“Spring Conference”, Manchester Friends Meeting House, May 11 2013

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Manifesto

The views represented in this Manifesto do not necessarily represent those of all speakers or participants in the spring conference, only those of its organisers.
Since 2008 the Western world has been in the grip of a 5 year economic crisis from which there is still no clear end in sight. A democratic spring has rocked the Middle East, toppling dictators and puppet regimes like a stack of cards. The Mediterranean is in flames, Greece in revolt and Spain and Italy facing economic collapse. Power is moving from West to East, as China continues to rapidly develop into the world’s next great superpower. The poor are squeezed by austerity, whilst the number of global billionaires reached a historic peak in 2011.

In short, everything is changing and shifting. And in that, there is nothing new. The question for the left is: how do we seize the moment? How can we ensure that what results from these changes is a fundamental improvement for humanity? In short, how can we alter the central social and economic core of capitalism?

We believe that the left is in diaspora, that its historic support base – the organised working class, and with it notions of solidarity and collective discipline – is a pale reflection of its former self. Without this traditional constituency, every facet of the left has fallen into decay. Working class education and traditions, and most importantly a solid grounding in the needs and experiences of the mass of the population, have been lost to the winds. In place of retreating class politics, forms of identity politics less fundamentally critical of capitalist structures have tended to dominate discourse, an indirect attempt to combat the alienation and disempowerment felt by so many. The once progressive movements of modernism in art and architecture to the contemporary eye seem contrived and faulty; the monuments to utopia constructed in our cities now appear as decaying concrete monstrosities. The left is isolated, uprooted and – as any other uprooted plant – it is shriveling and dying.

And yet, events currently unfolding present us with incredible opportunities. Amidst the suffering and desperation caused by recent turbulence, there is a clear passion amongst millions around the world to reconnect with ideas, to search for the meaning of their perpetual insecurity and to challenge the prevailing order of society. In a time when an audience for a clear and essential critique of capitalism has never been so potentially large, our spring conference wishes to challenge the decay, and ask fundamental questions pertinent to all on the radical left. As an essential human construct, what is art and culture? To change the world, how is it best we organise ourselves? What is, and why are we so focused upon, the working class? And whatever happened to leftist ambitions and aspirations – to modernity and modernism in politics – and can we (or should we?) stimulate and define ideas of what we are looking to achieve?

Spring is a shoe-string, non-profit operation put together by two full-time restaurant workers in Manchester. Our speakers span an eclectic range of experienced thinkers and activists from numerous traditions, who are giving their time to provide critical insight and perspective. We hope you will join us on May 11th for an afternoon of discussion and debate. And, potentially, some answers to the questions we face right now.

CONFERENCE TIMETABLE

11am: Opening Plenary

Greetings from the organisers and volunteers behind spring

11.15am-12.15pm: What is radical art? The search for universal truths, the left and contemporary culture

Speakers,

Ben Watson
A self-proclaimed ‘Zappologist’, Ben is the author of ‘Frank Zappa: the Negative Dialectics of Poodle Play’ and, most recently, ‘Adorno for Revolutionaries’. A former journalist for The Wire magazine, he is a founder member of the Association of Musical Marxists (AMM).

Alex Niven
Alex grew up in Hexham in Northumberland. He worked in the music industry before studying for a D.Phil in modernist poetry at St John’s College, Oxford. His first book Folk Opposition was published by Zero Books in 2011, and he has written for a number of publications including The Guardian, The Quietus, New Left Project, and the LA Review of Books.

12.30-1.30pm: Multiculturalism, Identity Politics and the centrality of class.

Speakers,

Paris Thompson
Former regional organiser and lifelong activist of the Socialist Workers Party (SWP). One of the ‘Facebook Four’ expelled in December 2012 for ‘factionalism’, in the fracas which precipitated the SWP’s current crisis.

David Broder
David has been active on the British far left since the war in Iraq. A history PhD student, he is currently living in Rome, preparing his dissertation on communists in the Italian Resistance during WWII. He is also a member of the Historical Materialism editorial board.

1.30-2.30pm: Lunch

2.30-3.30pm: Forms of Organisation – Leninism and the modern left

Speakers

Tim Nelson
Tim has been active in the socialist movement for over ten years, involved in a variety of different campaigns. He is currently a shop steward in Unison, and was recently expelled from the Socialist Workers Party as a result of the current crisis. He continues to fight for the building of a democratic, revolutionary left.

Andy Wilson
Andy is a founder of the Association of Musical Marxists and Unkant Publishers, both dedicated to the libertarian Marxist politics of the International Socialist tradition.  Andy was expelled from the SWP in 1994 and was a member of the IS Group which protested at the undemocratic regime in the SWP. Also the author of ‘Faust: Stretch Out Time: 1970-1975′, a portrait of the legendary krautrock band in their wilderness years.

Billy Ralston
A leading figure in Jerry Hicks’ election campaign for the leadership of Unite – the Union, Billy is particularly active in rank-and-file construction workers campaigns.

3.45-4.45pm: Looking back at the future – the decline of Modernist ambition

Speakers

Ashley Frawley
Ashley has recently completed her PhD at the University of Kent studying the construction of happiness as a social problem. Her research explores cultural ideas of personhood and progress and changing conceptualisations of social ills, in an era of apparent ‘no alternative’ to prevailing political and cultural structures.

Caspar Hewett
Caspar is the Director and Chair of The Great Debate, a community organisation in the North East of England dedicated to maintaining a space for public debate. He is currently a Research Associate in the Department of Geography at Durham University and Visiting Researcher at Newcastle Institute for Research on Sustainability. He is also a founder member of the Steering Committee of the North East of England’s United Nations Regional Centre of Expertise in Education for Sustainable Development (RCE North East), and is currently Director of NECTER (North East Centre for for Transformative Education and Research), the co-ordinating body for RCE North East.

4.50-5.00pm: Closing session

http://spring-conference-2013.com
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