Anarchist Bookfair and Marxism 2006

dublin | anti-capitalism | news report Tuesday March 07, 2006 22:52 by BC - Socialist Party (personal capacity)

Clash of the Titans (well, not really)

A personal report of a couple of left wing events in Dublin last weekend, beginning with a bit of browsing at the Anarchist Bookfair and continuing with a couple of meetings at the "Marxism 2006" conference.

Last Saturday two of Dublin's far left organisations held public events which were high profile, at least by the standards of the organised Irish left. I had intended to spend most of Saturday and Sunday at the Workers Solidarity Movement's Anarchist Bookfair and at the SWP's Marxism 2006 but laziness and hangovers kept me away until late afternoon on both days.

I drifted in to the Anarchist Bookfair after a bit of wandering around Meath Street and Francis Street trying to find the St Nicholas of Myra Hall. It turned out to be an imposingly ugly building, with a tiny poster near a gate announcing the bookfair, a few people standing outside smoking and a surprising number of ballet dancers wandering in and out.

Inside around a hundred people were milling about. Some were at meetings or watching video screenings, most were either behind stalls or browsing at them. The stalls included bookshops belonging to the Workers Solidarity Movement and Organise!, along with a presence from the Irish Socialist Network, Indymedia, Shell to Sea and a range of others. After a quick scout around it became apparent that many of the bookstalls overlapped heavily in their range, but there was still something to interest most people on the radical left.

The only meeting I managed to make it to was billed as a debate between Republicanism and Anarchism. The room was packed, with up to 45 people at it, which I gathered was the best meeting attendance at the event. It clashed with a meeting on abortion rights, leading to a not wildly surprising but slightly depressing gender split. In other words it was a room almost entirely filled with men. The two speakers were Andrew from the WSM and Tommy McKearney, the left wing republican dissident. Both made speeches which were interesting in their own terms, dwelling at length for instance on European radical republican traditions and the events of 1848. Neither speaker really addressed what seemed to me to be the political meat of a debate between republicanism and anarchism, though. There was little mention made of Irish nationalism, the strategies of Irish republicanism or whatever alternatives anarchism has to offer radicals today. My impression was that I wasn't the only person at the meeting who found that a little odd.

At the end of that meeting someone popped his head around the door to announce that there was going to be a communal meal downstairs and to ask us to bring chairs down with us. With stunning predictability at a far left event the food seemed to be some kind of vegan paste. Being more of a sausage roll man myself, I put the chairs I was holding down, made my excuses and left the remaining crowd of 75 or so to their dinner.

Marxism 2006 had one obvious advantage over the Anarchist Bookfair. I knew where it was, right in the city centre in Trinity College. It also had a pretty obvious disadvantage in that it cost me twenty quid to get in. I'd spent that much at the Bookfair but at least I got a book and some magazines there rather than the opportunity to hear speeches from people I've heard speak a few dozen times before! The last session of the day was just about to start, so I did a quick scout around the four simultaneous meetings. There were between 100 and 110 people there, with a very large majority at the meeting on the anti-war movement.

That was the meeting I went into. At this stage I've heard enough speeches about Iraq to last anyone a lifetime, so waiting for the meeting to start involved a sensation of mild dread not too distantly removed from the feeling of waiting to see a dentist. You know it's probably good for you but you still doubt your wisdom in coming. Anyway, the meeting was surprisingly entertaining. Sami Ramadani, the journalist, turned out to have strongly left wing views. The speakers from Iran and US Veterans Against War were informative. Eamon McCann gave us a highly amusing rant about international law. In fact the only things missing were any kind of political direction and any kind of clear headed assessment of the strengths and weaknesses of the anti-war movement.

We were urged to do more of the same, build the broadest possible movement, build the next demonstration. I spoke briefly from the floor and argued that there was a paradox between enormously broad anti-war sentiment and a relatively weak anti-war movement, with demonstrations gradually shrinking and local groups disappearing. I put forward the view that while anti-war activists had won the public argument about the war, we had done so only on a superfical level and hadn't yet won the deeper arguments about the nature of the capitalist society we live in or the centrality of working class struggle. The response was a warning against "narrowing the movement", which the SWP seems to think would be the inevitable result of socialists actually arguing for socialist ideas.

On Sunday afternoon, again hungover, I dragged my self back into town in time to attend the closing meeting of Marxism 2006. 85 people turned out to hear Kieran Allen talk about "Revolutionary Strategy in the Age of Mass Movements". While the title may have given the impression that he was going to look into a crystal ball and talk about his vision of the future, it turned out that the "Age of Mass Movements" is, well, right now.

The first part of Kieran's speech was an attack on the pessimism of what he called "the old left", which apparently doesn't understand the new movements, the new mood or the new situation. This old left insists on using "mechanical" measures of class struggle like numbers of strike days, when in fact the important thing is the new mood of questioning of capitalist society. He talked in some detail about the Shell to Sea campaign and the campaign of the Stardust families.

He then outlined what he called the SWP's "three pronged or three concentric circles" strategy. The first element is being in and of the social movements, although the term was not defined. The second element is political representation and in more concrete terms the new People Before Profit Alliance. This we were categorically assured is not the SWP, has a different style and rhythm to the SWP and different politics to the SWP. Most importantly it is to involve people who want to fight against neo-liberalism but who are not convinced of the need for a revolution. The third prong or circle is building the SWP itself.

My overall impression was that his speech was a relatively sophisticated defence of wishful thinking. Generally the sessions I went to were interesting and neither featured the kind of mild hysteria which SWP meetings can sometimes generate and which makes my teeth hurt.