Twenty-four ACR members and supporters from across England arrived at the Darsham Country Club in Suffolk last week for the organisation’s first residential summer school. Four days later they left with a reading list, a set of banners and a sharper argument about what the left here does next.
The subjects were the crises we already know: the rise of reactionary ideas, the ecological emergency, imperialism, and falling living standards for working-class people. What the weekend added was the chance to test them against each other, and against the experience members brought from their own towns and cities.
It was not four days of doom. Friday opened with a plenary looking back at the year’s campaigns, and closed with a film. The work started on Saturday.
Learning from 1917 and arguing about China
Saturday morning covered the far right in England and Wales, Andy Burnham and Manchesterism, the Waltham Forest Community Coalition, and the Russian Revolution. The history session on 1917 did what such sessions should: reminded us that ordinary people have overthrown a system before, and that the Bolsheviks’ tactical arguments are still worth reading rather than revering.
The afternoon turned to disability, Marxism and inclusivity in activist spaces, and to China. At a time of rising campism, when much of the left offers unconditional cover to Chinese capitalism, an honest conversation about Chinese workers was overdue. They face the same treatment as workers elsewhere, and ethnic minorities in China face far harsher repression of their language, culture and political activity. Parts of the left rarely mention it. Nor do they mention how people in China are organising against it.
Then banner-making, dinner, and a karaoke night that finished with a rendition of The Internationale.
Zionism, Grunwick and the manosphere
Sunday morning ran sessions on Zionism, racism and antisemitism; the politics of punk folk; early union organising and the 1926 General Strike; and the history of the Fourth International. The Zionism session traced the histories of Zionism and antisemitism together, and the consequences of both for Palestinians and for Jews. The Fourth International session was franker than these things usually are, covering the mistakes alongside the growth.
The afternoon took in Pride, prejudice and the proletariat; the Grunwick strike; the manosphere; and the break-up of the UK state.
Grunwick generated the sharpest strategic discussion of the weekend. A militant, multi-ethnic working-class movement is not a memory to be honoured but a thing to be rebuilt, and the session turned quickly from commemoration to tactics for reviving militant unionism. The manosphere session did something similar from the other direction, tracing where that subculture came from and how to fight it. Several members talked about people they know who have been drawn into it.
A world on fire
Monday began with clearing the venue and ended with the closing plenary, ‘The world on fire: ecosocialism now!’
Speakers were blunt about the decline of the climate and environmental movement. That decline was the weekend’s real worry, more than anything happening on the right. The discussion turned to how the movement gets rebuilt, and how we confront the people profiting from wrecking the planet.
Nobody was waited on
The camp was self-organised. Members cooked, cleaned, staffed the bar and delivered the sessions. That is not incidental to what a socialist school is for: an organisation that cannot run a weekend for 24 people has no business proposing to run anything larger.
ACR will hold a second school next year. If the arguments above are ones you want to be part of, join us — or come and disagree with us. The climate movement will not rebuild itself, and neither will the unions.