represent the aspirations of the working class, is ridiculous. Look at TUSC election results. You want to do better than that in the next election? Or maybe you don’t, this is just another PR exercise, with usual suspects behind the scenes.