What do you think of the AF?

Hi

Hardly ever. Seriously though, you're sure this history stuff is what people want?

Love

LR

You personally may not be interested in history, but I'll not take that as a good recommendation.

Part of the libertarian communist project is to ensure that we are not fly-by-night but have some level of permanence and that we can learn from our own practice and others' while building a revolutionary anarchist movement.

So none of the federations have become mass organisations over the last 20 years, but what do you really expect? Are you disappointed that the revolution didn't happen a couple of weeks after you first got involved? Bless. But I'm sorry to tell you, it doesn't work like that.

You and Glory Hole can chuck your dummies out of the pram and slag off the federations all you like... but I have to say, it does make you look a right pair of twats. "Wouldn't it be nice to see the federations swept away... ooh, anyone who's been involved for more than 10 years should be chucked out..." Well you and Glory Hole seem to have been around a long time. So what are you doing still hanging around libcom? Follow your own advice please.

Hi

Ho ho. Your Ad Hominem proves Glory Hunter’s point.

Love

LR

Hi

How would you feel about "advertising"? Market Socialist now is it?

Love

LR

No need to get so defensive SF...

You're right, John. I didn't realise I was typing out aloud.

This thread seems to have turned from what's wrong with the AF to what's wrong with the entire anarchist milieu.

If you ask me, I think agit prop and actual struggle have a simbiotic relationship and we need to recognise this. Reading Resistance or Freedom will only turn a handful of people into fullblown active anarchists, surely it's through struggle that this transformation will happen en masse?? I personally would advocate the breaking down of artificial boundaries between "us" and "them". Perhaps anarchists should be getting involved in local/relevant struggles as members of the working class (assuming they pass Lazy's test and sufficiently resemble an extra on Only Fools and Horses) rather than as anarchists. This means participating in what benefits you and your class, instead of desperately searching for the "correct position" on it. Anarchism is only a secondary term, a signifier - what it signifies is pre-existant to the term's introduction into any situation.

I think members of any group, be they local or national, would be well served by participating in the struggle as and when it enters their lives and then using any groups they're in as a solidarity mechanism where necessary, instead of joining out of a sense of moral propulsion and then participating in all sorts of self-perpetuating activity for the sake of it. After all, this shit's supposed to be common sense right??

I hope that is readable. I tend to stay away from long posts cos I don't trust myself to articulate what I'm thinking and I also worry about reiterating points or mistaking the grounds of the discourse. Anything you don't understand, get me to explain it.

Strangely enough, the way alan explains is it exactly the way a load of us in the AF see it. Personally, I haven't got time to go round looking for campaigns to "get involved" with. So I do what I can, where I can.

But I'd take him to task over this:

We don't "desperately seek" anything. We do try and understand the world around us. We are constantly fed mystification in the media and via "common sense". So we try and find our way through it all.

Why's that so incomprehensible??

What I said wasn't necessarily directed at the AF in particular, but I'd suggest that some of the rhetoric on this thread from AF members would contest that assertion (specifically in reference to recruitment drives, defense of Resistance etc).

Once again, this wasn't directed at you or AF in particular, but it is a tendency within the class struggle milieu. Discussion about events, both current and historical, is absolutely vital, but I would support the overcoming of inertiatic ideology by common sense. Anarchism is completely redundant if you remove it from the context of common sense and instead place it in alienated and secondary theory. (That's not a criticism of theory or ideology btw, just bad instances thereof.)

I agree, it could just be me but I find the picture aggressive in tone. (Is that the image we want to present ourself as?) Debatable.

Love the logo but don't like that medallion version - the black and white one on the back of Resistance is much better.

But as the person who did the initial ACF version of that logo design many years ago, I would think it's brill, wouldn't I! Agressive? Perhaps a tad. But the hands clasped like that is the anarchist salute from the Spanish revolution - so there's a bit more history for yer. And why fire? Well, it's all to do with fanning the flames of discontent, etc, etc.

The ACF used to have neat little enamel badges of it in black and red. I'm ashamed to say, I lost mine.

I like the logo in black and white aswell... especially with the Red and Black background.

I thought the fire represented the burning of capitalism etc. But discontent, makes a little more sense.

I have to say, I didn't know about the Anarchist salute. How exactly did it work? did you hold your own hands in that manner??

To get back to the original topic:

I am a member of solidarity federation, just to give you the background.

I have plenty of time for AF and consider any AF peep a comrade, this is given. Also AF people like knightrose are always there and has good provocative opinions (honest!) and we've had many good political discussions.

The reason why i didn't joing AF but joined solfed was simply because i am an anarcho-syndicalist. Now in practise i dont think for instance mine and knightroses politics or everyday activism differs that much, but AF has clearly suffered from the inflated (perhaps unjustly) anti-union stance because people like me will automatically be put off by that reputation.

Regarding the publications: contrary to many opinions here i quite like resistance, i think that is a fantastic way to give a brief selection of anarchist news and opinions to people you meet or talk to in events etc. The running costs are low and you can use the material in the web site, part of libcom news and so on as well. The discussion of resistance paper version vs online material is a false one because they do not exclude eachother and both are needed in different interaction situations.

The logo on the site, in fact the site as a whole, is just crying out, just begging (darling), for attention. For any newcomer going onto it after searching for anarchism, like I did a few years ago, they'll more often than be put off. I totally understand the difficulties involved but it's a damn shame that it's not better when it could be a great resource.

(But at least it's not as bad as the Scottish site. )

Really? That's cool.

"I have to say, I didn't know about the Anarchist salute. How exactly did it work? did you hold your own hands in that manner??"

As I understand it, it originates from before 1936 at a time when CNT members were being arrested in their thousands. I believe (and someone will correct me if I'm wrong) that as the CNT-ers tended to be handcuffed, so the two handed salute developed.

The thing is JDMF, that if you'd joined the AF, you'd have found a few other syndicalists present! We've just had a lengthy discussion on our internal list about workplace organisation as we want to be able to talk about it from an informed point of view at our forthcoming conference.

For what it's worth, we've never been outside and against. Loads of us have been stewards at various times. (Even me). We don't think unions can be converted, though. Mind you, Solfed doesn't either, does it? We are concerned about what we perceive as being a sectarian attitude by Solfed about industrial networks. The current view on the AFED list seems to favour joining the IWW.

nope.

they are part of solfed, part of its structures, much like locals, so i dont see the sectarianism. They are just networks for solfeds in a particular industry to network, share information etc.

Lets see how they start working in future though.

thats great to hear!

Poor souls, are they lost?

I do think the site needs an update...

Well, yeah, because you can't burn capitalism - it's a set of social relationships we perpetuate with our everyday behaviour: namely, by going to work.

I thought the clasped had salute was mostly from Germany... guess I was wrong!

Oh dear. That's not a very good idea... For another thread though. If the AF discussion is not private, it'd be interesting to see it posted up in your forum, or key points from it...

Keeping the political and economic seperate?

Check out the loverly new pamphlet thumbnails on:

http://www.libcom.org/hosted/af/ace/

More link association for http://www.afed.org.uk from http://www.libcom.org, great! That's another

The Anarchist Federation website exists to present the AF, aims to be one of the first ports of call for anyone interested in anarchism in the UK but does not replace sites that need more continual attention, so it ...

-Currently gets an excellent hit from 'anarchist' in google.co.uk (but not from 'belfast ferry workers').

-Site links to AF libcom forum on every index page and also links to libcom home page on the AF home page, news page and links page.

-Site is a hub for links to newswires and prisoner sites but not content.

-Definitely underuses meta-tags - currently only on home page - a matter of web admin time really. Not really a problem anyway as google doesn't care much for these (see Search Engine Optimisation thread).

In terms of circulation, as well as the website archive, all AF articles from Organise! and resistance already go out on a-infos as individual posts. Some stuff gets posted on Indymedia and Libcom as mentioned. Resistance gets posted directly by email for anyone who wants it in PDF or text as it comes out (see http://www.libcom.org/hosted/af/res/ ). You can also take out a £4 annual sub for the printed version!

BTW only one AF pamphlet is in the Libcom library. As new editions are done from time to time, to keep it up-to-date it would probably be best just to have a short description in the Libcom library and link to the archive content that already exists - short descriptions can be found on http://www.libcom.org/hosted/af/ace/ ) together with the content in PDF and/or HTML. Can this be sorted easily?

Anyway - for orgs like the AF, what's more important is what happens once someone has found you - meeting them, getting them off the web and doing something in the workplace, community...

well like jdmf i'm in solfed because i'm an anarcho-syndicalist, and because a few other comrades in the vicinity wanted to start up a local, and as i'm only here until the summer it seemed more logical to help with that than a fed i wouldn't contribute much to immediately. but i do like the af, it's just that given the choice of two tiny organisations with similar politics i'm naturally going to join the one with more members locally, especially if it means being in the same international as the cnt

i do agree with others on this thread though who have said it might be better if the af put more into something like freedom than resistance. the af, sf and unaligned class struggle anarchists have pretty limited resources, and it seems unlikely to me pretty stupid to have them spread more than they really need to be. the amount of comment, spin or whatever you want to call it that you can fit into articles the length of those in resistance, freedom and catalyst is pretty limited and i don't see why there would be much if any strong disagreement over them if we were to pool resources into one regular new source. and i think the logical choice would be libcom online and freedom offline because neither are controlled by one fed so it should hopefully reduce objections from whoever or whatever it is that stops the two feds from merging completely. also both are more regular, which is important for a news source.

as i said i doubt there would be much disagreement over content and style if there was sufficient involvement to swamp out the radical liberal and other undersirable elements, and to spread the load. if feds want to make their views particularly clear and in depth on something it strikes me as being better to do so in pamphlets as others have said, because generally it is on a subject that is fairly constant and deserving of deeper discussion than the shallow one that you can fit in something like resistance. also it's only in a piece of about pamphlet length that any differences worth spending extra resources on showing will be revealed.

i agree with others who have said that freesheets are most effective when they have a local focus, but if libcom is a good source of national and international news then it makes it very easy for local groups to pull articles off and add it to local stuff. i don't see why local af or sol fed or whatever groups couldn't add a bit to the newsletter with info on joining whatever organisation if they wanted, and i reckon that would be more effective in getting people interested than a national newsletter. for national demos and that as i think saii said, hopefully a pooling of resources could allow for a free distribution of freedoms now and again.

it's a while since i read organise!, so i can't really comment on the content, and the same with direct action despite the fact i seem to have ended up with about 4 copies of the last one. but unless things have radically changed in the last two years i imagine that they still cover similar kind of topics and the views are generally not antagonistic. and in fact the same can be said if you add black flag to the list. so as with the news sheet i don't see why all three can't be combined into one (i'd suggest black flag for similar reasons as i suggest freedom for news), obviously there would be a bit more difference of views than in short news articles, but hardly completely contradictory ones. having a healthy amount of debate (within a class struggle framework, obviously) would seem to be a strength to me at any rate, and probably make it easier for people to see any differences between the feds when deciding to join.

i don't know if any of that is workable, if it is then with any luck it might bring things closer to the two feds merging, although that seems to have been discussed since i got involved in anarchist stuff and has yet to make any progress i can see. but even if it didn't, it would save resources, avoid duplication and improve the quality of information. when there is an anarcho-syndicalist union of tens of thousands and/or a federation for hundreds of anarcho-communist affinity groups in the uk, then we might be able to afford to have three different publications all basically saying the same thing, but until then it's a waste.

Hi

I think this is extremely admirable. How many people have you got that have been through the “getting them off the web” process?

LR

Some newer members have come through web enquiries.

Every new member now gets a wearable computer (preferably one with GPS tracking and voice commands as used in leading supermarket warehouses - see pic). This helps bridge the gap between cyberspace and more meaningful class struggle interactions. You can apply to have this removed after 6 weeks of giving out Resistance in your town.

Hi

Wonderfully disarming response. “Resistance” is a bit of a depressing title, can’t you think of anything more catchy? The working class is tired of struggle and defence, the time has come to nonchalantly sweep the old order aside and surge forward.

Love

LR

It's Serge with an 'e'. And I don't sweep aside that easily

Good question - not sure We are winning would be quite right at the moment and we've steered clear of We're all doomed though it sometimes feels like it. Cl ss W r is one possibility (thoughts?)

Then again we do have a pamphlet Beyond Resistance http://www.libcom.org/hosted/af/ace/manifest.html (which does envision sweeping and surging)

Cheers

maybe not worth 7 posts though...

How about a Lazy Riser quote: "We are your executioners"