The Eclipse Committee has been presented as a necessary response to fragmentation and the rise of the far right. This article argues the opposite: that coordination without strategy risks repeating the very failures that have kept anarchist organising weak. At a moment when authoritarianism is gaining ground, we don’t need more networks, we need political clarity, rooted organising, and the courage to choose a direction.
The Eclipse Committee has struck a nerve. In a moment of fragmentation, rising authoritarianism and a far right that feels increasingly emboldened, its call for coordination across the anarchist movement sounds like common sense. Who could be against better communication, cooperation, or “unity” in the face of what’s coming?
But this apparent common sense deserves closer scrutiny. Because beneath the language of openness and diversity, Eclipse advances a familiar politics, one that mistakes connection for power, and avoids the harder questions of strategy by reframing them as questions of tone.
What’s being offered is not a strategy for confronting the far right, but a strategy for avoiding political disagreement. Eclipse doesn’t resolve the fragmentation of anarchist organising; it manages it. And management is not the same as transformation.
Diversity as an Alibi
The central claim of Eclipse is that anarchism’s strength lies in its diversity, and that the task before us is to better coordinate that diversity. But diversity is not a political line. It doesn’t tell us where to organise, who to prioritise, or how to intervene when forces clash.
This isn’t a new idea. Broad, plural networks have been a recurring feature of anarchist organising in Britain for decades. They appear in moments of crisis, promise renewal, and then quietly dissolve or become hollow shells once the initial momentum fades. The pattern is familiar because the underlying problem is never addressed: without shared political direction, coordination remains shallow.
Eclipse presents political clarity as something inherently risky, a step towards dogma or exclusion. But this is a sleight of hand. The real question isn’t whether power exists, but whether it is visible and accountable. In loose networks, power doesn’t disappear; it consolidates informally, around those who write the texts, run the platforms, and set the agenda. Calling this “anti-authoritarian” doesn’t make it so.
Antifascism without a social base
The proposal is at its weakest where it claims to be most urgent: antifascism. We’re told that 2029 may bring an openly authoritarian or fascistic government, but we’re given no serious account of how to confront that beyond “diversity of tactics”.
This is not a strategy. It’s a refusal to choose one.
Fascism doesn’t grow because anarchists aren’t talking to each other enough. It grows because working-class communities are fragmented, institutions have collapsed, and the left has failed to build organisations capable of offering material security and collective confidence. Any antifascism that isn’t rooted in workplaces, housing struggles, and everyday class conflict will remain marginal, no matter how militant it appears.
Street confrontations may feel decisive, but without a broader social base they are easily isolated, repressed, and recuperated into a familiar cycle of mobilisation and burnout. Eclipse offers no answer to this, because answering it would require prioritising certain forms of organising over others; precisely the kind of political decision it tries to avoid.
The 2029 trap
The looming elections are used as a rhetorical deadline, but not as a strategic one. There’s no clarity on whether Eclipse aims to intervene in the electoral moment, reject it, or simply orbit around it. This ambiguity isn’t tactical flexibility; it’s political evasion.
Elections don’t radicalise movements. They test them. And movements that haven’t built real power beforehand tend to be pulled into reactive positions; either campaigning for the “least bad” outcome or retreating into moralistic abstention. Eclipse risks preparing us for neither resistance nor rupture, but for commentary.
Coordination without Organisation
Perhaps the most telling feature of Eclipse is what it doesn’t say about organisation. There’s talk of networks, communication, and cooperation, but very little about accountability, mandates, or collective responsibility. This isn’t accidental. Organisation implies commitment, discipline, and political alignment; all things that sit uneasily with a project defined by its breadth.
But without organisation, there is no accumulation of force. There is only activity.
If we’re serious about confronting authoritarianism, then we need more than another layer of coordination. We need rooted organising, political coherence, and the willingness to make strategic choices; including the uncomfortable ones. That means prioritising class struggle over activist networking, and long-term insertion over short-term visibility.
Eclipse invites us to talk to each other more. What it doesn’t offer is a way to actually shift power.
And without that, no amount of coordination will stop what’s coming.
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