Michael Copestake reports from the 2012 Communist Students conference This year’s Communist Students conference took place in London over the weekend of June 9-10 against a background of controversy and intra-organisational struggle - up to and including a recent coup attempt against the elected leadership by comrades in Manchester CS branch around Chris Strafford. As such, ...
The emergence of a programme from the Occupy movement has caused a flurry of debate on the ACI website, Paul Demarty decides to join in The emergence of a written programme[1] from the Occupy movement is in some ways an odd turn of events. It has been a source of some excitement in the Anti-Capitalist Initiative, ...
Here we publish our reply to comrades from the Revolution youth group, who emailed CS (see below) suggesting closer collaboration between our organisations. Dear comrades, We thank you for your correspondence dated April 20 2012. The question of revolutionary unity and rapprochement is absolutely vital to our movement today. We in Communist Students are willing to debate and ...
James Turley and Ben Lewis argue that there can be no short cuts to building the mass, Marxist student movement we need We would like to express our concern at the drift of some Communist Students comrades towards the highly ambiguous Anti-Capitalist Initiative project. We are both veterans of, and also members of the Communist Party ...
Simon Hardy and Chris Strafford defend the 'Anticapitalist Initative' Ben Lewis’s criticism of the new Anti-Capitalist Initiative exposes not the weakness of our new project, but the problems of his own sect and its approach to politics (‘Ditch sects and fronts’, May 3). Firstly, deriding the meeting as small is petty and misleading. The meeting was initially ...
Last Saturday's launch of the Anti-Capitalist Initiative provided further evidence of an increasingly fractured, rightward-drifting left. Ben Lewis reports As I reported in last week’s Weekly Worker, bound up with the recent decamping of 15 younger comrades from Workers Power (British Section of the League for a Fifth International) is another far-left unity drive under the ...
The left must begin a process of rebuilding the movement and discussing how to create a revolutionary alternative, argues Chris Strafford The economic crisis and the austerity agenda has thrown the working class into largely defensive actions. The trade union leadership has crucially undermined any serious fightback and is offering only token resistance. We have a ...
The left must organise on the basis of genuine democratic centralism, argues Ben Lewis Readers might be aware that Workers Power, the organisation which heads the League for a Fifth International (LFI), has recently suffered yet another split - its second haemorrhaging of cadre in the last six years. Around 15, predominantly younger comrades departed, reducing ...