13.03.2003

WP youth front

The March 9 'Youth to Stop the War' conference, organised by Workers Power and its youth front, Revo, attracted around 100 people - divided between members and supporters of left groups on the one hand and raw youth drawn towards the anti-war movement on the other, in roughly equal numbers. Originally given the Stop the War Coalition imprimatur, the youth conference promised to be a useful initiative. However, WP saw fit to use the event for its own narrow sect purposes and this was reflected in the fact that no other groups were invited to involve themselves in the planning and preparation. Subsequently the STWC withdrew the franchise and the conference had, unsurprisingly, very much of a Workers Power feel. Kuldip Bajwa of WP, billed as a member of the STWC steering committee, gave the group's main platform speech in the opening session, entitled 'How to stop the war'. He dealt with the background to the current US-led drive to war on Iraq: that it is "really a war for oil" and for securing the US ruling class's unprecedented position in the global pecking order. He gave a brief account of some of the humanitarian costs in terms of deaths, casualties and refugees and called for "constant propaganda", "lots of protests" and the need for "big walkouts" by as many people as possible on the day the war is launched. Various speakers from the floor described actions they had been involved in. The passionate desire to organise and participate in action was admirable, but the absence of any coherent politics stood out. Unfortunately, this was actually encouraged by WP, who consciously went in for dumbing down, under the guise of allowing the unorganised to have their say. One comrade spoke of the need to "just build the united front", and to put our "socialist, communist, anarchist" differences behind us. However, when we were allowed to speak, CPGB comrades approached the matter differently - our emphasis was on the need to provide the anti-war movement with a political programme. Thus, comrade Tina Becker outlined the need to challenge state institutions, via the anti-war movement, on the basis of a fight to realise maximum democracy; and comrade Zoe Simon emphasised that we should make a programmatic distinction, not between Bush/Blair and Saddam, but between rulers and the ruled - just as we recognise that our main enemy is at home, we call for the Iraqi masses to wage a struggle against their own state forces. Some Revo supporters did not like this emphasis on politics and heckled: "Stop the party political broadcasts". When the meeting split up into smaller work groups, these were often dominated by anarchistic calls "to target the shareholders of Esso and all the companies that make profit out of this war", as a young member from Greenpeace proposed. Rather than challenging this and other calls to "throw smoke bombs through the windows of McDonalds", the WP comrades chose to let anarchism run wild. While it is of course positive that this conference was able to draw in a thin layer of new forces, we should be wary of repeating old mistakes, whereby each sect sets up its own narrow front. Stephen Bashow