Bangor Socialist Student & Youth Conference

Taken from Socialist Party Wales website - www.socialistpartywales.org.uk

Young Socialists from North Wales received a helping hand from comrades from the South for an all Wales day of action last Saturday in Bangor. The day started with a successful ‘Youth Fight for Jobs’ protest in Bangor.

Report by Sarah Mayo

Workers and students stopped to take our bi-lingual leaflets and sign our petitions and our well travelled ‘YFFJ’ banner attracted a lot of attention (this banner has previously visited Cardiff, Pontypridd and Swansea!)

This was followed by the conference itself, which had sessions on the role of the police, the world economic crisis and a practical session on organising campaigning stalls. Iain Dalton introduced the first session with an emphasis on how the police form a key part of the capitalist state machine and defend private property rather than act in the interests of ordinary people. For example, the police are quick to arrest shop lifters but incredibly slow to respond to domestic burglaries in working class areas. Nevertheless, as workers turn to the police on this issue, it’s important we raise the demand for the democratic control and accountability of the police. There was a far ranging discussion on the socialist analysis of everything from speed cameras, police repression of protesters to domestic violence!


Next, Joe Fathallah gave an excellent and succinct Marxist analysis of the world economic recession and its impact on workers and youth. The economic crisis was inevitable: capitalism is unable to overcome the basic contradiction of ‘boom and bust’ because working class people can’t afford to buy back the goods it produces . The previous long boom could only be sustained by cheap credit and mounting debt for so long. Whilst we are conditional about how long this recession will last, it is clear that workers and young people will be forced to fight back.
The discussion centered on the tasks for socialists, including our socialist programme on the economy, the role of the revolutionary party internationally and the campaign for a new mass workers party here and internationally.

The conference finished with a practical session on running a campaigning stall, with comrades sharing ideas and tips, including how to lay out the stall and how to deal with typical responses to our petitions. This inspiring day finished with an excellent fighting fund collection and a well deserved drink in the pub afterwards.

Socialist Party Wales Conference 2009

Apologies for not blogging much but I've had a very busy week, including going down to Swansea at the weekend for the annual Socialist Party Wales Conference with five other people from Bangor. The report below is taken from the SPW website (http://www.socialistpartywales.org.uk/) and a version will be appearing in the Socialist.


The capitalist crisis which deepened even further in the last few weeks formed the background to the Conference of fifty members of SPW in Swansea on February 1st. Naturally it was the subject of the first conference session, with Lynn Walsh, editor of Socialism Today, leading the discussion.

Report by Iain Dalton (Bangor Socialist Party)

Lynn pointed out that events were proceeding at a rapid pace at the moment, with the crisis becoming deeper around the world and capitalist leaders becoming despondent as their system spirals out of control. But whilst Socialists are by no means immune from the hardships that all workers will suffer during this recession, we are in a good position to try and give a lead to the inevitable struggles that will take place over the next period as we have correctly predicted the crisis in our materials. The beginnings of a fight back by the working class worldwide in the last week was discussed, particularly the wildcat strikes of construction workers across the country where our comrades had intervened to help to steer the anger towards the capitalist firms who use EU regulations to bring in foreign worker at lower pay rates and worse conditions and not against the workers themselves



Campaigns



Ross Saunders (Cardiff West Branch Secretary) to report on the Youth Fight for Jobs campaign and on the plans being made to develop that both nationally and in Wales. He pointed out that youth unemployment was already large and is set to grow much bigger

The Conference also heard from Yahya al-Faifa, exiled Saudi Trade unionist who is facing deportation by the Home Office. His inspiring struggle to organise Saudi workers which led to his exile and his efforts in supporting workers struggles in Wales, gave comrades determination to spread the campaign further throughout the labour movement.


Organisation



The final session of the conference was introduced by Alec Thraves, SPW Secretary. Alec reported on the growth of our organisation with new branches in Bangor and Cardiff (in Cardiff the old branch has subdivided as it has grown into East and West) as well as an emerging branch in Newport. He noted the dramatic growth in the party (increasing 25% in the last six months) with already 10 new members joining so far this year and old members revitalised by the developing crisis. Alec also re-emphasised the tremendous role Welsh comrades play in financing the party, with comrades making large sacrifices with membership subscriptions, but also through smashing Fighting Fund targets every quarter. This was reinforced by an excellent collection of over £900 at the conference.

The last year has seen the Party in Wales breaking new ground with solid growth in South as well as beginning to put down roots in the North too. This was reflected in the conference attendance of many new and young comrades who left reinvigorated and with the feeling that these will be exciting times for Socialists after the previous difficult period.

“It’s the economy, stupid!”

My most recent column for Bangor Student Union's Newspaper - Seren. I was a little short of space for this months column so I had to be very brief on the issues concerned.

Those were Bill Clinton’s famous words about what the main issue was during the 1992 US Presidential elections. And in the wake of the freezing up of the banking system last month, the part and full nationalisations that have taken place, increasing rates of home repossessions and the rising tide of unemployment have made it the main issue in this years U.S. Elections.
Of course, in the early days it was all about change, as Barack Obama positioned himself as an alternative to both the continuations of the last two US Presidents in the Republican Party candidate John McCain (potential successor of George W Bush) and his rival for the Democratic Party nomination, Hillary Clinton (potential successor to the aforementioned Bill Clinton). Of course Bush was responsible for the Afghani and Iraqi invasions, but Clinton had previously been responsible for the sanctions against Iraq and other U.S. military actions too.
The selection of Sarah Palin as John McCain’s running mate, as an apparent political ‘outsider’ (she still is the Governor of Alaska though!) was an attempt to undermine Obama’s theme of change which had actually mobilized a lot of younger voters to support him in the U.S.
But it is the economic crisis deepening that has swung Obama decisively into the lead. Thousands of families in the US face losing their homes as a result of the subprime crisis. Whatever anger about the Bush government’s policies that existed before (and unlike here the anti-Iraq war movement in the US was getting bigger not smaller), it has been massively multiplied by the economic crisis their ultra-neoliberal policies have driven the U.S. It is the height of irony that government’s who love the idea of the free market like those of Gordon Brown, George W Bush, Angela Merkel etc. have been forced to nationalize or part-nationalise so many companies to save the market they so cherish.
You may think that being a socialist I’d be on top of the moon at the moment with capitalism taking a battering, but unfortunately not. The truth is that what these governments want is to bail out these company’s bad debts, get them back into shape and then sell them back to the private sector. And its ordinary people that they are going to try and make pay for it with cuts to public services.
Capitalism goes through economic crises every so often like this, but the only way to make the situation better for the rest of us is to fight for it to be better. Although these companies have been nationalized, they are still gonna be run by similar people to those who wrecked them who won’t be as interested in the human cost of their decisions as opposed to the need for them to make these companies profitable again. And both McCain and Obama agree on this basic strategy, rather than what I would advocate which is placing them under the democratic control of the people who work at the company and the people who use their services.