Organise! magazine, then and now.

We have published retrospectives on Organise a couple of times before, to coincide with the 10th and 20th anniversaries of the AF and the then Anarchist Communist Federation (issue nos. 42 and 67) whilst in the 30th anniversary issue (no. 87) we chose to focus on organisational and political aspects, as well as members’ recollections about our organisation and why they joined. We have not quite reached the AF’s 40th which comes in 2 years’ time, but Organise 100 gives us an opportunity to review what has changed in our main regular publication.

As we have reiterated, the original purpose of our magazine was to sit between the agitational ‘in your face’ rag and the heavier theoretical journal, aimed at the reader who doesn’t need to be convinced how bad our life is under capitalism and the state, who is looking for more information and a closer view of the class struggle.

This said, Organise in its early days was mainly a platform for the AF’s positions, although we encouraged letters and commissioned occasional pieces from outside the organisation. We also spent many pages on critiques of the various left-wing organisations, especially in the UK, and notably the Trotskyists who wielded power in some struggles such as the anti-Poll Tax campaign of the late 1980s and who were present on most of the same national and local demos as anarchists. To pursue that approach now, where so many diverse voices are there be heard and the reach is so much more international, would no doubt seem quaint and self-obsessed.

Still, the themes of war, nationalism, and economic woes are constant. Earlier in Organise magazine’s history we witnessed the break-up of the Soviet Union and the ending of Apartheid in South Africa, the Good Friday Agreement, the Balkan Wars, 9/11 and its aftermath. We reported on working class responses to various waves of economic crises and the introduction of repressive laws, with repeated attacks on labour. Geopolitical changes, in particular with the growth of state capitalism in China, prompted the publication of Beyond Resistance, a Manifesto for the Millennium, which asked what the new world order might look like.

At the end of the 1990s, globalisation became a focus for sustained solidarity, and anarchists played their part, notably in the J18 Global Day of Action in financial centres on June 18th 1999, followed by the more well known N30 that included global protests against the machinations of the World Trade Organisation, notably in the USA during the WTO Ministerial Conference in Seattle.

In 2000, the AF joined the International of Anarchist Federations (Internationale des Fédérations Anarchistes) which was, at the time, a mostly European initiative of anarchist communists with a firm historical footing. The next two decades saw growth in IFA’s Eastern Europe and Latin America membership which has continued to this day with some ups and downs. An Organise special issue ‘Long Live the International’ was published in 2005 to celebrate and inform readers about IFA (issue no. 65). Later issues, nos. 78 & 79, covered the large international gathering of anarchists in Switzerland, at St-Imier, which was inspired by a commemoration of the 1872 congress in the same town that had consolidated the approach of the anarchist split from the Marxists in the First International. AF members participated in the gathering and IFA held its Congress during the same weekend. The pages of Organise continued to present reports about important developments such as the reemergence of organised anarchism in Cuba (issue nos. 86 & 88) and the ‘Three Bridges’ Balkan and Mediterranean conference in Crete in 2015 (issue no. 86).

A feature of the early to mid-2000s was growth in environmental activism. The AF already had a history of focus on climate struggle and embraced a meeting of minds with different anarchist groups and Earth First! in the context of Class War Federation’s decision to dissolve itself, a conference that became known as Bradford ’98. 7 years later, as the British state was reeling from the terrorist attacks in London at the end of the Gleneagles G8 summit in July 2005, Earth First! activists began the series of Camps for Climate Action which became a major focus for opposing fossil fuels. During the same period, No Borders migrant solidarity became an important cause for anarchists which sought to draw an ideological line in the sand on European immigration policy, whilst Defy-ID fought yet another attempt by British governments, this time a Labour one, to impose national identify cards. During this time the pages of Organise covered the impressive local resistance to Shell on the West coast of Ireland, the Rossport solidarity campaign, whilst we analysed both Green Capitalism and Grassroots Environmentalism (issue no. 78). A boost to anarchism in the late 2010s was the financial crisis that subsequently increased our membership, with large numbers of students who were pissed off with the encumbent Tory/LibDem coalition joining our organisation.

The next decade or so proved to be quite painful for the AF. Some of the new blood in the organisation wanted to move faster, not without reason, and we struggled with an internal initiative ‘Out of the Shadows’ that was more Platformist than the majority of the membership wanted to be (see 25 years of the AF, issue no. 77, for a summary). In the same year, 2011, we lost our dear and influential comrade Bob Miller (obituary also in no. 77). The next issue, no. 78, has already been mentioned with respect to the 2012 St-Imier international event, but this also provides evidence of some soul-searching, or at least some open thinking, about the next steps for anarchist communism in the UK, clearly prompted by the loss of members following ‘Out of the Shadows.’

We weren’t prepared for the shocks that led to Brexit and a pandemic, maybe a little less surprised by the terrible consequences of protracted wars in the Middle East and Ukraine. All of these domestic and global events have surely shaped and challenged the possibilities of anarchism. The wars in Rojava and Ukraine in particular, in the context of increasing international connections, have demanded from anarchists a position on what meaningful solidarity means. Arguments persist whilst the reality is that Belarussian comrades have left IFA whilst our Kurdish comrades have increasingly found a place within it. We have attempted to look at some of these nuances in Organise, yet even mentioning that these differences exist in our movement can cause consternation.

During this same time, we have witnessed and have been part of a new wave of gender liberation. In 2017, a number of members left the AF over arguments about gender politics, stemming from heated debates over intersectionality in struggle and attitudes to transgender issues. For some it was a step too far in the direction of identity politics, for others evidence that an organisation that had growth out of a predominantly class struggle worldview could not change. In the AF we have tried to respond positively and the pages of Organise are hopefully more diverse as a result.

Reading the new magazine since 2018 is to understand that to make the changes that were necessary, the Organise of today is not as ideologically clear as it once was, in terms of seeing this or that article as being what everyone in the AF believes to the letter, since there is evidence of more debate and questions don’t all have answers. There is also a lot more art that requires interpretation, much of it from non-members, which is a far cry from the structured approach to readers’ letters of the early issues. We have chosen to reproduce historical anarchist texts without major commentary. Whilst we do this, we still keep in mind the tradition of Organise to report on struggles and provide interesting content to support these. Some recent areas of note include Security Culture reflecting on the pandemic (issue no. 96), feminist struggle in Iran (issue no. 97), Operation Solidarity in Ukraine (issue no. 98) and Minority Languages (issue no. 99). Mainstays of Organise past and present are still in evidence, but we have expanded interest from reviews of books to graphic zines, music and games, for example.

So what’s next for Organise magazine? The Internet already provides a lot of the content that activists may wish to read, so is there really a need for someone to curate it? It could be suggested that the legacy of desk­top publishing and the web is that there are many more content creators out there who could spark a revolt. However, States increasingly wish to control internet media, and algorithms attempt to feed us the messages that powerful forces want us to see and hear, whether those are commercial or governmental. And the Left is still active pushing a statist agenda as a solution to the ravages and inequalities of capitalism. So, we can maintain that there is still a need for the magazine format, less so than ever to push a party line, but to make sure the anarchist movement is seen as being historically informed, having good ideas for present situations, and giving hope and promise for a better future.

Note: All of the Organise issues mentioned in this article can be found scanned in by The Sparrows’ Nest Library and Archive, Nottingham. This project can easily found online.