SHEFFIELD RADICAL BOOKFAIR
The CWO will have a stall at the Sheffield Radical Bookfair.
When: Saturday, 4 February 2023
Where: DINA, Fitzalan Square, Sheffield S1 2AZ
Report on the Milan Meeting of the IBRP 26-27 September 2009
When the Bureau was founded in 1983-4 we set out some clear guidelines to which we have adhered to this day.
We have not deviated from these basic premises throughout the quarter century of our existence and the groups in France, Canada and USA, and Germany which have entered the Bureau have operated within this framework. What we have asked affiliating groups to do is to have a basic document defining the organisation, regular publication, a definite orientation towards the working class, and a continuous practice to reflect this. This was among the reasons why we had to refuse the entry of the RKP, formerly GIK (Austria) into the Bureau in 2005.
In the text “25 Years of the Bureau - Balance Sheet and Perspectives” (see Revolutionary Pespectives 47 or at leftcom.org ) we analysed the reasons why we had not been more successful. First and foremost amongst them was the fact that revolutionary minorities reflect the actual condition of working class consciousness at any given time. We do not stand outside the working class or the real movement of history. At the very time of the Bureau’s foundation the great struggles of the class (the Polish strikes, the Spanish dockworkers’ strikes and the British miners strike), isolated as each was to one country were either defeated or on course for defeat. These defeats opened up the path for capitalist restructuring and have set back the workers resistance for a generation. Even today, in the face of the greatest global crisis since the Second World War, the working class has resisted only when under direct attack and the manner of workers’ acceptance of wage cuts, speed ups and redundancies in the central capitalist countries has been, until now, a great relief to the capitalist class. Basically the huge injection of state finance (to be paid for by workers exploitation in the future) and the usual mystifications of the propaganda machines (with Obama as global messiah being one key message) have prevented both a total meltdown and a consequent massive rejection of the system. However the measures taken so far have only postponed yet again the day of reckoning for a crisis which first burst in 1971 and which has still not yet been resolved nearly forty years later. This is unprecedented in human history but the Bureau has never deviated from an analysis based on the law of value. We have thus always recognised that whatever individual policy capitalism pursued, right up to the speculative bubble of the last fifteen or so years, these were only the latest consequences of the failure of capitalism to restore a sufficient level of profitability to start a new cycle of accumulation. We therefore predicted the financial meltdown even if it took longer to come about than we expected. This is to our credit but being right is not enough. Clearly there are some things outside our control and as our earliest comrades in the Committee of Intesa stated back in 1926
It is a mistake to think that in every situation expedients and tactical manoeuvres can widen the party base since relations between the party and the masses depends on the objective situation.
What we can do though is to act upon some of the analyses we have made and to improve the functioning of our own organisation. This was the main task which this full meeting of the Bureau, with delegates from all our affiliated organisations, set itself.
We expect the crisis not only to continue but to deepen (in one way or another). We expect that the world working class will be made to pay for any policy of so-called recovery. We also expect that the current acceptance of austerity etc. by the working class to give way to increasing resistance and anger. We also expect inter-imperialist rivalries to become more acute and for many to become the innocent victims of intensified war. In this circumstance revolutionaries need to be as prepared and organised as possible and this is why the Bureau decided to build on the steps taken after the Parma meeting in May 2008 (see “A New Development for the International Bureau” in Revolutionary Perspectives 47 or at leftcom.org ). In the Parma meeting we decided to take one step in the centralisation of our activity. This was not a break with our previous positions. Our founding documents always foresaw a time when the expansion of the Bureau would necessitate at the same time a greater centralisation of its activities. We took the first step on this road at the Parma meeting in 2008 as the document cited above indicated.
The Bureau was conceived to deal with a problem which was that we wanted to participate in the process of forming a politically centralised world party of the working class but we did not want, by our very existence, to prematurely close that process. We have thus hitherto hesitated to create any central organs and relied rather on a common bond of trust and discussion. This still exists, and has become even stronger in the last three years, as we have made the effort to fill the gap left by the untimely death of our inspirational comrade, Mauro. However such a process is a little clumsy when dealing with immediate emergencies for which statements are required, or for dealing with enquiries from individuals and groups about our work. In the light of this the meeting agreed to set up what was referred to in the document as a sort of “secretariat”. In the event the meeting rejected the name (partly on its unhappy precedents, partly because it does not correspond to our purpose) but instead set up a liaison committee between the various affiliated organisations. Its purpose will be to respond swiftly to international issues on behalf of the Bureau. It will have responsibility for correspondence and discussion with other groups, organising delegations to places where we have been invited, coordinating the preparation of international statements, as well as preparing and organising international conferences.
The liaison committee functioned well but it was not fully representative of the entire organisation nor was it clear what its relations to individual members were. The meeting thus began by discussing the work of this committee and ended by recognising the need for institutional change in the Bureau to meet the challenge of the coming period. After (mostly encouraging) reports on the work of the various affiliates of the IBRP the following decisions were taken.
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SHEFFIELD RADICAL BOOKFAIR
The CWO will have a stall at the Sheffield Radical Bookfair.
When: Saturday, 4 February 2023
Where: DINA, Fitzalan Square, Sheffield S1 2AZ
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License.