I came to this scene late. The implosion of anti-capitalism was still reverbrating 2 years ago as I took my first steps onto the streets of London, a somewhat naive, sectarian left-Trotskyist of no particular party. As it happened, with the foundation first of ULU Anti-authoritarians and then the Gower Street social centre, the milieu into which I fell was the 'lifestylist' split from that movement. Ironically, I had very nearly chosen to go to Essex University; there's little doubt that had I done so I would have ended up in CAG, on the other side of this grotesque divide.
But chance made its choice for me. So the people I met & in whose presence my politics advanced were people written off here as activists. Not that my politics came closer to theirs; in fact over these years I have gradually accumulated the basis for a wide-ranging critique of activism, as such. But I remain friends with many of those inscribed here as 'lifestylists' and in them I find vast areas of roughness, tension; the violent reduction of these people to a simple epithet continues to repulse me.
Recently John. wrote something to the effect that "even the lifestylists today give class a cursory nod", and that libcom had probably had something to do with that. Certainly it has been a factor, but I see no reason that the move couldn't be related to a critique organically generated within this group artifically constructed as one leg of a dichotomy. For instance, I have been consistent in arguing against activist conceptions of the world, morality/seperate action etc for the last years: not to claim to have had a significant impact or anything, but there are others who have pursued or developed the same critique, and not just because of Libcom.
Not that I want to shit on Libcom. Although I have always conceived of class as central reading these forums has faceted my view here and there, and the library has been of a huge amount of use in my continuing self-education. And furthermore insofar as the critique has been seperable from the invective I have agreed with a great deal of the critique of the world, whatever my differences on organisation etc.
Despite my self-identity as a free communist, and excluding a brief and glorious period when the events in France lit up my life and this website, I have never been able to feel Libcom as my own. And that is something I regret, because the ideas of the people involved are often intelligent, difficult and stimulating.
Je sais pas. I have been meaning to write something like this for a while. Not a call for anti-sectarianism but for an end to the dogmatic and churlish habit of ridiculing as lifestylists people who, on slightly closer inspection, could turn out to be people who for all their flaws and illusions are committed, intelligent and passionate, interested, interesting. Potential allies?
Of course this split has disfigured both sides, most clearly in their relationship to each other. I have cringed at the flames from both sides. But simultaneously there are tensions I would like to explore in future within both sides: the negation of lifestylism is an absolute refusal of self-organisation qua communists for our own interests and desires, of communist community, except where it can be safely expressed (what - morally?) in the virtual world*; while conversely the negation of workerism continues to result, in many sectors, in post-classist and moral visions of activity and strategy.
Too much; going too fast, now. I haven't said everything I want to but this post is too long already. Let's go for a bit of Aristotelian dialectic eh?
cheers,
Si.
*"1. Construct communities constitutive of values, values constitutive of community." - Bataille, Programme relative to Acephale.
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Glad you are all measured again now. You are normally so reasonable. 
, and really comes down to what NEFAC see's it's role as, but I don't think it is very fair of Pete to denounce them on the basis Wayne Price, especially when he is constantly giving off about the dangers of organisational fetishism.
i don't think this would have been a very good thread anyway, all things considered
alright there paris?