Counter-productive Divisiveness

bristol | miscellaneous | opinion/analysis Friday February 03, 2006 00:36 by pissed off

Is anyone else tired of the SWP vs Anarchist feud?

It's getting tired. It has been all along. Socialists vs Anarchists, who can be more self-righteous & better anti-capitalists?

It happens whenever a big campaign comes along. Bristol witnessed it with the anti-war movement, and we see it day in, day out here on Bristol Indymedia. Whenever the anarchists post details of an action, event or campaign, they are slagged of by the socialists and vice-versa.

Face it, there are contradictions on both sides, there always will be. We can sit and debate our middle-class intellectual theories till we're blue in the face, but are we really getting anywere?

We are supposed to be fighting for and creating this other world which we believe to be both possible and necessary. Can we ever hope to achieve this when we are constantly at loggerheads?

I have been involved in the embryonic stages of two recent campaigns which have sprung up recently - Reclaim Bristols Buses and Reclaim the Pool.

I have sat and watched meetings facilitated and working by consensus with SWerPs waving their hands in silent applause alongside anarchists, liberals and non-politicised members of the local community. I saw (usually fluffy) liberals involved in squatting the pool, reformist campaigners considering direct action, and anarchists seeing the merits of (from time to time) using and abusing our local council.

When I saiw this I realised how irrelevant our narrow-minded ideologies can become. I see ideologies as ideas to guide us, not dogma. You don't get points for being as purist and splitting into ever-smaller factions is only serving to strengthen capitalism.

With both campaigns, the most important part is uniting in anger and building a movement to fight privatisation and to fight for the public space and transport we deserve. Lets start working WITH our communities instead of arrogantly acting on behalf of them. Get the people together first and the tactics will emerge from there, we can't dictate how we run a campaign and if we fall out about it before we've started we'll never get anywhere.

Face it, we're all pissed off with the privatisation of buses, public space, our lives, and we don't need some Marxist theory to prove it. We're not gonna agree with everyone's tactics for overcoming it, but lets at least engage.

Maybe i'm being young, naive and idealistica and I may have not been involved for long enough to be cynical.

But in the few years I have been an activist i've grown sick of self-righteous dogmatic purists and I don't intend to continue as one. I'm not suggesting we bury the hatchet and all work together in loving harmony, but we could at least be a little more tolerant and realise we have more to unite us than to divide us. If we don't realise this soon we might as well all pack up, go home and give up.