The Eclipse

  • 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 civilians 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 loose 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 force both capitalists and governments to 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.

  • Post-Gathering Eclipse: A Review

    It’s been over a month since the Eclipse network held our first gathering in Liverpool, and we’re now in the process of shaping the project’s future. 47 organisers active in 34 projects showed up, from 27 towns and cities across England, Scotland, and Wales, for up to three days of workshops, discussions, and networking, keeping a broad focus on revitalising anarchism and anti-fascism on these islands. This isn’t the first time such a gathering has been attempted here, but many of us came away hopeful all the same for Eclipse’s prospects.

    We provided six meals – vegan, gluten-free, nut-free, and sulphite-free, thanks to a tangled web of dietary stipulations – organised by volunteer kitchen teams, and served with domineering zeal courtesy of the local youth. The event was entirely self-funded, with collective subsidies on travel and food costs available, and we were able to make £400 in solidarity donations to our venue, facilitation team, and BSL interpretation team, with a couple hundred put by for future events.

    In the days following, the project’s initial roster of four working groups more than doubled, with a focus on increased interconnectivity, strategy, radical education, and forthcoming action. It’s likely that most involved found it a useful step in connecting disparate groups, especially with increased collaboration between anarchist media projects.

    It’s perhaps useful now to share some of the gathering attendants’ feedback here (the majority positive, though not without constructive criticism):

    • the tour of the hosting housing co-op was well-received (for whom we organised volunteer work crews to help with home improvements), as were the morning nature walks
    • folks were especially happy with Tripod, the facilitators, though some wished that even more sessions were held by them
    • the DeafAnarchy workshop went down really well, as did Plan C’s strategy games
    • the gathering’s largest issue was that the agenda was too overstuffed, not allowing enough time for discussion – directed or informal – or to introduce ourselves properly
    • the disruption to sleeping arrangements was a real problem for some, with short-notice changes to late night spaces forcing early-sleepers to relocate
    • a lack of childcare was a particular problem, with no designated physical kids’ space or dedicated childcare team
    • another problem was a lack of communications by the organiser team in the gathering’s immediate run-up

    Some of the above problems were unforeseeable and specific to that weekend, but many of these are things we can and (almost definitely) will improve on in future.

    It’s fair to say that Eclipse isn’t as refined at this time as everyone in the network would like; as is the nature of such a decentralised and motley beast, we’re still working out our organisational kinks – including the tensions between structure and structurelessness, and we’re not yet in a position to describe what the Eclipse actually *is* with any certainty. Alongside the working groups’ ongoing activities, there’s planned a series of monthly online meetings to resolve some of these questions, and we’re aiming towards a second in-person Gathering, this time during late summer.

    There’s every chance this second gathering should be somewhat larger, as there were – alongside the usual last-minute cancellations – a growing collection of folks who couldn’t make it in-person, or who hadn’t heard about Eclipse in time for the event. And we’re still likely to want to keep the focus on face-to-face and real-space organising, as opposed to remote attendance, as it seems to us an effective vehicle for improved trust and communication; but nothing is as yet set in stone.

    Our numbers have mushroomed up now from our original handfuls of organisers, but (now we’re mostly recovered and back up to health) we’re immensely grateful to all who attended and took part. The minutes will soon be getting out to those concerned.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • ANARCHISM AGAINST FASCISM PART II – THE STATE AND FASCIST PEOPLE

    In our previous post we argued that the state as a structure will always encourage fascist ideas. The state requires obedience and strong borders to function, and this is far more compatible with fascism than it is with liberalism, socialism, or even conservatism. However, while fascism may be the ideology that best aligns with the needs of the state, this does not fully explain its ability to embed itself in our society. If everyone within our society held anti-fascist attitudes then any fascist tendencies inherent in the state would result in rebellion instead of a slow drift towards fascism. We need to look at how the structure of the state not only encourages fascist ideas, but creates people who are open to those ideas.

    The ways in which the state does this are similar to the ways in which capitalism does. Among the capitalist class profit must come before everything else, including commitment to any kind of ideals. People and ideas are evaluated only by their potential to make profit, and any capitalist who does not tend towards this approach will end up outcompeted by other capitalists with less scruples. The political class and the technocrats that actually manage most of the hierarchies within both business and government face a similar pressure to cast aside ideals. At the top of the state hierarchy political parties or factions are in competition with each other over positions of power, and those parties or factions that hold any ideals above taking power are at a disadvantage against those willing to do whatever is necessary to win.

    This creates a class of rulers who are conditioned to see the people below them as disposable to their needs, and the needs of the hierarchy that empowers them. Ideas that are not useful for securing power or profit are seen as impractical distractions to be ignored. Those climbing either state or corporate hierarchies in order to secure better pay and conditions for themselves face increasing pressures to put power or profit ahead of everything else as they progress, weeding out anyone who is not willing to engage with the system on those terms. This creates a ruling class that is ripe for adopting a fascist ideology; they have no scruples beyond the pursuits of power and profit.

    The structure of state and capital also incentivise fascist attitudes among those at the bottom of society. Workers exist in a position that encourages them to see themselves as in competition with each other for jobs and promotions, and to see fulfilling their boss’s desires as the key to securing their own safety and comfort within the economy. Again, people are in a similar structural position as citizens look to the government to provide them with the infrastructure and services they need, and other potential claimants on government resources are competitors. Just as fascism exploits fear of migrants and “undesirables” taking jobs, it also exploits fear around those same people taking welfare.

    This encourages the lower classes to adopt ideas that give them special claim to economic or political support from capitalists and politicians. This can manifest as demands for better treatment when raised by oppressed groups, but when raised by sections of the lower class that already have some kind of privilege it results in ideas that are easily compatible with fascism; appeals for preferential treatment on the basis of nativeness, whiteness, gender, straightness, legality, and the rejection of others on the basis that they are foreign, black, queer, criminals, or just weird.

    In order to oppose this we must not only oppose fascism as an ideology, but build structures in our workplaces and our communities that discourage fascist attitudes. We need to focus on working from the bottom-up, along lines of free association and consensus, based on the idea that people should look to their peers for support instead of looking up their rulers. In organisations built along these lines, people are encouraged to see each other as potential collaborators instead of competitors, to discuss and understand each other’s desires as people instead of dismissing each other as stereotypes, and to bridge divisions in order to cooperate – instead of attempting to leverage them for preferential treatment, because there is no one at the top who can grant that preferential treatment, only a web of equals supporting each other.

    As a practical example of this, take workplace organising when compared to climbing a workplace hierarchy; be that workplace a government department or a capitalist corporation. If someone is looking to secure their wellbeing through promotion, then they must look to the desires and preferences of their superior above those of their co-workers, and find reasons as to why they are more deserving than their co-workers. On the other hand, if someone is looking to secure their wellbeing by organising with their fellow workers against management through strikes and other workplace direct action, their wellbeing is based on the ability of everyone within the workplace to come together as a collective regardless of what divisions may exist among them.

    Combined with the conclusions of our last post, this means that we need to not only build organisations independent from the state that can put pressure on it, but build them in a way so that they provide a different lived experience compared to the hierarchies of the state. We need a movement that is bottom-up and anti-authoritarian in order to promote a more accepting and egalitarian ethic within society. Just the best strategy to oppose fascism is inherently anarchist, so are the best organisational structures.

  • ANARCHISM AGAINST FASCISM PART I – THE STATE AND FASCIST IDEAS

    Today, much of the global core seems to be sliding towards fascism. In the USA, the liberal establishment is paralysed by the rise of Trump. In the UK, both Labour and the Tories have reacted to the rise of Reform not by opposing its ideas, but pandering to them; and this seems to be the common tactic of the established political parties across Europe. Now more than ever, there needs to be a radical response to the far right.

    This radical response requires understanding the basis of fascism and why supposedly liberal and social democratic societies keep failing to offer meaningful opposition. The traditional socialist account of this problem is that fascism develops out of capitalism as it decays and fails to resolve its internal contradictions. While this explanation is not necessarily wrong, it is also not necessarily complete, and we think that it is also important to examine how the state structure also plays an important key role in encouraging fascism.

    The modern state has two requirements that it needs above all else in order to function:

    1. Obedience from its agents and citizens: The power of any dictator, oligarchy, or democratic parliament is dependent on this obedience; without which, the state will collapse. No political elite has the ability to enforce its will over an entire country without the obedient cooperation of the state hierarchy, and even then a state will struggle to impose its will in the face of widespread disobedience from its own citizens. This fact is what makes revolution possible and forces states to compromise when they face widespread internal resistance.

    2. Borders: Borders are the boundaries that define where one state’s authority ends and another starts; without an ability to define and maintain those borders, state authority is fatally undermined.

    These requirements mean that any state must encourage ideals that support obedience and borders – any ideology that holds ideals which conflict with these two things is a threat to the strength and stability of the state. Many modern ideologies sit awkwardly with these needs: liberal support for freedom and universalism, socialist support for equality and internationalism, and even principled conservatism’s support for local traditions and religious solidarity all represent ideological commitments that can conflict with obedience to the state and strong national borders.

    Fascism, on the other hand, is perfectly compatible with the requirements of the state. Absolute obedience to a strong leader and the social norms they dictate are part of the package of fascism. Fascism also brings with it a violent nationalism that super-empowers the state border regime. On top of this, fascists revels in the idea of using force to suppress their enemies, freeing the state apparatus to take whatever measures it deems necessary – up to and including the genocide of entire populations – to beat society into a form that best maintains its power.

    This does not mean that all those who are involved in maintaining the state are fascists, but instead that the needs of the state constantly pressure its rulers, agents, and supporters in a fascist direction. The principled liberal, socialist, or conservative will always face a tension between their ideals and the requirements of the state, and therefore be forced into uncomfortable compromises. Non-ideological state technocrats and amoral grifters will always see a practical appeal to fascistic ideas and policies to empower them. From both the practical perspective and the perspective of having ideals that match your actions, drifting towards fascism is the path of least resistance for those who maintain the state, unless there is an even stronger pressure pushing people onto other paths.

    This has important implications for anti-fascist strategy. Firstly, the state can never be relied on as a tool to fight fascism. Analyses of fascism that only understand it as a reaction to the collapse of capitalism often make the mistake of seeing social democratic reforms or Leninist revolution as a potential counter-strategy against fascism, but as such strategies empower the state they only re-enforce one of the wellsprings of fascist ideas. The modern global resurgence of fascism has as much to do with the collapse of social democratic and Leninist parties into increasingly fascistic authoritarianism, as it does the contradictions of capitalism.

    In the short term, we need to build institutions outside of the state that can create anti-fascist pressure to push back against the fascistic tendencies of the state. The politicians, technocrats, and agents of the state need to be put in a position where they are forced to accept compromises between the needs of the state and the needs of their subjects because they fear the level of resistance and disruption they will face if they do not. In the long term, we need to abolish the state if we want to defeat fascism. As long as the state exists, it will always require obedience and control of its borders – and that requirement will always be a structural basis from which fascist ideas will develop. Such a strategy is inherently anarchist, in that it organises outside and against the state, with the ultimate aim of replacing it.

  • A DIVERSITY OF ANARCHISMS PART III – MAKING DIVERSITY WORK

    In our last two posts, we argued that diversity was a necessary and unavoidable part of the anarchist movement, and that accepting and working with this diversity can ultimately create a stronger and more effective anarchist movement, rather than ignoring it or trying to work against it. But this leads to the question of how well the current anarchist movement in Britain actually takes advantage of its diversity, and how can we do better?

    Anarchism in Britain is extremely fractured. It is defined by a vast array of different niche groups that organise around specific issues or in specific areas, and isolated individuals embedded in communities and more general radical political movements and organisations. The connections between all these groups tend to be individual, with flows of knowledge and opportunities for cooperation based around informal social connections. While most individual groups have their own ideas of what the anarchist movement should be doing, there are no consistent traditions or institutions of cross-movement communication, decision-making and cooperation.

    This fractured nature prevents anarchism in Britain from taking advantage of the potential advantages of its own diversity. Information does not spread quickly or evenly and, unless you know the right people, finding out what is happening outside of your immediate area or community is very difficult. This means that major issues in certain areas only ever make it to people as half-distorted rumours, important lessons from success or failure end up isolated in specific parts of the anarchist movement, and interesting projects flounder for a lack of reliable ways to reach the people who might be interested in supporting them.

    This prevents good ideas and practices from spreading across the anarchist movement. Instead of having the collective experience and experimentation of an entire movement to draw from, many anarchists can only draw on what is known locally or within their organisation, and many anarchists must painfully reinvent the wheel over and over. This does not create a dynamic movement that can out-organise state and capital through superior flexibility and adaptability, but instead creates islands of isolation and stagnation.

    This is especially harmful for new anarchists or the anarcho-curious who are not already linked into our informal and patchy network of cooperation and communication, which is a growing number of people in the age of the internet. If someone becomes an anarchist, their ability to learn more and get involved is heavily based on whatever their immediate point of contact with anarchism is, if they have one at all. This prevents anarchism as a movement from growing based on the diversity of ideas and practices it can offer people, because people can not understand or navigate that diversity in a way that allows them to find their place in the movement.

    In many cases would-be anarchists end up joining in with more general radical organising because of the lack of any easy entry points into anarchism. This leads to the bizarre situation where many non-anarchist political groups, unions, community organisations, and protest movements are sustained by the contributions of anarchists or fellow travellers and often benefit greatly from the anarchist approach to organising, while anarchism remains weak as a movement and mostly ignored or mocked as an idea, even within radical circles that would be greatly diminished without those ideas being put into practice by the anarchists working within them.

    The nature of these informal and incomplete networks of communication also mean that any discussion of wider strategy within our movement is often opaque to those not already in the know, and it is very difficult to turn that discussion into action, because there is no easy way to bring the ideas that result from it to the wider movement. Even at a local level, there are often no groups providing a general forum for anarchist thought, discussion, and action that can proactively organise to fill holes in capability or exploit new opportunities.

    This leads to a situation where individual anarchists and anarchist groups can still be effective, often still achieving more given our limited numbers and resources than other strands of radicalism, but anarchism as a real movement is weak to non-existent, with all our achievements often failing to support each other, failing to spread more broadly, and failing to spark any greater understanding or interest in anarchism. We are in a situation where our diversity has made us weaker instead of stronger, because our diversity is one of isolated and sometimes antagonistic individuals and groups, instead of an integrated network of organisations, cells, and people.

    As anarchists, the only way we can fix this problem is to start at the bottom and work our way up, and to start loose and work our way towards tighter organisation. This means building networks of communication that allow all the various anarchist groups and projects in Britain to reliably talk to each other, create shared resources that can direct new people to the place they want to be, spread the word of new groups and projects to the ears of the people who need to hear about them, hold spaces for the discussion and agreement of strategy and practice that allow discussion to turn into action, and develop the kind of joint projects needed to put anarchism in the public consciousness as a coherent and active political force.

    However, the infrastructure to do this will require work from existing anarchist organisations to build and maintain, and this kind of work has often been seen as optional. A big part of this is because we tend to dedicate all our limited time and energy to the problems in front of us. If we do take an interest in the wider movement, it is only to the extent necessary to keep our immediate projects and organisation functioning. Time spent on maintaining a big network that does not yield immediate gains in organising our workplaces, sustaining our mutual aid groups, or defending our communities is time that many people feel is wasted. But this has led to a disastrous underdevelopment of the infrastructure that brings more people from a broader base into the movement and allows us to cooperate effectively, which in the long run would allow us to do more as a revolutionary movement.

    And we need to built this infrastructure, because we are on a timer. There is a real chance that after the next general election in 2029 we will be living under an openly fascist government, and at that point we may be forced to fight for the survival of our movement and humanity. We need to make sure that by 2029 we have the strongest movement possible, one which can resist not just locally but coordinate to resist across the span of the British isles and oppose both the far right and dead-end mainstream political parties. This is what the Eclipse project is attempting to build, but we can not do so alone. We can only provide the space and the framework to make a start, and then we need existing and new anarchists and organisations to communicate and cooperate with each other, to build an anarchist movement that is more than the sum of its parts.

    We are the eclipse.