Weekly Update #49

Hello comrades,
This is a short update to let you know about our first meeting of the new year - we look forward to seeing you there!

Merry xmas and a happy new year,

Derby SWP

 

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Post-Conference Update

The SWP conference was held recently. This update shares some of our general perspectives and priorities for 2015 following conference's decisions.

As always there have been ups and downs this year for socialists.

There has been good news - thanks to hard campaigning by the broad anti-fascist organisations (in which our comrades made a significant contribution) Nick Griffin was not re-elected to the European parliament, and the BNP vote collapsed. Defeating fascists is always good news.

Industrially there have been more large-scale national strikes and in some cases the rank and file have been able to push their unions to continue action, such as in the fire service and NHS. Alongside this, movements have continued to show the strength of feeling in the public which opposes austerity, whether through the People's Assembly or support for Russell Brand. More concretely, the recent Unite The Resistance conference was bigger and more confident than previously, full of examples of active trades unionists leading fightbacks in industry and the public services, showing that there is a real core of workers willing to take action and lead it.

However, the revolution isn't imminent. In fact workers look set to be hammered by the ruling class for the foreseeable future, so the order of the day is to build the fightback wherever we can. The challenges are clear:

• The continued electoral and media success of UKIP provides three central challenges.

1. Their racist populism against migrants and use of the EU as a bogeyman will increase the space for hardcore racists like the EDL to spread their poison, and the same applies to the misogyny and homophobia which prominent UKIP members have injected into the public discourse.
2. Their policies are violently anti-working class and if they obtain a significant measure of political power we will see even worse cuts to services and worse working conditions than the Tories, architects of Workfare, have promised. Every victory for UKIP is a challenge to working people.
3. The willingness of the media to give them a spotlight has allowed them to project the most profoundly false and hypocritical image as some kind of 'anti-politics' party, when in fact they represent the most reactionary parts of the establishment. For example in Derby at the moment they have the nerve to front a 'save Moorways' campaign, when their own policies will mean that councils will be completely unable to run even statutory public services, let alone leisure centres. Their flat tax and privatisation stance would simply see Moorways closed or flogged off (more likely the latter), yet they will continue to push this and other equally deceitful campaigns unless they are stopped.

• Building Stand Up To UKIP as a broad anti-UKIP group has to be a big priority. In Derby we hope to start building a serious Stand Up To UKIP campaign early in the new year, and would like to involve as many groups as possible who are opposed to their racism, misogyny and homophobia.
• At the same time the fascist threat has not gone away. We must continue to be active in anti-fascist work and UAF wherever we can. Stand Up to UKIP is not a replacement for UAF as UKIP are not fascists and we must have different tactics to tackle them. Having said this, a strong turnout at the 21st March Stand Up To Racism demonstration in London for the UN's Anti-Racism Day will send a message to both UKIP and the fascist right.
• A credible left electoral presence in May will help to provide an alternative to the racist populism of UKIP and a positive force for change. Unity and alliances across the left nationally must be pursued to achieve this. Any electoral challenges should be serious, not tokenistic, so we need be clear about where such an electoral campaign can be successfully mounted.
• Continuing to build Unite the Resistance will help to build strength and confidence within the organised working class to resist the attacks by the establishment parties and build independent working class action that is the most important force in stopping austerity. Workers are the people who create the wealth and provide the services we need and without them the wealthy cannot rule and the powerful have no power; but workers need to feel their strength and be confident enough not only to fight back but to challenge their union leaders where they are not given a lead.
• We must continue to oppose western intervention and imperialism from any quarter and remain committed to supporting the Stop the War Coalition in the UK and the revolutionary working class abroad. The massive movements that sprang up to defend Gaza show the strength of feeling against war. Bombing ISIS will simply create new problems for the people in these countries and will leave them at the mercy of whichever imperialist force is doing the bombing.
• The referendum in Scotland has shown the appetite for a progressive movement for social change which is exciting for everyone on the left. The decision of Scottish Labour to elect Jim Murphy, a Blairite who represents everything that turned Scottish voters away from Labour, continues to show that there is a real space on the left and the SWP will be part of the efforts to create a united left party that can articulate these progressive demands for change. The SNP is not such a party and it cannot be left to be the receptacle of the hopes of working people.

We believe that these are the right policies to pursue, but the more people we have around us, whether members or simply willing to work with us on one or more of our activities, the stronger we are!

Our first branch meeting in the new year will discuss these decisions and how we can implement them in Derby. Why not come along? An update announcing the meeting time and date will be posted on here shortly, and will also be sent out to our email list and Twitter followers.

See you in the new year comrades!

Alienation, or, why capitalism makes you miserable and how to stop it

As part of our occasional series, we are pleased to be able to present the text of the talk which opened this week's branch meeting. We hope you find it as useful as we did - we had a particularly lively discussion this week!

Alienation, or, why capitalism makes you miserable and how to stop it.

Defining alienation

Alienation is not a concept exclusively used by Marxists, nor did it originate with Marx. However, it was Marx who explained its origins and pointed a way to its removal.

We all feel alienated, probably quite a lot of the time. We feel a distance between ourselves and the world around us. We do not seem to connect on a human level with most of the people we meet, or feel in control of our lives. The environment which creates the conditions for living is on the verge of catastrophe, yet we feel powerless to stop it. Why is this?

Marx argued that alienation is not a necessary part of human experience, that it is produced wherever social relations isolate people from each other, the produce of their labour, or the natural world, or take away our ability to control our conditions of work. These four factors form the basis of alienation within a capitalist society. This talk aims to illustrate the specific ways in which capitalist societies produce this alienation and, in many ways more importantly, how we can defeat it.

Alienation and the commodity.

Whenever I think about Marx's philosophy I usually start by thinking about the commodity. It's the way he starts his analysis of capitalism in Capital, and that's because it's an excellent way to start thinking about the forms that our society takes. In Marx's own words, 'A commodity appears at first sight an extremely obvious, trivial thing. But its analysis brings out that it is a very strange thing, abounding in metaphysical subtleties and theological niceties.' [Marx 1990:163]

What does he mean by this? He means that once you take apart any object as a commodity, in order to understand its nature as a commodity, it suddenly appears a lot more complex and unsettling. Take anything you like, such as a table. Initially it seems simple, comprehensible. What is it? Something we put things on. That was easy!

So far as it is a use-value, there is nothing mysterious about it, whether we consider it from the point of view that by its properties it satisfies human needs, or that it first takes on these properties as the product of human labour. ... But as soon as it emerges as a commodity, it changes into a thing which transcends sensuousness. It not only stands with its feet on the ground, but, in relation to all other commodities, it stands on its head, and evolves out of its wooden brain grotesque ideas, far more wonderful than if it were to begin dancing of its own free will. [ibid.]

What are these grotesque ideas? The answer lies in its nature as a commodity, that is to say something made simply for exchange. All commodities are exchangeable only because of their one common quality – human labour went into its creation. Yet this is not immediately apparent, giving the commodity its mysterious aura. Why is a mug worth £5 and a pencil 50p? In reality it is due to the socially necessary labour-time embodied in it, but when we see the object we do not see the social relationship which placed it there. This was very nicely summed up by the terrifying BBC nuclear armageddon drama Threads: 'in an urban society everything connects. Each person's needs are fed by the skills of many others. Our lives are woven together in a complex fabric.' or as the Marxist geographer David Harvey once put it, 'how many people put breakfast on your plate this morning?' Yet when we pour our cereal into our bowls and add the milk and pick up the spoon, we do not see the huge web of social relationships required to put those things there.

This finds its ultimate expression in the universal commodity of exchange – the money-form. Money allows capitalists to exchange commodities in such a way that the amount of money received will, on average, reflect the socially-necessary labour-time congealed in them. It is a material representation of a social relationship, just like all other commodities, yet because it can stand for exchange of anything, it 'becomes a real god' [Bottomore and Rubel 1963: 179] 'since it has the property of purchasing everything, of appropriating objects to itself, is therefore the object par excellence. The universal character of this property corresponds to the omnipotence of money, which is ... the pander between need and object, between human life and the means of subsistence. But that which mediates my life, mediates also the existence of other men for me. It is for me the other person' [Op. Cit.:180]

Alienation in production.

In addition, the people who made the commodity have put their labour power into its creation, yet they will receive only a tiny fraction of the value which they created. They will have no say in what happens to these commodities, either in who they are sold to or how they are used. They have no control over the production process beyond the tasks which they have been instructed to perform. Working life under capitalism is spent making objects which are alienated from those who produce them because of the social relationships between themselves, other producers and their employers. If exchange is fundamental to a commodity, so too is exploitation. Capitalism relies upon not giving the worker the true value of the labour they perform. Labour is socialised but value is privatised. Even the value that workers do receive – the wage – is alienated: a parcel of the magical money-commodity that seems to have no direct relationship whatever with the labour performed and yet is capable of standing for it.

Alienation in consumption (consumer fetishism of commodities)

These social relations which define commodity production are usually hidden from view. The commodity appears to us as a neutral object. Yet all our social relationships are mediated through commodities. The commodity therefore comes to be seen as possessing power in and of itself, hence Marx draws analogies between the commodity and religious forms of expression: exchange becomes a hidden universal force, giving all commodities value in a way which cannot be measured save by its effects. This means that people relate to each other socially through things – commodities – for the most part. How many people put your breakfast on the table this morning? It also means that the object can be elevated to a position of significance in people's lives beyond that of actual people.

Alienation from nature

At the same time that we are being alienated from the product of our labour and from other human beings, our society alienates us from the natural world – a world which we are in fact a part of, and yet because of the way in which capitalism uses nature in order to create commodities it is seen not as a world of which we are a part, but rather a separate entity which needs to be mined for the creation of profits. Indeed, nature itself can be and is being increasingly commodified. We cease to see the natural world as a part of the conditions of our existence, in which we are in a continual and dynamic interaction, and instead see nature as something 'out there' which needs to be conquered so that it may yield its use-values and be sold. A recent example of this commodification process in the UK would be the repeated attempts by the Tories to sell off the national forests. This would pave the way for rapid deforestation, which would increase the environmental problems which we are facing but would allow capitalist enterprises to sell lots of wood, for a short while at least.

Capitalism, because of the anarchy created by commodification and competition, cannot be used to provide a stable relationship with the environment, or really take account of nature in itself, because we only see it mediated through social relationships which are defined by exchange and exploitation.

Alienation from others and ourselves – vampires and zombies

The sleep of reason produces monsters, and so too does the experience of alienation. We are alienated, we feel it, and we express it. The first monster of capitalism was the vampire. Transformed from a bestial horror of Hungarian folk legends into an aristocrat: debonair, charming, commanding, seductive. The vampire has a mysterious hold over his victims – young women, symbols of innocence and virtue. Marx saw the vampire as the metaphor for capital: 'capital is dead labour, that, vampire-like, only lives by sucking living labour, and lives the more' [Marx 1990: 342]. But more broadly the vampire also comes to represent the money-commodity – alien, omnipresent, inscrutable, powerful, mysterious.

The monster that comes to represent our relationships with people is, I would argue, the zombie. The last book written by one of the party's greatest theoreticians, Chris Harman, was called Zombie Capitalism. By this he meant that the capitalist system, once dynamic, chaotic, creative and destructive, is now weighted down with its own accumulated capital. Firms are existing, zombie-like, without growing or failing. '21^st century capitalism as a whole is a zombie system, seemingly dead when it comes to achieving human goals and responding to human feelings, but capable of sudden spurts of activity that cause chaos all around.' [Harman 2010:12]. Yet the zombies first appeared in popular culture during the height of capitalism's long boom: a shambling mass of undifferentiated aliens, looking like people but without any human characteristics, wanting to devour the organ which gives you your sense of self – the brain.

The best epitomisation of the zombie scenario is the TV series The Walking Dead. In this we follow a shrinking group of survivors as they attempt to maintain their humanity in the aftermath of a zombie outbreak. Not only are they surrounded by zombies but the other humans who they do meet are frequently increasingly debased and inhuman themselves, as their increasingly desperate conditions lead to violence, conquest and even cannibalism. This takes place in the remains of consumerist America, with survivors hunting amongst convenience stores and supermarkets for the commodities that will keep them alive.

The zombie myth reflects the extremes of existential crisis which alienation produces, heightening our worst fears and the worst aspects of our behaviour towards others, in which other people are rendered literally alien to us.

Overcoming alienation – capitalism, cracks, conscientious consumerism and unalienated labour

Capitalism itself can appear to offer a way of overcoming the alienation it produces. We see this in every magazine, most TV channels and cinema, hear it on the radio, and out of the corner of our eyes on every web page: advertising. Advertising is a vital part of late capitalism, not simply for its functions in increasing sales of the commodities which capitalism produces but because it creates the promise of a better world. This is an empty world, of what John Berger calls 'glamour' – you want the products it offers because with it comes the promise of a happier, more fulfilled you. Thanks to advertising, coca-cola isn't sticky brown sugar water, it's the key to a perfect Christmas, and Marks and Spencer's food isn't just food, even though it is, it's sex, even though it isn't. The problem with this of course is that the world of glamour doesn't overcome alienation at all. After all, even if you were to purchase all the goods which advertising offers you, you would then need to purchase the products which replace them next week. And there's the further problem that all you will have done is surround yourself with more commodities, which are the cause of alienation in the first place. Finally, there's the other issue – the glamour that advertising offers isn't even available to most people. Odds are that you don't have the cash for most of these gadgets, services, exotic ready-meals, cars, clothes, phones, tablets, phablets, smart watches, 3-D Ultra HD curved 56” screen TVs and discount five-star hotel breaks anyway, so even the empty promises of capitalism will likely remain unfulfilled. Hard luck, pal.

But what if you're mad as hell and you aren't going to take it any more? Can't we escape alienation by changing our lifestyles? Communes, travellers, and smallholding farmers have all been touted as alternatives to capitalism. The logic goes that you can overcome alienation by living in such a way that your labour is not alienated, the commodity-form is not produced and producers feel that they have control over their lives. This will allow us to live more authentic lives, relating to others as human beings, not means to an end; not viewing the natural world as external to ourselves; feeling a sense of ownership over the products of our labour.

The problems are that such groups as these find rarely if ever truly exist outside the world of capital. Capitalism is expansionist, forever seeking to extend the commodity form in whatever direction it can. So a smallholder may end up selling more and more of their produce to supermarkets, a commune may need a new tractor, travellers need a new bus. But in practice too, the state is not a neutral presence happy to let alternative forms of social organisation emerge. The Thatcher government's crackdown on the travelling communities in Britain demonstrate this, as do the more recent harassment of the residents of Dale Farm. And that's assuming that your commune was an alternative paradise in the first place. As Adam Curtis noted in his documentary All Watched Over By Machines of Loving Grace, in many communes there was formal equality and so no formal power structures. For many this meant an unofficial tyranny for which there were no structural means of redress. Hardly a solution to alienation, then.

On a more theoretical level, we need to return to the causes of alienation. The problem with our relationship to nature under capitalism is the commodity form itself, in which the commodity mediates between ourselves and nature. Nature becomes either something which is experienced through the commodities we use or viewed as a repository of raw material from which our alienated labour flows. Buying artisanal bread and locally sourced produce are nothing more or less than other commodities. They do nothing to alter the fundamental relationships which create alienation. In addition, since they necessarily require more labour-time to produce than the socially necessary labour-time, they are subject to the same pressures as any other form of luxury commodity, and can never be available to the great mass of people.

Overcoming alienation – collectivisation, organisation, revolution, socialism

In the SWP we have a relentless focus on the importance of the working class. 'The emancipation of the working class is the act of the working class' is our motto. We have a focus on the working class because the working class has the power to change society and it is in our interests to do so. The power comes from the class's vital role in production as the creators of value, and the interest comes from the exploitation which workers experience. In order to overcome capitalism workers must act collectively, and collective action can overcome vital aspects of alienation: alienation from each other, and from our humanity. But collective working class action which challenges capitalism also overcomes the commodity relationship. As John Berger might have said, we make political decisions, not consumer decisions. The commodity is at the heart of alienation and exploitation and exchange are the forces which create the commodity. If we produce instead items on the basis of need, not on the basis of profit, we will have lives which are not governed by alienation. As Harman put it:

It is the very development of capitalism that shapes and reshapes the lives of those it exploits, creating the objective circumstances that can turn a disparate mass of people who sell their labour power into an increasingl elf-conscious class “for itself”. This class is the potential agent for challenging the chaotic and destructive dynamic of capitalism because capitalism cannot do without it. The mistake of Mouffe and Laclau – and thousands of other sociologists, philosophers and economists who write that the working class has lost its central place within the system – is that they do not grasp the elementary point made by Marx. The system is a system of alienated labour that has taken on a life of its own, and capital cannot survive without more labour to feed it, just as the vampire cannot survive without fresh supplies of blood. [Harman 2010:349]

So what is the best way to overcome alienation? The first step is to become a revolutionary – because if you are a revolutionary you will understand why the world makes you miserable and how we can have a world which doesn't. The second step is to be an active revolutionary, helping to create the subjective conditions where the working class can take power and be transformed by transforming society. I'd like to finish with a description of life in the midst of a revolution, by way of illustrating how revolution can overcome alienation in a very real way:

All around them great Russia was in travail, bearing a new world. The servants one used to treat like animals and pay next to nothing, were getting independent. A pair of shoes cost more than a hundred rubles, and as wages averaged about thirty-five rubles a month the servants refused to stand in queue and wear out their shoes. But more than that. In the new Russia every man and woman could vote; there were working-class newspapers, saying new and startling things; there were the Soviets; and there were the Unions. The izvoshtchiki (cab-drivers) had a Union; they were also represented in the Petrograd Soviet. The waiters and hotel servants were organised, and refused tips. On the walls of restaurants they put up signs which read, “No tips taken here–” or, “Just because a man has to make his living waiting on table is no reason to insult him by offering him a tip!”

At the Front the soldiers fought out their fight with the officers, and learned self-government through their committees. In the factories those unique Russian organisations, the Factory-Shop Committees[4] gained experience and strength and a realisation of their historical mission by combat with the old order. All Russia was learning to read, and reading–politics, economics, history–because the people wanted to know–. In every city, in most towns, along the Front, each political faction had its newspaper–sometimes several. Hundreds of thousands of pamphlets were distributed by thousands of organisations, and poured into the armies, the villages, the factories, the streets. The thirst for education, so long thwarted, burst with the Revolution into a frenzy of expression. From Smolny Institute alone, the first six months, went out every day tons, car-loads, train-loads of literature, saturating the land. Russia absorbed reading matter like hot sand drinks water, insatiable. And it was not fables, falsified history, diluted religion, and the cheap fiction that corrupts–but social and economic theories, philosophy, the works of Tolstoy, Gogol, and Gorky…

Then the Talk, beside which Carlyle’s “flood of French speech” was a mere trickle. Lectures, debates, speeches–in theatres, circuses, school-houses, clubs, Soviet meeting-rooms, Union headquarters, barracks–. Meetings in the trenches at the Front, in village squares, factories–. What a marvellous sight to see Putilovsky Zavod (the Putilov factory) pour out its forty thousand to listen to Social Democrats, Socialist Revolutionaries, Anarchists, anybody, whatever they had to say, as long as they would talk! For months in Petrograd, and all over Russia, every street-corner was a public tribune. In railway trains, street-cars, always the spurting up of impromptu debate, everywhere…

And the All-Russian Conferences and Congresses, drawing together the men of two continents–conventions of Soviets, of Cooperatives, Zemstvos, nationalities, priests, peasants, political parties; the Democratic Conference, the Moscow Conference, the Council of the Russian Republic. There were always three or four conventions going on in Petrograd. At every meeting, attempts to limit the time of speakers voted down, and every man free to express the thought that was in him…

We came down to the front of the Twelfth Army, back of Riga, where gaunt and bootless men sickened in the mud of desperate trenches; and when they saw us they started up, with their pinched faces and the flesh showing blue through their torn clothing, demanding eagerly, “Did you bring anything to read?”

...

It was against this background of a whole nation in ferment and disintegration that the pageant of the Rising of the Russian Masses unrolled… [Reed 2010:12-14]

Bibliography

Berger, J. 1972, Ways of Seeing, Penguin. Documentary available online at Youtube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5jTUebm73IY

Bottomore, T.B. And Rubel, M. 1963, Marx: selected writings in sociology and social philosophy, Pelican.

Curtis, A. 2011, All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace, BBC. Documentary available online at Vimeo: http://vimeo.com/78979216

Harman, C. 2010, Zombie Capitalism: Global Crisis and the Relevance of Marx, Haymarket Books.

Marx, K. 1990, Capital Volume I, Penguin.

Reed, J. 2006, Ten Days That Shook The World, Dover. Available online at Marxists Internet Archive here: https://www.marxists.org/archive/reed/1919/10days/10days/

Swain, D. 2012, Alienation: an introduction to Marx's theory, Bookmarks Publications.

Weekly Update #48

SWP Weekly Update

Hello comrades,

Welcome to this week's update from the Derby Socialist Workers' Party!

Branch Meetings

Our next two branch meetings:

This Thursday we discuss the origins of alienation, something which we all experience, whether we know it or not, and how we can overcome it, with Alienation, or, how capitalism makes you miserable and how to stop it!

7 pm at the West End Community Centre, Thursday November 13th.

Next Thursday we will discuss the current situation in the middle east and present the case for refusing to support western intervention with Imperialism in the Middle East - why do we say don't bomb ISIS?


7 pm at the West End Community Centre, Thursday November 20th.

Upcoming Events

We are involved in organising or supporting the following events in the near future, please help out if you can!

• November 11^th – Derby Quad: (Still) The Enemy Within,

On the 30th anniversary of perhaps the defining confrontation between workers and the ruling class of the post-war period, certainly one whose effects are still felt today, we are fortunate to have this coming to Derby for one night only!

(Still) the Enemy Within is a powerful film featuring several comrades that gives the miners' view of the 1984-5 strike.

Book your tickets here!

• Are you a trades unionist? Are you angry about what has been happening to your workplace, your conditions of employment, the constant attacks on workers from the top of society?

Unite the Resistance is an organisation of rank and file trades unionists from across the movement, private and public sector, coming together to learn and plan the fightback.
Interested? Follow the link to book your place or contact us for more information!

November 15^th Unite the Resistance national conference in London.

Trained to Fail: The Tory plan for education

As you may know we are occasionally able to post the talks given at our local branch meetings. This is the talk on education given a few weeks ago. We hope you find it interesting!

A good education under capitalism?

 I wanted to start this talk with a positive, since so much of the subject is, unfortunately, not. So I wanted to talk about what education could be, if we had a different group of people making decisions.

I would like to make a distinction between what education might be in the best of all possible worlds – a future socialist education – and what good education can look like under capitalism. The kind of education that would be possible in a future socialist society would be one where we were freed from the capitalist system and our systems could be decided on by the majority of people to suit not simply our social needs but to encourage the flowering of the human spirit. That would be the an idea of education which represents highest possible aspirations. It would also be a great topic for a future meeting, but take us somewhat off the topic tonight.

On the other hand there is the best kind of education system which we could hope for under capitalism and that is still pretty good. We can have good educational experiences even under a system which most of our students will ultimately enter as hands to be exploited. This is because education is a field of contest between the great classes of capitalism, and the ruling class do not always get their own way. Gove was a ruling class ideologue who spoke the language of the petty-bourgeoisie to scam them into agreeing to a substandard education for their kids and ours, but we have had glimpses over the last half-century of a better alternative. Within teaching unions we often talk about Finland, where children start school aged 7 and have no formal exams until they leave secondary education; there are no league tables and none of the rhetoric of 'choice' that the Tories and New Labour favour. Finnish children do much better than UK children and are top of the world rankings in the international PISA scores which, in a far from perfect way attempt to compare student progress in different countries.

But you don't have to go as far as Scandinavia, or other radical projects like Germany's Laborschule and Spain's Ramiro Solans School – in the UK the comprehensive movement had the potential to provide a high-quality, broad education in a local school to every child. A good comprehensive school can embody a great vision in education. Students mix with a range of children from a variety of social classes. They have the opportunity to have a broad education in academic, practical and vocational subjects. They have some choice over which subjects they take forward to Key Stage Four. In really good comprehensives students understand that skills they learn in one subject can be transferred to others, with whole-school investigations and projects. Melissa Benn in her recent book School Wars: The Battle for Britain's Education gives this example:

a child who is set to building, with others, a bridge over a small stream, will, over the course of that intricate, important task, encounter many discrete subject areas: geology, biology, mathematics, physics, design / aesthetics, history, literature and so on. The more deeply a child is involved in the process of making something beautiful or useful, the more likely the child is to retain, and be able to apply, the knowledge acquired during the course of the task. [2012:181]

She goes on

A good schooling should explore, and help children to develop, the vital balance between compulsion and trust-in-self, duty and creative freedom. It should be about doing and finding out, as well as reading, note-taking and imbibing knowledge. [2012:182]

The comprehensive ideal has never really been fully supported by our ruling class, for reasons that will hopefully become clear during this talk if they aren't already, but here's an example of the kind of education that is possible within our capitalist society – the project method.

The project begins with a theme or issue introduced by the teacher of pupils. This is discussed freely and critically, so ideas and questions emerge.

The next stage is independent research or enquiry, with each group or individual student choosing to investigate a particular aspect. In the final plenary stage, each group presents to the class and stimulates further debate. Where possible, there is a fifth stage, involving a real-world outcome.

Here is an example of this that came from student teachers in Edinburgh. The issue was asylum seekers.

This isn't socialist education in the sense of being offered under the conditions of socialism, but it is a way of educating students which is multi-disciplinary, cooperative, practical, allows for a variety of approaches of foci and can provide a really satisfying learning experience for students which will help them to engage. To be clear, I am not suggesting that this is the only appropriate form of education or that it is a panacea that will turn all students into geniuses. This example simply illustrates what most parents and students already understand, if they think about education in a broad sense – that it does not have to be an alienating, isolated experience primarily aimed at the successful assimilation of a prescribed body of 'knowledge' decided upon by the great and the good.

Reactionary Education - Gove and his allies

 

Unfortunately for students today, this latter, narrow form of education is the one currently being pursued by the government. Gove might be gone, but Nicky Morgan is showing no signs that she wants to depart significantly from his agenda. The right's approach to education can be illustrated in many ways, but I think the attack on so-called 'child-centred education' shows their approach quite neatly.

The bizarreness of the right is shown from the start in their choice of target, much like their recent campaigns against human rights. Really, who could be against education being centred on the needs of the child? If it isn't about helping the child to develop the knowledge and skills needed to be a confident, active citizen, what is it for? If you don't use pedagogical theory to understand how your teaching needs to be accessible to the child and help them to understand effectively the material at hand, how is schooling anything other than a waste of time for student and teacher?

The Daily Mail, luckily, was on-hand to help me to understand why education should not be 'child-centred'. I don't usually go near the Mail's website in case my computer appears on a register for deviants somewhere, but for this meeting I braved it. “Let us cheer Michael Gove for waging war on child-centred claptrap” wrote Mark Dooley in 2012, who feared 'the liberal crusade against academic excellence.' To Dooley, education is 'a means of morally and intellectually civilising children.' He went on

There is nothing elitist in saying that education should be knowledge-based, or that it should inspire children to shun mediocrity for the ‘best that has been thought and said’. There is nothing elitist in teaching them how to make distinctions between what is true and false, right and wrong, beautiful and ugly. To anyone but those dedicated to its demise, the purpose of genuine education is to replace subjective emotion with rational objectivity.

One person who gets this is British Education Secretary Michael Gove.  Some years ago, I had the pleasure of co-authoring an article with Mr Gove. In the course of our deliberations, I realised that he is one of the most brilliant minds of his generation.

Having read some of this guff, I am forced regard this man as an idiot. Let's take his huff apart a bit.

Is education a means of 'morally and intellectually civilising children'? Let's be clear: Dooley's words here are profoundly paedophobic and speak of a belief that children are fundamentally savage beasts who need taming with the whip of 'civilisation'. It is a view of humanity typical of the right, which sees society as a kind of imposition on individuals that is the only thing separating us from nature 'red in tooth and claw'. The idea that human beings are fundamentally social and that schooling is only one way in which children can learn to make moral judgements is not one which he considers explicitly, and yet it is implied in his statement that children should 'shun mediocrity for 'the 'best that has been thought and said'.' This is another typical trope of right-wing thinking, which tends to take the existing social order as somehow a natural phenomenon, whose laws are as inexorable as those of gravity or photosynthesis. 

This is a viewpoint that utterly fails to answer the most important questions whenever anyone talks about a 'knowledge-based curriculum': whose knowledge? Whose ideas of the best? In a society like ours, where there is a fundamental antagonism between the rulers and those who are ruled, there are competing understandings of a whole set of ideas, priorities and events that children might need to learn about. Yet Dooley wants to pretend that education can be impartial, universal and free from fundamental clashes of ideas. But there is no single uncontested body of 'knowledge' hanging out there like a Platonic form, waiting to be snatched by a well-trained philosopher-king. The obvious examples that leap to mind are subjects like history. Gove himself weighed in on World War One, trying to persuade us that it was a 'just war' – and to his class it probably was. To ours, it was an horrific slaughterhouse that threw body after body onto the altar of imperialism. But the same applies to the natural sciences, where new ideas and challenges to existing theories are commonplace. In history such an attitude would reduce historical investigation to a narrative with good kings and bad kings, plucky Brits and perfidious foreign types. In science it would lead children to the erroneous view that science is about dogma rather than data. In media studies it would lead us to understanding how good a film is by the number of Oscars it was given.

So it is disingenuous of Dooley to say that there is 'nothing elitist' in saying that education should be knowledge-based – a claim which he goes on to immediately (if unconsciously) ridicule by suggesting that when he was at school he was given the Big Official List of Beauty, which presumably contains a complete list of the things which are genuinely pretty. I wish right-wingers wouldn't keep these secret truths to themselves, because it would have saved me the trouble of having to respond to art myself and work out what I thought about, say Joan Miro's gigantic tapestries. In fact presumably Dooley doesn't even have to bother with going to a gallery in person. He can just look at a catalogue and tick the ones that are on his list.

Right-wingers like to pose a false dichotomy between 'knowledge-based' and 'skills-based' education, where evil 'liberals' (an oddly vague term from people so obsessed with knowledge) want kids to learn no facts at all, just skills, which presumably exist in a vacuum. In practise of course, no education is all-skill or all-knowledge, but it is true that teachers today who are still largely in receipt of some pedagogical education despite Gove's best efforts, don't favour 'chalk and talk' or other didactic methods, but rather try to find ways of getting the students motivated to do their own research, selection of evidence, analysis and evaluation. It's not that there is no knowledge there you see, but rather that we tend not to see children as passive vessels waiting to be filled up with a quota of facts. It is possible that this is not news to anyone who has ever actually met a child. This is what child-centred education really means: not no knowledge, but critical engagement with both ideas and facts.

Dooley concludes his defence of Gove by claiming that anyone who is serious about education will accept that 'the purpose of genuine education is to replace subjective emotion with rational objectivity.'

This is another wonderful false dichotomy, as absurd as the line in Kipling's If about

'If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster
  And treat those two impostors just the same;

to which I always want to respond, why on Earth would you do that? Clearly triumph and disaster are hugely different things. Why would anyone react to those in the same way? And more fundamentally, what is wrong with reacting differently to two different things?

In much the same way do I greet this idea that any human being is a detached, rational observer who sees all the game and yet is not a part of it. This is completely counter to how our world actually works. Our world is dynamic and full of contradictions and as we are ourselves both objects and subjects so our world is full of both subjective and objective factors which coexist simultaneously. Who would seriously want their child to grow up imagining themselves to be an object and not a subject? Yet this is the implication of Dooley's article.

Living in Goveworld

 

So why would Gove want to push this vision of education, and how has he done it?

There has been considerable disagreement about the extent to which Gove ever had a coherent vision of education. Certainly as an education secretary his speeches and policies were full of contradictions: a man obsessed with his own version of 'academic excellence' yet who refused to pay attention to the opinions of educational researchers or professionals; he set up free schools and academies because he wanted schools to have freedom in what they taught and then set up the most prescriptive national curriculum ever; he said that 'There is no profession more noble, no calling more vital, no vocation more admirable than teaching', yet allowed schools to hire teachers with no teaching qualifications whatsoever, and when teachers went on strike suggested that their jobs could be done by pretty much any parent with nothing to do.

Gove made many u-turns and sometimes changed policy seemingly on a whim. For example, after announcing in 2010 that schools would be failing if fewer than 35% of students achieved a certain grade benchmark, the next year he announced that by 2015 the benchmark would be 50%. Needless to say the massive increase in funding that would be required to achieve this was not forthcoming.

In addition we shouldn't underestimate the extent to which Gove was building on Labour policies. The competition between schools through league tables, constant focus on grades, academisation, using Ofsted as a blunt tool to create fear amongst teaching staff and school leadership and creeping privatisation were all introduced or extended under Labour. Ideologically Gove was further to the right but he did not represent a radical break from the practices already in place, rather a deepening entrenchment of them.

Nevertheless, there are a few strands of ideas which we saw repeatedly from Gove during his tenure in office. Whether the actual system which he has left behind reflects these ideas is a somewhat different matter. The first is an idealisation of a mythical golden age in the past, somewhere around the 1950s, where standards were high, children wore school ties, and you  received corporal punishment for misbehaviour. According to Gove's view of education, which Dooley's article reflects quite well, British education was failing, and it was failing because there were too many non-traditional subjects being taught, too much coursework was being done and too many students were getting good grades in their exams. It should be emphasised that for all his rhetoric there is no reason whatever to believe that education as a whole was better in the past. As the general secretary of heads' union NAHT said: "There was no golden age of education. It felt good then because we were only concerned about the education of a minority of children. If it feels bad now, it is because we consider ourselves accountable for the education of every one of them."

It follows that Gove would want to see a narrowing of educational opportunities for students so that they pass a smaller range of subjects  using a smaller set of skills (exams necessarily entail long written responses within a tight time frame so tend to reward a combination of rote recollection and application, analysis and evaluation of rote-recalled facts) and a devaluation of vocational qualifications which offer practical skills. This is indeed what has happened, but too an even greater level of ridiculousness than many in education could ever have envisaged. Children are now tested at the age of four for 'school-readiness' and woe betide a four year old who cannot sit still for long periods, for these will be earmarked for academic failure.

Once school-ready the child – and her teachers – will be subject to a tyranny of data for the next fourteen years. What I mean by this is that student 'progress' is the new be-all and end-all. Student achievement is predicted by a 'flight path' which assumes that a child will routinely make a particular amount of progress every half term, which must be demonstrated by assessments and, preferably assessed tasks between assessments to ensure that the data that is required is available. If a child fails to make this progress then the teacher is held accountable for this. Such a model will fit the Dooleys and Goves of the world, because of course it is a sterile and objective model. After all, nothing happens to children during their development which might cause them to miss their flight path. Tests are always objective and produce useful data, in this view, and so are a good use of class time. This was reflected in Gove's comments that all aspects of a child's behaviour were the responsibility of their teachers. This is part of his rhetoric about teacher 'accountability,' but in practice teacher 'accountability' means accountability to the flight paths of their students. There are many reasons which teachers have for not liking the 'accountibility' that Gove wanted, but a central concern is this: if you're accountable for test results you will spend all of your time teaching to the test. You will spend more and more time teaching ways to pass the test and have less and less opportunity to open a subject out or adapt lesson content to the ways that a class responds to the subject. In a rather nifty piece of bureaucratisation, Gove hit on a method of narrowing a child's education without formally abandoning a single subject.

Finally of course, they will be put towards their EBacc. In its original incarnation, the EBacc was to be the only qualification which children would be allowed to sit, which would have resulted in more than half of all school-children in Britain being drilled relentlessly in how to pass tests from toddler to young adult, and still leave with precisely nothing. Gove also said that if it looked as though too many students might achieve the top grade, he would add another grade on top of that, ensuring that not only would the goalposts shift regularly but that students who the previous year might have been at the top of the system would now no longer be.

When this failed togo through, Gove decided to attack vocational qualifications and coursework to place the emphasis on final exams, weeding out as many working class students who benefited from the opportunities that coursework and resits offered to get their work into the formal language that comes so naturally to the bourgeoisie but has to be learned by others. This point was made by Terry Wrigley in Another School is Possible, written under the last Labour government.

Gove made an infamous speech where he branded teachers as 'enemies of promise' who wanted to fail working-class children. The reason that working-class students do not do as well as middle-class children in exams is because of either feckless parenting or do-gooding child-centred teachers. As Wrigley says, however, 'Britain, alongside the US, has one of the widest social divisions in educational attainment. This is because the gap between rich and poor in society at large is greater than in most developed countries, and because the link in school achievement and family background is stronger than elsewhere.' [2006:18] Wrigley goes on

inspiring examples of school improvement in working class areas have been based on genuine empowerment. ... teachers and heads were driven by a commitment to the children and families, a belief in social justice and the desire to encourage young people's concern about social and political issues. Sadly, these are not the principles driving official school improvement under New Labour, with its insistence on quality control and "effectiveness". [2006:34]

What went for New Labour goes doubly for Gove.

This phrase, quality control, relates directly to the second strand of Gove's thinking, which is a belief in the virtues of competition. This applies within schools, where he has encouraged a return to house systems where students compete amongst themselves, and between schools, where league tables and Ofsted judgements have become the obsession of leadership teams. Gove ensured competition in several ways. One was by removing local authority planning so that instead of new schools being opened as needed to meet growing populations, new free schools and academies began sprouting in areas where there was no shortage of school places. Although in theory these schools were not allowed to be selective, in reality academies often practice 'covert selection' through being perceived by parents as somehow offering a superior experience (although this is not supported by the much-coveted data) to local authority-maintained schools. The intended result of these pressures on schools themselves would surely be a two-tier system, where perceived 'desirable' (i.e. middle-class) schools pay higher salaries to lure qualified teachers and have the resources that wealthier parents bring to offer a broader education, while other schools are poorly resourced, with unqualified staff and the students and teachers run the data treadmill continuously.

Together these produce an education system which is modelled more closely than ever before on the structures of consumer capitalism. The students become data which are processed into discrete quantities by teachers, with grades as the products. Education becomes as alienated and dehumanised as any other factory floor. And schooling becomes another range of products to buy, with parents given a choice between the Tesco value option or, if you've got the income you can splash out on a Waitrose education for your progeny. And just like with consumer capitalism the central difference between the two options is the quality of the packaging. The academy down the road might have nicer blazers and the building has more plate glass windows than the local authority school in Victorian brick, but the same industrial process is being applied to your children. The Waitrose kids will still be more likely to go to university than the Tesco kids, but it will be for the same reason as before - the cultural capital that middle-class parents have access to, and working-class parents don't.

Why would anyone do this? Why create a narrow, prescriptive curriculum where children are constantly tested and ranked, practical skills are devalued and academic 'knowledge' that is more attuned to the values of the middle-classes elevated? Why increase competition between schools that will concentrate the obsession with data still further? Partly it no doubt reflects Gove's class position and the way he has bought into the golden-age gloss that the reactionary ideas I've discussed cover themselves in. However, in my opinion there may be a deeper reason for this production-line education, which is because Gove was deeply cynical about the need for a good quality education system in the UK at all. He was an enemy of promise. He had decided that capital no longer needs large numbers of qualified, skilled workers for the labour market. The proletarianisation of many formerly skilled professions means that only a relatively small number of students need the skills that further and higher education can offer, and the student riots showed us that too much education can be a dangerous thing for a ruling class. The clear implication of a two-tier education system is that it is better for most of us to know our place, and reserve access to the academic heights to nice middle-class children who will know theirs.

RIP Gove?

However, it should be emphasised that this was Gove's vision, not the vision of the ruling class as a whole. In fact there was disagreement with Gove's policies from a large section of the ruling class. In November 2013 the head of bosses' organisation the CBI John Cridland told the press that schools were turning out 'exam robots' and demanded that education offer a broader curriculum than students were currently getting, so clearly sections of capital felt that they needed more students who had a broad range of opportunities rather than fewer. A July 2014 opinion poll by Ipsos MORI showed that Gove was the least popular senior politician in the country with a net likeability rating of -35. Reasons for this dislike have many causes other than ideological ones – a series of high-profile scandals involving his much-vaunted free schools project (which led to the utterly amazing discovery that if you allow any random group of people to set up a school, give them millions of pounds and remove virtually all oversight that the wheels can come off pretty quickly); the acute shortage in primary school places that these policies of competition produced; the chaos unleashed by his repeated, rushed changes in policy; his proposals for unqualified teachers and fast-tracking ex-soldiers into classrooms; or perhaps his fining of parents taking children out of school during term-times may have helped in levering him out of the Department for Education and into the obscurity of the Chief Whip's office. For many, dissatisfaction with Gove was as much about the simple fact that many of his ideas were unworkable, as they were to do with objections to his vision for education.

The education battleground

At the start of the talk I referred to the way that education is always a battleground as forces from above and below seek to set its agendas. The failure of Gove to persuade a majority of the public that teachers were wrong to strike over his changes to the education system, and the way in which the two major unions (and the NUT in particular) were able to make these strikes about education and not simply about terms and conditions of employment show that the right have not had it all their own way. Indeed the NUT has taken advantage of the onslaught from the right to offer a more progressive manifesto for education and launched the Primary Schools Charter as an alternative.

Under capitalism there is much about education which benefits the system. An emphasis on competition is often a part of students' education. Students are encouraged to know their levels and target grades and judge themselves according to where they fall on these scales. 'Meritocracy' – the idea that those who have the highest grades deserve more than those with lower grades – is implicit. On a more basic level, bells and timetables teach children the expectations of the workplace and the management structure of the school reinforces ideas about hierarchy. Many of those who are critical of Gove might accept uncritically some of these hidden ideas about schooling as 'natural' rather that constructed, though constructed they are. But there is also a constant battle for the kind of ideas we want our children to learn and the ways in which we want them to conceive of themselves and the world they enter into. As socialists we need to be active in this fight, to reject the ideas of the right, both explicit and implicit, and build a movement for comprehensive education reforms in the here and now, as part of our fight for a different society in the future. Building within teaching unions to support further industrial action is a vital part of this. In recent weeks we have begun to see Nicky Morgan, Gove's successor, being forced to give way on certain teacher issues, and continued pressure from teachers and parents can begin to reverse much of the damage of recent years.

Further reading
There is a wealth of great work on education out there, from the Socialist Teachers' Alliance's publication Education for Liberation to the Anti-Academies Alliance, and the NUT's manifesto for education and NUT-led primary schools' charter but two books that I found particularly helpful in writing this speech were Terry Wrigley's Another School is Possible and Melissa Benn's School Wars: The Battle for Britain's Education.  These and others are available from the socialist bookshop Bookmarks here.

Weekly Update #47

SWP Weekly Update

Hello comrades,

Welcome to this week's update from the Derby Socialist Workers' Party!

Branch Meetings

Our branch meetings are back!

This Thursday we mark the end of Black History Month with Malcolm X, the Panthers and Black Power, a meeting that will look at the radical black power movements that erupted from the civil rights movement.

7 pm at the West End Community Centre, Thursday October 30th.

Next Thursday we will celebrate the world's only successful socialist revolution as it approaches its 97th anniversary. Revolution in Practice - the Bolsheviks in 1917.

Why do we call the Russian revolution of 1917 a socialist revolution, how long did it remain a workers' state and why did it degenerate into state capitalist tyranny? Join the discussion and find out how we answer some or all of these questions!

7 pm at the West End Community Centre, Thursday November 6th.

Upcoming Events

We are involved in organising or supporting the following events in the near future, please help out if you can!

• November 11^th – Derby Quad: (Still) The Enemy Within,

On the 30th anniversary of perhaps the defining confrontation between workers and the ruling class of the post-war period, certainly one whose effects are still felt today, we are fortunate to have this coming to Derby for one night only!

(Still) the Enemy Within is a powerful film featuring several comrades that gives the miners' view of the 1984-5 strike.

Book your tickets here!

• Are you a trades unionist? Are you angry about what has been happening to your workplace, your conditions of employment, the constant attacks on workers from the top of society?

Unite the Resistance is an organisation of rank and file trades unionists from across the movement, private and public sector, coming together to learn and plan the fightback.
Interested? Follow the link to book your place or contact us for more information!

November 15^th Unite the Resistance national conference in London.

Weekly Update #46

SWP Weekly Update

Hello comrades,

Welcome to this week's update from the Derby Socialist Workers' Party! Apologies for the lack of updates for the last week or so, this was for reasons beyond our control.

Branch Meetings

This Thursday there will not be a branch meeting, but branch meetings will resume as normal next week.

This Thursday we have a topical meeting, as it's Black History Month, Malcolm X, the Panthers and Black Power, a meeting that will look at the radical black power movements that erupted from the civil rights movement.

7 pm at the West End Community Centre, Thursday October 30th.

Next Thursday we will celebrate the world's only successful socialist revolution as it approaches its 97th anniversary. Why do we call the Russian revolution of 1917 a socialist revolution, how long did it remain a workers' state and why did it degenerate into state capitalist tyranny? Join the discussion and find out how we answer some or all of these questions in two weeks!

7 pm at the West End Community Centre, Thursday November 6th.

Upcoming Events

We are involved in organising or supporting the following events in the near future, please help out if you can!

• November 11^th – Derby Quad: (Still) The Enemy Within, a powerful film featuring several comrades that gives the miners' view of the 1984-5 strike. 
• November 15^th Unite the Resistance national conference in London.

Weekly Update #45

SWP Weekly Update

Hello comrades,

Welcome to this week's update from the Derby Socialist Workers' Party!

Branch Meetings

This Thursday our guest speaker will be looking at the recent hugely successful book by Piketty, Capital in the 21st Century. What should socialists think about a book which identifies serious problems within capitalism - but is lapped up by sections of the ruling class?

7 pm at the West End Community Centre, Thursday October 2nd.

Next Thursday we have trained to fail: the Tory plan for our kids' education, rescheduled from last week due to illness. Our speaker will argue that the Tory party's educational policies are destined to fail a whole generation of children - and that much of this is not accidental.

7 pm at the West End Community Centre, Thursday October 9th.

Upcoming Events

We are involved in organising or supporting the following events in the near future, please help out if you can!

• October 4th and 11th - Derby's fledgling Palestine support group has organised a leafleting stall to raise awareness of and support for the Palestinian people on St Peter's St. Volunteers welcome! 
• October 13th - Health workers across England are likely to be on strike. The wider these strikes the more effective they will be, so argue for your colleagues to vote for action and your union to be part of it!
•  October 14th - Local Government workers are likely to be on strike - show your support in whatever way you can!
• October 18^th – London TUC: Britain Needs a Pay Rise. National demonstration called to demand pay rises for Britain's workers. Coaches will be organised, we will give you more details as they become available. 
• November 11^th – Derby Quad: (Still) The Enemy Within, powerful film featuring several comrades that gives the miners' view of the 1984-5 strike. 
• November 15^th Unite the Resistance national conference in London.

Also on during September at the Quad is a film which presents a story well-known within the socialist movement but virtually unheard outside: Pride, the story of the Miners' Gay and Lesbian Support Group. Well worth a viewing for all socialists!

Weekly Update #44

SWP Weekly Update

Hello comrades,

Welcome to this week's update from the Derby Socialist Workers' Party!

Branch Meetings

This Thursday we have trained to fail: the Tory plan for our kids. Our speaker will argue that the Tory party's educational policies are destined to fail a whole generation of children - and that much of this is not accidental.

7 pm at the West End Community Centre, Thursday September 25th.

Next Thursday our guest speaker will be looking at the recent hugely successful book by Piketty, Capital in the 21st Century. What should socialists think about a book which identifies serious problems within capitalism - but is lapped up by sections of the ruling class?

7 pm at the West End Community Centre, Thursday October 2nd.


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Stand up to UKIP

THIS SATURDAY!
LAST CHANCE TO BOOK YOUR PLACE! 

UKIP is becoming an increasingly-heard presence in the UK political scene. Whilst not an openly fascist organisation like the BNP or EDL, they are an opportunist party with racist policies who only care about the rich, and try to make hay out of the anti-immigrant rhetoric which all the leading parties and much of the press have indulged in for years now.

UKIP represent a real danger, not least in 'normalising' racist anti-immigration ideas, but also in the way in which the media indulge in their posing as some kind of alternative to establishment politics whilst they pursue a virulently ruling-class agenda.

Stand Up To UKIP are organising a national demonstration against this toxic party on September 27th in Doncaster. All anti-racists should support this event - more information is on the Stand Up to UKIP site here.

A coach will be going from Derby, 9.45 am from Full Street.

Book your place now!

Email derbyswp@gmail.com or phone 07742 532 677.

Upcoming Events

We are involved in organising or supporting the following events in the near future, please help out if you can!

• September 28th - Demonstrate outside the Tory Party conference in Birmingham, organised by the TUC. Details here. 
• October 4th - Derby's fledgling Palestine support group has organised a leafleting stall to raise awareness of and support for the Palestinian people on St Peter's St. Volunteers welcome! 
• October 13th - Health workers across England are likely to be on strike. The wider these strikes the more effective they will be, so argue for your colleagues to vote for action and your union to be part of it!
• October 18^th – London TUC: Britain Needs a Pay Rise. National demonstration called to demand pay rises for Britain's workers. Coaches will be organised, we will give you more details as they become available. 
• November 11^th – Derby Quad: (Still) The Enemy Within, powerful film featuring several comrades that gives the miners' view of the 1984-5 strike. 
• November 15^th Unite the Resistance national conference in London.

Also on during September at the Quad is a film which presents a story well-known within the socialist movement but virtually unheard outside: Pride, the story of the Miners' Gay and Lesbian Support Group. Well worth a viewing for all socialists!