(Madness, I know...
)
Standards are slipping, I can't believe no-one from the ACG has popped up to flog Cafiero's Compendium or anything. Does anyone want to have a go with that new book about doctors and that?
Yes, perhaps I should go to the bookfair.
Actually it's quite soothing to follow a dispute upon which you are unable to form an opinion. The most enjoyable parts of the Joe Rogan podcasts I've watched are when he talks about MMA because I know even less about MMA than I do about contemporary British anarchist groups.
Here you go, fill your boots:
This article came out of a talk given in Belfast by anarchist MMA fighter Jeff Monson in March 2009. The article first appeared in issue 1 of The Leveller.
libcom.org
Pretty sure that Monson is very much not an anarchist nowadays, another sign of the downwards turn or whatever you want to call it.
Absolutely we need a bit more optimism and bada bing . Why doesn't someone make a list of achievements that the anarchism scene has achieved so we can big them up up.
Interesting question - just thinking of recent British stuff and trying not to duplicate anything from above, I'd say
Bristol 21/3/21 was probably not one we can directly claim credit for, but the legal support infrastructure that's meant people aren't facing repression alone is very much an @ thing. That fire round Bristol way in about 2013 and the cops' continuing failure to get anyone for it is entertaining at least. Infrastructure stuff is easy to overlook, but keeping the 1 in 12 going since the 80s, the Sumac, ACE in Edinburgh, Cowley and so on are achievements worth noting.
Lots of housing stuff - again, on a spectrum here, sometimes stuff has happened through Solfed, mostly it's been groups that aren't explicitly anarcho but have some in.
Workplace-wise, I suppose UVW, CAIWU, IWGB are all considerably less anarcho than the IWW, but I would imagine that anarchists are still probably over-represented in at least some of them? Does anyone know if there are any anarchists involved in the electricians/construction r'n'f, or is that an example of people organising along the lines that anarchists would recommend without any actual anarchist involvement, possibly like Amazonians United in the US?
Personally, this week I got asked to check the list of members that payroll send through as paying through DOCAS versus the list of union members we have as being the same so we could spot any leavers, and I thought it was gonna be a nightmare at first cos payroll's list had the names as a single column and the union list had first name and last name separately, but then I realised I could use the concatenate function to get the union list of names in a single column as well and that made eliminating duplicates loads easier.
Anyway, the above list may not be the most impressive thing ever, but then again it's not like the last decade or two has been an uninterrupted parade of glorious triumphs for the UK working class/pro-working class politics or whatever you want to call it either?