Anarchist, schmanarchist…

conference 09

Things have been quiet on this blog (we’ve been getting on elsewhere with life, birth & death, among other things). But the other night I got pulled up over my reservations about the forthcoming anarchist movement conference. So here are some rambling responses…

There’s all the usual trivial stuff about what “anarchism” means. Like a lot of people, I have a love/hate relation with the label. In the grand scheme of things, it’s clear that my politics are probably more “anarchist” than anything else. And at certain times it has been really useful to play up to that – a handy way of positioning myself in relation to other groups and practices. In the 1980s, for example, it was a really convenient short-hand for cutting out all the party hacks and robo-Trots. And during the struggle against the Poll Tax, “anarchist” came to mean someone you could depend on, utterly (they wouldn’t sell you out or grass you up).

But more often than not, I’ve found it a barrier, a limit to what can be done. Partly this has to do with how piss-poor most anarchist thought is (or was, certainly when I was growing up). It was never enough to say you were an “anarchist” – you had to say you were a “class struggle anarchist” to distinguish yourself from the 99 different varieties of nutter. But that brought up the whole thorny problem of the Left. However much we denied it at the time, anarchism rode on the coat-tails of the Left it despised (just as the Left was parasitic on the Labour Party). Anything that smacked of the Left (including any sort of critical Marxism) was anathema. It had to go. And what room did that leave for thinking? I can remember when a few people in Class War were talking about sticking the hammer and sickle icon on the Class War banner. “Can you imagine the cops’ faces when we come round the corner? Can you imagine the Left’s look of horror?” They were only half-joking. Shame, really…

But that’s really a side issue. Much more important is the whole idea of how movements come into being, and how they operate and where they end. It’s hard to pick fault with the spirit of the call, but in a strange way it seems so unambitious. In the face of a global economic meltdown, is re-constituting ourselves as an Anarchist Movement in the UK really the best option? We can’t tell from here how things are going to pan out, but maybe that sort of (activist) politics is dead. Sure, you’d hope that libertarian, anti-capitalist ideas and practices would now make more sense than ever, but that’s not to say they have to be wrapped up in all the trappings of politics-as-we-know-it. In fact, those trappings may prove to be a limit, hindering our ability to move rapidly and act flexibly as things unravel. It’s a possibility we should at least consider.

To be fair, some of this has to with London exceptionalism: I guess there are enough anarchists in London to make them appear a viable independent force (although a recent post by Ian Bone says otherwise). Out here in the sticks, it’s a little different. We don’t have the luxury of only working with “–ists”, and that’s not a bad thing.

Re-reading this, it does sound really negative. Sorry. I do have a lot of time for the spirit behind the conference, not least because it’s consciously based on the MayDay 98 conference. As I remember it, that event was really successful in reinforcing a new pragmatism and openness. It was part of a wider moment where movements coming from different directions opened themselves up to the prospect of ‘contamination’ (cross-fertilisation). There was a definite unfreezing of sectarian attitudes. Of course, one of the criticisms of that conference was that it didn’t result in a New Organisation. But that was never the point; and I’m not sure it would have had the same impact if that had been its aim.

Communism is for us not a state of affairs which is to be established, an ideal to which reality [will] have to adjust itself. We call communism the real movement which abolishes the present state of things.