Well there you go! I recently heared the SWP approvingly quote a French attac member saying that Globalise Resistance is as big and important as attac! Perhaps all this manipulation like the story above is to make a small party front look like a mass movement. This will impress other groups internationally, and gain a hearing in Porto Alegre and New York for these leaders of the supposedly 'massive and broad GR'
However, what we really DO need is an organised mass movement, one that represents a genuine comming together of different types of radical activists, including groups like the SWP but not dominated by them. An alliance of equals, not a few individuals from NGO's revolving like satallites around a big red party machine.
However, the real danger for the 'anti-capitalist / anti-globalisation' movements is now not co-option by the SWP, but co-option by parliamentarians and big buisiness. Six French government ministers tried to speak in Porto Alegre, and sections of the attac leadership are loving up to these types. So whether you are an anarchist, marxist, feminist, radical, green, pacifist or whatever, lets make sure our movement has a vision of an egalitarian and democratic post-capitalist society at its heart, and not merely a more humane cloak to cover the barbarism of the system.

Ahh man!

The SWP, man.. fucking hell I know exactly what you mean.

I went to Marxism 2001, which was really interesting, and this girl spent about half an hour trying to persuade me to join. I tried really hard to explain that you don't need to be part of the SWP to be part of the movement... but she wasn't having any of it.

There's nothing wrong with being in the SWP but the arrogant attitude of insisting that people in the movement have to be in the SWP does annoy me. Diversity is what we need. They have strenth in the fact that they are organised and all like er.. marching in the same direction.

Like a magnet for example. All iron is magnetic but it's usually made up of little microscopic magnets all pointing in different directions and hence cancelling each other out. When all those little units are all lined up in the same direction then you get a powerful magnet.

The movement in general isn't very well organised and that's a weakness.

If we're not all working together as a coherent force then the powers that be can play us off against eachother and divide and rule us.

But there's strength in diversity as well.

We need to find the right balance between all marching in the same direction to the same tune for the sake of organisation and hence strenth on the one hand and on the other having diversity within the movement and autonomy of individuals and small groups.

If the SWP ran the movement then that would be a vulnerability because if you take out the leadership then you've got the whole movement.

Like when they got Ocalan in Turkey and tortured him until he told his followers to give up their cause - that did a lot of damage to the Kurdish movement.

I guess the best balance is to have a variety of groups of different sizes - eg large like SWP and small like cambridge university's autonomous Anti-Capitalist Action group and even just individuals doing their own thing. and everything in between.

...and have loose non-hierarchical links between the different groups.

Diversity is good because whilst SWP members are good at conforming to the party line, the Party doesn't have all the answers. We need different people coming up with different ideas and we need to share those ideas around within the movement.

um.. if the SWP ran the whole movement then that constitute putting all our eggs in one basket.

..and stuff like that.

peace

OIII

slaggin swp with a name like ocolan?? stalinist cunt!
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