local group

well there was plenty of anarchists, just mostly involved in loads of single issue stuff (anti-arms trade, G8, ABC, eco, animal rights) and not from any kind class perspective (generally speaking).

don't know the porkadian guy except on here, you can email him here http://libcom.org/user/1351/contact if he hasn't changed his email since he was last on the boards. good luck getting something together!

I'm just new here and looking to get involved in anarchist activism later this year in Glasgow. Could someone tell me a little bit about this new group Praxis as i'm interested?

Praxis is still at the stage of a steering group made up of 7 members and half a dozen supporters based in Edinburgh, Glasgow and Inverness. We're developing our national policy framework based on the following general topics:-

Workplace Democracy
Social Control Over The Economy
Real Social Housing
Meaningful Employment / Re-industrialisation
Direct Democracy
Popular Management of Society

We have a number of draft position papers in circulation amongst members of the group and we're deciding on the specifics of our policy amongst comrades who have a certain level of agreement before we look for contributions from others on aspects of our programme. In September we'll be making our official national launch and we hope by then to have developed a framework and have logistics in place to form a national political organisation, which will accept members who are in agreement with our programme and who want to constructively engage with us. The reason for developing the organisation was developed in our founding statement and our mission statement:-

We will coordinate our involvement in existing class struggles with the dual aim of improving people's lives and building truly democratic social movements and institutions of and for the working class. We hope that these can become the basis of a new, classless, society. We want a serious approach to combining theory and practise where we set targets and assess ourselves against those targets, and build new theory based on what we learn. No bullshit - let's just see what we can actually do to help, and work towards more working class power. Our strategy and tactics will be based on what works. The community and workplace are both sites of struggle against the ruling class, and struggles in both must be fought. In some workplaces a "red" union such as the IWW may be the best option, in others a democratic network of trade union members may be the better option. These are tatical decisions, not unbending principles. We will settle strategic and tactical disagreements by vote, and act in unity once the issue is settled. We are very interested in involving anyone who agrees with these principles and is serious about the struggle.

We are at the point of adopting our constitution and preamble this Tuesday and I'll be able to post more on that then, but I don't want to pre-empt the final discussions on that. Certainly however we are coming from the position of specific anarchist organisation and involvement within social movements as the primary goal and aim of the organisation and take the platform and especifist organisational ideas as where we are coming from, but we feel that this is one tradition of organised anarchism which doesn't have much of a currency in Scotland or the wider anarchist left in the UK, so we won't be using that label where it doesn't advance dialogue with Scottish/UK based anarchists.

Those involved with the group posting on libcom include myself, A Fraser, and Ginger.

There are currently two solidarity groups operating in Glasgow along the lines of anarchist organisations. One is clustered around a community newspaper which developed out of a social centre (all three Praxis members who post here are involved in that - PM me for more details), the other is an affinity group composed of ex-SSP members who are mostly anarchists and who were involved with getting a number of independent leftwing councillors elected in May (again PM me if you want more information on that, I'm not involved but might be able to put you in touch via a third party). Apart from that Praxis is the only group that is currently organised. There are a lot of anarchists involved in mass organisations though, particularly with Unity, the asylum seekers advice centre and union, but they don't really have organised groups.

Recent Glasgow anarchist politics developed from a number of splits following a unification of anarchists, anticapitalists, liberals and peace protestors in 2004 with the Printworks Social Centre. That was big tent politics at its worst, but the split which was not really connected with politics per se has affected how organisation has developed following on from that. In '05 and '06 there were two anarchist social centres.

One was primarily concerned with providing a base for an emerging No Borders group. It later closed when No Borders became the main activity of most of the people sustaining the centre, and more especially when Unity was founded. The membership of Unity grew from zero to 3000 people in the space of a few weeks and local organisations were being seeded across the city. There was some faction fights initially with the anarchists involved in this and the only left group to know about it or touch it the RCG. The anarchists won pretty quickly. Much of the local organisation has since fallen away a bit and there are attempts to reconfigure the union underway. You'll appreciate that takes a lot of work. Welshboy, who posts here, is involved in this.

The other centre ran for a year and focussed on community organising. The group was confused in how the organisational activities related to the centre, which while initially successful for developing a base from which to talk to people quickly became more of an office with a confused agenda and exorbitant rent, which local kids used as a youth centre. The group there, which involved the three Praxis posters here, attempted to create four tenants associations and was involved with others across Maryhill. It launched a campaign for a youth club which has seen some investment in youth facilities in the area, and it launched a community newspaper which is still running. It was primarily informed by an anti-gentrification agenda. I still quite like what we were up to at the time, and how we managed to unite a lot of different folk on a community level, but I question whether it was worth the effort we put into it, and much of the informal organisation has not really been lost from the closure of the centre, but we suffered from the split in the SSP in many of our projects because we were relying on some of their local branch people for some of the organising activities as we were punching above our weight really. The experience of the disagreements on strategy in a relatively serious project like the group organised around this centre though I think was a spur to some of us wanting to create a group like Praxis. There is a need for a political group to have a codified strategy and a programme, and for a majority of members to be in general agreement with it, and for the whole of the group to argue for it. The background to all of the agitation around tenants organisations and anti-gentrification struggles was the development of the Save Our Homes campaign attempting to prepare the ground for a federation of residents groups. A number of us were involved in that. Organisation towards that objective continues (PM me if you want more information).

I hope that helps explain things. If you're not from Scotland a brief explanation of the left might be necessary. Anarchists in Scotland are quite a marginal force. There are very few class struggle anarchists of any particular tradition, and the major left groups are social democratic. Until recently the SSP, which still has 800 members, but once boasted 3000, hoovered up all young people interested in left politics and had brought most left groups under its umbrella. Internally it was quite a corrupt and backstabbing environment but only for those who wished to get on in the party I guess in one way or another. There are still a lot of fairly decent people involved in it, but politically it's not very good and the debate on the left resembles that of 1970s labour party conferences. Anarchists amount to exactly zero on the ground for the most part though so much of what we are doing is trying to establish ourselves as a force, and that will really be the first task for Praxis. There are some interesting mass projects though in Glasgow, namely the stuff happening around residents associations, continuing on from that social centre, the Unity stuff, and the refugee agitation which has started to develop beyond just asylum seekers fighting back but is starting to involve whole communities, and the IWW, which is still incipient with only 50 members but has a job branch at Glasgow University and is involved in a major struggle.

In terms of where Praxis members are coming from there have been two discussion documents circulated in a personal capacity by me and A Fraser, which have sparked some discussion:-

* Residents Associations - Latterday Parisian Sections Or A Distraction From The Struggle For Socialism

* Exaggerated Privatisation?

It's likely that we will have an adopted policy in relation to Real Social Housing, a preamble and constitution sorted out in the next week or so. The rest you may have to wait a few weeks yet, but by September we aim to have all that worked out and functional branches in Edinburgh, Glasgow and Inverness, which are begining to flex their muscles.

yeah, Dundee_united is your man when it comes to housing stuff too i believe. dundee - do you ever get time to sleep?

are you going to come up with a decent name?

got on a puter , so just read this thread, yep im alive and kicking and still in inverness jambo 1 but getting in touch with me is a pain as i rarely get access to a computer,pm me and we can try to arrange a meet,but oly got access to this coputer till tomorrow { saturday} then back off the radar but if i can willget back in touch when i can.