This anecdote describes the divisions arising from intellectualism - ditthupadana - clinging to ideals, and the ego clashes that produced.
Following the conference (Addon P2) bill’s work became focussed on trade unionism. At his school he had become the union rep, and because of the ITUS conference he had established links with the trades council - as a representative from his local NUT association. Following the conference that trade unionism was to include internationalism but was not a focus on it, it became organising in the movement. Almost immediately that meant becoming the administrative dogsbody of the Trades Council - the secretary. The work of the Trades Council secretary is strenuous, administrative, respected by all and wanted by none, without a secretary the Trades Council does not fulfil its minimal functions.
Being secretary suited bill at the time, it gave an outlet for his movement desire for work activism - and following the egos of conference there was no bulldozing as they wanted someone to do the work. But the work like most work in the movement was that of movement survival as the movement in general and trade unionism in particular was suffering under the capitalist attacks puppeted by Thatcher - following on from the miners.
Within the established grassroots movement the trade union activity of the Trades Council was a bit significant as they had subscriptions from the local trade union associations; nationally the whole unions were affiliated to the TUC and locally union associations were affiliated to the Trades Councils. Annually Trades Councils had a conference with the TUC but were not influential in policy. If campaigns were being built they were built through the Trades Councils, the National Unions and possibly the Labour Party. The campaign that best illustrated the Trades Council function was the campaign against the Poll Tax; the Poll Tax campaign also illustrates the destructive nature of another organisation - Militant. The SWP and Militant were very similar tactically but had one major difference - at the time Militant were all members of the Labour party. To all intents and purposes Militant functioned as a party within the Labour party, but they could not call themselves a party - like the SWP did - because the Labour party did not allow this.
From early on Militant were astute in recognising the importance of the Poll Tax campaign, and began organising around this campaign long before the majority of the movement were active. Once recognising the need for action against the Poll Tax Militant’s organisational ego wanted to make itself the figurehead and in so doing would hope to build their “faction”. Militant and the SWP had a strategy of joining their unions and getting themselves nominated as representatives on the Trades Council. With the movement as a whole being under attack the Trades Council struggled for active members, and the business of meetings was usually dominated by these factional members trying to get Trades Council to support their campaign - often financially. Working up to the anti-Poll Tax demonstration that culminated in the Aintree images of Trafalgar Square, Militant members of the Trades Council were single-minded in their campaigning - building up to the formal Trades Council involvement in the campaign nationally. Good on Militant in that their foresight and hard work built the campaign, but much like bill and his conference their tactics did not build the movement.
Within the movement Militant had a reputation, when bill became involved in the Poll tax campaign as Trades Council secretary he was perceived as Militant and for some outside Trades Council that meant alienation. bill learnt a great deal from one old campaigner, George, and George was very critical of the way Militant organised with phrases such as “piss-up in a brewery”. He predicted this as having disastrous consequences - the disruptive violence that was Aintree at Trafalgar Square.
Quite rightly there was much population anger at this people tax proposal. bill’s Trades Council was near rural wealth, and the initial Poll tax proposals meant that council flats with large families were going to pay taxes 3 or 4 times higher than nearby wealthy estates. The Poll Tax demo was committed, in his time of activism it was the demo that could be called a peoples’ demo as opposed to just an activists’ demo. The establishment also knew that it was a peoples’ demo - and therefore a threat, and they needed to disrupt it; George knew this. For George the demo needed to be internally marshalled to prevent hotheads from exploiting it and to prevent the establishment from causing these hotheads to exploit. Literally as hotheads they wanted violence to fight the establishment, with a rationale of showing people what the state did; the state has longstandingly spun this violence as hotheads and alienated the non-activists of the movement from them. None of this marshalling was done, and the demo became Aintree. This was a success for the establishment as once the disruption started the Poll Tax campaign was finished as a peoples’ movement - the people had become alienated by the violence. bill understood George’s desire for marshalling but to this day is unsure whether it would have worked.
Militant claimed the demo as a success because Thatcher changed from Poll Tax to Council Tax but it is still more of a tax on poorer people than the wealthy. Now Council Tax bills are accepted and cause people hardship - Thatcher had successfully increased the taxes on people. bill suspects that the Council tax compromise was their original target but he can never know. What is the case was that the potential for building the movement was lost by the violence on the demo. The constant is that the establishment will always try to disrupt peoples’ demos as a divisive tactic, in the case of the Poll tax demo they were successful - because of the lack of marshalling and organisation.
Based on these 3 personal anecdotes (P1, P2 and P3) there are two underlying themes:-
 The need to organise to build a movement
This building was negated by egos
The longer bill was an activist, the more bill saw the need for organising and building. This building was very different to the activist strategies of Militant and SWP whose concerns were the building of their own factions; very different from bill's own bulldozing at the ITUS conference. IN the movement bill became attracted to people who focussed on organising, and eventually joined the communist party; George saw this, warned against it quietly and he probably foresaw the end results.
bill was initially enamoured with these communists because they were life-long activists and because they were knowledgeable with a sound analysis. And he learnt a great deal about Marxism through them but little about organising. Whilst they professed to be concerned with building, their history in the movement meant they couldn’t build with certain activists. Historically as soon as an activist was known as a communist, Militant and SWP would not work with them so the primary motivation of building was negated from the beginning. Has that changed? And perhaps the biggest crit about building is that UK communists were themselves divided. At the time of bill’s activism there were 3 communist parties in the UK - a revolutionary communist party (about 600 members), a revolutionary communist party built around the Morning Star (about 600 members), and a communist party that accepted elections (about 5000). As a brief generalisation all of the UK communist parties sought a change in class rule, by the term revolutionary it was recognised that such a change could not be achieved through elections but there was never an attempt at active violence in the UK movement.
The longer he was a communist the greater the divisions mattered, and bill began to see the building as rhetoric and the practice as divisive. Whilst they would claim a theme of organising they made intellectual distinctions (typical ditthupadana) that caused division. There were 2 situations that led to bill ending his membership. He discovered at a training course that his communist party had a policy that women members should not join the military; whilst bill empathised with the non-cannon fodder aspect, he could never accept such paternalism as policy. And the 2nd situation was that as part of their analysis and building theme they asked teacher members to work within the Broad Left of the NUT. Within the NUT there were many intellectuals, and such intellectuals reacted to their upbringings by becoming socialist intellectuals against capitalism; they had organised in the STA and regularly supported strike action. Given the alienation described in P1 bill was not sympathetic to this intellectually-sponsored strike action so during conference he sympathised with the Broad Left. At the end of conference younger members attended the rival discos. What bill saw at the Broad Left disco was leadership sycophancy and he walked out, he already knew that most of the leadership were opportunists whose self-interest was making the union ineffective. He sought change, neither the Broad Left nor the STA was an alliance for him but at least the STA sought change.
Ending his communist membership bill returned to working within the trade union movement.As a pathtivist zandtao has to recommend not joining a communist party, and that is sad as their education was so clear and diffcult to find elsewhere in the movement. Having been a member of a CP now led to ongoing surface opposition from the intellectuals of Militant and SWP but they were divisive bubbles separate from the stream of the movement so there was no problem with the Trades Council as a whole. He was to be a non-affiliated trade unionist seeking to build. At this point he became active in the Peace Movement because of the Iraq war, and the daily vigils and weekend demos burned him out - at times coming home at midnight and marking books. He remained a member of the Trades Council Exec but not that active until his personal life soon took him to Africa. He returned to the activism of a radical educator and remained that way until his early retirement that has led to thezeer and pathtivism.
As a pathtivist there can never be membership of the parties of intellectualism (including communists) as such membership creates division. Embodiment means the need for some social activism working within the movement. Beyond that the pathtivist must choose their own “cause” - what suits their own life path. But within the chosen activism their main strategy is to harmonise egos and work against division to build the activism of embodiment. This is what communists claimed they were doing but observation and practice clearly shows they weren’t. It is more than 30 years since he was active in the movement so advice has to be limited. He surmises an activist would join the trade union movement but collective labour has less and less power. He would probably join the Labour party but post-Corbyn Labour appears totally opportunist offering little in the way of conscious activism. Under Corbyn Labour offered hope for change but the reaction that followed him shows an alienation that even when a divisive intellectual is voted as party leader it can also be destructive given the weakness of the movement; in zandtao's view themovement as a whole lacks the clear thinking that comes from the path. Corbyn was always active in the socialist intellectual alliances so despite the hope of his leadership the reality became the alienated response of Starmer. But zandtao’s current knowledge of the movement is too limited so beyond the pathtivist requirement of conscious activism there can be no other sound advice.
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