Come on the eurostar train from London.

Phone 020 7053 2072 for details. Ticket price includes registration and there's free accommodation if you want it. You can be as independent as you want. Coming on the train doesn't make you part of any group or organisation.

Tickets are:

£84 unwaged
£93 if you earn up to £700 per month
£109 if you earn to to £1,400
£125 if you earn more than £1,400

Do give us a ring :-)

Even if you decide not to come on the train we'll give you any useful information we have.

020 7053 2072

am not being funny but.... is 'uk mobilisation' just another way of saying swp mobilisation ? just wondering since you give a phone number and no name of group (s) etc...

smelly dead cat

My understanding is that the UK Mobilisation is largely being run by Globalise Resistance. While it's true that GR has non-SWP members, including some of their steering committee, my experience leads me to believe that it is essentially a front for the SWP...or at the very least, an important aspect of their strategy for dominating the movement.

If they're getting people to the ESF, good...the more the better. But having said that, I think it's a good idea for those of us who wish to see a diverse movement, which is not controlled or dominated by parties, to keep a close eye on the way in which the whole social forum movement is 'used' by these organisations. In future we need to be able to prevent the GR's and SWP's from taking over mobilisations like this by doing a better job of it ourselves! Hopefully a grassroots network of social forums will develop in the UK over the next year (as has been happening with huge success in other European countries since July 2001) which will make this a practical possibility.

As for this years ESF...I've already booked my ticket on the Eurostar (not the GR train) and plan to arrive in Paris and sort out registration when I'm there (if it has not been possible to do so on the internet before then). I'm sure this won't be a problem.

See you in Paris!!! :-)

Yes, the people organising the UK mobilisation are from GR. And if you dial the number, the phone you'll get through to is in the GR office in London. Someone will pick up the phone and say "Hello, European Social Forum" or something like that. It's a phone which is currently dedicated to the ESF mobilisation. I didn't mention this before because I know some people are prejudiced against GR.

Well I've been in GR (and its steering committee) for 5 months and not once has anyone asked me to join the SWP. I went in expecting it to be a front group and hoping to find out. So far this really doesn't seem to be the case.

But as for the ESF mobilisation, GR has taken on the task of getting a train and filling it with people in order to get as many UK people as possible to the ESF. It's not billed as a GR train because we want to encourage all sorts of members of the public to come, rather than just concentrating on GR people. We want to truly make this a public mobilisation rather than just a mobilisation of our own clique.

We're not taking anyone over. For a start we're way too small an organisation to even have the potential to do that so I don't see what you're scared about. If you come on the train you get a cheap ticket, you get registration at the ESF and you get free crash accommodation if you want it. That's all we're doing, we're not telling people what forums to go to or anything.

If you'd rather buy a more expensive ticket because you can't bring yourself to go on a train that's been organised by GR then fine, go ahead, it's up to you.

It does annoy me that people are so obsessed about the fact that GR are supposedly trying to take over the movement. I got so much hassle from a couple of people at DSEi for wearing an orange sticker which contained the words (amongst others) "Globalise Resistance invites you to STOP THE ARMS FAIR 8.30 Cundy Road Recreation Ground Tuesday 9th Sept."... It was the wednesday and I was wearing it because I had a spare one left and I wanted something anti-DSEi to stick on my t-shirt.

"Thanks for inviting me!!!!!" I was told sarcastically (several times). People just LOVE to get the wrong idea. The point of those words was that GR was inviting people to the public march organised by GR, one of many events against the DSEi. (which ended up merging with the CAAT march because our tank was late). It hadn't occured to us that people might take it the wrong way and assume that what we actually meant was that GR was organising the whole of Disarm DSEi and that we alone had the moral authority to invite people to stop the DSEi. It hadn't occured to us quite how much people like to read stuff into what we say and do.

Why do you bother? If people like you spent anywhere near as much time fighting against capitalism as you do slagging off groups like GR then we'd have a far stronger movement.

Sectarianism divides and rules us. And it's a COMPLETE waste of time.

No one else has organised a train to the paris. We thought we'd take on the role ourselves. We thought it would be a good contribution to make. And it is.

But of course there are always people who like to take everything we do the wrong way.

This is an unofficial rant written by a GR member writing as an individual on behalf of myself.

I have no inside experience of the SWP so like the rest of you I'm not really qualified to talk about this but what the hell.

I understand how the SWP is perceived to be trying to "dominate" the movement. But the way I see it, it has a program (revolutionary marxist socialism) for defeating capitalism and it wants to promote this agenda within the movement. That's entirely understandable and entirely natural. Everyone with their own ideas for an alternative to capitalism believes that their idea is the correct one and so it's only to be expected that they will seek to promote their ideas.

The SWP places a lot of importance on recruiting people to the cause.

Anarchists aren't so big on this. But they should be. If anarchists believe that anarchism is the way forward then why don't they want everyone to be an anarchist? Sometimes I think that anarchists don't really want revolution. They just want to hang out with their anarchist mates and be anarchists. If they believe in what they're doing then they should be trying to promote it as much as possible and win people over. But instead they prefer to criticise the SWP for doing exactly this with their own (SWP's) ideology.

Anyway, as I say, it's entirely natural that the SWP should want to promote their ideas (which include the importance (to them) of a mass party - hence the emphasis on recruitment) but at the ESF they're going to be doing this through the medium of engaging in dialogue and debate with other parts of the movement. That's entirely fair enough. And if they don't win those arguments then they don't get to convert people. And that's entirely fair enough too.

I really do feel that the different groups spend far too much time slagging eachother off rather than standing in solidarity with eachother where appropriate and engaging in vigorous healthy debate where appropriate.

Instead people respond to a post advertising a train to the ESF with unconstructive comments slagging off GR and the SWP.

Let's stop this pointless sectarianism now.

I go away for a little while and you all go mad! What's this about not wasting time slagging off GR/SWP? Don't you see there is no more important task for GENUINE REVOLUTIONARIES than cohering an autonomous proletarian critique of Chris Bambery's Leninist quasi-hegemony?

And as for getting organised ourselves.. haven't you read Animal Farm? 'Organisation' is just one step away from Stasi and show trials! Organised action is just what the bosses expect! Much better to stay in bed, after all if everyone did that we'd all eventually starve to death and THE SWP WOULD BE FINISHED!

Also in case you are not aware of the this.......
The pig who wrote the animal farm was infact an undercover pigscum.
The public record office recently declassified the papers that shed light on the long suspected case of the British left being made largely of middle class perverts and led by pigscum plant.

Sort it out!

a large part of the british left is middle class, ok ram
that's partly true....

but could one say 'a large part of the british middle class is left-wing'?

(I am sure you are able to see the difference between the two assumptions)

but ram, can you please elaborate your point a bit further...?

ram

Where do you get off saying George Orwell was a pigscum?(although i have no idea what you mean saying that)
Orwell was not a socialist or a communist anyway, if you'd read 1984 or Homage to catalonia, or indeed animal farm, you'd know that he was an anarchist pure and simple.
Although it is true that the socialist movement in the thirties was dominated by middle class pricks, at least they weren't in apathetic comas like most of the middla class today.

Orwell didn't call himself an anarchist, rather an independent socialist. He was certainly hostile to (Stalinist) Communism and not keen on Trotskyism either, in both cases because he thought their ideology led them to tell lies. For some years he was in the Independent Labour Party, a non-Trot party to the left of Labour.

He did say that in the Spanish Civil War he was "proud to serve among anarchists and POUM people" (POUM were a sort-of quasi-Trot group, Catalan politics is complicated!) rather than (Stalinist) Communists.

And as I'm sure someone will point out, later in life his anti-Communism sadly led him to shop Communists he knew to MI5. Bang out of order, but to be fair he was pretty ill + depressed by then (this was the period he wrote 1984).