Fascism, anti-fascism and anarchism

I think you make a lot of worthwhile points here but I have to take issue with the following

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.

reply:

How many "readers" do the 3 national federations get? How many papers do they print and newsletters distributed? I don't think centralising the information in what I term the "old" anarchist left is the answer. People should be making their own propaganda and distrubuting it because they wrote it and want people to see it rather than some sort of collectives central distribution.

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.

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"Sucking people in to dead end activities"?! I like how you use "we should not be wasting time organising big national events", well if you are in the AF then YOU don't and are, in your own logic, not wasting your time - leave the people "wasting their time" to it!

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!

I knew it, 'cos I speak to people outside of walthamstow, that I check out other groups websites, that I make it my job to meet as many anarchists in other groups as possible.

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.

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Calling people to join organisations, get a membership and subs paid to feel like they are proper anarchists? People involve themselves in Mayday - the day of action, they don't neccesarily become a member of "Mayday federation". Big difference. Haven't you ever thought that the reason people don't join membership organisations is that they are old hat, they are hardly the most inspiring groups in the UK are they. Plus the shortcomings isn't that there isn't enuff people, or maybe it is the case for the 3 national feds, but they don't have any quality to them, they seem to be competiting with the lenist left or IWCA and not creating their own anarchist position to the world.

I'm not having an unconstructive dig for no reason, I will try and post up a more positive reply but it would be nice to extend this dialogue beyond assumptions on the anarchist movements in London. There are hundreds and hundreds of anarchists in London if not thousands the more you define the anarchist movement to being 3 national feds and a partridge in a pear tree the more you discredit the diversity of the anarchist movement in London that exists here and now.

If your around Kentish Town, come down to our social centre at 93 Fortess Road, NW5 --mind the dope smoking spanish squatter, the juggle, the clown training workshops, the middleclass wankers --- on your way in.

This looks just a little optimistic to me. Either that or there were some very big meetings I missed!

To answer earlier points about Mayday my feeling, having been involved in organising a couple of them, is that they take up too much time and effort for too little return. Also other activities that i think are more important do suffer because you don't have the time or energy for them.

I think we need to move away from doing stuff that is only of interest to other 'activists'. So that's what i've been doing.

Hi again,

But instead of discussing on these boards don't you think it's time that the AF/Solfed/Class War sat down with EF!, wombles, ayn types, the comrades from the various social centres and discuss where we are at, what we are doing and we should relate to each other. at the end of the day we are for [or should be for] creating a really exciting movement and we have, collectively in London the resources to make it happen. It took two of us to do up the Autonomie club and loads of groups use it, simple initiatives by a relatively small group of people can make a huge impact if we look at things like a movement. I don't give a shit about expanding the wombles or whatever, I want to be in a movement that is worth fighting for.

anyway we have this excellent social centre that might be a good place to hold such discussions or any discussions for that matter. Lets give it a go.

There used to be - in the early -mid 90s there were people in the Anarchist movement who lived, ate and breathed anti-fascism. My god they were boring! We used to joke in London Class War that if you asked comrades from elesewhere to come down to London to help with an action, the only way you could guarantee they would come was if you lied that the BNP would be doing a counter-demo!

Now of course things have gone to far the other way (as tends to happen) and people are suddenly waking up to the problem. They will wake up even more when the BNP have 100 councillors!

I think a strong anti-fascist movement will come out of a strong anarchist movement. And I think we are some way for getting that, certainly compared to some European cities.

At the moment everything has gone to extremes - the ex- AFA people who consider the IWCA THE ONLY ALTERNATIVE and condemn everything else, to the extreme of the Searchlight/Unite Against Fascism nonsense, where all that matters is a cross-community appeal to vote Labour, or if not, anyone who is not a Nazi. Is there one person in Britain who would be put off voting BNP when told Diane Abbott is a signatory to Unite Against Fascism?

We need to avoid the extremes of our own. Anarchists are very good at finding reasons not to work with each other, from citing obscure regulations of International bodies virtually no one has ever heard of, to old personal disputes that people are not big enough to put behind them.

I do think a class based approach is essential though, because the majority of people voting BNP are staunchly working class. The weakness of fascism is nearly always its cross-class appeal, fascist organisations always end up disappointing their working class members - there are real points to be made here, if we can be bothered to do so.

But doing this requires focus. Something the movement sorely lacks.

Hmmm, well regarding Freedom, we don't really want to prioritise the actions of anarchists really- we kinda want to cover general news of people using DA to improve their lives, with strikes, rent strikes that kinda thing..

But I do agree that @s should publicise their activities more - particular the nat feds who are very bad at that! Cos they and their members do do loads of stuff, but everyone thinks they do FA

It might be worth them electing someone who could compile monthly reviews of activities and advertise them on IMC, a-infos etc. etc.

I think fora like indymedia are good places for that, and stuff like the local forums here (as the Wombles have been doing), and the enrager newswire.

We're trying to do this now - the WAG anti-bailiff info together with the red+black club's anti-bullying article and other things are going up in the Organise section, and we want more articles for th e thought section, explaining anarchist/libertarian ideas about certain subjects (crime, immigration etc.) clearly and succintly - I know wag have done some of these so it'd be cool if you could email us some "wot anarchists fink" (admin AT enrager.net ).

Well we don't want too many forums, cos then discussion dies - but there are specific local forums for each area, which we hoped would be used for stuff like this

Hopefully yeah! Welcome to the boards.

Re: mayday and big events - I don't think you can deny that they have helped anarchism regain a lot of limelight recently. I mean I know that pretty much everyone who joined AYN (which was up to about 70 nationally) did so following j18, maydays etc. OK a lot of those people have drifted off now, but there are still a good few of us around - and lots of people have heard of anarchism now where they wouldn't have done a few years ago. So I do think we've gained a lot from them

As i still don't seem to fit enough nerd-time into my day I'm going to have to go back a few posts and respond to some things there. A point was made that membership organisations are 'old hat'. This is of course true. There have been anarchist organisations for over a hundred years. But just organising in affinity groups without a defined membership is nothing new either so i'm not sure what the point is. When you join a membership organisation you don't get tatooed or branded you know, and there's nothing to stop you leaving if you decide your time is better spent elsewhere. Not having a formal membership and structure has caused problems with mayday, like when RTS packed a meeting (with people never seen before or since in mayday organising) and more than one person has complained about the old 'tyranny of structurelessness'.

Then again, perhaps the next thing mentioned, paying membership subs, is the important point. Again, i'm not quite sure why people object to this, unless they're just being tight. Though it's funny how people who can only cough up a few coppers when the hats passed round never seem short of beer when they hit the pub! Whether we like it or not, in the current society we need money to get things done. So we need to raise some. Asking each person involved in a group to contribute something seems to me a very reasonsonable way of raising money to me. Better than relying on rich backers

As to the idea that all groups that could broadly be termed libertarian/anarchist should be talking to each other, well, fair enough, we probably have a lot of common ground. But events like Bradford '98 and the Mayday 2000 conference didn't seem to make very much difference in the long run. OK, so we all had a 'group hug' and were a bit more friendly when we bumped into each other, but without any organisational structure being set up nothing much changed and i don't see how a new general get together would be any different. Similarly, the point that an individual can keep up to date with what the entire anarchist movement is doing by regularly checking out websites and going to lots of different group's meetings isn't very satisfactory. Not many people are going to have the time, energy or resources to do this, and anyway wouldn't it be better if we could collectively work together to keep each other informed of what's going on.

I think anarchists are very widely spread in what we want to do. It's amazing we manage the degree of unity we've already got... An 'organisation' by itself won't sort us out. We need to address the lack of common activity in the here and now.

Plus there's too much worry over the need for all anarchists to work together. I think that many self styled anarchists are not very useful people to work with, or only on certain issues.

Let's establish short term, achievable goals tha will benefit us ALL and work towards them. maybe this will deliver an all-islands anarchist co-ordination, or maybe it will just get that one thing done. Either way we'll be better off.

For example, we'll all benefit from anarchist spaces at the ESF; we could all contribute to that...

It's a short-term, achievable project that we could all work on, and so is covered by your initial points 1 and 3. It would help to achieve greater publicity for anarchist activities, so that answers your latest posts point number 2.

It's one example; I'm not pretending that it would help counter the rise of the BNP, other short-term projects should be devoted towards that. The most obvious would be sustained work with residents'/tenants' associations. I think the IWCA are the best example of a group offering a political alternative to the BNP, and I think that anarchist activity has to learn from that example. Too often we jump from one issue to another.