In the three previous posts we have argued that the structure of the state causes an inherent drift towards fascism if not opposed, that anarchism is the ideology that offers the best strategies and organisational structures to build such opposition, and that other progressive ideologies are too confused and compromised to do the job. However, the current anarchist movement in the UK does not live up to this anti-fascist potential, and there are three interrelated problems that we have to overcome in order to effectively fight fascism. The first is that, while individuals and groups are often doing good work in their specific areas of interest, we often do not do the work needed to maintain anarchism as a movement.
The current anarchist movement is incredibly diverse but also incredibly fractured, with any given person or group active within it only knowing a fraction of what is going on in the wider movement based on their own personal ties. There is no universal infrastructure to allow groups and projects to spread information and gather as much support as possible. In most cases, there is little in the way of intentional support to help new people into the movement. Those interested in anarchism often struggle to find a place for themselves in the movement and end up drifting away.
We also lack the infrastructure to push anarchism into areas were it does not already exist as an organised force. Even among groups with a national reach there is rarely an attempt to directly organise new local groups in areas without an existing anarchist presence. The burden of forming new groups often falls on relatively new anarchists, and these new groups often fail or succeed based entirely on their own capabilities, without receiving much support from the wider movement. Many groups end up making their own materials, building their own organisational form, and learning from the same old mistakes without any outside support, re-inventing the wheel over and over again.
This creates a vicious circle of fragmentation; new anarchists who can not find a place for themselves in the movement or build a new group from scratch end up going into apolitical community organising, mainstream political projects, or trade unions, and end up isolated in structures that offer little potential for real change. New anarchist groups are often isolated from the wider movement because the wider movement played little role in their foundation, and so remain stuck in a position where they must put all their energy into maintaining themselves and their local projects, because they have no safety net to support them in attempting more ambitious projects.
The second of these problems is that anarchists are often very timid about announcing or advocating our anarchism. Many anarchists are involved in bottom-up, egalitarian, and liberatory projects that build solidarity in our workplaces and our communities and provide living counter-examples to the kind of isolated and paranoid existence that fascism feeds off of, but far fewer of us actively evangelise for anarchism in a way that spreads an understanding of the broader theory and strategy behind our actions. If we want to position anarchism as an answer to the failures of liberalism and socialism and a real alternative to fascism, we need to be loud and proud about what anarchism is and why people should be anarchists.
The third problem is that the anarchist movement does very little in the way of strategic planning. I do not think the current situation is much of a surprise to long-term anarchists. It has been clear for a while now that liberal capitalism was failing, that fascists would use issues like migration and transphobia as pivot points around which to turn society to the right, and that mainstream liberals and socialists would bungle the response, because of their inability to live up to their ideals or critique the features of the state that breed fascistic ideas.
Yet we have failed to really do anything about this in a coordinated manner. Some may blame divisions within the movement for this, but we have failed to organise even around topics we all agree on. Take migration as an example; from the most traditional of anarcho-communist class warriors, to the most contemporary of punk insurrectionaries, to the fluffiest of horizontal community organisers, we are united in opposition to state borders and supportive of migrants. This is a topic that the right has developed a successful narrative around which established political parties have failed to counter, and that anarchists should have been able to organise against across our differences.
These three problems have all fed into each other. The fragmentation and division within the movement has meant that we have been unable to to articulate our ideas in a coherent manner to wider society, and that we have failed to develop any kind of shared strategy to confront the far right. Our timidity in committing to an explicit anarchism has also hindered our ability to build our own movement infrastructure for better onboarding, communication, and cooperation, and our ability to think and act in a more strategic manner. Lastly, our lack of strategy has hindered our movement-building and our ability to spread anarchist ideas.
We need to start fixing these weaknesses as soon as we can, because if things continue as they are now Britain will have a fascist government sooner rather than later. We need to do everything we can to prevent this and build the capacity to resist a future British state that may be more authoritarian and violent than it has been within living memory. We need to make sure that before the election in 2029 we have the strongest movement possible, one which can resist not just locally but coordinate to resist nationally and eclipse both mainstream political parties and the far right.
The Eclipse 
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