libcom.org keeping a UK focus?

Nah rkn's right, it's far better to do what's being done atm, ie. letting the international community do stuff if they want to, than aiming to properly cover the globe with nine people based in the UK (mostly Southeast indeed).

while we are 9 people based in the UK there will never be an issue of us trying to cover the whole world, don't worry!

You guys really should consider branching out as far as possible. If you haven’t noticed this site is becoming a real focal point for class struggle anarchists in the anglophone world. Especially for America it’s important to have a central resource for class struggle anarchism. Otherwise we’ll get run over by crimethinc and the infoshop halfwits.

Practically speaking this could be a strain on resources, but all that’s required is an expansion in your collective. Create those subsections for Ireland, USA, Australia, NZ etc. I’m sure there are people here (myself included) willing to contribute content.

hmm

But if workers in other countries developed their own bit of the site that would be "their own backyard".

true. but the main focus of enrager should be to build a resource for workers here, as anarchism in the uk desperately needs a voice in the labour movement.

Admin - branding correction ....so what

TBH I think it's more re-building a "labour movement" - one without the illusions of its predecessors.

And workers here are no more or less important than workers elsewhere.

All very nice. Would be wonderful for us to be the labour movement, but is that realistic right now? i dont think it is, we have to subvert the current labour movement and intervene as much as possible and at the same time build unions which can carry forward the struggle.

come down pub on friday night.

all we can do is abandon the current unions to piss all over the workers and build small organisations away from the ongoing struggle??? wtf. you need to be realistic, we are not in a situation to just leave the unions and build things ourselves we need to be as active inside the current unions as possible otherwise we will remain insignificant groups and unseen by the majority of workers.

And how do you do that by acting outside of the unions? anarchists need to have a presence in the current unions, we need to have as much influence on the shop floor and in the branches as possible, whilst at the same time building our own networks.

My views on this - I don't think we gain anything by staying UK focused, apart from maybe a higher concentration of UK users but we already have that.

We stand to lose a lot if we overstretch ourselves though, and an easy way to overstretch ourselves would be to lose our focus. I don't think our focus necessarily needs to be on the UK though, it should be on the type of politics and information that's here - and that's likely to stay focused by having people who're like-minded (to some extent) from elsewhere, rather than just more people from the UK.

The only thing I think it'd be impractical to expand into is other languages to any significant extent - if that ever became a possibility the best thing would be to help people set up another site closely linked to this one (like hosted), or a completely new section, because multi-language sites are usually very confusing.

I want to see people posting and reading news that's from their own situations or close to them from as many places as possible. I'd also like to see us as the main repository of contemporary social anarchist/anti-state communist theory and history internationally - we may be close to that, but there's a lot to go anyway.

What we don't want is people writing stuff about international struggles, or worse liberal geopolitics type stuff when they're completely divorced from it themselves, have nothing new to offer, and ignore what's going on down the road from them - this is the problem with nearly all anarchist/left sites at the moment and one we've been trying to avoid as much as possible by keeping a UK focus.

There are real practical limits to how much the present admin team can expand the site and keep up with what's already here, so any international expansion would require a lot of input from other people - it'd be impossible for us to cover it to any significant extent ourselves.

Er, that is a lot - just about pays for a year's hosting (although we need to get more expensive hosting so we don't disappear all the time). Hope we get to meet up properly when you're over and refund some of that donation in beer.