REBUILDING THE TRADITION OF INDEPENDENT WORKING-CLASS EDUCATION
MEETING
Saturday 4th February 2012
10.30 – 3.30
Brunswick Centre, near Russell Square Tube, London
£6.00 includes lunch. Pay on the day.
Please email now to confirm / book your place
“How can Independent Working-Class Education contribute to today’s class struggle? What can we learn from history?”
The programme will be participatory, valuing what colleagues bring to the day. Presentations will include:
Colin Waugh: Lessons from the Plebs Strike; Louise Raw: The Matchworkers’ Struggle; Jane Martin: Organising for Socialism: Mary Bridges Adams and IWCE; John Grigg: The Work of Labour Heritage; Mary Davis: Shop Stewards Education and Women – a neglected majority of the working class; Dave Welsh: Trades Councils and Workers’ Education today – New Directions.
Directions: from Russell Square Tube follow Marchmont Street to Entrance One of the Brunswick Centre / big block of flats. There will be signs. Put Flat 10 (Community Centre) in entry phone and ring. Lift to Floor 2. Follow signs.
IWCE Project tries to
- Develop a diverse range of education materials and approaches for trade union and other working-class and progressive movement groups
- Respect the role of the working class in making history, and in making the future.
Never has there been a greater need to recreate IWCE than now. Labour (class not party) is facing:-
1. Sharpest attacks from the boss class and its servants (Tory, LibDems and allies in Labour Party) for decades
2. A declining ( but not dead) Labour Party, with a leadership daily moving further to the right – aiming for some meaningless middle ground – to parraphrase Trotsky – If you stand in the middle of the road you get run over. The labour left, what exists, is aiming at regaining labour for – radical politics – this may or may not be possible.
3. The unions ( public sector in partic) are being radicalised with many having left leaning leaderships, A number have broken links to labour party and others never having formal links.
This produces great opportunities and dangers for the class that require thought and debate and IWCE could play an important role – not academic discussion as the old NCLC often fell into but a that developes concrete answers – this is not a call for some predetermined democratic centralist programme, strat/tactics, but a genuine open process.