Ideas for Freedom 2014

Submitted by AWL on 9 July, 2014 - 5:46

Once again, well over 200 people attended Ideas for Freedom, the weekend of socialist discussion and debate hosted by Workers' Liberty.

(Omar Raii addresses the closing plenary)

The event included thirty sessions, as always with a mix of formats – straight lectures, panels, PowerPoint presentations, film footage, participatory workshops, group discussions. We had more speakers from outside the AWL than in recent years. There were academic speakers, but many more activists – from high profile struggles such as Focus E15 Mothers, the Ritzy Living Wage strike and Lambeth Unison, but also labour movement and student activists speaking on a wide range of topics, contemporary and historical, practical and theoretical. We were pleased with the high level of presentation and debate.

As always, we had speakers and stalls from other left traditions and organisations.

As well as the historical themes of the Miners' Strike and World War one, the event had a strong focus on liberation and on international solidarity. All of it related to the overarching theme of “Their class war and ours” - reviving and retooling the labour movement for class struggle, and putting basic (not simplistic) ideas of socialism back on the political agenda.

Except for the opening and closing plenaries, we ran four or five sessions at once throughout the weekend. Particularly popular sessions include “Marxism and intersectionality”; “What should the left demand of Labour?”; “How can unions regrow?”; “The left after the SWP crisis”; “India after Modi's election”; “Revolutionary Jews”; “Why everyone loves a TV murder”; and “Socialists and religion”. (We'll put up recordings, notes, etc from various workshops soon.)

The Friday night meeting on “A century of women's struggles” was packed out and our Saturday night social at the Institute of Education SU bar, organised jointly with the Worker-communist Party of Kurdistan, raised £240 for left-run refugees' organisations in Iraq.

Overall the event was pretty youthful, but there was a good mix of experienced comrades, newer or younger people and some who had never attended a socialist conference before. Six people joined or began the process of joining the AWL.

In terms of the spirit of the event, for me it was summed up by an anecdote in the Sunday morning session on the Miners' Strike and liberation politics.

Lesbians and Gays Support the Miners speaker Ray Goodspeed told the audience about an argument that took place in LGSM during the strike. Most of its activists wanted to publicly condemn the Polish government sending coal to Britain, but backed down in the face of opposition from the chair, a member of the Communist Party. The only person who kept arguing about it was a supporter of Workers' Liberty's predecessor organisation Socialist Organiser – who as it happened was speaking at Ideas for Freedom later that day.

Working constructively in broad movements while consistently arguing and fighting for our distinct ideas – and always striving to work out and tell the truth, even when it makes things awkward or difficult – is what Workers' Liberty is all about. That's why we organise events like Ideas for Freedom.

• If you would like to join Workers' Liberty, be put in touch with your local branch or activists in your area of work, or get more information, email awl@workersliberty.org or ring 07796 690 874. Please also get in touch if you have any comments or suggestions about the event.

• For information about the Workers' Liberty summer camp in West Yorkshire (14-17 August), see here.

• For more photos of the weekend click here.

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Comments

Submitted by AWL on Wed, 09/07/2014 - 19:26

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