Midlands Discussion Forum, Birmingham, Saturday 2nd November 2013

[Blake's Baby]

The next meeting of the Midlands Discussion Forum will be on Saturday 2nd at the Anchor Inn, Digbeth.

We'll be discussing the question, 'what is class consciousness?'

All comrades are welcome to attend. We should be finishing around 6pm.

[The Idler]

Would love to, but unlikely to be able to this time. Hope the audio is recorded.

[Blake's Baby]

We'll certainly try. Hopefully it won't be quite as quiet as the last one.

[Blake's Baby]

Unfortunately the pub management had not consulted their diary, and when we turned up we found out that the room we were supposed to be using was also being used to store the guest ales for their beer festival. So we were somewhat squashed into a room where we were interrupted every five minutes or so by one of the staff coming in to pour a pint. After about 45 minutes, we moved into another room which had emptied, but this only had a kind of partition separating us from the main bar, with a TV screen above it audible from our side, and anyway patrons coming into the pub were ignoring the 'Private Function' sign on the door and coming into the room we were using. The manager did offer profuse apologies and say it was entirely his fault, but all of this made it a bit tricky to keep up a sustained discussion. I hope those comrades who'd travelled a long way thought it worth while. The noise and disruption also meant it wasn't worth recording the meeting.

We did manage some discussion, about the relationship between consciousness and struggle, class and culture, class consciousness and political minorities, minority action in general (both through political groups and 'cultures of resistance') and the importance of discussion groups and similar forums - but partly due to the disturbances we weren't really able to develop the discussion as fully as we'd have liked. Not much discussion about how we saw class struggle developing in the coming period, for example, which could have been a fruitful way to take the discussion if we'd had more time. Or been able to use the time we had more effectively at any rate.

There were six of us there, comrades from a variety of backgrounds, Left Communism, Council Communism and Anarchism. None of the political organisations we'd invited were able to be there: the CWO contacted us beforehand to say that they wouldn't be able to attend; the ICC and the SPGB, who we'd hoped might be able to send people, didn't as far as we know send anyone. Or perhaps they couldn't find us as we moved about the pub.

So, positives and negatives - we discussed some important questions, but circumstances prevented us from going as far as we could have done. Which is possibly an illustration of something.