There’s something about the prospect of a meeting platform with ten or eleven speakers that has an inexplicable depressing effect. It has the potential to be utterly stultifying. This potential is generally fulfiled, especially when you know that they are all going to say more or less the same thing.
Last night’s meeting “Can’t pay, won’t pay: solidarity with the Greek protests” managed to avoid it. Rather than the droneathon you might have expected the pace was more like one of those conveyor belts in sushi restaurants where you get more or less interesting morsels at short intervals. Pleasingly robust chairing kept all the contributors to six or seven minutes.
And gosh there were loads of them. Tony Benn, Caroline Lucas, Christos Giovanopoulos, Aris Vasilopoulos of SYRIZA, Penny White of BASSA, Paul Mackney, Clare Solomon, John Rees and Michael Bradley who, to my disappointment, was not the former Undertone. Due to my habit of not taking notes at these things I’m pretty sure I’ve missed a couple of people off the list but perhaps the chap in the next row who was taking a verbatim record can flesh out the details. The text of Aris’ speech can be found here.
There was general agreement on what we used to call “the nature of the period”. We are most likely facing a double dip recession, the ruling class wants working people to pay for it and it’s necessary to organise resistance to it. By looking at the Greek example and solidarising with Greek workers we begin to generalise some of these experiences. I think it would also be instructive to look at the Irish example where effective resistance to the budgetary carnage has been minimal but that always seems a bit of a downer.
Michael Bradley is in no doubt that an effective vehicle for resisting the ruling class offensive has already been assembled. In his account it has already succeeded in pulling together a coalition of left Labour MPs, Greens, trade unionists and campaigners. All that remains for the rest of us to do is to await further instructions from the Right To Work. One had a sense that many in the packed main auditorium in Conway Hall were not quite as enthusiastic.
John Rees took a rather different position arguing that an effective resistance to the new Thatcherism cannot be the property of a single party, group or union. Pointing to the history of involvement in the Stop The War Coalition of several of the top table he suggested that it might offer an alternative model.
This is a debate that is going to become immensely urgent in the next couple of months. Flat pack campaigning organisations which are widely viewed as under the control of a single group immediately impose a limit on their own credibility and effectiveness. The real impetus for organising local defensive campaigns has to come from the unions and they will need to orientate themselves to community organisations, the Greens, the Labour Party and formations like Respect very quickly.
However as Aris pointed out in his contribution last night and Padraic observes in a comment “the biggest crisis of capitalism for decades provides the opportunity for us to put forward a radical economic programme, which points in a positive direction. So what about an alternative economic programme which, for a start , targets the banks and the speculators?” And that requires more than a defensive campaign.
Liam redux 
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