Our politics

Following our summercamp at Varna last year comrades agreed a Common Platform as a basis for the 2024 event:

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Common Platform for Communism on the Beach

 

Activists from about 25  initiatives including political collectives, media projects, base unions, local mutual aid organisations and others met in a summercamp in September 2023. The event aimed to provide a space where comrades from different territories and different revolutionary proletarian traditions could discuss both practical experiences and theoretical questions. 

 

This and future events are not intended to be a recruitment ground nor a debating club without aspiration towards common organisational work. 

 

We would like to create stronger bonds between participating groups and individuals, which can hopefully lead to a continued debate and practice between the summercamps. If you are interested in attending and agree with the spirit of the summercamp and the following basic political points, please get in touch!      

 

1. Internationalism

Following discussions at the 2024 summercamp both the following paragraphs were retained with (b) reworded as below.

 

a) All states, without exception, exist today to maintain the domination of the ruling, capitalist class over the working class. Capital is everywhere, transcending borders, and we need to be able to face it internationally, not just with workers from our own territories. Therefore, we do not offer any support to wars waged by any capitalist state or any faction aimed at creating or strengthening a new state, whether aggressor or aggressed, whether or not they describe themselves as ‘socialist’ or ‘democratic’. 

 

b) States worldwide serve to uphold capitalist production, reproduction of class relations and exploitation of labor. Global capitalist relations have produced a global working class, the division of which into national working classes competing with each other is a major factor for class disunity. Capitalist power can only be overcome internationally based on antinational global class consciousness and action. Therefore working towards international class solidarity and perspective is pivotal.
In wars waged between capitalist nations the global working class has nothing to gain and it’s always working people taking the brunt in lives lost and lives disrupted on all sides. At the same time wars tend to deepen class disunity along national lines and especially call for building international revolutionary structures that are able to unite the class against global capital.

 

2. Abolition of capital  

There is no solution to the existential disaster confronting humanity other than the disappearance of capitalism as a mode of production. Its replacement by the ‘free association of the producers’ will inevitably necessitate an end to all the features of capitalist (re)production, including wage labour, commodity production and (gendered/racist etc.) social relations. The summercamps, and the discussions between them, bring together advocates of the worldwide social revolution necessary to achieve this.

 

3. Workers’ autonomy 

‘The liberation of the working class can only be the task of the workers themselves’. The 2023 event brought together comrades from a range of differing approaches to theory and practice.  There was a shared commitment to support the working class’s struggle towards a liberated future based on independent, working class self-organisation. Our future framework will aim to maintain such an openness and exchange of theory and practice. 

 

4. Rejection of parliamentarianism 

We strive to ensure that our revolutionary perspective against parliamentary politics is maintained. This is not because of ideological dogmatism, but because of a historical understanding of where this path leads us - towards the reproduction and strengthening of the state and capital instead of its destruction. 

 

5.  Mutual respect and trust

Working class organisation can only be built on trust, not on constraint. Every participant, irrespective of sex, gender, culture, origins or age, has the right to be heard with respect. Every participant commits themselves to behave, during the summercamp or not, in such a way as to deserve the trust of the others.

 

 

Process and logistics

 

* We acknowledge that capitalism sets workers in competition with each other, in terms of sex ethnicity, nationality, etc. We know we cannot magically solve these divisions within a summercamp setting, but we are committed to put in place certain suggestions that may facilitate more equity between people and their participation in decision-making, organising, facilitation and participation in workshops, reproductive tasks etc. We are more into constructive ideas and experimentations rather than strict formalism, recrimination and blame.

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* In order to set our own agenda and financial independence, we resource all of the summercamp and associated activities ourselves. 

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* We aim to meet annually with a different group taking the lead on practical organisation on the ground, with support of a transnational organisational committee. Communications are made via the mailing list and our online platform/forum.  

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* We aim to put all of the minutes and reports from the summercamp workshops online and publicly available on our website. This is in order to make our pole visible amongst international comrades and make our circle wider and more international in the longer-term. Invitations though are still by personal invitation only with prior agreement from existing participants. 

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* We encourage active participation by everyone - regardless of experience and other barriers - on subject matters that fit into the overall themes of the summercamp and its focus on independent, working class organisation and waging the class struggle, in all its forms. People should feel free to make suggestions, ask for help, and put in the work to make things happen!