L&S disbands

To be fair, thats a decent and reflective blog post.

Looks like there's a vacancy for British section of Anarkismo......

Is CA too ultra-left tho? <3

Nah there's a few countries with more than one group in the Anarkismo network. The network doesn't have 'sections'.

The suspicion they received in the IWW had nothing to do with their relation to other anarchist groups, but more to do with the fact they were pushing what many people looked at as business union practice and perspective.

Honestly, good riddance to a joke of an organization that was despised and ridiculed by most of the English speaking milieu they tried to identify with initially (platformism, Anarkismo).

To echo Juan. Good riddance to bad rubbish. I was a member for 14 months at the start (I left in Nov 2009) but over the last two years they'd been doing things like trying to take over organisations by using tactics like packing meetings. (In case you don't use the same terminology in the US that refers to turning up on mass at meetings that you normally don't turn up to to vote through your groups proposals and elect your members into positions.) They did this both with LCAP and the London IWW.

Indeed the back story to the IWGB/IWW split has a lot to do with L&S fucking around with the London IWW in November last year.

All that said I do find the way people talk abut L&S quite funny. Like dastardly cunning trots. When actually they are a 10-20 naieve anarchos led my someone who is a complete loon. They really have next to nothing in common with trotskyism.

the get called trots because they act like trots, by doing things like packing meetings etc

A balance sheet of the group would be a pretty poor read. Not because they didn't do much, on the contrary, they played a massively disgusting role in virtually everything they touched. And I guess when the core of an alleged platformist group is composed of union bureaucrat's, people defending sex pests, Scottish nationalists, fantasists and the socially inept, there is not enough coherence to maintain your own existence on the peripheries of the anarchist scene.

I will leave it for others more savvy in the facts to explain their disgraceful role in the IWW, but I will happily recount the details of how their members sabotaged efforts at joint workplace activity and tried to squeeze SF out of the Berns solidarity work in London. Snowball/K can put whatever spin he likes on it, L&S's raison d'être was sectarianism, has can be amply can be shown. I doubt there is libertarian group going in the UK who have anything good to say about them, the trots is another question.

But what I find the most detestable of all, is the crass stupidity of the WSM and Anarkismo. Not only did members of WSM help with the initiation of this wretched group and then further help them on their way. They knew they were fucking loons and associated with them for four years!

At one time a lot of people on this side of the Irish sea used to have good things to say about the WSM. Well thats pretty much evaporated after this little opportunistic episode.

I can't really comment on the rest of your post, since while I had fleeting involvement with L & S in its early days I later drifted away for various reasons (more personal than political) and only got the odd update since. However, this last point I do find highly questionable. Just speaking personally anyway, I know plenty of folks who are fairly positive about the WSM who have never even heard of L & S, and of those who have, there still seems to be a fair bit of goodwill even if they might have criticisms in this regard.

Admittedly I don't have a huge amount of contact with the wider anarcho scene so could be completely wrong on this one, but my impression isn't quite as drastic as this...

Yeah but that's meaningless crap. That's like saying "they get called trots because they act like trots, by doing things like relying on oxegen to stay alive etc"

Every authoritarian organization packs meetings and does shitty things like that.

Breaking news: The Monday club packed a meeting of the conservative party, thereby revealing themselves to believe in the principles of Marxist-Leninism as understood by Leon Trotsky, the fourth international and the groups that are descendants of this tendency.

Yeah but in fairness, that had more to do with 1. not knowing they were loons until after about 18 months. 2. Some people not thinking they were loons (all of whom have since left the WSM), for an account of this see the James O'Brien text. 3. The WSM losing interest in international anarcho stuff because of all the stuff happening in Ireland from Oct 2008-2009 in Ireland and 4. then going into melt down from 2009-2011 and losing most of the members who cared about international stuff.

Finally, I don't think

is an accurate term for someone who works as a bottom of the tier union organiser. Being a union organiser is a really, really shit job.

Some stuff on activists getting employed as union organisers here:
http://libcom.org/library/unions-new-grounds-when-work-mate-becomes-clie...
http://libcom.org/library/interview-german-union-organiser-prol-position
http://www.wsm.ie/c/organising-tg-union-uk

trots are the largest group of authoritarians on the left, so the first think people will think of when they see leftists acting that way. torys don't take part in activism, at least not where anarchists/communists would encounter them

Exactly

The only bits of all this I can really speak about is the involvement of L&S members in the IWW switching to a delegages' convention. I only know of two L&Sers who were part of that. I've fallen out of touch with them personally but I always liked them as indviduals. Others may have been but I dunno. I worked heavily on the effort to get hte IWW adopt a delegate convention. As I remember it (and I'm not 100% sure my memory is right here, I'd be interested in hearing more from other people who were part of this effort) the initial push for a delegate convention came from UK-based IWW members including but not limited to the two L&Sers I mentioned.

The push for a delegate convention was a good thing for the IWW in my opinion for a variety of reasons including that it facilitated more equal input to the organization and it made branches more important in organizational decision making (because the old system, general assemblies, dramatically reduced the input of people outside the country hosting the assembly, almost always the US, reduced the input of anyone who lived far away from the assembly site, and increased the influence of individuals, because assembly was basically a rule by whoever happened to who up). So their contribution to the shift to delegates convention was a good contribution to the IWW. That said, I found the L&S cats, one person in particular, were so polemical and harsh in dealings with other IWW members that they actively made it harder to get the convention proposal passed because the convention proposal was associated with this intense polemical communication style that put a lot of people off and created a lot of needless arguments in the IWW. I took this to be an issue of individual personality rather than organizational culture of L&S or a real plan withing L&S, but with groups as small as this it's hard not to define by their louder members. I also was hopeful for a long time that this could be dealt with constructively, that the polemical aggressive thing could be toned down and whatnot. I felt like there was often a polemical counter-response which increased the general level of nastyness, where someone would respond to inappropriate/questionable behavior with their own inappropriate/questionable behavior ("that guy's a jerk" "you call people jerks because you're a jerk" "no YOU'RE a jerk" "no YOU ARE FUCK YOU" "NO. FUCK. YOU." etc etc). My sense was that inappropriate responses fed inappriopriate behavior and that if the responses could be chilled out then everything might be chilled out. That proved wrong.

I also don't think this is really true:

I think a lot of the bad blood didn't have all that much to do with the political content of their ideas. I think a lot of the ideas L&S members put out have some currency in parts of the IWW (emphasis on dual carding, focus on key industries etc) and have currency in parts of N American anarchist organizations that some IWW members have more time for than they did for L&S. And those ideas get some traction with some IWW members who aren't in anarchist political organizations. I think the bad blood and suspicion that IWW members (at least outside the UK, I dunno what people thought in the UK) had was because of how L&S or their louder/more visible members acted interpersonally within the organization. They also were around at a time when a lot of people were beginning to move against similar sorts of unpleasant behavior (stuff that made the IWW more disfunctional) on the part of other IWW members in the US, and I think a lot of people were like "fuck all these people who just like to shout at other IWW members" regardless of political views, which fed the suspicion of L&S. (To the degree that people in the IWW knew the L&S-IWW members were in L&S; I think a lot of people were suspicious of the individuals and/but didn't really know about L&S.)

Well, this is good news if about four years overdue.

As to the sentence "the world in 2012 looks a lot different to that of 2008", that nearly made me LOL. The world is pretty much exactly the same now as it was then, albeit there are new iPhones.

The only reason it probably looks significantly different to them is that their initial arrogance has been shown up by their organisational failure and a few years on this has probably become obvious.

All I can say is about time.
They acted as an entryist group, trying to gain control of organisations through block voting, packing meetings and so on.

I never realised they were meant to be anarchists though - several members I knew were avowdly not anarchists. They also seemed to want to avoid using black and red in the IWW as they're associated with anarchism.
That and being authoritarian...

It would be interesting to see a proper balance sheet of L&S that wasn't the usual 'wah wah we hate them stuff' typical of the British anarchist scene. We had pretty much lost contact with them around the start of 2011 and they had dropped out of what was always a very limited active role in Anarkismo around then. The motions they put in the London meeting of Euro Anarkismo around the start of 20111 had been heavily modified, mostly by us and that may be why they lost interest, I don't know. At that point it was clear they didn't really have much in common with the rest of the Anarkismo groups anymore and from the bits I did hear about them since I was wondering whether it was worth the effort to suggest the initiation of removing them from the network (and decided that this would be far too much effort).

With the AWG ( http://struggle.ws/awg.html ) we were able to produce some quite detailed analysis of where we thought they had gone wrong, pretty much the only such work that was done. But we had quite close contacts with them in terms of exchanging Internal Bulletins and sending observers to pretty much all of each others conferences including the final one. Plus the AWG were much more visible in terms of publications but also explaining their thinking in detail. We got to a couple of L&S conferences (I was at the Birmingham one about two years back) but otherwise had very limited access to what they were doing or thinking so we are probably not in the same position this time around. GS if you are interested in working on something though I'd also have a go, it would be useful I think to look at what they tried to do, what worked, what didn't and why it didn't.

As to the comments about WSM above. Given the basis L&S formed on it would be very strange if we didn't seek to have close relations with them. Yes if you are in another organisation that might prove difficult to accept, especially given the ultra sectarian nature of the organised UK anarchist scene. L&S started with the involvement of some very good anarchists and the right ideas in terms of a new departure but it certainly went off the rails in terms of practise & politics. In an ideal world we would probably have moved to reduce or end those relations 18 or so months back once the departure of L&S from anything that resembled our anarchism became clearer. We have been a little too busy with internal reorganisation and the crisis to even discuss them in that period though.

Yes, the initial arrogance was manifested in stuff like one of them predicting at their launch that they would be twice the size of the AF within six months. Of course over that period the AF grew quite a lot, whilst L&s remained where it was.
From a strictly platformist view, they did totally the wrong thing by
1. Not producing any publication whatsoever, nor stickers or posters or other propaganda
2. Having virtually no public presence (apart from desultory stuff on their website)- no public meetings, open day schools etc.
All the other platformist groups have always had a public face and so it was a deviation from their norm to act as a secretive, manipulative group inside larger groups
On top of that was various L&S members involvement in the SSP and then one member being given leave of absence to work inside the SNP.

Andrew F , can you pinpoint what these "right ideas" were that L&S have, please. And I think it is rather harsh accusing the organised anarchist movement of being "ultrasectarian" when it was quite obvious from early on that L&S behaved in a manipulative way, packing meetings and attempting to capture positions in larger groups. This is not ultrasectarianism but an understandable response to such behaviour.

Yeah, the "ultra-sectarianism of the British organised anarchist scene" accusation seems a bit odd to me.. given that there are two other organised British anarchist groups - AF and SF - who work together frequently, holding joint meetings, attending each others protests, have internal discussion about how work more closely with each other etc.. where's the 'ultra-sectarianism' here? To me it seems like the two main British anarchist organisations didn't like L&S (for reasons others have gone into above).. and you can't just put that down to sectarianism, imo..

Anyone for a game of 'rackets' ? .....

Sorry I just coudn't resist the temptation.

I think the ultra sectarianism can be seen in how the AF and SolFed react to any new group.

For evidence go back over threads on Praxis, WAG, ALARM, Plan C, Collective action, The Commune, the WOMBLES, early L&S, Feminist Fightback etc. etc. (And this is not to mention specific issue groups/networks like NCAFC, Climate Camp.)

Now some of those groups were shit, some weren't/aren't but its definitely the case that the AF and SolFed react badly to new groups emerging and cutting into their territory.

Its not a big point and I don't think getting defensive or accusatory is particularly useful or interesting. I just want to help you understand why Andrew might have made that comment.

(And for clarity I think "ultrasectarianism" is ridiculous rhetoric. Its more "who the fuck do these upstarts think they are? Don't they know we've been doing this since they were knee high?" than ultra-anything.)

Yeah I wouldn't mind writing something on that. I could use a long discussion document I wrote assesing the failings of L&S while I was a member and my resignation letter as starters. I'll see if I can find them and forward them on to you. But I want to do a balance sheet of The Commune more. I think it was a more interesting initiative and explaining what happened briefly would probably be of more use to 'the movement'. And I haven't got around to it. And again I want to make a contribution to the debate on what happened to the WSM 2009-2011. L&S is interesting mainly in its novelty, it was a very, very odd organisation.

Ha ha maybe ultra was a bit strong but somewhat prompted byJoeMaguires post

and my experience of being alternately blanked and scowled at by some members of those two at the Anarchist Bookfair each year. And whatever that ultra weird thing was at the post bookfair do in the laneway outside Freedom 3? years back - still not sure if I imagined that or not. As I was hammered at the time and ended up at that insane rave in Dalston all night I remember that as a sort of Fellowship of the Ring moment with W in the role of Strider.

But yes ' dominated by people prone to overblown sectarian rhetoric rather than analysis despite being very capable of the later' would probably be a more reasonable way of putting it. Also a kind of mini me version of one of the major problems L&S had in terms of the way individual members can sometimes come to define how everyone sees an organisation.

Collective Action are critical of national liberation support in the Anarkismo editorial statement, so i don't see that happening.

But anyway, wasn't the problem with L&S's behaviour not that they were harsh in their dealings, but that they were unnecessarily harsh and too eager to employ these tactics. I don't see a moral issue with packing meetings if it is to defend an organisation from stalinists or trotskyists seizing/forming an executive, but using them in an organisation like the IWW was just plain stupid. Softer methods respecting the internal democracy and accepting initial compromises on their positions could have allowed them to win far more sustainable influence without offending the rest of the IWW, not to mention it would have been less turmoil for the IWW overall.

All this said, i don't actually agree with the political line of L&S (specifically with regard to the IWW).

And really, for all the talk about being tactical and beating rival tendencies, they lacked basic sense for refusing to import the Organiser Training 101 to the UK IWW. By doing so they handed it on a plate to SolFed, and it has since been one of our most useful assets driving recruitment and further development toward a workplace focus.

This is also a big point.

George, with the greatest respect, this is basically all completely untrue. You're conflating rows over the internet with real-life relationships. Most of the groups there have had decent real-world relationships with SF-AF members, some even with dual-membership or at least AF/SF involvement at some point.. some of those groups are so new there hasn't been any interaction beyond libcom and one I've honestly never heard of (Praxis?).

That's not to say there weren't threads on libcom rowing about it.. but there are also threads on libcom of AF and SF members rowing, fuck, even of SFers rowing with each other.. I don't think this means anything more than "people row on libcom"..

But like you say, its not a big point but just thought I'd put across the point from the other side of the 'ultra-sectarian' divide..