@Dan: I said the SWP don’t engage in meaningful activity ‘a great deal of the time’. Sure, there have been exceptions, although Vestas isn’t one of them. I felt thoroughly embarrassed by the attitude of many party marxists there.

Of course we have to engage and agitate struggles, but by dull I mainly mean the bread and butter of keeping a party going (on which we should have a separate conversation if indeed we need to have one). It easts up most socialists’ time, it’s not imaginative, and I don’t think it’s particularly progressive.

But let’s call a spade a spade eh?

On that score, I personally didn’t care about the Nature Doesn’t Do Bailouts banner, though if it has the anti-modernist conclusions which Jacob points to, then I resent it equally, because it’s not a progressive slogan and it’s anti-scientific. It doesn’t represent a lowest-common-denominator for me in that instance.

But as I say, I didn’t get too hung up on it.

I don’t think this is at all fair. This all hinges on what you think meaningful activity is, I suppose, but I think it’s a bit sad to reject what people do so easily. Trades Councils, unions, solidarity committees, visiting pickets, these are all meaningful, and they are a fraction of what the socialist orgs do. And I don’t think they are dull at all. Vestas and Visteon certainly weren’t dull, and for different reasons neither were the construction strikes. Even the pickets at Colchester bus garage are a fascinating experience.

@David – yes, we’re all theorists, but being engaged with what’s going down on the ground, and actually helping with what’s going down on the ground is quite different. The very practical problems of ‘how shall we organise a meeting in the rain with 150 people’ or ‘what do we do when the police get here’ or ‘an anarchist just picked a fight with a news reporter – help!’ are of course intensely political.

There’s also the fact that a genuinely diverse grass-roots movement (which the climate movement increasingly is) also requires a really broad vocabulary for expressing theoretical ideas. so while ‘Nature’ is of course incredibly problematic, I don’t think it has as much anti-industrialist connotations for the banner-holders as you might think. But you’re right that when certain slogans are acceptable, they carry a legitimacy within the movement, even if not total agreement. For instance, Nature Doesn’t Do Bailouts isn’t a favourite of lots of people in the Climate Camp network, but it’s one of our big weather proof banners, made especially for the G20 (when it made more sense), and the ‘Capitalism is Crisis’ one, while well cool, kind of omits that we’re meant to be a climate change movement.

I think one of the main reasons I stay involved in Climate Camp is that I’d rather problematize the theory of a group doing something than try and get a bunch of so-called theorists to turn ideas created outside of ANY struggle into some kind of action.

It’s easier to teach a singer to act than an actor to sing.

Besides, I’m a theorist and so are you. The very fact that we’re having this type of conversation marks us as the best practitioners of praxis, does it not? We’re reflectively engaged with what we’re doing on the ground. That we don’t have tenure is hardly here or there; believe it or not, people really have led revolutions without it.