charlie mowbray
The Enforcer
I would say that Solfed definitely is another anarchist groupuscule, although claiming to be a union.
Are you an anarchist but not a member of an anarchist organisation?
- Thread starter danny la rouge
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LDC
On est tous des pangolins
Some of this is just the fragmentation of society being even more individualised around work, and I think anarchism with its anti-work current and also partly due to the background of many anarchists has led plenty to be self-employed or to have got jobs with NGOs or co-ops, which ends up making any organising around work a much harder task.
It's that Nation of Shopkeepers book in some ways.
That and the transcient nature of where and how many people live also makes organising where you live much harder and less likely. So that leaves many anarchists to end up in the pick 'n' mix world of single issues campaigns and issues, which of course is where much of politics has been anyway for a few decades.
It's that Nation of Shopkeepers book in some ways.
That and the transcient nature of where and how many people live also makes organising where you live much harder and less likely. So that leaves many anarchists to end up in the pick 'n' mix world of single issues campaigns and issues, which of course is where much of politics has been anyway for a few decades.
Plenty examples of high functioning drunkards doing useful/good things. Hallas was one such.
chilango
Hypothetical Wanker
We need physical infrastructure. Social Centres, bookshops, social clubs, infocentres etc. alongside stable - and welcoming - groups to engage with. Points of f2f contact.
There's bits of this, but it's fragmented, exclusionary and often off-putting. Often only last a 'generation' before vanishing without a trace.
What happens to us when we get older, get families, responsibilities and have more to lose?
Retention is perhaps more important than recruitment if you think of the 10s (maybe 100s) of thousands who have passed through (or close by) the milieu and are still sympathetic but have no connection to the scene anymore.
There's bits of this, but it's fragmented, exclusionary and often off-putting. Often only last a 'generation' before vanishing without a trace.
What happens to us when we get older, get families, responsibilities and have more to lose?
Retention is perhaps more important than recruitment if you think of the 10s (maybe 100s) of thousands who have passed through (or close by) the milieu and are still sympathetic but have no connection to the scene anymore.
The39thStep
Urban critical thinker
I once picked him up from Manchester Piccadily where a small trail of beer cans clattered as he alighted from the carriage.
Serge Forward
Just enjoyin' my coffee.
It's comparing apples and oranges. Anarchist communist organisations and unions have very different functions. Under the current system (at least in a bourgeis liberal democratic system like the UK), organising in the workplace as a union, though not easy, will always be miles more easy than attempting to build a revolutionary movement.
Hallas anecdotes are legend. He stayed with me for a time and i found him to be really excellent company. In my toilet there were copies of various socialist newspapers, and when he was using the trap i could hear him roaring with laughter (it was a tiny property). When he had finished ( 
) i asked him what he found so amusing, and he replied that it had been years since he had read the "sectarian press" - but a copy of the Weekly Worker had reminded him why he stopped reading them in the first place.. For myself, i wasn't involved with the cpgb, but i loved the gossipy quality of that organ in those days. i admired Duncan greatly.
) i asked him what he found so amusing, and he replied that it had been years since he had read the "sectarian press" - but a copy of the Weekly Worker had reminded him why he stopped reading them in the first place.. For myself, i wasn't involved with the cpgb, but i loved the gossipy quality of that organ in those days. i admired Duncan greatly.
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chilango
Hypothetical Wanker
...and I've made this point before, but we really need to create spaces and activities where "ordinary" (and I know how problematic this concept is, but still...) people of all ages can both feel comfortable in (and talking about to others) and that can can become a sustainable part of. everyday life.
charlie mowbray
The Enforcer
I don't think the base unions are "anarchist successes" there's too much of the hierarchical in the IWGB and CAIWU, UVW less so. I'm just emphasising that they probably have achieved more workplace organising than the IWW. As to success, how do you measure that? Can winning a few small wage demands, getting withheld pay or reinstatement,though worth fighting for, be compared to a substantial raising of class consciousness?
Pickman's model
Starry Wisdom
there are some permanent features of the anarchist milieu, eg freedom, larc, 56a: and there have been many more or less ephemeral social spaces - the 121 centre, rampart, the sutton street squat, various social squatted social centres - but i don't know whether we need more institutions with their tendency towards institutionalisation. if you look back at the history of other movements, they have had venues which played a major part and then passed on: for example, the chartists had the eclectic hall, the irish nationalists premises on grafton street, now gone but formerly near cambridge circus, and rooms on chancery lane. the simple thing about anarchist groups is none of them have the money required to get the sort of spaces you want legally - larc a very unusual space in that regard. of the national anarchist groups, i know cw scraped by on a couple of grand a year, of which maybe half was raised at the bookfair. i don't suppose the national anarchist groups of today have much more than that, if that. if it's a choice between funding a short-lived social space or producing stickers, t-shirts and other propaganda, i suspect most groups would go for the latter.
and social spaces are bloody hard work. with the squats the finding, the cracking, the cleaning and the retaining takes a great deal of energy - let alone the effort needed to ensuring the spaces are at least vaguely welcoming. the wombles spent a great deal of time and energy opening up various social centres and i know it was very wearing on them doing that.
so yes, it would be nice to have more spaces to meet, to introduce new people to the scene and for returning friends to get together. but the work for these has always fallen on a few people, who can be burnt out by the experience.
sorry to be negative - i'd be interested to hear how you think that the difficulties to getting longstanding or permanent places together might be overcome
LDC
On est tous des pangolins
Actually I'm going to kind of disagree with you here for once...
The call for the social centres, bookshops, etc. comes up loads, and to some extent as you say it's been done. But one of the issues is that these are just an expansion of (youth dominated) activism and subcultural politics, hence they also come with the inherent problems you mention of exclusionary and off-putting. So just saying we need them again is also bound to fail. You mentioning people getting older, families, responsibilities also acknowledges this issue.
There's also this long running joke among a few anarchists I know from non-Western countries about British anarchists who see something 'cool' and want to replicate it, so they try and copy the 'end product' without understanding the sometimes decades of hard organising work that's gone on to enable these things to be 'successes' in longer term. it's western 'quick-fix answers'. Some of the Rojava stuff has been terrible at this, trying to copy something without understanding what made it work in a particular context that means you can't just cut and paste to where you live.
So I'm not against things like social centres etc. but until they're genuinely rooted in a wider mass struggle and emerge from that as genuine need for that struggle to generalise and sustain itself then they're just going to be a time and money sapping subcultural drain on the small groups that do exist.
The sad truth (for me) is that until the form and content of politics significantly changes then anything we build is doomed to just be sub-cultural tinkering around the edges.
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LDC
On est tous des pangolins
Yeah, the difference with those is broadly as I said they emerge from a wide struggle or movement rather than the anarchist way round that uses them to try and create a movement. And yes the financial issues in the UK for property make it a total nightmare as well for sure. I could also moan about how much of the 'propaganda' produced by groups is at best pointless, or at best is just about maintaining an identity rather than actually anything more politically useful (with some notable exceptions of which CW and some of their related stuff was one IMO).
I mean it's also where the poisonous and difficult nature of some parts of identity politics comes in, how would people deal with a wider section of society with the myriad of fucked up views and attitudes using that space? I know this is veering into the 'bloody soft youngsters moan' but IME a significant chunk of the people attracted to anarchist projects and ideas over the last decade or so seem very happy to retreat into, and operate as, a small subcultural scene. The idea that it could manage a physical space that was usable by lots of different people with challenging and sometimes dodgy views and manage to hold it together is absolute dreamland, and that's even without any real external pressures like repression by the State or far right.
chilango
Hypothetical Wanker
I take (and generally agree with) your points LDC and Pickman's model but ...
...if we want a sustained - and sustainable - organised Anarchist presence in public I think that this is the nettle that needs to be grasped.
However, I'm not 100% convinced that maintaining this Anarchist presence is worth the effort it would take. Maybe time to let Anarchism fade away and see what else appears in its stead? Surely anti-authoritarian and democratic praxis can take other forms?
...if we want a sustained - and sustainable - organised Anarchist presence in public I think that this is the nettle that needs to be grasped.
However, I'm not 100% convinced that maintaining this Anarchist presence is worth the effort it would take. Maybe time to let Anarchism fade away and see what else appears in its stead? Surely anti-authoritarian and democratic praxis can take other forms?
Pickman's model
Starry Wisdom
if you want an anarchist presence in public that really means taking to the streets on a far more regular basis than is done at the moment.
chilango
Hypothetical Wanker
Indeed, but - again - the old "demo infrastructure" has gone. The flyposting, the (usually SWP organised) coaches from all over. The local stalls and sign ups.
I can't remember the last 'big demo' I heard about. XR maybe?
LDC
On est tous des pangolins
Yeah, that's my position really. I think nearly all of anarchism as it stands 'formally' in the shape of groups and projects, when judged against the potential for catalysing or playing any significant part in a revolutionary change, is about zero - maybe even worse than that. But ironically in times where there's widespread anger and disatisfaction with the world being run the way that it is, and that's even without taking into account the massive changes we'll see with the climate crisis in the next 2-3 decades.
But that doesn't mean the ideas are dead as they exist (thank fuck) in ways far beyond anarchism as a political philosophy and movement. But they do need to be articulated and put into practice somehow more overtly as an antagonistic position, and you do see that in all sorts of places, even in the projects and groups I've criticised, but also in all sorts of 'non-political' social groups (although less so the anatagonistic part).
I honestly think some of the most useful things we can do is keep the ideas of anti-capitalism, co-operation and mutual aid alive, and get to know people where we live and work and cultivate healthy ways of relating to each other and the world around us. And openly pro-revolutionary political organising rooted in where we live and/or work of course lest I sound too much like a hippie.
I increasingly think the future will be some more chaotic mix of changing situations including some slow & quick collapses around the globe that enable all sorts of possibilities to emerge, some of which will be much worse than what's about now, but some of which will be closer to what we imagine classically as a 'revolution' of a kind we could get critically behind.
TLDR: Be nice to (most) people and get ready for more Mad Max than Spain '36 tbh.
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Rob Ray
Weight is meaningless
It's not either/or. Maximising the chance for something to emerge involves having infrastructure and projects in place that can accelerate the process. "Build it and they will come" is overrated but if you have nothing to offer those who do show up can swiftly disappear again. And movements don't often appear entirely from nowhere.
I'm in a weird place when it comes to the scene atm. I'll acknowledge the general malaise, but on a personal level I've been trying to help get Freedom to work right for decades now, and we've finally gotten the damn thing to be vaguely self sustaining with a bookshop that pays its way, a publishing outfit that sells well enough to renew/expand our slate of titles, a reasonably regular news wire and rooms hosting multiple groups. So my corner is actually on the up, touch wood.
On another positive note, this year's Earth First summer gathering is their boldest in quite a while
Earth First! – Build a culture of active non-hierarchical grassroots ecological resistance
Which follows on from quite a decently organised climate camp last month
Climate Camp wraps up after Ineos confrontation - Freedom News
Following well-organised protests at the site of Scotland’s biggest polluter the camp at Kinneil, Grangemouth has been tidied away and legal support is now ongoing for nine people who were detained over the weekend. The camp was sited just a mile away from Ineos’ headquarters to the east of...
freedomnews.org.uk
This stuff is happening largely outside internet social media bubbles mind.
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hitmouse
so defeated, thinks it's funny
See, in some ways, I'm tempted to agree with you, but on the other hand, over the last few years, "letting Anarchism fade away and seeing what else appears in its stead" seems like it's mostly ended up with either joining Labour or else deliberately getting arrested to stop climate change, which makes me think that maybe people could do with a bit more sitting down reading dusty Malatesta PDFs, or sending each other pictures of capybaras or whatever.
Interesting discussion though, think it returns to a theme that's maybe run through a lot of this thread, about the usefulness of anarchists organising as anarchists in Anarchist Organisations versus anarchists organising in non-anarchist projects that to a greater or lesser extent reflect at least some of the values and principles of anarchism.
I suppose there's another question, about what happens when the relevance of anarchism overall is weak or declining, but specific anarchist ideas* spread far beyond our usual reach, like with the mutual aid groups during the pandemic, or the idea of abolishing the police being more visible and mainstream than it's been for a long time. Could also throw in here that Unison's recent organising campaigns among HCAs and other hospital workers have drawn very heavily on direct action techniques that I think the IWW developed or at least put a lot of effort into popularising - is that recuperation and/or building a culture of resistance?
*no, not that kind of specific
Dystopiary
putting up a hook to hang my hopes upon
Dom Traynor
Tino Pai
In the UK as well as in New Zealand where I live now a not insignificant number of ex anarchists and direct action types transitioned into becoming union organisers for a variety of reasons but many wanting to marry the best tactics of where we had come from with where we were going. Most of us have since totally abandoned our original politics but most still regularly push for more radical responses where we can without endangering our careers. It has coupled with lessons from people like Jane Holgate and Jane McAleevy led to pockets of improvements here and there in mainstream unionism in my view but does it bare much relation to anarchism?
I don't know as I'm no longer an anarchist and therefore not the best judge.
I don't know as I'm no longer an anarchist and therefore not the best judge.
LDC
On est tous des pangolins
It's not either/or. Maximising the chance for something to emerge involves having infrastructure and projects in place that can accelerate the process. "Build it and they will come" is overrated but if you have nothing to offer those who do show up can swiftly disappear again. And movements don't often appear entirely from nowhere.
I'm in a weird place when it comes to the scene atm. I'll acknowledge the general malaise, but on a personal level I've been trying to help get Freedom to work right for decades now, and we've finally gotten the damn thing to be vaguely self sustaining with a bookshop that pays its way, a publishing outfit that sells well enough to renew/expand our slate of titles, a reasonably regular news wire and rooms hosting multiple groups. So my corner is actually on the up, touch wood.
On another positive note, this year's Earth First summer gathering is their boldest in quite a while
Earth First! – Build a culture of active non-hierarchical grassroots ecological resistance
Which follows on from quite a decently organised climate camp last month
Climate Camp wraps up after Ineos confrontation - Freedom News
Following well-organised protests at the site of Scotland’s biggest polluter the camp at Kinneil, Grangemouth has been tidied away and legal support is now ongoing for nine people who were detained over the weekend. The camp was sited just a mile away from Ineos’ headquarters to the east of...
This stuff is happening largely outside internet social media bubbles mind.
Not, it's not quite as clear as either/or, but they have to have some significant base of support and with that hopefully ability to be sustained. Often people see them as the panecea to a moribund state off affairs though. And most of them have emerged from a subcultural scene rather than a broad political movement, and I can't think of one that has managed to break out beyond that, so they might fulfil a role of sometimes sustaining a scene of certain type of activism, but I'm not really interested in that. I mean I don't think that's 'bad' as such but it worth acknowledging, and then of course as that scene wanes so does the ability to keep the social centre going.
Earth First! has had a very limited revival after stumbling on for many years, partly due to some inflow from XR and HS2 from what I can see, but it's still tiny, and even more subcultural and sceney than it used to be. It broadly suffers from what much of the newer anarchist scene does, which is no real strategy for wider change beyond 'more action' that people do for a bit then get fed up, arrested loads, or like chilango said; a family and/or job and it then becomes almost impossible to continue with. It has spurts of 'new people' getting involved but with no real chance of it generalising or making any real impact.
Claiming the Climate Camp for any form of anarchism or revolutionary politics is stretching things a bit far isn't it? I mean it's probably good it happens but it is just some slightly more risque Greenpeace like thing isn't it really?
It's great projects like Freedom are working though.
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danny la rouge
More like *fanny* la rouge!
AnarCom Net’s annual report.
anarcomuk.uk
Class Report ’23
December marks the 1st anniversary of our formal constitution as the AnarCom Network, an organisation of internationalist revolutionary class-struggle anarchist-communists. Despite having bee…
anarcomuk.uk
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Dom Traynor
Tino Pai
Well done on having a brass band.
steeplejack
trapped lbw for a duck
AnarCom Net’s annual report.
Class Report ’23
December marks the 1st anniversary of our formal constitution as the AnarCom Network, an organisation of internationalist revolutionary class-struggle anarchist-communists. Despite having bee…
View attachment 401872
An amusing crossover between this publication and the kind of biscuit-ersed "annual reports" delivered unsolicitedly by MPs / MSPs.
Usually such material is sent to the recycling / cat litter tray unread. I may actually read this one though.
danny la rouge
More like *fanny* la rouge!
Tldr: there’s not a lot of us but we do more or less what you’d expect. (Except the brass section might be a surprise).
danny la rouge
More like *fanny* la rouge!
So-
rry
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