The ICC's response is what you'd expect from them (point missing-tastic which is what they do), but I think an awful lot of people have missed the point of what we were trying to do. It's been responded to as if it's some grand theoretical statement, and found severely lacking, whereas in fact, as we state several times, it's something much more modest than that. We were trying to answer the question of what isolated militants can do in the workplace in periods of low class struggle. We came up with a series of necessarily contingent and provisional answers. I don't think there's anything wrong with that side of things, but I think there are two clear problems which we would basically have to start again to fix.
One is the form in which it's written. It's not a manifesto, but it's written in manifesto-ese. The writing needs to draw more directly and obviously on experience. There needs to be first person stuff in there and the structure needs to be far more clearly working through questions rather than stating contingent answers without showing the working as it does at the moment. This can't be fixed within the existing structure which would need to be torn up and something new written.
The other is a question which is implicit throughout but which is not addressed directly: is it possible for a militant to kick something off that would not otherwise have happened? There's real disagreement about this (as there should be, it's not a question with a clear answer), but some of the ambiguities and contradictions of the piece are places where this question rears its head and is fudged. This is particularly true in the syndicalist union section, where some of our engagement in the IWW is about supporting existing struggles and some of it is about trying to kick stuff off. We've tried to run all this together which I think is where the 'fighting organisation of the working class' line comes from, something which is basically not true but which does capture some of the things that people hope to gain from the IWW.
The thing as it exists is out there doing what work it can now, and it needs to be left to so that. I think we need to take some of these lessons forward into writing a community thing and then revisit the workplace in a couple of years. I'll be honest though, I really don't have the energy to do much towards a community document, but I really think it needs to be done.