Donn161

Anarchy for who?

A group's core aim, it's reason to exist in the first place, is effectively the most important thing for any group to work out.

I've generally found the more specific a group's vision of their own goals and activity the more effective it can be in taking action.

If you exist to write and spread a newspaper, you all know that every moment you dedicate to activity is in pursuit of the newspaper being written, printed and spread.

If you exist as a group to eliminate fascist activity in an area, every action, meeting, demonstration and pound spent needs to directly or indirectly accomplish the goal of eliminating fascist activity in an area. This doesn't mean that things like community building shouldn't be done and money only spent on weapons, because these things are necessary and useful to achieving the initial goals of the group just albeit in a longer term sense.

The question then comes, for anarchists, what do we do when the aim is "destroy capitalism and replace it with Anarcho-Communism" - it's quite a large task and you can literally go mad trying to do it all at once.

I think good texts for these questions include Give Up Activism and of course Fisher's Capitalist Realism. I think that while these texts are good for shifting anarchists modes of thinking, I want to talk more about the gritty practicalities of what we talk about when we want to build a movement to destroy capitalism and replace it with something else.


When I was 17 and wrote a far fetched grand plan on how we can win, I broke the anarchist movement down into 3 categories. First was mutual aid and community building, second was syndicalist trade unionism and the third was a militant wing charged with defending the others and building militant capacity.

One of the reasons I wrote this at the time was that I joined the Anarchist Federation and didn't really know what to do in it, I sort of understood that we gave out stickers but then also other Afed branches called demonstrations, should we call demonstrations or do hand out stickers? We also called meetings and assemblies to set up activist groups but then often they became seperate from Afed and we were left to do the next project.

I wanted clarity of purpose and wasn't getting it so I found it in antifascism. "We organise so that fascists and proponents of fascism are destroyed, primarily through physical and community direct action against them" - it was clear and obvious who our targets were, where they operated and how we went after them and won.

In one way, you could say that antifascism is activism then, similar to protesting a bridge being built just with better tactics, but opposed to bridge activists it manages to go beyond that because antifascism, unlike traditional "activism" creates a structure that is necessary for building revolution and would most likely remain in some form after a successful revolution. Peoples' militias for community self defence are a vital part of winning strategy so antifascism, when done well and isn't just a bunch of pricks running around after other pricks, becomes anarchist preconfiguration.

One thing I expressed in When Do We Blow up the Railroads is that quite a lot of people are upset right now but don't know where to put that energy into, personally I think as an anarchist you should be able to say to people "if you're angry, join X" and guide people to useful organisations and structures, but at the moment it's quite difficult to do that.

We need to ask who most anarchist groups are for, what do they aim to achieve and why.

I feel that current anarchist groups fall into several categories. Propaganda groups - groups that mainly just write and spread anarchistic materials, task-focused groups - groups that aim to take action on a specific issue (copwatch, antifascist and mutual aid groups) and then trade unions. Each, however good their work, is hard to recommend to an angry person asking "How do I fight back" unless they're talking about that specific issue like "I want to fight back against police/fascists/my boss" all groups imply a fight on a systemic level and all contribute to a systemic fight but don't make it their task specifically to change the system.

As well as this, many groups fall victim to becoming "anarchist clubs" where ingroups, styles and personal lifestyle become more important than systemic change. What I want is somewhere I can send an angry person to best use their anger. I want a programme I can show them and say "if you agree with this join us here" where we can bring people into a common space where the actions we take aren't based on random bursts of activity but are deliberately chosen based on short, medium and long term goals.

At present, anarchism in London isn't set up to build a movement in any serious sense and the sooner we can build something that you can feel comfortable inviting a friend, coworker or someone on the street to get involved in if they're angry at how things are, the better.

Specifically, I want us to start designing anarchist groups and the movement as a whole towards people on the street who may want to change things seriously as opposed to people who have an academic interest in anarchism, not only do we need to bring together anarchists but also we need to win over people to the ideas of anarchy and bring new people into the fold! Anarchy is for the people not just intellectuals!

Some more bits on Especifismo and how I feel anarchism should be organised if we're looking to win:

FARJ: Our Conception of anarchist organisation

Role of the Revolutionary Organization

Especifismo