feedback on the Climatre Camp

It's not clear that he's a member of solfed, maybe he or someone who knows can clarify. But former solfed member Gentle Revolutionary said much worse things on here about all the organisations he was a member of at the time, so I prefer to read things how they actually read rather than give them the best possible spin. Perhaps you'll withdraw your straw man arguments against myself and John now this has been clarified?

Also, if Dublin Dave is in fact a member of SolFed, then it appears he's got very little idea about their members' involvement in workmates only 2-4 years ago. Given that it appears to have been along the lines of a "workplace resistance group", this would be massive hole in their internal communications and education when a "letter oft thanks from the RMT" is hailed as a great achievement.

Strike committees, mass assemblies - although the form has changed over time and place, this type of action and day-to-day organising has led to just about all the major revolutionary events and individual strikes of the past 100 years and earlier. The two examples of direct action given were during the lowest period of class struggle of the last century, with the Dockers being a spectacular defeat. They may have been "good", but as saii points out, they've got little to do with how strikes are organised, fought and won since in isolation these tactics are easily marginalised and repressed.

Right ok I see what you mean now. I wasn't so much referring to those particular examples as that kind of thing in general. It is "spectacular" and arrestable DA is by nature quite exclusive, "shite" I use to describe lots of things.

But anyhow, I still don't agree that those things are inherently worth more. Especially when the acts of solidarity are with firmly union-controlled struggles. The key to winning disputes is workers taking as much control over the struggle as possible themselves. Another key thing is trying to spread struggles. I think that attempting to forward these aims are worth more than helping to physically stop work in most instances.

I also think it's funny I've attracted more scorn, and been called a "leftist" and compared to the SWP for saying what I've been saying, whereas no one mentions the initial poster fawning over a letter from the RMT. Actually I believe a member of SolFed quit the RMT executive a year or two back after they called off a strike over safety which 85% voted in favour of.

Well the important thing to me is you seem happy for him to compare them favourably against strike committees which (his own organisation?) solfed was involved with, and 140 years of (anarchist) working class history including Spain '36, the Makhnovschina, and the Haymarket Martyrs, since that's what his ill-informed post actually did if you read the whole thing.

Because anarchists have never occupied anything, oh no.

Yeah that is my point....I'm sure you don't think a mass action involving picketting and an occupation in support of a strike is elitist shite.....(I dunno how it is "that kind of thing in general" ) but your justified animus towards "that kind of thing in general" eg kick it till it breaks activism, elitist notions within activism and so forth, clouds your vision, it is like RTS....activisitoids.....must be bad.....this actually undermines the critique of the "activist ghetto" - a critique of the "activist ghetto" should be very cognisicant of breaks from that ghetto - clearly what the OP is referring to isn't "that kind of thing in general"

On the other point re:unions and the OP, yeah totally - but there is enough people here having a go at leftist notions of the unions for me to concern myself with such on these boards.

Yes catch I have re-read it, you are right that is exactly what the OP is doing, it is comparing the RTS-Liverpool dockers with the Spanish Revolution and coming down in favour of the former, it is totally dismissive of anything Sol Fed has ever done, and not saying well getting a whole bunch of people to go down to pickets for mass picketting and an occupation is better than a few people going down to hand out anarchist propaganda. Totally off-the-head for it to not consider the Makhnovschina in relation to contemporary Britain. I withdraw any criticism of anything anyone has said about "spectacular elitist shite" in view of the fact that the OP did not bring into consideration this 140 years of history.

But apart from the original post, no-one here has ever actually advocated handing out ‘anarchist propaganda’ as he clearly means it (ie. what do we need comrades? Anarchist revolution!). They’ve advocated distributing information which helps to link people, improve tactics and facilitate more effective struggle. If we’re talking misrepresentation, it starts with the ‘OP’.

What is actually fairly obnoxious about the sentence – and tbh your follow up sentence - here is that it assumes that the people criticising the climate camp are one-dimensional leftists unable to engage beyond shouting ‘we can only solve this through anarchist revolution comrades’ – something which has been repeatedly disproven.

Even if we're talking about roughly the same period 1987-1997 in the UK say (i.e. pre summits), I'd say the activity of anarchist (and related) groups during the Poll Tax were at least as significant as RTS, to give just one example.

Also, would you like to actually answer my points about Workmates? Specifically why you're continuing to fall into the false binary of "D-locks vs. anarchist propaganda", the regular resort of the "Do Something !!111!" brigade when other possibilities for action are put forward.

Or will we just get more sarcastic deflection?

I'd say this entire site, and your editorship at Freedom, are to some extent an attempt to excise ‘we can only solve this through anarchist revolution comrades’ at the end of every fucking article ever from anarchist/communist literature (as evidenced by our shared style guide. It's therefore particularly insulting that Dublin Dave and Terry throw "anarchist propaganda" around in the way you've outlined.

In addition if I remember rightly the co-operation in question involved the organisation of a conference, a march, and plenty of publicity as well.

Must exist to be excised.

(referring to OP)

I'm a person who would criticise the climate camp myself so I hardly think such are "one-dimensional leftists" as for what is represented by the above posts (or posts describing the Liverpool Dockers RTS link up as "spectacular elitist shite") it is beyond me. As I person who would criticise such (eg the climate camp) and often in terms similar to what some of the folk here would say, I just know I want to put as much distance between myself and statements like those above.

not wanting to put words in dublin dave's mouth i think when he said "class struggle anarchists" he meant:

class struggle anarchism developed as a recognisable tendency in the early early 80's as an identifiable distinction away from pacifism and individualism both of which gained currency in the anarchist movement at the time. class war can be said to have established and progressed such a tendency, picked up by anarchist federation and other such anarchist groupings. Class struggle anarchism today is simply a term used by internet anarchists to distinguish themselves from everybody with whom they disagree with, as such it remains meaningless internet jargon
and not the makhnovschina, and the haymarket martyrs or spanish revolutionaries people here are so desparate to identify with.

Just to clarify further it could be argued that libcom is the 21 st century version of the anarchist reading groups predominating in the early 80's; a self-selected group of insular middle class anarchists who would sit around and talk about anarchism (mentioning makhno and spain '36 in passing) but who never managed to apply their politics in any real world situations.

http://www.indymedia.org.uk/en/2007/08/378855.html
Ah is this what you mean by ''applying your politics to a real world situation''?

While i do give a fuck about tha expansion of heathrow airpor and its effect on working class housing and communities and the likely use of mass amounts bof migrant and commuting labour to isolate and break up stronger workforces, most of the hippies you are describing don't. I mean our mate went and superglued herself to the department of transport, now she's a nice person and all that, but she only went because like ''climate change is like bad yeah''', to pretend she and the people who carried out those sort of elitist stunts give a fuck about ''applying their politics to real worls situations'' is juts absurd, it would be amost as ridiculpus as pretending she had ''links with the locals''. To me it just smacks of the same old shit as ''wanstonia'', where you had a motorway being built through a council estate, but a bunch of hippies turned up and made it into a conservation issue by caring more about the fucking trees than the estate.
Now personally i don't lumber you and raw in with these lot, but if your going to go to the camp then you need to establish some sort of distance between yourselves who do care about the wider issues, and a bunch of hippies, who think that its about some liberal anti-cosumerist bollocks.

Anyways on more of a side note, if you were applying your politics and your opposition to air travel to real world situations then you would be argueing for longer holidays and cheaper and expanded rail travel, don't see any of those arguements being made at all on indymedia or anywhere else. So in the absence of these arguements, where are working class families supposed to go on holiday?

my generalisations are pretty accurate though guy. Who i am talking about are the mouthy few who are waiting for the purer than pure struggle to fall out of the sky and into their laps, obviously. If only the people here actually involved in struggle did out-weigh the mouthy few then this website would retreat into an unnecessary extravagance.

I am talking about the people who don't express, never mind apply, their politics in real world situations (in fact don't even tell 'real people' they have these political ideas) who over the last 5 years have told us what we should be doing, how we're not doing it properly, and yet when we look to them for some evidence, that maybe we should be emulating, we find not only a paucity of any political activity but a kind of fearless delusion that telling each other over the internet how politically wrong everybody else is somehow a valid substitute.

If you're not one of those people guy, then i'm not talking about you.

I have a lot of time for you guy, as i do with everybody involved with wsm (is it just you and george stapleton who post here now?) in fact anyone who puts themselves on the line, but the similarities between the anarchist reading groups of the day and the libcom website today are too eerily familiar to dismiss.

nb 'real people' as opposed to internet personas.
real world as opposed to the internet world.

Thing is I'm not sure who that's actually aimed at, is it anyone specific? Because most of the main voices on libcom I know of do take action, albeit not on the spectacularist stage. They're involved in strike support work, turning out on picket lines etc, information outreach (which as I tried to establish earlier is usually not a million miles away from the aim of the activist set), they agitate for strike action and then refuse to cross picket lines.

It's not fair to cast aspersions like 'you're just a reading group' unless you have concrete evidence to back it up. It's fair enough if you can prove what your saying but rhetoric without substance is not.

He's just trying to insult us because he doesn't like us, me in particular. Don't bother looking for logic in it, you won't find any. Not more than his logic that says gays gets Aids from poppers and HIV doesn't exist.

Eh, at least ten people at my old job knew both my politics and that I was involved with this site, so will you either name names or shut the fuck up please?

And I think it's time for you to realise that the internet actually is a part of the real world that hundreds of millions of people use as a medium of communication, for shopping, for booking cheap holidays on a daily basis. Not some cybertopia from the '70s.

Yes, hes a member of the Preston local

excellent catch, excellent. Was that a basis for workplace agitation, did these workers use libcom? You see libcom's political rhetoric relies on workplace and community organising, which is in no way a criticism, so how did those 10 workers relate to libcom? How did you apply your political ideas (that you readily express on the internet) to your workplace environment?

See i'd much rather hear the positive aspects of you using this website in a real world situation than the kind of relentless student union banter on here [of which i admit i'm not entirely immune] about other peoples "shit politics" that always threatens to undermine it.

Do you think you're in a minority here in terms of people in your workplace knowing your political background? Certainly be interesting to find out, and i'm happy to be proven wrong on the subject.

saii lets take a little time to look at the examples you've given. All the people from the climate camp who visited the nippon express picket did the things on your list (in fact every one of "the activist set" I've ever known have been involved and done the things you list) therefore are they expressing the same politics as the libcom types you are defending?

You've listed acts people have done. Acts of solidarity certainly, acts of support without doubt, but they are not in themselves an expression of any political ideas.

Let's take the phrase 'agitate for strike action' as an example. (I genuinely have no idea what this means. It's sounds like libcom jargon. If it means being active in your union, doing your job as a union member then maybe that should be made clear). The question then is whilst agitating for strike action how do I express my political ideas within that context? Applying your political ideas in real life situations means not simply building for strike action but expressing your politics in building that strike action. Do you see the distinction? And in expressing your political ideas it necessarily means talking to people about them. Whether it be in the canteen, on the shop floor, on the picket line. This is how your anarchist views become common currency. How your anarchist views gain credence and acknowledgment is how you act upon them.
The next question is then how do my political ideas inform reflect and contribute to this process, how they can be usefully engaged in a real world process. This i say is the start point of the building process. Needless to say context is the essential balancing feature in such undertakings.

Now when I went down to the nippon express picket I did so as anarchist, when I went to climate camp I did so as an anarchist, when sheffield af organised a meeting there they did so as anarchists, when I and others go back down to the next nippon express picket we will do so as anarchists, when we try to build a relationship with the nippon workers we will do so as anarchists, when we offer support and solidarity it will be through the understanding and acknowledgment that we do so as anarchists.

This is what I mean when I ask if any libcom types ever express their politics in real life (does their anarchism exist outside of the internet environment?)

But let's not lose site of the thing we are talking about here; about the ecological movement's organised, collective and mutually recognised intervention in workers struggles during the 90's. Dublin dave's question is can class anarchists have that kind of impact and recognition in future struggles?

The answer i think lies hidden in the last 3 pages.

You're just jealous we have jobs. Get over your obsession with us, it's pretty sad.

One bloke signed up last year, lurked for ages, and we've chatted about a lot of issues. I'm in the process of writing up the (not very exciting) attempts to get the place organised at the moment, although it's just first draft stage at the moment. I did get a lot of advice from people on here along the way though, fwiw.

No idea. In the private sector it'd be more risky than the jobs I'm doing now. I think it's a lot more important putting ideas into practice than walking 'round like the only anarchist in the village (edit: which frankly is what your "as an anarchist" post sounds like above). The way things are at the moment, I don't think you have to be explicit about your political ideology in order for that to happen, certainly in the early stages, and given the lack of general knowledge regarding this area of politics, I can think of situations where it'd simply divert from things if there wasn't already some kind basis for activity ("what, do you like Stalin then?"), and in some workplace simply making you a target for sacking.

My personal view is to be upfront and honest with people, which doesn't equate to pushing things down their necks and hectoring them - I give my views on things and expand when asked, sometimes that's about "politics", hopefully it's more often rooted in the shared material conditions we have and potential responses to that. The only reason I can think of to push being "an anarchist/communist" over the strategies and tactics which those ideologies inform is if you're trying to recruit people to something (which can be the ideology itself, doesn't have to be a particular organisation). Still waiting for your comments on the dispatch thread by the way, assuming you actually have anything to say about its content.