When? Friday 27th-Sunday 29th August, 2021
Where? Sheffield, details upon registration
AngryWorkers are having a live weekend meeting and you are invited! Since the book was published, we have been having regular zoom meetings and public discussion meetings with UK and international comrades. While fruitful, there have been obvious limitations, especially with regards to getting to know each other better, meet new people, and get on with some local efforts. Now that restrictions have been lifted, we want to take the chance to meet our comrades in person and drill a bit deeper into discussions, debates, some introspection and future plans. To mitigate the risks, we will be limiting numbers to 20 people and asking everyone to take a test before they attend.
Who is this meeting for?
This meeting is open to everyone – if you’ve been interested in AW from afar, if you’ve been in email contact with us but never met us, if you’re a regular attendee at our meetings, if you want to get a local group going, or simply because you find the political questions we raise in our agenda interesting and want to find out more.
What to expect
We’ve booked some beds in a hostel in Sheffield and will be meeting at a venue nearby. The agenda is split up into sessions that are more reflective about AW’s work so far (so perhaps more interesting to comrades who’ve been involved up until now) and also sessions where comrades with no prior experience with the group can participate fully.
We want to make some much-needed time to discuss matters in more depth than zoom meetings usually allow for. This means that people who attend will be asked to do some prior reading for some of the sessions. Most sessions will begin with an input/presentation from an AW comrade. There will be space for questions as well as contributions, and we hope to make the sessions as open, participatory and comradely as possible. This weekend won’t be about preaching an AW ‘line’, but more about developing our thoughts (and doubts!), as well as self-education and arming ourselves for future plans in times of flux and widespread despair. We’ve deliberately given generous timeframes for the sessions, but there will be regular breaks and time for socialising in the evenings. If people feel like it’s all a bit too full on, feel free to leave and rejoin.
Other bits and pieces
If you want to come but don’t have childcare or can’t afford the travel or accommodation, get in touch and we can try and sort something out.
You will need to register for this event by emailing us and telling us if you want accommodation.
**PROVISIONAL AGENDA**
FRIDAY 27th
2-6pm (with breaks)
Welcome and introductions
Discussion: Where’s the UK at? And what’s our role and response?
AW will kick off with a presentation about the current state of the UK in terms of the changing landscapes of the economy, work, workplaces, class movements, divisions, ruling class attacks and working class responses. This will include a more comprehensive look at recent strikes and struggles, in order to highlight some tendencies. We will be asking ourselves: in light of this current landscape, what is or could be the role of a revolutionary organisation? How can we be relevant and useful to the class?
FRIDAY
6pm onwards
Dinner and pub
SATURDAY 28th
9.30am-11.15am
Discussion: What kind of organisation does AW want to be?
What would we need to do (individually and collectively) to become that? Is there a role for a ‘militant’ today? This discussion will be facilitated, with a couple of readings in advance.
11.30am-1.30pm
AW: An internal stock-take. Where are we as a group?
In this session we will go over our last year’s activities and output and discuss what worked well and what we need to improve on. Some questions we want to touch on are: can we blame the lockdown for the slow progress of the development of local groups? What other obstacles do we face? How do we write together? What to do about the tension between individual differences and what is seen as the AW ‘position’ on things. We will also drill down into some of our local initiatives (e.g. amongst health workers and workers at Heathrow Airport) to see if we are spending our energies wisely. We will also reflect on other jobs comrades are working in and whether they would allow for common activity.
1.30pm-2.30pm LUNCH
2.30pm-6pm
Training session: Getting rooted, the first steps
Here, some of us will talk about our plans for local groups so that new people can get involved and get some ideas about what they might want to do in their local areas. We will provide a sort of ‘toolkit’ based on our experiences and discuss the best ways to ‘get rooted’.
6pm DINNER AND SOCIAL
Sunday 29th
10.30am-12.30pm
Discussion: Current assessments and future plans
We will round up with a bit of an action plan based on what shared work we want to do over the next 6-12 months. The aim is for this to tie up all of our weekend discussions and put them to some practical use.
