Another important piece! Comrades may also find issues 3 & 5 of The Communist Bulletin which Mike Rooke and I published in Nottingham in 1983 which focus on the propaganda tasks facing communists in that period of interest. These arguments informed my recent paper to the Cymru'n Codi Cyngor (Council) on our tasks in building an Ecosocialist Republican movement in Cymru after the Senedd elections. The Communist Bulletins I refer to are on Rob Marsden's excellent Splits & Fusions site along with some other material on centrism in the 1030s, the Labour Party etc. This link takes you to them together with a brief note of context - it goes without saying I no longer subscribe to everything we wrote then (especially the Spartoid leaflet on the USSR!!), but I feel they are still perhaps of some value. I hope so! https://splitsandfusions.wordpress.com/2019/12/25/the-communist-bulletin/
Thanks for these: The Plan for Coal argument in No. 5 is the bit that stayed with me: that the fight to keep pits open ran straight into the logic of a 'competitive' coal industry, and that nobody on the left was willing to say so. That's a harder point than the general strike argument and it has aged better.
No. 3 is the one I keep turning over though. The insistence that agitation has to flow from propaganda rather than float free of it, and the warning against the get-rich-quick route to a mini mass party, reads uncomfortably well against what several formations have been doing since Corbynism collapsed.
The propaganda-group question seems to me exactly the one an ecosocialist republican movement has to answer after May: what it is for in this period, rather than what it hopes to become. Forty years on, the argument is more live than it was.
PS John, if you read Tony Whelan's booklet about the SLL, you'll see some vignettes that will remind you of Workers Power in the 1980s. There is a very important discussion (which you and Simon can have especially) about the role and risks of a propaganda group raising an 'action programme'.
Another important piece! Comrades may also find issues 3 & 5 of The Communist Bulletin which Mike Rooke and I published in Nottingham in 1983 which focus on the propaganda tasks facing communists in that period of interest. These arguments informed my recent paper to the Cymru'n Codi Cyngor (Council) on our tasks in building an Ecosocialist Republican movement in Cymru after the Senedd elections. The Communist Bulletins I refer to are on Rob Marsden's excellent Splits & Fusions site along with some other material on centrism in the 1030s, the Labour Party etc. This link takes you to them together with a brief note of context - it goes without saying I no longer subscribe to everything we wrote then (especially the Spartoid leaflet on the USSR!!), but I feel they are still perhaps of some value. I hope so! https://splitsandfusions.wordpress.com/2019/12/25/the-communist-bulletin/
Thanks for these: The Plan for Coal argument in No. 5 is the bit that stayed with me: that the fight to keep pits open ran straight into the logic of a 'competitive' coal industry, and that nobody on the left was willing to say so. That's a harder point than the general strike argument and it has aged better.
No. 3 is the one I keep turning over though. The insistence that agitation has to flow from propaganda rather than float free of it, and the warning against the get-rich-quick route to a mini mass party, reads uncomfortably well against what several formations have been doing since Corbynism collapsed.
The propaganda-group question seems to me exactly the one an ecosocialist republican movement has to answer after May: what it is for in this period, rather than what it hopes to become. Forty years on, the argument is more live than it was.
PS John, if you read Tony Whelan's booklet about the SLL, you'll see some vignettes that will remind you of Workers Power in the 1980s. There is a very important discussion (which you and Simon can have especially) about the role and risks of a propaganda group raising an 'action programme'.