Last word from an old bastard

Last week I turned 27, so I’m now too old to be a member of SSY or to post on this blog. I’m making a small infringement of the rules to get my last word before I leave it to a new generation to carry on the work of keeping this site fresh and interesting.

What I want to use this last piece to do is reflect a little on the significance of SSY as a group, and encourage its members to think about just how important what we’ve built is, and why it should be defended.

SSY was founded in 2002 (if my memory of what conferences were what year is right!) when the Scottish Socialist Party was approaching its peak of strength. For most activists in SSY now it must be hard to imagine just how important we were as a group back then. Virtually the entire socialist left in Scotland was united in the SSP. Our convenor was by a long long way the most well known and popular political figure in Scotland, way ahead of the First Minister or leader of the opposition. We were a leading force in all the major union and community struggles that were taking place, particularly the massive wave of anti-Iraq war activism that saw mass demonstrations and school strikes everywhere. The mainstream media were forced to sit up and take notice of what we had to say. And we were on the brink of an electoral breakthrough that would see six socialist MSPs elected to the Scottish Parliament.

Since then the left in Scotland has been through some disastrous experiences, that have left many of the socialists who I worked alongside back then traumatised. SSY itself had its ups and downs, but I think it’s a testament to what we’ve built in this organisation that virtually everyone in SSY saw through the celebrity/politician cult that split from the SSP, and stayed united as an autonomous, self-organised and active group of young socialists. The reasons we remain strong are political.

SSY played a leading role in protests against the G8 summit in Scotland in 2005

Organisations like SSY are pretty rare, either in socialist or mainstream politics in the UK. Other parties have young people involved in them. But generally they act as cannon fodder for decisions taken by the grown ups. The youth of most parties are expected to donate their time and energy for free to promoting something over which they have relatively little control. It’s hard for people with the experience of being in SSY to realise how unusual, and important, the freedom we have to organise is. We are so much more than just the youth wing of the SSP – we’re a political group that has fought for and earned a voice in our own right.

On the rest of the socialist left, a focus on youth the way we do is rare. Most left parties and organisations concentrate their efforts on students, based on the assumption that students go to uni, have a loan and free time, and are open to thinking about the world. In other words, they will be easy to recruit and then easy to put to work once they’ve been recruited.

The SSP and SSY on the other hand concentrate on the fact that youth are a specific section of the working class, an oppressed group that suffers from problems that don’t affect the rest of the population in the same way. The costs of the economic crisis have fallen on the shoulders of youth in an outrageously disproportionate way: higher youth unemployment, coming on top of the fact youth were already most likely to be working in difficult, insecure low wage jobs that are unlikely to have any kind of union organisation; compounded by the fact that the government institutionalises discrimination by enforcing a lower minimum wage for young workers.

British imperialism takes advantage of the crappy conditions for young workers to constantly prey on youth, trying to con us into the British military with lies about how it’s a great career, rather than a hellish nightmare in which you will be asked to lay down your life for the profits of the super-rich.

The education system is facing devastation as a result of cuts, making it harder and harder to stay on in school without EMA or to be able to get any kind of access to further or higher education. Education in capitalist Scotland isn’t geared towards allowing young people to realise their full potential and development as human beings, but instead to enforce discipline, respect for authority and produce compliant workers for the future.

Our communities leave us little access to culture or entertainment that isn’t corporate controlled and expensive beyond the means of most youth to be able to afford it. Alienation and boredom are the everyday experience of youth in Scotland. In this context, its hardly surprising that there’s so much violence between young people throughout Scotland, or that so many people choose to use drugs. Instead of viewing these facts as products of the wider society that caused them, the mainstream media and politicians have consistently used them as excuses to manufacture a moral panic out of youth and their behaviour. To distract the attention of the people from the real failings of our society, we are encouraged to see young people as a threat that need to be controlled by ever increasing powers of police surveillance and harassment.

SSY and SSP on the Make Poverty History march 5 years ago. I'm on the left faithfully recording Colin for posterity

SSY has recognised from the start that the first solution we can offer to the huge range of problems and oppression facing Scottish youth is to allow young people the space and resources to organise their activism politically. On issues like drugs, violent crime, youth unemployment and job discrimination SSY has led the way not just on the socialist left but in Scottish society as a whole in putting forward real, progressive solutions.

Let’s take drugs as an example. Off and on it’s now been nearly 10 years that SSY has been organising Legalise Cannabis marches in Glasgow, the most prominent public opposition to the disastrous prohibition policies of the UK governments. For those in power, drugs provide a convenient reason to criminalise a vast swathe of young people who see through their bizarre, non-scientific moralising lies. We’re the only political group that’s stood consistently behind scientific evidence on what kind of an approach will actually reduce social and health harms. Part and parcel of that is that we’ve rejected the ideas promoted by those who don’t know what they’re talking about; the idea that drugs are somehow morally evil, that they represent a threat to society. Human beings have always and will always find ways to alter their consciousness – what matters is how we as a society regulate and control that impulse, and make sure that people aren’t harming themselves or others.

This is truly radical thinking, something that goes against the ingrained attitudes that have been promoted by politicians, the media and the education system for a century. It’s only been possible for us to formulate this kind of sophisticated politics given the space and autonomy to discuss, think and act as youth, without being told what to do by those supposedly older and wiser.

Because we fought for and claimed out autonomy as an organisation, the SSP can now boast an absolutely vibrant youth wing, which is at the heart of key struggles throughout Scottish society, from having played a leading role in forming new anti-fascist coalitions that have successfully prevented the spread of the anti-Muslim paranoid racism of the EDL to Scotland; helping organise inspirational school strikes against the Iraq war and more recently education cuts; and being unafraid to take radical direct action against climate change, war and racism.

The Olden Days, lol

This website reflects just how significant SSY is. You can tell at a glance that it is in fact written by young people, and no one dictates the agenda of the authors. We use the most underrated weapon of the left, humour and ridicule, to devastating effect. Thousands of people come to read it every day because it really is a unique voice in Scottish politics. Now that you’ve lost my obsessive daily blogging, the responsibility is on the other authors (and SSY members who aren’t yet authors) to take up the baton. Keeping it up to date with something new every day isn’t an easy task, but it’s one that is absolutely worth it, and I really really encourage you to try and keep up the excellent standards our readers have come to expect.

Crucial to our success in my opinion has been our embrace of popular education and participatory democracy. We understand that education is a process where we learn from each other, rather than the “ignorant” being filled up with information by a socialist guru. For years we have struggled with how to make our political discussions organised in such a way that people with differing levels of political and life experience can all both learn and teach. That spreads into the way we try and organise our political decision making, and our attempts to be a truly democratic organisation with no hierarchical control. I’m not trying to say we’ve always got this absolutely right or we’ve never made mistakes. The point is that we struggle to reflect in our organisation the way we think the whole world should work. It stands in stark contrast to so many socialist organisations of the past where a Great Leader dictated the politics to his obedient followers.

We’re coming into a time where SSY is going to be more needed than ever. For the first time in my 10 years as an activist, we’re now under an extremist Tory government hell bent on going to war with the working class of this country. It can’t and won’t be defeated by playing nice. It’s going to take people who are able to see the ways to mobilise mass opposition, who can relate what they have to say to normal people. It’s going to take people who are unafraid to piss off their teachers, the police, the government, their parents and anyone else who thinks youth should be apolitical and quiet.

. . .and we do!

To be able to do that is going to take some courage and some intelligence. It’s clear from what’s happened in recent weeks that the police and the state understand that we’re entering a time where people aren’t going to take as much shit as they did when they could be pacified with cheap credit and McJobs. They understand that SSY contains some of the smartest, most organised opponents of the system they exist to defend. That’s why they’ve already begun targeting our members for extraordinary repression. They are watching and listening to what we do; they’re reading this article. We need to start preparing ourselves for their attacks, with regular direct action training, learning how to deal with arrest, our legal rights, how to break a kettle and occupy a building.

We live in a society which is in the early stages of collapse. The economic and ecological crises are two sides of the same problem – a socioeconomic system that is exhausted, used up and is eating its young. Today’s youth are the ones who will live to see the full consequences of this play out, with masses of human beings fighting for survival, fleeing from the climate change and war that capitalism has caused. We are the ones who will have the responsibility of imagining and building ways that will allow human civilisation to survive the 21st century.

SSY is a tiny pocket, a sliver of that future world. It represents a place where we can come together outside of hierarchical control or interaction that isn’t about human beings but profit. It represents a space where people can collectively examine the problems that face them and work together to tackle them. It’s a space that, at its best, we educate each other, and I know there is a huge amount I have learned and grown as a person as a result of the people I’ve met, and having been a member of SSY.

If I had a last bit of advice, it would be defend what you have in SSY. Maintain it, build it, introduce others to it. Never let anyone question the value of your autonomy and self organisation. Keep being unafraid to speak your mind, and be unafraid of who you might offend with what you say.

I’m going to end this self-indulgent rant with a couple of tunes that for me sum up some of the key experiences I’ve had in SSY that made me the person I am today. Putting them on here may be a bit of an in joke, but if you were there you’ll know what it was all about. If not, it’s time you got involved and found what all the fuss is about. It’s been an honour.