Sorry if the title of this thread is somewhat grander than this initial post to it, but I couldn’t think of another.
I’ve been over on Urban 75 reading the “Fascists Bashed” thread and started to get pretty wound up by it. I was going to register and post there but decided I couldn’t be bothered with dealing with responses from 1) The liberal whingers, and 2) The sanctimonious ex-AFA types who are either RA/IWCA or have bought in to their “we need to drop absolutely ALL other activity and join THE organisation that is providing the REAL alternative for the working class” line. Some of us, of course, have never seen militant anti-fascism and community/workplace activism as mutually exclusive categories.
Anyway, on to the matter in hand. I can’t think of many anarchists at all who do solely anti-fascist work. Maybe there are some out there, but I don’t know them. Most of us are involved in building an alternative to both the BNP and capitalism in general for working class people to get involved in, and have been doing so for quite a few years.
We all do this in different ways, depending on whether we work, are students, unemployed, etc but as I understand it most of us seem to be involved in grassroots organising of some kind or another.
I suspect that our political opponents would ignore/rubbish these efforts regardless. However I believe that our lack of co-ordination of these efforts, and our failure to publicise them in a consistent manner, only makes it easy for them. And so they paint a picture of us anarchists as incapable of providing a revolutionary alternative for people to tap in to.
As well as this, our disorganisation doesn’t just make us appear less effective, it actually does make us less effective.
So, assuming that people reading this are anarchists who want to get stuck in to building an revolutionary alternative for working class people, here are some practical suggestions for you to mull over:
1) We need to publicise what we do more. All anarchists involved in grassroots campaigns could send reports of their activities to the main 3 feds and Freedom who then publicise them. The 3 Feds and Freedom could prioritise this sort of news (that is, stuff relevant to working class people) over and above news written for the benefit of other anarchists. They could also positively encourage submissions of this sort from aligned and non-aligned anarchists alike.
2) We should be working together more at a local level. We should not be wasting time organising big national events like Resist G8 and Mayday in central London. We should argue against others sucking people in to these dead end activities.
We should be getting organised where we live, work or study and encourage others to do the same. In a nutshell, we need to put down some roots.
There are a number of ways we can do this. The most obvious is to meet up with other anarchists in your area and see if you have enough in common to work together. If you do then you could try producing a local news sheet together – something simple and cheap like a double-sided A4 effort is enough to get the ball rolling. Dish it out locally and see what response you get. Once you are up to issue 2 or 3 you should start getting feedback from people and may even have flushed some other anarchists out of the woodwork.
To aid this, article sharing should be encouraged. Maybe enrager could facilitate this by providing an article “dump”. All articles written by the different local groups around Britain that might have more widespread appeal could go in there. In the Walthamstow Anarchist Group we have published a lot of practical anti-bailiff info that has been reproduced by others. In turn, we have nicked stuff of the WMA website. A more formal pool of articles would make this sharing easier and so hopefully encourage the growth of local publications.
3) We need to talk to each other more. Again, maybe a forum on enrager dedicated to local class based activity could be set up. Maybe there should be a once-a-year meeting of anarchists involved in this sort of work. I recently discovered that a group of anarchists in South London have been campaigning against the very same organisation that w@g has north of the river and we didn’t even know it for the best part of a year. This is crazy!
4) Join the national federation that you are closest to politically or that has a local/regional group in your area. For some reason suggesting something like this is perceived as lefty recruiting by some, whereas calls to join in with Mayday organising groups (for example) aren’t. Personally I don’t see the difference. And I actually do think that people should sign up to either Class War, SolFed or the Anarchist Federation (I’m in the latter) for very practical reasons.
This would immediately lessen a lot of the shortcomings outlined above.
To finish, I’ll just add that I’m not at all in to some kind of parochial “localism”. Often, maybe always, local issues are not separate from whats going on in the big bad world and fit in to the bigger picture in some way or another. This is why we need to be organise locally, regionally, nationally and internationally.
The firefighters strike would be an example of this. We did what local support work we could, as many other anarchists did, but there was no co-ordination/information swapping at a national level amongst anarchists which can only be a weakness.
Well that’s my piece. All constructive criticism welcome. Any additional ideas welcome.
PS - I'm pretty new to enrager so well done to those who got it up and running. An excellent forum and resource. Hopefully it will lead to more co-operation between anarchists and help spread our ideas further.
I think you make a lot of worthwhile points here but I have to take issue with the following