The SWP is touring the meeting ‘Capitalism isn’t working- the case for socialism‘. CS member Mohsen Sabbagh was there at the Sheffield stop on the 6th November.

The number of people at the meeting was a pleasant surprise, the room packed to the rafters with around 70 people. Unfortunately, what they heard from the top table was an utter disgrace. The two speakers were Martin Hickman from the PCS and Weyman Bennett from the SWP. Martin Hickman opened his talk with next week’s PCS strike, urging people to show solidarity, and going on to argue that socialists should fight for nationalisation, especially of utilities. He then talked about how capitalism divides society in terms of race, class and Islamophobia. Democracy is meaningless when a ‘cigarette paper’ divides the policies of the main parties. The current crises was leading to people challenging this setup, more than ever people were facing a simple choice between right and wrong, between socialism and capitalism, and we are now ‘in the driving seat’ and need to seize the initiative.

Weyman Bennett’s talk opened with the American election, and the fact that Barack Obama will be the next president. He dismissed the idea that Obama was a vindication of the American dream and argued that it was the civil rights movement and Malcolm X and King that got him there. The reason why people voted for him, Bennett argued, was because ‘a change’ is necessary and because he was the only candidate who voted against the Iraq war (I kid you not). It is a good thing that nationalisation is back in fashion. But ‘people don’t realize their power'; it is not a lack of wealth that is the problem but a lack of control and distribution. Bennett then made a miraculous jump and quote Luxembourg – ‘Barbarism or Socialism’.

So the usual reformist, statist and utterly inadequate solutions given a radical sheen with a few sprinkles of Rosa. Interventions from the floor continued in a similar vein to the top-table speeches, with comrades supporting the election of Obama simply because he is black or because he is the ‘lesser of two evils’ and as a result represented progress. Most comrades skirted around the subject of the meeting, the current economic crisis, except for Alistair Tice (SP) arguing for a new workers’ party, and Mike Martin, arguing against nationalisation and for socialisation.