This is an abridged version of a report on plans for the next five months adopted by the AWL National Committee on 1 June.
The working class is on the back foot. Working-class struggle is low. There is no big, exuberant rush to the left.
But the work done by a revolutionary socialist organisation, and only by a revolutionary organisation, has a greater relative importance in such quiet times than in many times of high struggle.
In a revolutionary onrush, no special organising methods are necessary to sustain socialists in consistent activity. Activity surges beyond all plans. If socialists are not drawn into high activity by the general movement, no-one will do anything but shrug and write them off.
What the revolutionary organisation contributes then is clarity of ideas. Its activists’ contributions to debates in the maelstrom will be sufficiently brisk and clear only on the basis of the political and theoretical education which the revolutionary organisation’s activists have gained in previous, quieter epochs.
In periods of lull and retreat, the specific organising work of the revolutionary organisation is essential to stop activism dissipating into drab, erratic fragments, and to stop the socialists’ educational work of developing class consciousness being overwhelmed by the tasks of sustaining minimal trade-union and campaigning organisation.
By conserving and honing purposefulness and consistency of activity, the revolutionary organisation trains its activists, integrates new activists, strengthens its political influence in workplaces and union branches, and thus creates the means which enable it to contribute well in the subsequent upsurges.
There will be important strikes and other struggles in the next five months. We must be ready to be energetic and quick-moving in support of them. That energy and speed of movement cannot be got by sluggishness in activity between the strikes and the big struggles, but rather by briskness and reliability in those quieter times.
To stabilise, and make reliable and well-followed-through, our basic routines of AWL paper sales, stalls, meetings, and educationals, is not merely marking time, but doing the best we can to enable us to contribute positively in whatever battles come soon, and in the bigger struggles later.
Parts of the existing left are in flux. We intervene consistently and vigorously for a proper political assessment of the Stalinoid past of the SWP and others, for democracy in debate, and for the continuing importance of revolutionary organisation.
Paper sales are both an important substantive part of, and a “thermometer” for, our activity of circulating ideas. They are an important part because big ideas require codification in writing to get across. They are a “thermometer” because the paper is the main visible sign by which our activists identify themselves as AWL on campuses, in workplaces, in union forums, on the streets, on the doorsteps, etc. In almost all cases where we can make real new contacts and initiate new streams of conversation, we will also convince the person involved to take the paper.
And paper sales can be quantified. Monitoring our activities by tracking the number of papers we sell gives an objective measure.
To take that measure as the only criterion would be wrong. To proceed without monitoring it would be as wrong as a mass revolutionary party proceeding only by vague estimates of things which can’t be quantified, like “the mood”, and neglecting hard facts of party membership, votes, strikes, etc.
Paper sales are not as high as they were in the period of the immediate shock of the global financial crisis, in late 2008; or in the 1984-5 miners’ strike; or in some periods of high class struggle in the 1970s. But generally street sales and door-to-door sales, if done competently, produce somewhat better sales than in, for example, most of the 1970s.
This is paradoxical. A probable reason is as follows. In the 1970s, someone interested in left-wing politics could readily see many accessible openings for activity which seemed thriving, on the up and up, etc. They could express their interest that way. Unless they were highly motivated, they would feel no special impulse to express their interest additionally by buying a left-wing paper encountered in the workplace, on the street, or on the doorstep.
These days left-minded people are more likely to see available activity as hard going. However, if they see a left-wing paper offered for sale on the street, or on the doorstep, buying and reading it can seem to them a good and undemanding way to express their interest.
It follows that the conversion rate, from those who will buy papers on the streets on the doorstep to those who will e.g. come to meetings, is lower now than at other times. But we already knew that.
Routines of stalls, paper sales, and meetings are an essential underpinning for more elaborate “broad” enterprises. They do not undermine or contradict those “broad” enterprises any more than regular breathing contradicts complicated athletic feats. On the contrary: making the regular activity of political “breathing” so reliable and steady that it requires no fuss or worry is a springboard for everything more athletic.
Union membership numbers rose fractionally in 2012, by 59,000 to 6.5 million according to the count by the Department of Business. The rise was all in the private sector, where however union membership numbers had previously fallen since 2008 by almost 500,000. The small rise, and the steadying of union membership in the public sector, are welcome achievements in current conditions.
The squeeze on real wages in Britain, much longer and bigger than in living memory, combined as it is with relatively brisk inflation and new prosperity for the wealthy, sets the scene for a potential “wage explosion” later on. But there are no grounds to rely on that explosion happening in the next five months. It is not happening now. Strikes have been at historic-low levels since 30 November 2011. The local government cuts in the April 2013 budgets were harsher than in 2011 and 2012, but aroused less trade-union and campaigning response.
As we noted in October 2012: “We cannot at will change the level of militancy and confidence of the broad labour movement. In principle, a shrinkage of ‘broad’ activity should for us, as revolutionary Marxists, simply mean that time and energy... is shifted to the ‘narrower’ activity of our own education, training, paper-selling, contact work, etc.
“In practice the shift is not automatic. It requires conscious and deliberate effort. Without that conscious and deliberate effort, a lull in the ‘broad’ movement will tend to lead to a slackening rather than a stepping-up of our ‘narrower’ education, training, paper-selling, and contact work”.
The bedroom tax has produced the first real surge of campaigning against benefit cuts since the initial burst of campaigning, mainly by disability activists.
Bedroom tax campaigning is patchy, and in many areas more a matter of leftists making publicity against the tax than communities organising themselves against them. But leftists making publicity is good, and may be an essential first step towards helping communities organise themselves. AWL branches should be active in bedroom tax campaigns.
The NHS is an epochal issue, still identified in the minds of the British working class (including young working-class people) as the centrepiece of the welfare state, and now under grave threat from the Tories.
In the foreseeable future campaigning on the NHS will take three forms: a. Big local campaigns against the closure of local hospitals or departments (Lewisham, Stafford, etc.) b. Regular publicity work (stalls, etc.) by smaller local committees. c. Activity in the Labour Party to reinforce and enforce the decision on the NHS made at the 2012 conference. We should work on and assist all three.
The revolutionary socialist movement always depends for new vigour on recruitment from youth. These days, by far the largest accessible concentrations of young people are on university, and secondarily college, campuses.
However, they are not “accessible” unless we make ourselves visible. On many campuses there is really no visible left activity. A new student arriving at one of those campuses with a tentative interest in left-wing politics is likely to have that interest wither unless we develop some visible activity through which she or he can explore that tentative interest.
A reliable, well-done routine of stalls, sales, meetings, film-showings, etc. on every campus where we have AWL members, or where non-student AWL members can get ready access, is therefore central.
As our October 2012 conference document noted, we need an ideological offensive which “should not take place only at the level of ‘high politics’ but also at the level of raising big political issues, such as the NHS or immigration, which are ‘live’ but fall outside of the immediate remit of the student union or the anti-cuts group. The AWL should be the natural point of reference for left-minded students looking for answers on such issues”.
We should not let our political profile on campuses be swamped by concerns for the engineering of anti-cuts campaigning. There will be battles against cuts. We should be in them. But cuts are not the main thing, and the inevitably fading cadre of activists “against cuts and fees” from 2010-1 should not be the main focus
As we reported (Solidarity, 20 Feb 2013): “While less well-off universities are losing thousands of applications, overall university finances are set to increase by billions... Overall, business is booming. The ability to charge £9,000 fees is allowing universities to increase their incomes.
“Much of this new loot is being poured into projects to make the sector more competitive”. And student political activity is higher on the bigger, more up-market campuses, which in 2013-4 will be further boosted financially by their new licence to enrol 115,000 ABB+ students outside quotas.
On each campus we must find ways to organise discussion events, usually weekly during term time, with a range of left-wing debates and speakers. These will include AWL speakers, often debating with other leftists. We will also invite local campaigners, left-wing academics and research students from the university, and right-wing academics open to debate.
The meetings should be include film showings, debates, panel discussions, etc., as well as straight lecture-plus-questions sessions. Within each society we should pursue individual discussions with the students who become interested in specifically AWL ideas, and seek to recruit them to AWL.
• 22-23 June: Ideas for Freedom 2013
• 20 July: AWL National Committee sets the agenda for AWL conference
• 8-11 August: AWL summer camp at Heightgate Farm, near Hebden Bridge
• September: AWL branches will plan a drive on stalls and sales from the start of September, re-raising activity after the inevitable impact of holidays in July and August, and organise activities for students’ return to the campuses around 23 September.
• 26-27 October: AWL conference.
