Organisation of Revolutionary Anarchists

Comrade Battlescarred is your man.

The Organisation of Revolutionary Anarchists (ORA)

The Anarchist Federation of Britain (AFB) had slowly emerged in the aftermath of the political dead-end and decline of the Committee of 100 and the growing new radicalism of the1960s, with its founding conference in Bristol in 1963. There was an impressive list of group and individual contacts featured in Freedom. National conferences began to be organised that were well attended. On the face of it things looked very good indeed, with the potential for an Anarchist movement to grow and once again have some influence as the pre-WW1 movement had. In reality things were far from rosy. Anyone could attend conferences, often to make contributions and then never to be seen again. There was no structure of decision-making, and therefore no decisions made at conference. There was no paper controlled by the AFB, and often groups loosely affiliated within it contained all sorts of ‘anarchists’ from individualists, pacifists and gradualists, lifestylists and agrarian communards, through to syndicalists and anarchist communists. No clear analysis could be developed because of the huge array of differing and opposing ideas. Indeed the AFB only had an internal bulletin from late 1969.

The AFB was unable to respond to the huge potential offered to it, and began to drift. Indeed there was a massive exodus of activists to International Socialism (IS) and the International Marxist Group (IMG). A group emerged in the AFB around Keith Nathan and Ro Atkins , the former who had been a driving force in the very active Harlow Anarchist Group. This group produced a document called Towards a History and Critique of the Anarchist Movement in Modern Times as a discussion paper for a conference of Northern Anarchists in November 1970. Militants in Lancaster and Swansea (including Ian Bone, the future founder of Class War) also had criticicisms of the AFB. " The people in Swansea dropped out of the fray after their open letter was published, but their action had encouraged people in Lancaster, Leeds, Manchester and York to put a motion to to the AFB that it call a ‘reorganisation conference’ to discuss the criticisms raised" (from The Newsletter, bulletin of the ORA May 1971). The Critique and a joint statement produced by all the critics was taken from the conference to the AFB conference in Liverpool the same month. It should be pointed out that this critical current was made up of both anarchist communists and anarcho-syndicalists as well as those who had no specific identification other than Anarchist.

The Critique was a trenchant and deeply honest document. It is worth quoting at length on the state of the Anarchist movement: " the omision of an attempt to link present short term action with the totality of capitalist society and with the totality of the future alternative society, means that when the short term issue dies, as it will, then so does the consciousness created by this short term action. ....bitter personal disputes based upon spuriously advanced positions; battles for the soul of the revolution / movement / Individual / reified anything, fought in reams of paper attacking and defending positions long since overrun by time. This is our ‘theory’. Usually it totally replaces even the pretence of activity".

Ginger

Following on from the Liverpool Conference the group in York decided to set up the Organisation of Revolutionary Anarchists to act as a ginger group within the AFB. The attention at this time was not to leave the AFB. It wanted the AFB to open its doors to other libertarian tendencies e.g. Solidarity. "...The ORA people do not want to form another sect-we see our role as acting within and on the libertarian movement in general, as well as initiating our own work...we hope it can act as a link and a catalyst not only for ORA and the AFB but also to all libertarians". (ORA Newsletter see above).

ORA’s objections to the traditional anarchist movement then, were more on the level of organisation than of theory. Their advocacy of collective responsibility, the use of a Chair and voting to take decisions at meetings, formal membership and a paper under the control of its "writers, sellers and readers" while warmly greeted in some quarters for example the May 1971 Scottish Anarchist Federation Conference was viciously attacked by others.

But the ORA itself was a hotch-potch including all sorts of anarchists, including syndicalists and those who argued for a pacifist strategy. When the ORA decided to bring out a monthly paper, Libertarian Struggle, in February 1973, it proved to be a forcing house for the development of the group, and these elements fell away. Also significant were contacts with the Organisation Revolutionnaire Anarchiste in France which had developed along similar lines within the Federation Anarchiste. Through the French ORA the British discovered the pamphlet the Organisational Platform of the Libertarian Communists which had been written by a group of Russian and Ukrainian Anarchists, including Nestor Makhno and Piotr Arshinov. This argued for a specific anarchist communist organisation, and ideological and tactical unity.

The ORA produced a number of pamphlets and a regular monthly paper. At first this was lacking in theoretical content, in the main consisting of short factual articles on various struggles. Quite correctly, Libertarian Struggle gave extensive coverage to both industrial struggles and struggles outside the workplace, including tenants struggles, squatting, womens liberation and gay liberation. By issue 8 a greater analytical and theoretical content emerged. For example in an article on the Spanish Revolution of 1936 in Libertarian Struggle 1973 we can read about: "The failure of the anarcho-syndicalists who make a far too ready identification of their union with the working class as a whole. The way forward in a revolutionary situation is the rapid building of workers councils...union committees are no substitute for direct workers power". These anarchist-communist criticisms of anarcho-syndicalism were to be further developed within the libertarian communist movement over the years.

Similarly, the analysis of Labour was to be a consistent feature of British anarchist-communism over the following years. For example we can read in Libertarian Struggle November 1973: "Only by carefully explaining and exposing the role of the Labour Party to the working class can any progress be made to building a revolutionary anarchist alternative...It cannot be done by first insisting we vote Labour". The Labour Party was defined as a bourgeois party.

On the unions, however, the ORA was not so clear. The criticisms of the union bureaucracies were clear enough, and this included the ‘left’ NUM leadership. Also clear was the call to create workers action committees leading to the establishment of workers councils. However this was mixed up with calls to democratise the unions(!) and to democratise the various Rank and Files (all of which were IS fronts).

http://flag.blackened.net/af/org/issue42/acbrit.html

There you go:

http://www.afed.org.uk/ace/manifest.html

Yes. I was in the ORA and its avatars the AWA and LCG. What would you like to know???
The early 70s was a period when you could sell papers easily. I used to stand outside Kings Cross tube and sell with other comrades up to 40 in an hour. In fact I used to do a tube sale practically every evening for a hour with good results. Me and another comrade went round the pubs in Kilburn once a month and get up to a 100 sales from predominantly Irish labourers. That's not to mention the demos. In that time there were demos almost every weekend and sometines 2 in a weekend and obviously we shifted a lot that way.
THat's a myth about 40 health workers joining by the way. It never happened.
As to the significance of the ORA? Hmm, a group that reached a top membership of 73 ?( I remember that figure well)

battlescared:

Specific politics aside, that was a pretty good number for class struggle anarchists back then --- certainly by US standards.The Syndicalist Workers Federation was a handful. The AFB was sliding down and was synthesis federation by that time. So the numbers were pretty good. If you compared them to the marxist left,of course, they were small. But in our context it was a decent number. Well, in my opinion and from the other end of the Atlantic.

Well I suppose you just never hear of it. Or of what happened in the 70s. I mean you hear about Solidarity all the time but you don't hear much about anarchists. I mean what happened the the magazine Anarchy, did that have any relation to the AFB or ORA?

Christ that sounds very very different. Would it have been common for people to be doing daily tube sales?

That seems like a pretty big commitment.

Hehe. Its not often you get people saying my group was shit and insignifcant. Thats cool.

On another issue, when did the AF join the IFA? It seems very different to the other IFA organisations.

Plus in those 8 years there has been a good level of discussion and agreements reached about world views that has brought the IFA members together. You can reach much of this material, like joint statements, via links on this page: http://www.afed.org.uk/international.html

Jack,

Martin Gilbert's book: "Known to the Authorities: Anarchists in Social Work"

records Anarchist industrial struggles in the the NHS during the 70's.

Regards

Peter Good(TCA)

Just curious, the Hull folks aren't the same who morphed into a number of other groups, but mainly called "Hull Syndicalists"?

While morphing, did Hull Syndicalists morph into a small knot of Direct Action Movement members circa 79/80 who also hailed from Hull? [Had a comrade/friend called "Dino" who I lost contact with circa 1982.] Just wondered like.

I'm 22.

Wait, Dino, like Dino who moved back to Italy (or to Italy)? I had a lively mail correspondence with him. he was DAM, strictly.

The group which became the "Hull Syndicalists" were clearly (and prolly rightly) asked to leave DAM. At the time of their DAM departure, they were kind of mischevious and trued to run a game inside the DAM against the WSA.

That said, they did some good solidarity work over the years.

Haven't heard peep from them in a few years.

Yeah probs. He was at college at the time, Middlesboro Poly I think it was. Hull was his home town. We worked together in the North East Anarchist Federation between 1979 and 1981'ish. I did hear at one point he moved to Italy. (His parents were Italian).

Not how I remember it at all. The WSA didn't have any relevance to the events.

There was also a DAM 'typewriter scandal', pretty much like the ICC's but nobody ever brings that up.

Devrim