Up The Anti – An Important First Step, But Just a Step

The Up The Anti (UTA) conference on 1 December aimed to budge the entrenched positions of ‘the Left’. Activists from a broad range of political backgrounds attended and engaged in healthy debates during panel discussions, Q&A sessions and in breakout groups, and united around a number of specific issues, such as debt and the housing crisis.

But the conference also illustrated that the Left has a long way to go. The gender imbalance at the conference was repeatedly raised and criticised. The Left often side-steps gender with little more than a tokenistic gesture. But lip-service is insufficient – what needs to change is the methodology itself. Feminism (or something like a femme perspective) should pervade activism. Partly due to post-UTA reflections, the OT collective is now working more consciously on challenging the oppressions and hierarchies of gender relations.

Real effort is also needed to include those at the sharp end of the current crisis in any future event which aims to ‘reclaim the future’. Having an anarchist, a Trotskyite and a Leninist sitting around a table does not amount to genuine diversity. More grounded, practical and experientially-based discussions would be welcome and would reduce opportunities for obscure and theoretical soapbox rants, of which there were a few at UTA. Ironically, in the closing session, one of the speakers pondered on how can we stop middle-aged white males (such as himself) dominating, without noticing that he was the only one addressing the crowd while standing up.

A hypothetical future event of this ilk could include sessions on imagining a radical alternative to the welfare state, urban politics, stories from youth, et cetera. The event should be held not in a formal or grandiose setting but, perhaps, in one of the many London estates struggling to hold out against ‘regeneration’.

Some of the critics at UTA could have made more of their experience by eschewing talks with the ‘big names’, concentrating instead on subjects they were interested in. In a refreshing session on housing, young people exchanged their personal experiences about housing precariousness, squatting and debt; a discussion about the situation in Greece was animated yet constructive; and a debate on ‘lessons from the global south’ was extremely informative.

Criticism should not detract from the efforts made by the organising group (of which the OT was a small part), but will hopefully encourage everyone involved to radically rethink how similar events might be approached in the future. It would be heartening to see a conference where audience, organisers and speakers were not hierarchically separated but were working together while challenging each other to create “a world where many worlds fit”.