>A chat-shop/think tank kind of thing for the global "Left" at large
>isn't a bad thing, although, given it's open-ness and hostility to
>"Old Left" concepts (and I would really like to know what they mean
>by that. Real Stalinist and Kimist-types? Or just any group that's
>not as fixated on "non-hierarchy" as the organizers like), I'd
>imagine one would find lots of petit bourgeois nonsense (like the
>kind of "small is beautiful" crowd you mentioned, Doug, in After the
>New Economy, the anti-modernism lot) mixed in with the good stuff.
Check out the ESF links I posted the other day. The CPGB writer, Tina Becker, talks about how parties as such are excluded, but Alex Callinicos & the rest of the Brit SWP are all over the place as individuals. And Massimo de Angelis has an interesting piece, which I'm not sure how much I agree with, on the virtues of plurivocality at the Commoner link.
CPGB on ESF: <http://www.cpgb.org.uk/esf/>.
Commoner: <http://www.commoner.org.uk/>.
All this touches on some of the reasons I started this list in the first place - I think all these strands of the left should talk to each other, though I'm not sure how much or well they can all work together.
Doug