communism is not just a nice idea: meeting at Tent City University, 22 December [Archive]

Alf

23rd December 2011, 08:17

This was the third time an ICC comrade had spoken at the Tent City University in the St Paul’s occupation. The previous two meetings, introduced by a visiting French comrade, had been on the economic crisis of the system and the ecological question. I hadn’t been able to attend, although I did see some video footage of the first one.
This time I went along with another ICC comrade from London and my two sons, who are sympathetic to the ICC’s politics. One of them filmed the meeting and we can see whether it’s feasible to publish parts of it. I won’t try to give a blow by blow account but will just make a few synthetic points:
1. the meeting turned out OK in the end, despite some dodgy moments at the beginning. There were about 20 people all told, with some comings and goings. I already knew some of them: two comrades from the Communist Workers Organisation and the one who posts as Pingu on libcom, and would also see himself as a communist, influenced by the autonomist current. He is involved in the organisation of the occupation. The others were an even mix of ‘residents’ and visitors;
2. there were definite problems with the organisation of the event. There was little evidence of publicity around the organising tents and the bookshop/university, and no one knew where the microphone was – the mic being useful even in a small meeting because of the amount of outside noise intruding into the tent (such as the bells of St Paul’s). But the main problem was the presence of a ‘resident’ (I think) who made persistent low level interruptions as I was trying to give what was intended to be a short summary of the book. Along with going around sticking for ‘sale’ labels on books and papers and even people attending, he tried to get people to ‘vote’ (wavy hands and all that) on things I was saying, like why we need a revolution He said the Occupation had agreed on non-violence, so he was against it. In sum, using the ‘forms’ of open discussion to make actual discussion very difficult. So I gave up trying to make the presentation and opened up the discussion, which went on quite intensely for the hour and a half, and improved greatly when the interrupter lost interest and left. But I am not saying he was representative of all the organisers. Pingu in particular expressed his irritation with the interruptions and wanted to hear the presentation, and was also annoyed about the absence of the mic, which would have made the interruptions less possible;
3. despite all this, the discussion mostly stayed on topic, and through the responses given by the communist ‘contingent’ to some of the questions, a number of the themes of the book (and subsequent volumes of the series on communism) were incorporated into the meeting, such as:
- ‘doesn’t communism mean making everyone the same, which goes against the fact that people are all different?’. Comrades referred to Marx’s early writings to say that he had been explicitly opposed to what he called ‘crude’ or barracks communism. The aim of the communist revolution was to resolve the problem of labouring to produce life’s necessities and thus create a society where wealth is measured not in labour time but in free time, and where individuals can develop their full potential;
- ‘can’t we change things without violence?’ Several comrades responded that no ruling class had ever given up without a fight, but it was also pointed out that the more organised and conscious the revolution is, the less it will get bogged down in violence. And whether or not Occupy London had agreed on non-violence, the other occupations in Spain, North Africa, Greece and the USA had all faced police or army violence when they tried to take over ‘public’ spaces. And they had been obliged to defend themselves. Posed with a concrete situation like this, there was a wider level of agreement that we could not avoid the question of force, above all if we were talking about taking over the whole of the means for producing wealth;
- ‘how can we make a revolution which doesn’t end up with new Stalins?’ In response to this, reference was made to the actual experience of past workers’ revolutions, such as the Commune and the workers’ councils of 1905 and 1917, which had not been ‘invented’ by Marx or other revolutionaries but had emerged from the struggle itself and expressed the need of the working class to create forms of organisation that could be under its direct control. The re-appearance of the general assembly form in the occupations movement was, whether its participants were aware of it or not, a continuation of the same dynamic. Of course there can be no guarantees that a revolution won’t degenerate, but we can certainly learn from the failures and errors of the past, such as the mistaken idea that the role of the communist political organisation is to take state power into its own hands. The participant who raised the question, someone who might have termed himself a ‘sceptical marxist’, seemed happy with this last response;
- ‘isn’t there a subjective element to the crisis?’ This was raised in response to the point I had made about Marx’s analysis of the economic crisis, which in his view and ours derives from contradictions inherent in the system and are thus ultimately beyond the control of the capitalists or the state. But it was posed from two very different angles: Pingu wanted to discuss the subjective role of the working class in either provoking or aggravating the crisis through its own struggles. Some answers to this were given, such as a reference to the 1930s when you had a defeated working class and yet an economic crisis that was extremely deep. But the discussion was pushed into another direction by two or three people who thought that I was being naive to think that the ruling elite had not engineered the crisis: in other words, they held to the classic conspiratorial view of history: there is a continuing elite passed down through blood lines over hundreds of years, who manipulate the world’s finances to bring about the crisis and thus shore up their power. The main spokesman for this viewpoint had also been the one most in favour of non-violent resistance. In response a number of points were made: the ruling class is profoundly divided along national lines, hence their imperialist rivalries and their total inability to come together to do anything about the ecological crisis; the crisis is not benefiting the ruling class because it is creating the conditions where people are indeed resisting capitalism and posing questions about the future; and, even if there was a single, secret elite running the world, we would still need a revolution to overthrow them. When you discuss with people who hold to the full-blown conspiracy viewpoint , you usually get the impression that this is ultimately an ideology of resignation: nothing can be done because the elite (the Illuminati, etc) are so all-powerful.

This topic was, unsurprisingly, not resolved and we ran out of time. But these kinds of ideas are extremely widespread and they need to be answered They are connected to a growing disillusionment with the democratic facade and an attempt to make sense of an increasingly chaotic world. The response is a false one but revolutionaries have to respond to the underlying questions being posed (just dismissing people as ‘conspiraloons’ isn’t really what’s needed here).

All in all, worth doing and it might be a good idea to repeat the talk, or something similar, at the Bank of Ideas in the new year.