The Eclipse

  • FOUR FUTURES PART IV – COLLAPSE

    COLLAPSE

    The last possible future we have to think about is where there is some level of collapse in many of our political and economic institutions. This does not necessarily mean a total collapse in which both the state and capitalist businesses no longer exist, but one in which both the central government and big corporations abandon large swathes of society, and many people are no longer able to get stable wage work, nor access consumer markets to buy the things they need, nor rely on state welfare to provide for them. For most of us, society as we know it today would collapse, while the rich and powerful would retreat to their own strongholds of power and profit.

    This may sound extreme, but if we start thinking in terms of decades instead of years, this is a future we must take seriously. For example, if both the 2029 and 2034 elections lead to business-as-usual governments, the social fabric of society will continue to weaken as more and more people fall into isolation and poverty, and a series of economic shocks caused by a worsening environmental situation and geopolitical conflicts, could tip society over into some form of collapse before 2039. Another possibility would be an unsuccessful reformist Labour or Green government elected in 2029 that leads to a runaway far-left social movement, which then leads to a fascist Conservative or Reform government being elected in 2034 that causes widespread economic and social destruction in attempts to destroy this social movement, which leads to a society in 2039 that has collapsed in many places.

    Collapse is also not a binary state that happens instantly or everywhere all at once. Some parts of British society could be said to be already collapsing whilst others are thriving. The government is likely to try to prevent the City of London from collapsing for as long as it possibly can. On the other hand, there are many small post-industrial towns or vulnerable neighbourhoods that already feel like the state and capitalism have abandoned them to their own devices, outside of occasionally sending the police in to keep them in line.

    Anarchists can build mutual aid movements and other forms of bottom-up provision in the gaps where the state and capitalism retreat, providing infrastructure that proves anarchist ideas through action. Mutual aid is one of the key organising pillars of anarchist movements, and there are already bottom-up organisations such as Common Ground Collective and Mutual Aid Disaster Relief in the United States that we can look to for ideas suitable for even the harshest of conditions. But we cannot assume that doing this alone will be enough to build a movement that can overthrow the state and capitalism, as it is possible that we may end up simply filling in the gaps for them by building key infrastructure from the bottom up, ultimately stabilising society so that the state and capitalism can continue to exploit people, without having to provide any services themselves. Anarchist mutual aid projects must be accompanied with anarchist politics that spread an understanding as to why the state and capitalism have abandoned people and why we should abolish both, and should also be ready to deny their services en masse, ideally to the state and capitalism specifically, as a form of general strike.

    This is especially important in the case of society facing some kind of general collapse. In such a future, there is no guarantee that, even if the state and capitalism retreat from the lives of most people, people will replace those institutions with anything more liberatory. In times of stress, people are likely to fall back on the organisational forms and social assumptions they already know, so we would probably see society shatter into a patchwork of smaller authorities that continue exploitation and oppression locally, until one of those authorities can re-unify Britain under centralised rule, or Britain is conquered by an imperial power from the outside. Often, when a state falls, central authority is replaced with decentralised warlordism that then re-solidifies into up to a few imperial states. As the classic historic example of this, when the Western Roman Empire fell, it did not usher in a new age of freedom. Instead, it left behind a decentralised patchwork of feudal kingdoms which then slowly centralised into the early modern empires that often looked back to Rome as an inspiration, not as a warning.

    If there is a general collapse, anarchist ideas and structures will need to be well-distributed across society, if we want to ensure that what gets built out of that collapse is not just a more decentralised form of authority. We need to be building our structures in as many places as we can as the state and capitalism retreat, and we need to make our politics explicit so that people understand and trust anarchism as a complete alternative framework to hierarchical rule.

    WHAT NEEDS TO BE DONE

    To bring everything we have discussed together, there are a few things that anarchists in the British Isles need to be prepared for in order, to be ready to deal with the possible futures we might face after the next election:

    1. Regardless of what happens, even if it is business as usual, we must embed ourselves more in our communities and workplaces, both demonstrating our ideas through practice and directly advocating for them. Without this, other forces in society like fascists or left-wing reformists will be able to organise in the gaps left by the state and capitalism instead of us. We must also be prepared for more and more areas to open up for us to do this, if the state and capitalism start to retreat due to internal failures.
    1. We must attempt to combat reformism in all left-wing social movements that develop. Where possible, we ourselves should build social movements from the ground up that are immunised against reformism and hierarchy. Part of this involves making demands for things that reformism cannot possibly provide, such as complete worker control of their workplaces, directly-democratic community control of infrastructure, the abolition of the institution known as work, or the abolition of the police and prisons and their replacement with anarchist alternatives, and convincing people of those demands. If we only demand higher wages, better state welfare or real equality before the law, then there is a high chance that we will be outflanked by a progressive reformist government, that can provide those things without undermining the state and capitalism.
    1. We must be prepared to survive extreme political repression. Any anarchist movement that is successful is going to push social movements beyond demanding reform to the point that reform is no longer a successful tactic to manage social unrest. When this happens, the only tool left in the state and capitalism’s toolbox of social control is brute oppression: violence, indoctrination and surveillance. We must harden our own organisations and social movements against widespread surveillance and extreme violence, to the point that they can defeat any attempt to subjugate them. Then we can start to build towards a fifth future that we often do not dare to think about any more: social revolution.

    We expect that none of this will be new to most anarchists, who already agree with these three main points in theory. However, having a good strategy is only a necessary first step, and it is useless if we do not build the capacity to implement it. It should be noted that the early-20th-century anarchist movements were far more powerful and well-embedded in society than our current movement, and they were almost completely destroyed by the one-two punch of repression by fascists and Leninists, and reform by liberals and social democrats. We are in a far more precarious position right now and we must quickly, significantly improve what we are doing if we want to survive the possible futures we might face.

    We must also remain flexible in the face of different possible futures. The security culture that is appropriate for a future of severe repression might be a hindrance in a future where anarchists need to be more open and public-facing in order to influence a left-wing social movement. We need to be ready for many different challenges, be aware of the trade-offs we are making with our tactics at any given moment, and be able to react to shifting circumstances.

    If there is one other point that we want to drive home, it is this: whether we are facing a future of business as usual, reformism, oppression or outright collapse, we cannot assume that things will automatically go our way. We cannot (just) count on impersonal historic forces without us actively spreading anarchist ideas, ways of relating to each other, tactics, strategies and structures, and obtaining spaces and resources. The state and capitalism will happily keep doing what they are doing until they destroy society, unless there is an active attempt to prevent them from doing so. People will not automatically see the limits of reformism unless we explicitly persuade them. Oppression will not breed more anarchists unless we offer anarchism as the most effective way to fight oppression. If society collapses, it is likely to collapse into a mess of smaller authorities unless we demonstrate a better alternative. Liberation will not happen automatically: we must fight for it and eclipse the state, capitalism, fascism, and all rulers.

    WE ARE THE ECLIPSE

  • FOUR FUTURES PART III – REPRESSION

    SUCCESSFUL POLITICAL REPRESSION

    Possibly the worst future that anarchists might face after the next election is one of competent political repression. This would be a government that, looking at the current problems that are causing unrest, does not attempt to relieve any of those problems, but instead attempts to repress the unrest they cause through:

    • Implementing widespread surveillance so that enemies can be tracked
    • Progressively increasing violence
    • Deceiving people into supporting the regime, capitalism, etc. or to turn their unrest on each other, through prolific propaganda and the widespread indoctrination of the youth and possibly political prisoners.

    Such a future can easily follow one of failed reform, where a government moves to destroy a social movement that has escaped their control.

    This is the kind of oppression that helped break the anarchist movement in the first half of the 20th century. This kept it suppressed in many places through most of the latter half, and we are still recovering from this today.

    This could come as the result of an openly fascist Reform or Conservative government, but could also come from something like a Labour government that refuses to reform, attempting to maintain the British state in the face of increasing systematic problems. At time of writing, this seems to be the road that the current Labour government is heading down, although their recent election defeats may change their strategy in various ways.

    It is important to note that, looking at historic examples, such oppression has often involved a variety of non-state and semi-state political organisations as well as formal governmental and private security forces. Fascist authoritarian governments especially have often relied on right-wing street movements to impose their political goals on society, when the bureaucratic structure of the state was not responsive enough for the job or when state agents were not yet fully on board with fascist policies. If we expect to face competent political repression from a far-right party like Reform UK, we must be ready to face paramilitary forces that do not even pretend to stay within the limits of the law.

    In terms of state repression, we must expect that many of the ways we communicate and organise will become far more dangerous:

    • Aboveground anarchist and anarchist-adjacent organisations may be entirely banned, whether in law or informally (whether enforced by the state, non-state actors or both).
    • Many of the tactics we rely on may be made illegal, or be confounded by paramilitary groups regardless of their legality.
    • The internet may become increasingly censored and surveilled in ways that make communication, organising or even simply reading radical texts online risky or impossible.

    Against such authoritarianism, anarchists will have to fall back to underground methods of organisation, communication and resistance.

    Such a turn to oppression will also affect how the state and capitalism approach propaganda and indoctrination of the youth. They will likely find it hard to maintain the pretence of pretending to care about human freedom and wellbeing, ideas which can we can argue to anarchism from, and will have to elevate other ideas, like nationalism, white supremacy and patriarchy, which are completely incompatible with anarchist ideas. The general cultural environment that we operate in will likely become hostile to anarchism, even outside of institutional oppression.

    For anarchism to have the best chance of surviving such a future, we must start preparing for it now. Any competent repressive government will make use of not only the information it can gather while in power, but also whatever information previous governments have collected on its opponents, meaning that lax security in the present will get people imprisoned, exiled or killed far into the future. The kind of organisational forms, technical skills and equipment necessary to survive such totalising political repression is best developed beforehand instead of waiting for repression to strike and having to develop it on the fly, where any mistake could mean disaster. However, we must also remain aware that unnecessary paranoia about security can make anarchism unwelcoming, and hence prevent its growth as a movement in times when such high security is not necessary.

    We should look to places like Russia, Belarus, Turkey, Iran and China for ideas on how a competent repressive government might attempt to deal with resistance. Comrades from those countries have important things to say about operating under a surveillance/police state, what could have been done differently as those countries became more oppressive, and what they wish they had prepared for beforehand.

    It is important to note that such an oppressive government will not automatically lead to a revolutionary response against its domination. People are just as likely, if not more so, to yearn for a return to mild social democracy or liberalism as they are to reject all hierarchy and turn in an anarchist direction. Many of the most repressive states in recent history successfully suppressed radicalism and, when they did finally fall, those societies transitioned to generic capitalist liberal democracy instead of abolishing the state and capitalism in a social revolution. Because of this, it is important that anarchists both work out how to survive under such oppression and spread our ideas, so that resistance might head in a truly libertarian direction.

    It is also important to note that all competent repressive governments have historically ultimately ended up as victims of their own success: they suppressed internal opposition, but in doing so, they suppressed the internal forces that might have held the leadership accountable to basic standards of diligence, competence and sanity. Such oppression has always led to a ruling class that became increasingly corrupt, negligent and detached from reality. Competent repression lays the groundwork for oppressors to become incompetent, and for the system to collapse or be overthrown.

    This future is also heavily contingent on how technology develops and is implemented. Ubiquitous surveillance and advanced data analysis could open the possibility of a permanently totalitarian state that makes organised internal rebellion nearly impossible. However, such systems could instead accelerate the collapse of the state and capitalism by removing some of the pressures that prevent them from giving in to their most self-harming tendencies. Likewise, technological development can open up new avenues of resistance just as it makes old tactics harder. This development and implementation is itself something that is not pre-determined, and can be influenced by what we do now both in terms of organising against state surveillance, and developing technologies that enable resistance.

    FAILED POLITICAL REPRESSION 

    While authoritarian governments like to project an air of hard-headed competence, this is often more a myth than a reality.

    Often, political repression is incompetent from the very start and fails to achieve the ends of those imposing it. However, just because such repression is not effective does not mean that it is not also horrific in terms of the suffering that it causes. Indeed, an incompetent repressive government may end up causing far more harm than a competent one, as it uses increasing amounts of violence in a vain attempt to achieve its aims.

    Such incompetence can take many forms:

    • Using enough oppression to anger people without using enough to bring them into obedience.
    • Using violence or surveillance without doing the necessary propaganda work to justify it.
    • Using so much violence that resistance becomes a necessity for survival.
    • Using violence or propaganda/indoctrination without having the surveillance apparatus, or understanding of society, to ensure that it is used against the right targets.

    Successful anarchist preparation for a repressive government make it head towards these kinds of failures. Ensuring that our movements are not easily identified or understood by hierarchies, ensuring that the technologies and techniques to evade repression are widespread, and embedding a broader culture of resistance and disobedience into British society are all ways to make political repression harder to use successfully.

    Such incompetence is also likely to show itself in more than just how the state and capitalism deploy repression, but how they run other parts of society. Political repression does not solve social problems, but only covers them up by suppressing obvious discontent and resistance, so that they fester under the surface. For instance:

    • Workplaces and infrastructure are likely to be run in a negligent or corrupt way.
    • Services that not only make people’s lives better, but are key to keeping society running from the perspective of its rulers, will likely be underfunded and mismanaged.

    A future in which we suffer under a government that is both incompetent and repressive is the one most likely to lead to deeper social collapse.

    Such a future is likely to be one in which anarchists must be well-prepared to deal with severe oppression, but in which there are also gaping vulnerabilities in that system of oppression that anarchists can exploit to resist. Failed political repression is likely to see bottom-up movements of resistance that grow to oppose it, which anarchists can launch, take part in, and propagandise in. Failed repression is also likely to create gaps in social provision which anarchists can build mutual aid organisations in, that can act as both a logistical backbone for resistance, and the seeds of a future libertarian society.

    But again, we cannot assume that these movements will be naturally revolutionary without anarchists arguing for our position. Left to their own devices, they are just as likely to be movements simply for “good governance” or a return to liberal capitalism. The failures of a repressive government will create openings for change, but the direction of that change will be determined by whoever can best advocate for their ideas and structures and prove them in practice.

  • FOUR FUTURES PART II – REFORM

    SUCCESSFUL PROGRESSIVE REFORM

    An approach that a future government might take to deal with the current systemic problems is to actually implement some set of limited reforms that improve the lives of everyday people, defuse some of their ill will towards the current system, and help reproduce a functional and productive society in the long run that can continue to be controlled and exploited. Such an attempt is most likely to be made by the Greens, a Labour party that has been captured by a resurgent left-wing faction, or some other left-wing party.

    However, this is easier said than done. Under normal conditions, governments are more accountable to powerful businesses and their own internal technocratic bureaucracy than they are to everyday people, and both of these have interests that conflict with the needs and desires of everyday people. Capitalists are driven to make profit by competition in the market, and technocrats are driven to build power by competition within organisations. This often leads to exploitation and oppression of those at the bottom of society in order to create that profit and power, and often these drives end up being quite short-termist in how they manifest: when your social position is defined by profit and power, what is the point of trying to build a stable society tomorrow if doing so comes at the cost of going bankrupt or being thrown out of power today? Because of this, most governments, regardless of ideology, end up protecting these short-term interests because they need the co-operation of capitalists and technocrats to function, even if this leads to social disintegration in the long term.

    Therefore, there are two ways that a reformist government can get its reforms through:

    • It can work out a set of reforms that are agreeable to enough of the capitalists and technocrats in society that they can pass them on those merits alone. Such reforms are often very limited and end up looking more like business as usual.
    • If a force outside of capitalism and the state’s bureaucracy can create enough of a short-term threat to cause many capitalists and technocrats to fear that they might completely lose their positions of power and privilege, then more serious reforms can be pushed through to stabilise the system.

    Such a threat can be external, such as a threat from another state or the immediate risk of a natural disaster, and cannot be controlled by any political party. Due to those pressures previously mentioned, for a party like the Greens or Labour to push through major reforms, they would need to be combined with a social movement outside of capitalism and the state which can apply enough pressure to make reform look like a better option than ignoring the social movement and risking a revolution. If we look at the golden age of social democracy in Europe, we see it came out of a combination of these threats: the fear of an external Soviet superpower and the fear of the kind of internal radical workers’ movements that had launched revolutions in several countries provided the motivation for many European states to build strong welfare states, as a way of defusing internal tensions and guaranteeing the loyalty of their citizens.

    For anarchists, successful reform offers a mixed bag of opportunities and challenges. The limited changes brought about by a competent government might start to restore the faith of many in the system in a way that undermines our ideas and desires for a better way of living. On the other hand, once people start to see that change is possible, it will become easier to argue that we can use that possibility to push for even more radical change. To face such a reforming government, we need a strategy that encourages people to look beyond immediate survival and make more ambitious demands that are not possible within the bounds of reform. It will be important to emphasise and argue for changes that undermine the very system of the state and capitalism itself, and so cannot be implemented by any government. For example, the government may be able to accept better working conditions or a less brutal border regime as the price of social peace, but it can never accept full worker control of the means of production, or the abolition of the police and controlled borders.

    FAILED PROGRESSIVE REFORM

    While social movements can be a necessary tool for a far-sighted political elite to push through reforms that are needed for the long-term stability of the system, they are also potentially dangerous. These social movements have to be far enough outside the state’s and capitalism’s systems of power that they can threaten them, but also integrated enough that they can still be controlled and even disbanded when they have done what their leaders desire. This was the ultimate fate of the mainstream workers’ movement in much of Europe, which saw much of its bottom-up infrastructure outside of the state undermined and then destroyed, when they became no longer useful to left-wing political parties.

    However, the fact that such social movements need to be somewhat outside of the system of the state and capitalism and powerful enough to genuinely threaten it means that they have the capacity to break with any political party that is attempting to use them, and push for more radical reforms, or even revolution. If a social movement develops a new elite with competing interests to the existing elite, as was the case with the Leninist and national liberation movements of the 20th century, or develops bottom-up structures that put the movement under the control of its members as a whole, then they can become a genuine threat to the current elite or, in the latter case, even to the system of state and capitalism itself.

    Successful progressive reforms can also create the space for this to happen by providing people with more time and resources, breaking them out of apathy and despair, and encouraging them to engage more with social movements and take more prominent roles in running them. One of the things that brought the golden age of social democracy to an end was an explosion of worker, countercultural and social justice movements that could not be contained within the acceptable bounds of reform, requiring the state and capitalism to pivot to the more oppressive strategy of neoliberalism that has led to our current conditions.

    This future would provide the most obvious opportunities for anarchists, but it also represents a potential danger. On one hand, an uptick in social movements will provide spaces for anarchists to spread our politics, argue for bottom-up structures and encourage social movements to move in a more radical direction. On the other hand, facing a political party that is deliberately trying to leverage these social movements in order to push its own objectives will mean that there is the potential for anarchists to get involved in social movements that ultimately use us as useful idiots for their political masters. We will bring the skills to make the movement work, only to be marginalised and discarded when the movement has played its role, as has happened to us many times in the past. To avoid this latter result, we must not get involved in social movements in a thoughtless and haphazard way. We need to be ready to:

    • Contest reformism within them.
    • Persuade members to support methods of anarchism in practice.
    • Spread anarchist thought.
    • Leave those movements and start new ones if they end up as tools to reinforce authority.

    Ideally, we start these social movements ourselves, and immunise their structures and ideas against reformism from the very start, so that any attempt to co-opt such social movements for mere reformism will result in failure. However, attempting to proactively be the first movers in social movements will require an anarchism that is more confident, committed and co-ordinated.

  • FOUR FUTURES PART I – BUSINESS AS USUAL

    THINKING ABOUT THE FUTURE

    Forming a strategy requires thinking about the many possible futures that we might face. Today, it is hard to say with confidence where British society will be in 10 or 20 years. The state and capitalism seem to be in a slow decline, and the old established political parties are dying, but they still have time to reinvent themselves. Likewise, new political forces are on the rise, but the extent that they will attempt something genuinely different to the current ruling class consensus is unknown. On top of this, environmental problems, wars and natural disasters all affect politics and the economy in ways that are hard to predict.

    While it is hard to say for sure what kind of future we might end up with, change is inevitable. Our current political-economic system is not maintaining itself because everything is fine. Instead, it has come at the cost of ignoring the many systemic and structural problems that society faces, which will eventually require changes to be made before they cause total collapse.

    For anarchists in Britain, perhaps ironically, the 2029 election is a potential pivot point for such change. However, given the current weakness of the ruling Labour Party, there is also a chance that an emergency election may be called before then. We must think about what a change of central government might mean, and map out the different futures that might come from such a change, because they will affect our strategy.

    There are broadly four different futures that seem the most obvious:

    1. The current political system tries to resist change and stay on its current course.
    1. The system attempts to stabilise itself through progressive reforms, competently or otherwise.
    1. The system attempts to stabilise itself by leaning more heavily on its authoritarian and oppressive elements, competently or otherwise.
    1. Social collapse

    Each of these futures will demand different responses if we want to push society in a genuinely libertarian direction, and they pose different challenges that we must consider and plan for in advance. Of course, there are far more possible futures than these four, but hopefully they will act as a basis from which the reader can start to think about possible futures and start planning for them with their comrades, instead of just reacting to whatever happens in the moment.

    The first possibility that we must consider is that the next election does not bring any major changes to the political-economic system. Here, whichever party gets into power mostly ignores the structural problems that face British society, and attempts to run things as they have been run for the last few decades. This is the first possibility we discuss because the opportunities and challenges that it presents anarchists are broadly similar to those we face now.

    BUSINESS AS USUAL

    Such a result could come from any of the current political parties. The establishment wing of the Labour Party, the Liberal Democrats, or even a deradicalised Conservative Party would all likely take this approach, and both Reform UK and the Green Party might end up being forced to maintain business as usual if they are quickly co-opted or strong-armed by the entrenched economic and political actors who benefit the most from the existing status quo.

    While the victory of business as usual would appear to indicate the stabilisation of the political-economic system, it would not deal with any of the problems that this system causes, which have resulted in a combination of apathy and radicalisation among the general public and the rise of Reform and the Greens:

    • The cost of living would likely keep rising as nothing would be done to reign in the current political and economic structures that enable price-gouging and rent-seeking.
    • Workplace conditions would likely keep getting worse due to the systematic bias of the current system against workers.
    • Key social infrastructure (such as the NHS, public utilities, and social third spaces) would continue to degrade as they are stripped down to make them more profitable or efficient.
    • Very little would be done about a collapsing environment.
    • Despair and anger would continue to spread among everyday people.

    The continued stability of the political-economic system would be at the expense of the continued destabilisation of society at a deeper level.

    Such a result would simply defer social change, putting off any major changes while ensuring a build-up of social pressure that makes future changes even more likely, and likely to be drastic. So business as usual would mean that anarchists would still need to prepare for a more radically oppressive or progressively reforming future government, but this has been put off for another election cycle.

    The strategy we would have to develop in this situation is a continuation of the strategy we need to develop now. The system of the state and capitalism is awkwardly maintaining itself in Britain while continuing to make most people’s lives worse, driving them either to apathy or to find alternatives in Reform or the Greens. Anarchists need to demonstrate how both apathy and electoral political parties on the right or left cannot improve people’s lives in the ways that they desire. To do this, we need to actually be present in communities and workplaces in a way we simply are not right now. Anarchist organisations and propaganda currently have a very small reach, and some of this is due to anarchism being small in Britain. Strangely, we often seem comfortable for anarchism to remain small: we do not put a strong focus on getting our ideas out there or intentionally growing the anarchist movement in a way that, by 2029 or earlier, puts us in a better position to contest the far right or a resurgent left reformism within society.

    And while business as usual may present many of the same kinds of problems that we see today, they will likely intensify the longer the status quo remains unchanged:

    • People will become more isolated and disillusioned with the status quo.
    • People will become poorer and more desperate for organisations that will fight for them in their communities and workplaces.
    • The welfare state and other public infrastructure will become more dysfunctional.

    Any political movement that can step in and provide solutions to these problems outside of the existing system will be able to embed itself deeply within society, and while anarchism might be best placed to do this in theory, it will still require concerted action by anarchists to make this a reality. Otherwise, the far right can take that position and use it to support a fascist Government, and left-wing reformists can build a social movement to introduce or reinforce a reformed version of the state and capitalism instead of replacing it with something radically better.

  • MAY DAY AND ANARCHISM

    May Day goes back at least as far as ancient Rome, celebrated by various European cultures as the start of summer and a festival of fertility and rebirth. Modern May Day is more associated with International Workers Day, originating with the American Federation of Labour (AFL), who launched a campaign for the 8 hour day on the 1st of May 1886. Many of us today take the 8 hour day for granted, but in the 19th century many workers were working 12, 14 or even 16 hour days. It was only through concerted struggle that the 8 hour day was won as the “standard” work day across much of North America and Europe.

    This campaign was built on strikes and other militant actions that put real pressure on capitalism to give in. Chicago was one of the more radical hotbeds of action, and 400,000 people came out on a general strike that shut down much of the city. The police reacted to this with violence, rounding up militants, raiding houses and meeting places, and beating people. On the 3rd of May this escalated to gunfire, with the police killing at least two striking workers and leaving an unknown number injured.

    After this act of brutality an emergency public meeting was called for the next day in Haymarket Square. The police tried to attack the meeting, a bomb was thrown into police lines, and police started firing randomly into the crowd. This resulted in 7 police deaths, but it is unclear how many police were killed by the bomb and how many were killed by their own gunfire, and at least 7 workers were killed by police with many more wounded.

    After this massacre the authorities rounded up 8 activists and put them on trial for murder. 5 of them had not even been at Haymarket, but all were given the death penalty by a rigged jury of business leaders. In the end, 4 were hung, 1 committed suicide, and 3 had their sentences changed to life imprisonment. Eventually, all 8 were acquitted and the authorities admitted they had been wrongly convicted. This pardon was little comfort to the workers already killed, their families, or their friends. In 1889, May 1st was adopted as an international day of struggle for the 8 hour day by the Second International of social democratic parties in commemoration of the workers killed, injured, and imprisoned in the 1886 Chicago campaign.

    However, the 8 activists arrested after the Haymarket massacre were not social democrats, they were anarchists, and the Chicago campaign had a very strong anarchist presence, with Chicago being the first city to support a daily anarchist newspaper. Unlike the social democrats, the anarchists saw the state as as much of an oppressor and exploiter of the working class as capitalism, wanted a world were workers ran the economy from the bottom up, and advocated for actions like strikes to bring about lasting change instead of relying on political parties.

    The radicalism and militancy that kicked off International Workers Day is one of the things that the modern British left has lost. The idea of May Day as a day of strikes, actions, and demonstrations that put fear into the hearts of the ruling class has been replaced with a sedate A to B march, while living conditions worsen, wages drop, and hours increase. We only get what we are willing to fight for, and without a willingness to struggle in the present day we can lose the gains made by previous workers. For many modern workers, the 8 hour day has already been lost.

    The mainstream left often has no ideas beyond getting a social democratic or green party into power, either through election or revolution. This strategy is based on the idea that workers are incapable of running our own lives or our own workplaces, and that the best we can do is support a technocratic “socialist” ruling class to rule over us more kindly than capitalism. But “socialist” rulers have proved just as corrupt and malicious as capitalists; they control and abuse workers for their own ends.

    But anarchism, often written out of the history of labour struggle, offers an alternative to choosing between rulers; a vision of popular power where workers collectively manage our workplaces and neighbours come together to collectively manage our communities, and those workplaces and communities cooperate together from the bottom up without rulership. This power is not built with political parties and elections, but through organising strikes against bosses and landlords, mutual aid, and direct action to fight abuse by capitalists and governments until workers are powerful and organised enough to throw both out of power.

    International Workers Day should not be a day that anarchists leave to the social democrats and mainstream trade unionists. It is a day that commemorates a movement full of anarchists and which anarchists died for. We should be a strong presence at every May Day march, distributing our own propaganda and articulating our word view and strategy to others on the left. More than that, we should push May Day to be a genuine day of action again, not just a boring march that achieves nothing. May Day should be militant, and it should be anarchist.

    A flyer version of this post can be found here

  • THINKING ABOUT STRATEGY

    Developing strategy can be very intimidating: it requires thinking about a lot of different things and how they interlink, taking a stand on certain issues and committing to courses of action based on imperfect information. Anarchists face an additional barrier to developing strategy in that we cannot simply hand off thinking about it to leaders – we must all be strategists on top of whatever else we are doing, and often we are doing many other things already. A framework to think about strategy, which both breaks it down into a set of smaller questions and also ensures that nothing key is missed, is often useful. So, lets go through developing a strategy in four steps.

    Step One: The World You Want

    The first part of developing a strategy is to define your end goals. This means first thinking about what an anarchist society might look like. Modern anarchists have often rejected this kind of theorising, but if we want to think about strategy in depth, there is no way around developing a vision of a future society that is detailed enough that we can use it as something to work towards.

    When thinking about this future world, you should conceptualise at least two different things: institutions and culture. You must ask yourself both how the economy might work, how infrastructure might be run, the general organisational structure of an anarchist society, and what cultural norms are necessary to maintain those institutions. You should then tease out the ways in which anarchist institutions can encourage anarchist culture, and vice versa. This does not necessarily need to be very detailed, and you could list a range of different potential solutions. However, there are limits to how a society can be structured and still be “anarchist”, and you need to have some idea of the structures you are aiming for in order to start working towards them.

    This can be done as a form of brainstorming on paper or on a digital device, on your own or with others. Put ideas down and draw links between them where they rely on each other or affect each other. Circle things together when they are alternative organisational or cultural solutions to the same problem. When you have what you know down, ask yourself what is missing and what social problems you do not have solutions for.

    Step Two: The World You Have

    Now you need to develop an idea of how the current system is structured and how it maintains itself. What are the formal institutions of state and capital? What are the cultural norms that maintain them? What other forms of oppression and exploitation, like patriarchy or racial supremacy, exist within society? How do these all interlink and support each other? Are there tensions between any of them? What are their vulnerabilities and failures? Again, this can be done as a brainstorm, and working out what you don’t know is just as important as developing what you do know.

    If done as a brainstorm, this should be on the same piece of paper or document as step one, either below it or next to it. Then you can mark out where existing institutions and cultural norms directly contradict or prevent the creation of the anarchist institutions and cultural norms you have listed in step one. Your aim is not just to understand the structure of our current society, but how that structure prevents the development of an anarchist society and where institutions or cultural norms need to be abolished or changed, and what specifically they need to be changed into.

    Step Three: From Here to There

    Now you can start to think about the tactics you will use to overcome barriers and build the world you want. These tactics could be, for example, building radical unions, or community organisations, or mutual aid groups, or various kinds of cultural or propaganda work. Again, if brainstorming, this should be the next part down or along from step two. You should link tactics to the institutions and norms identified in step two that they are supposed to undermine or change. Circle alternative tactics that solve the same problems. 

    However, you should not just think about how tactics undermine existing institutions and norms, but how they build the world you want. In this case, you may draw a link through step two and all the way back to institutions and norms from step one. Some tactics will undermine the existing world, some will build a new world, and some will do both. Again, work out what tactical problems you do not have answers for, along with those you can solve.

    Step Four: Inevitable Reaction

    The final step is working out how existing society will react to your tactics. The system of state and capital, the wider culture of authority and privilege, and competing political movements are not static and unchanging. They react to threats, and one of the ways that radical movements have failed is in not anticipating these reactions, and continuing to do the same thing long after state and capital have adapted to our tactics.

    As a brainstorming session, put this step below or next to step three, and put down tactics that might be used to undermine your own tactics for change. Link them to the radical tactics they undermine. Circle them when there are multiple possible reactionary tactics that could be used in a given context. You can also draw lines through step three into step two when reactionary tactics reinforce or adapt a specific existing institution or norm.

    When you have completed these four steps, regardless of if you have written them down, typed them up, or simply run through them in your head, you should know what your objectives are, what stands in your way, the tactics you will use to overcome those barriers and achieve your objectives, and the ways that your tactics might be countered, and you should know where the holes in your understanding are. You will have a provisional strategy and an idea of how to improve it.

    The Limitations of Strategy

    With all this said, it is also important to understand the limitations of this kind of framework. It is a starting point, not an end point. It parcels up the act of thinking about strategy into four simple stages in order to make that thinking easier, but any framework is going help illuminate some things at the cost of obscuring others. If, having used this framework, you find that certain issues do not fit easily into it, then it is time to modify it to suit your needs.

    Any strategic thinking that you do is also not something you can impose on others, but the basis for conversations with them. An organisation or movement-wide strategy must be built from people comparing and contrasting their own understanding and coming to a compromise or synthesis. Hopefully this framework makes it easier to think about and articulate not only how you think about strategy, but where specifically your differences are with others. Are they at the level of the end objectives? Your understanding of the current system? The tactics you prefer? The ways you believe that the current system will react to those tactics?

    Lastly, strategy must remain flexible. Any strategy is going to have flaws in it that will only be discovered by trying to put it into practice, and the point of developing a strategy is not to build a perfect idea of how to create anarchism, but to work out a direction of travel to start following, with the expectation that you will encounter problems you did not expect and will need to adapt to. Strategy is a tool that you modify and refine as you use it, not an absolute to be worshipped. But you need to start using that tool in order to discover how it needs to be adapted.

    A zine version of this post can be found here

  • ORGANISATION – GENERAL OR SPECIFIC?

    The following are the opinions of an individual member of Eclipse and do not necessarily represent the opinions of the entire committee.

    I have been involved in several anarchist and libertarian socialist organisations with very specific politics and I have always felt that such organisations are genuinely useful. There are certain kinds of concerted action which you can only take if you’re willing to take specific positions within the broader theoretical framework of anarchism, and certain kinds of long-term practical work require specific theoretical outlooks. However, I have also felt that the lack of more open and general organising across the anarchist movement in Britain has not only hurt the movement as a whole but has also hindered the ability of organisations with a more specific politics to act effectively.

    The first way that the lack of a more general anarchist organisation hurts more specific anarchist groups, is that anarchists with very specific political commitments do not pop into existence fully formed. New anarchists come to anarchism either influenced by other political traditions such as liberalism or social democracy, or they come into anarchism without any previous political experience. Often such new anarchists are still in the process of working out their own politics and are not willing to commit to an organisation with a very specific set of stances.

    In order to develop their politics to the point that they start to hold specific positions, they need to work with other anarchists on practical projects, develop experience, and deepen their own understanding of theory and practice out of those experiences. This requires a broad anarchist organisation they can get involved in without committing to specific political or strategic ideas. In order for someone to become the kind of committed syndicalist, or communist, or insurrectionary, or whatever, which many groups desire as members, they need time to develop and find out for themselves what they are about.

    This is also a problem in developing new anarchist groups. In many places there are simply not enough anarchists of a specific political leaning to form more specific groups. A more general anarchist group in such areas would allow for spreading of anarchist ideas, the recruitment of more anarchists, and the development of the politics of existing anarchists, to the point that more specific groups could be formed. More general groups are also the reactor that can best generate new kinds of specific anarchist groups in reaction to new circumstances.

    A more general anarchist organisation is also the connective tissue that allows more specific anarchist groups to share opportunities with each other and send new people to the projects and groups that are most appropriate for them. Often someone will get in contact with a specific anarchist group that is a poor match for their needs, or a specific anarchist group stumbles into a situation which would be better handled by a different group, and without more general networks of communication these individuals and opportunities end up lost in the gaps between specific groups.

    Lastly, many of the specific anarchist groups in Britain today are too small and weak to take meaningful action on their own. Such action requires groups either work together or draw from a wider pool of anarchists who have not yet committed to a specific approach to anarchism. Both of these are best served by a broader and more general form of anarchist organising that specific groups can embed themselves in and use as platforms to advocate for their projects and strategies to other groups and individuals.

    I have seen first-hand that more specific groups go down two different paths when we lack this kind of general organisation. They can attempt to remain pure to their specific ideas, but without a more general anarchist organisation which they can propagandise to and recruit from they end up small, isolated, and useless. Secondly, they attempt to fix the lack of a more general organisation by taking on some of the roles of a more general group. This leads to more specific groups having to sacrifice some of their political and strategic clarity in order to fulfil that role, while also not being able to fully commit to the role because of their attempts to avoid entirely losing their specific stances. I have not seen either of these approaches work in the long-term.

    Instead, I believe that we need more general forms of anarchist organisation that allow anarchism to build groups where it is too weak to support more specific groups and allow anarchists who are not committed to a specific kind of anarchism to take meaningful action and develop their own ideas and practices. However, attempting to build a general organisation without anyone involved developing more specific approaches to theory and practice will hinder our ability to take decisive action and develop more complex ideas, so we also need more specific groups.

    But anarchist groups built around a specific political theory or practical orientation, on their own, tend towards a kind of isolation that leaves them to wither and die or attempt to become more general in nature and abandon the clear commitments that make such groups useful in the first place. So we still need a more general anarchist organisation which more specific groups can push for their ideas and projects within, recruit from, and coordinate across. More general and specific forms of organising are not necessarily at odds with each other, but support each other.

    The exact nature of such a general organisation is not for me to say. It is the kind of thing that can only be decided by individuals and groups coming together across Britain to discuss what we would all find most useful. This is why I think that the Eclipse project is so important. It could be the basis of the kind of general anarchist network that could, both in local areas but also across the country, do the kind of things that I have seen so many specific anarchist groups end up doing to their detriment, and do them far better because it would be more general and open by design. And far from absorbing and infringing on the specific positions of other anarchist groups, it could provide them with a forum to spread their ideas and free them up to really pursue their own projects on their own terms.

  • ANARCHISM AGAINST FASCISM PART IV – AN ANARCHIST ANTI-FASCIST MOVEMENT

    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.

    All four parts of this essay have been combined into a zine that can be found here

  • ANARCHISM AGAINST FASCISM PART III – THE FAILURE TO FIGHT FASCISM

    In the last two posts we have discussed how the structure of the state promotes fascism and how we need a movement based on opposition to the state, and bottom-up structures that encourage anti-fascist ideas. In this post we will take a look at what this analysis means for how we understand the development of fascism, and how the failures of liberalism and mainstream socialism have helped fascist or fascistic ideologies position themselves as the only viable alternative to mainstream politics.

    The modern state is, historically-speaking, an unusually hegemonic hierarchy. Across much of history any tendencies a hierarchy might have towards a certain ideology were at least partly countered by other structures in society that could threaten the power of that hierarchy. Partly this was simply a matter of capacity; society did not produce enough wealth or have the technological means of communication and surveillance to allow any central hierarchy to become truly hegemonic, and regardless of whatever a king or emperor might claim about their own absolute power, in reality they relied on the cooperation of other social structures that had significant independence and could turn against them if angered.

    As society developed the wealth and technological capacity to enable the modern hegemonic state, the ideologies and social movements that developed along with it were often ambivalent to the implications of this hegemony, and built counter-power that could keep the state in line. Sometimes these were holdovers from the old social order like village collectives and free cities defending customary freedoms, or factions of the old elite defending privileges that the state now threatened.

    But new progressive movements that developed in opposition to traditional social structures also had reason to organise in opposition to the state. While progressive ideologies like liberalism and socialism often backed the state against the old order, they also based themselves in ideals like freedom, equality, solidarity, and reason, which just as often put them in opposition to the social norms and structures which the state created to secure the obedience of its citizens and the security of its borders. Liberals and socialists formed political parties, but they also build independent protest movements, revolutionary cells, community mutual aid groups, and workplace unions that would defend the interests and ideals of their members against the state.

    Today’s conditions are very different to those of the early modern nation state. The state has either absorbed or destroyed the vast majority of independent social structures, or it has regulated the economy to replace them with allied capitalist firms. While historically there might have been large parts of the population that mostly served their own needs through their own traditions of organisation and only interacted with the state to pay tax or face conscription, today such self-organisation is greatly suppressed. Within the modern state most people either buy what they need from a capitalist business or rely on state services to provide for them. Society lacks any strong independent structures of cooperation that might provide the basis to push back against the state, or provide people with a lived experience outside of state power and capitalist profit.

    Both liberalism and socialism have also resolved the historic contradictions between their ideals and the state by compromising their ideals. Most progressive political ideologies not only take the state for granted, but believe that any kind of functional social order outside of the state is impossible and the state must now be maintained above all else. The leaders of progressive parties have systematically demobilised and dismantled the bottom-up social movements that they grew out of, because such bottom-up power is a threat to the top-down state hierarchy they believe is needed to keep social order.

    This has left the modern state in a position of ideological and organisational domination that might be unprecedented in all of human history. In terms of its integration into the everyday lives of its citizens and its ability to surveil and regulate their relationships, even the most progressive modern states eclipse any previous form of centralised hierarchy. In terms of our ability to think of solutions to social problems, the vast majority of society believes that the state is the only tool worth seriously considering, even when dealing problems that the state has created in order to maintain itself and has no reason to fix.

    But this has put liberalism and mainstream socialism in a disastrous position when it comes to both offering solutions to structural social problems and opposing fascism. Progressive political parties have accepted that certain kinds of social change in pursuit of their ideals or even the basic needs of the majority of society are impossible because they would endanger the state, and that any social movement attempting to create this social change outside of or against the state is a threat to social order. Most progressive thinkers now oppose the development of any independent power-base that might prevent the structure of the state from pushing society in fascistic directions, or provide the basis for real resistance when fascists eventually take power.

    This has also allowed fascists to make valid critiques of mainstream progressive politics. When fascists claim that progressive politics are either a hypocritical cover for the will to power or impractical utopianism that will weaken the structure of the state, they are for the most part correct. If the state is necessary, then the fascists are the ones most honest and practical about what it requires and progressive ideals are misguided nonsense at best, or dishonest manipulations at worse.

    However, this fascist critique is only valid if the state is an unavoidable necessity. The way out of the bind that modern liberalism and socialism have put society in is to reject the necessity of the state, and propose it be replaced with social structures that are actually compatible with ideals like freedom, equality, solidarity, and reason. Only by arguing for ways to organise society that both grow out of progressive ideals and reinforce them, can we undermine the fascist argument that such ideals are a threat to social order.

    This means that we can not afford to be mistaken for mainstream liberals or socialists who have discredited themselves by their own hypocrisy and impracticality. If we share our ideals without offering anti-authoritarian strategies and organisational structures, we risk coming off as another set of useless dreamers in a world full of failed dreams. If we share our strategy and our structures without being explicit about our ideals, then our motivations will be unclear and we risk coming off as untrustworthy in a world of grifters. Defeating fascism does not just require us to be anarchists, it requires us to be open and honest about it and have concrete proposals for the world we want and how to get there.

    All four parts of this essay have been combined into a zine that can be found here

  • STRATEGY AND NETWORKS

    This is a response to a critique of the Eclipse project posted on LibCom here

    Firstly, we thank the comrade for their concerns and for giving us an opportunity to clarify what it is we are trying to do and why we have positioned the Eclipse project the way we have.

    Many members of the Eclipse committee are also part of other anarchist organisations that do have a more specific strategic outlook and a tighter organisational structure. Eclipse started out of discussions within the Anarchist Federation, but has grown to include organisers from Bristol Anarchist Bookfair, Manchester & Salford Anarchist Bookfair, and Swansea Radical Community Festival, as well as members of IWW, Solidarity Federation, Suffolk Anarchists, Wessex Solidarity, and independent anarchists otherwise cut off from much of the wider movement. Most of those involved do have strong opinions on anarchist strategy and organisation, are already members of groups that align with those opinions, believe that the anarchist movement in Britain needs to develop a solid strategy to be effective, and that a pluralistic network will not be sufficient to defeat fascism or the general system of state and capital.

    However, since many of us have been part of organisations that have a more specific strategic and organisational outlook, we have also seen first hand how that model of organising on its own has not worked either. Such groups have often struggled with maintaining their political purity at the expense of becoming isolated and irrelevant, or have diluted their strategic and organisational principals in order to achieve short-term practical goals, acting more like NGOs stemming the bleeds within Capitalism rather than revolutionaries actively working towards its destruction, and either way have struggled to maintain an active membership and have any serious impact in British society. New groups with specific strategic and organisational principles are unlikely to act as a focal point around which to rally the anarchist movement as a whole, and are more likely to end up just another faction within the existing movement, which is too small and isolated to meaningfully implement an effective strategy.

    From this experience, and not from abstract theory, we have come to believe two things that have fundamentally motivated our broad approach to Eclipse. Firstly, that a pluralistic network is the best starting point from which to develop greater strategic and organisational unity beyond our existing involvement. Secondly, that a pluralistic network is an important piece of supporting infrastructure that anarchism in Britain needs, regardless of if we ever reach any kind of broad agreement on what we should be doing. Even without changing society ourselves, every step that brings us closer to this is in the right direction.

    To develop the first point; any strategy that is going be widely adopted enough to be put into meaningful practice is not going to be the brainchild of any single anarchist organisation but is going to have to be come out of conversation and diplomacy between groups, communities and individuals within the existing anarchist movement, and within society at large. Likewise, tighter organisation and cooperation between anarchists is not going to come out of anarchists flocking to one group or single approach, but is going to have to be built out of practical solidarity and cooperation between existing groups. We currently lack the existing framework to do this, and so may struggle to even imagine the potential that such a convergence of our movement could create.

    One of the hopes that we have for the Eclipse project is that it will act as the core infrastructure on which to build tighter strategic and organisational agreement within the anarchist movement in Britain. Individual members of the Eclipse Committee certainly want to use the first gathering as an opportunity for discussion around how we build a more unified strategy and deeper cooperation and mutual learning within anarchism. We hope the gathering to be the kind of place that the comrade who wrote this critique could put forward criticism and proposals for strategy and organisation to a broader anarchist milieu, and find like-minded collaborators that they might otherwise have been isolated from.

    But for the Eclipse project to act as a focal point around which the broader anarchist movement can start to develop deeper strategic agreement and tighter organisation, we feel that as much of the anarchist movement as possible should feel welcome to attend Eclipse gatherings. Because of this we have avoided putting out our own strategic ideas in too much detail – for one thing we do not agree entirely among ourselves – but also those discussions are something we want to save until the gathering, where a wider section of the anarchist movement in Britain can put forward their own ideas.

    To develop the second point; there is a lot of shared infrastructure that anarchists could benefit from regardless of their level of strategic agreement, which is best handled by a pluralistic, decentralised network, and in fact probably should not be maintained by a more specific organisation to avoid conflicts of interest. One of the recurring problems that many of us have faced is that groups with specific strategic and organisational principals end up getting sidetracked by trying to maintain this necessary infrastructure, when it would make far more sense for this stuff to be maintained by the anarchist movement as a whole, but we currently lack many of the structures needed to enable that. Again, we have not really talked in detail about this as it is another thing that we want to raise at the gathering, and ask those who attend what kind of infrastructure they would find useful.

    Likewise, regardless of our level of strategic and organisational unity, there are still ways that anarchists who disagree can mutually support each other to the benefit of all involved. Building bonds of trust and solidarity through such mutual cooperation is one of the methods through which we believe the anarchist movement as a whole can actually come to widespread shared strategic understanding. But again, right now the anarchist movement as a whole does not have the structures in place to systematically enable this, meaning that the anarchist movement is less effective as a whole regardless of any strategic divisions it might have within it, as well as less likely to find ways to resolve those divisions by developing shared ideas out of joint action.

    Even if we do achieve strategic and organisational unity across large parts of the anarchist movement, there are always going to be minority trends that take a different approach, or address a specific intersection or fight for a specific oppressed group through anarchism, and having those differing strands of anarchism isolated from each other will only weaken anarchism as a whole. There will likely still be opportunities for mutual support and opportunities for anarchists who disagree or have different enhanced experiences of oppressive forces to develop better versions of their ideas and practices through mutual critique, and that will require the kind of shared infrastructure of communication and coordination best provided for by a pluralistic network.

    So, do we believe that pluralistic networks on their own are enough? No, many of us have also seen them fail. But do we believe the specific organisations on their own are enough? Also no, as many of us have been involved in such organisations for long enough to see the pattern of them going nowhere in isolation. We believe that a strong and effective anarchist movement is going to need both, and that they should be mutually supporting wherever possible instead of hidden away from each other, kept at arms length rather than embraced as fellow anarchists in a common struggle against the state and oppression.