Stand up for your rights Festival‏

international | anti-capitalism | event notice Monday August 25, 2008 13:31 by pat c

A Festival, drawing on the great struggles of the past.
Saturday October 18, 14.00 to 20.30
Waterloo Action Centre, 14 Bayliss road, London SE1.

Sketches, music, debate, exhibition.Speakers include John McDonnell MP, Paul Feldman, Bill Bowring, Rahila Gupta, Southall Black Sisters, Global Women's Strike. Tickets £10 and £5. Organised by A World to Win.

The Putney debates

One of two plays will focus on the Putney Debates held by the New Model Army in 1647 during the English Civil War. The Levellers put forward ‘An Agreement of the People’ which demanded that Parliament be subordinate to the will of the people.

A second sketch will highlight the great debate within the Chartist movement in 1839 about how to achieve the vote for workers if – as it did – Parliament rejected their demands. In the ‘Manifesto of Ulterior Measures’, the Chartists said that the poor would prevail against their oppressors, ‘peaceably if we may, forcibly if we must’.

A World to Win aims to build, in collaboration with other groups and organisations, a movement for a democratic society based on equality, co-ownership and self-management as the way forward from the current crisis.

Chartist insurrection, Newport 1839