How much start up money?

Rather than forking out from your own pocket, I would be looking into ensuring that people who don't have the basics are getting all the help they can get from existing structures. Are they claiming and receiving all the benefit they are entitled to? Are they taking advantage of schemes which are supposed to help them - I'm thinking specifically of the "free insulation" schemes currenlty operating e.g. https://www.sheffield.gov.uk/in-your-area/housing-services/environmental-sustainability/free-insulation-scheme/eligibility.html but there may be other similar things.

This approach might not have much to do with libertarian communism, but so what. One problem with schemes like these is that not everyone is able to take advantage of them because they are either not aware of them or they need help following the process.

If tenants do not have appropriate heating facilities then landlords should be pressed into providing it. There may be more opportunities for libcom action in this arena.

There is nothing pointless about sharing some time and coffee with a homeless person. I'm sure it can be a lonely existence and a friendly chat won't go amiss.

Yeah it may not be revolutionary but helping people's never bad. Tbh startup cash needs depends on what you're hoping to do - visiting the homeless with tea and biscuits is pretty cheap but providing a sustainable safe space for the night is likely to be way beyond your means.

If there's a partiular gap you want to fill (say a project for a warm community cafe for people to stay in during the day) the key thing'll be who you know and how many people you can galvanise, so start grabbing potential allies early. A mate of mine once set up a community space in the village hall, took him five years and a team of a dozen folks from round the way to make it happen - so for any bigger projects you might want to bear in mind it'll take a while!

He also cultivated good contacts on the local council which is invaluable for the sake of funding applications, finding potential council properties to get a peppercorn rent on and to avoid getting them in the frame of mind to shut you down. Sadly, playing the game is the order of the day with any bigger project work unless you have some serious community leverage. Be careful though - anything smacking of Big Community is likely both to draw the political vultures and the little Hitlers, the best defence will be community influence - don't sign your autonomy away!

You could hold Food not Bombs type events. They're a way to combine social interaction with yummy nutrition (also a great way to "evangelize" if you are so inclined though I think some may take that as patronizing).

The only thing you'd need is a place to cook and eat - maybe nearby community centres will help you out with that. Well, you need food too, obviously.

Whether you dive dumpsters for food is another question, however (and largely depends on availability of "free" food "lying around", over here stores padlock their garbage), but it's theoretically a way to keep this as low-cost as possible, practice may turn out quite different however.

The way FNB is meant to work from what I understand is that the people eventually take over the organizing and cooking to blur the line between givers and receivers.

I think squatting is a great idea too, if you're really badass you could use that house as the community center itself.

However, as others have pointed out, no one can give you a shopping list without enough info, and even then we'd struggle with it because we lack proper context (as in, we don't know all details of the situation, that to me is something impossible unless you're directly involved)

We get it BJJ, you go to the gym. Lots

Also, my gym is 16 pounds a month. No joke.

Choccy v. BJJ in a libcom battle royale?

Who's up for it? Who knows, might make enough to get you that start up money...

Of course helping people is a good thing in itself.

However as an anarchist/libcom I think it's more important for our primary focus to not be on trying to set up some sort of charitable enterprise to help people, but on trying to fight with others to defend the services which we already have. And in particular fight to defend services which the state currently provides and which the government is currently trying to replace with well-meaning people like you - unpaid volunteers or "The Big Society".

I've always wondered, isn't that essentially a reformist type of action?

To be fair, BJJ you pay for the instruction, sparring partners, insurance etc so it's always a stack more. I train at one of the best in the world and it's 75quid a month, London was even more! That said it's obviousl ystill a fucking rip off.

My 'gym' costs me nothing now - got olympic bar in the garden

Back on topic , sorry. Yeah someone said this about trhe 'free universities' meeting at the bookfair. I didn't make that meeting but my old workmate's partner went and he said that, although well-meaning, and coming from a good place, it all sounded exactly what 'the big society' wants. Basically take all the top provisions best resources, cream it off and give it to those who can afford it, and let the rest of us scramble to build our own.
While of course as you say we shouldbe figthing to take back what we already built and gained, but are now losing again.

That said, I could see an emergence of community/worker/self-education intiatives happening given no one can afford uni, certainly not most kids I teach.

Note that I'm not against this kind of action, just a bit suspicious of it (which I consider a healthy approach to everything one encounters)

The point I'm kind of struggling with is what happens after a successful struggle. I can see lots of people going back to their old lives, and when another issue pops up, they attempt the same course of struggle again (hopefully).

Now its already in itself valuable that people learn to fight for themselves, but I'm not sure how one bridges the gap between "just" that (effectively struggle reduced to single incidents) and actively encouraging class consciousness and class struggle on a wider front.

This debate seems to get raised again and again, but taking action in the workplace is about having confidence, not politics. In fact, oftentimes "action precedes consciousness" with the ostensibly non-politicised workers taking more militant action than than supposedly radical ones. As always, I recommend Brecher's Strike! on this.

In my experience organising, the worst thing we can attempt to do is attempt to organise workmates politically. Instead, we have to relate to the materially, about real life grievances that they're willing to take action on. From those little victories, people will be ready to tackle larger battles--eventually up to whole factory closures. It's struggle that creates the place for politics and, emphatically, not the other way around.

Controversial depiction of the panthers right there

Would you say having oratory (or better, rhetoric) skills is a valuable asset for us then, to ignite the spark of inspiration to act for oneself/ourselves?

Because I don't have any. And I guess this sort of thing would be seen as quite manipulative by some...

Yeah, like Huey Freeman in The Boondocks who in one episode tried to get the cinema workers unionized which only got them laid off and they were like, fuck you and thanks for nothing.

Radical workers have to come from somewhere, workers can radicalise themselves by their response to their conditions.

Is the outcome of this self-radicalization always positive? I'm not going to use any specific examples, but there have been times when the working class was both debased and co-opted, in response to miserable conditions.

It's not necessarily positive, I just felt that BJJ seemed to be saying that radicalisation was something that needed to be done by radicals.

I don't think it's that simple BJJ. I mean if you remember the BA cabin crew strike--one of the most militant we've seen in past years--the workers (not the union) were publicly saying "we're not militants". Obviously, they had militants ideas, but they weren't vocalising them.

And I guess that the point I've been trying to make: often the militancy and radicalism comes before it's articulated. It's the struggle itself that opens up the space for radicals to begin having conversations about things like class and capitalism.

It's also probably worth noting that it's been governments' and capitals' policy to divide up the workforce (often with the help of the trade unions) since capitalism first began. That basic solidarity of sympathy strikes and strikes spreading across and between industries was the norm in early capitalism.

Once again, I can't recommend Brecher's Strike! enough.