Worldwide Information Blogger Luc Schrijvers: Anarchic update news all over the world - Part one - 5.01.2018

Today's Topics:

   1.  Britain, afed: 2018 - In with the new -- A year ago we
        blogged the view that "2016 was very demoralising, and 2017 is
        looking worse." (a-infos-en@ainfos.ca)


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Message: 1





It certainly feels that way. We've witnessed the (hyper-)reality of the new US president 
and Brexit deliberations trundle on to some kind of deal with the rest of the EU after the 
formal exit was announced. Some areas of the world (Yemen, Syria, Myanmar) continue to 
take a huge toll on working class lives and livelihoods through warfare and forced 
displacements, where we are still mostly disconnected from the horror abroad if not for 
the repeated calls for humanitarian aid, although the war has come home to England with 
terrorist attacks in both London and Manchester. The Trump administration has already 
attempted to reverse decades of sexual liberation and more social policies (such as 
healthcare) and action against climate change has been scuppered by a protectionist focus 
on fossil fuels. Immigration controls have been used to restrict freedom of movement into 
the US to follow up on the promised hard line against Muslims. Diplomacy has evaporated in 
relation to Korea and Israel. Regional nationalisms have taken hold in some parts of 
Europe, notably Spain with the Catalan independence drive, also apparent elsewhere such as 
in Corsica.

In Britain, the Grenfell fire and its aftermath brought into grim and deadly relief the 
inequalities in British society with its still unabated increases in rent and house prices 
whilst the choice of insulating materials for social tower block housing sat in the hands 
of distant bureaucrats including, it appears, neglectful or incompetent building 
regulations officers, whilst the organised voice of tenants was ignored.

The economy has flattened and interest rates went up for the first time in years, the Bank 
of England responding to increasing personal debt due to wage stagnation. In other words, 
austerity is permanent and normal, and growth just isn't there to fix it. At the same time 
state services like the NHS hang in the balance having little room left for more 
efficiency savings whilst social inequality only piles on the pressure.

On the otherhand, promise of advancement from entrepreneurship and philanthropy of the 
rich, especially those who hold the reins of the legacy of dotcom, has been lifted to 
dizzying heights and we are even asked to consider this a new Golden Age. Private capital 
*can* solve climate change and other global problems, especially with the use of the 
technology that created all this wealth in the first place. We'll end poverty *and* go to 
Mars. No power to the people though who are now asked to worry about their more lowly jobs 
being done by robots.

The number and knowledge about celebrity abuse cases has increased and wider discussion by 
survivors on social media about this and legal action taken has highlighted the continued 
ability of powerful men and institutions in Western society to do as they please. And the 
authoritarian Left is not excluded from this.

Overall, the Left in Britain is expressing their own ‘yes we can' confidence, as the 
leadership cult of Corbyn has been honed to an almost religious level after Labour's 
General Election boost, but seems to sweep under the carpet the nastier aspects of British 
politics fostered by Brexit - xenophobia and fear of the other. Most of the effort is 
focussed on winning in the electoral process, next time, but it seems hard to get away 
from the fact that they are behind the curve in trying to raise up a leader by populist means.

Anarchists and libertarians are now having to wake up to the real possibility that some of 
the more liberatory gains in the West since the 1960s will actually be reversed, in the 
USA for sure (especially for people of colour who may have expected more from the Obama 
time in office) and probably coming to Britain soon as Brexit gives the space for some of 
our establishment right-wing to try and roll back human rights here. On the other hand the 
politics of gender and colour have been a core feature of anarchist movement politics for 
at least a decade, with an explosion of gender related texts and zines, and non-English 
workers' groups at bookfairs. Anti-colonialism has come to mean not only understanding the 
well-known structural legacy of the European empires (which has led to calls to remove the 
statues of Great Men from campuses and public places, for example), but it is also a wider 
recognition in our movement that class struggle cannot be analysed without a deeper 
conversation about the sources of internal and external dominance. This is not completely 
new of course as similar questions around ‘white skin privilege' were around at the time 
of the dissolving of the Love & Rage Revolutionary Anarchist Federation in the 1990s USA, 
the same period as when Black Autonomy challenged a Euro-centric anarchist movement to do 
better.

The AF has been a large part of recent developments, not least our co-organising of the 
AFEM 2014 international anarcha-feminist conference. However, the result of development of 
anti-colonial and even more inclusive thinking around colour and gender has clearly 
challenged the cohesiveness of the anarchist movement which, apart from small pockets of 
individualism that still exist, has all but adopted a social anarchist perspective in 
recent years. At this year's bookfair the distribution of a leaflet against transgender 
rights (concerning an amendment to the Gender Recognition Act which would allow trans 
persons to more easily self-identify) was incendiary, being both pre-meditated by Trans 
Exclusionary Radical Feminists and pre-empted by a large number of bookfair attendees who 
choose to take direct action.

For the AF (and the ACF before our name change) we are proud of our having made explicit 
the need for struggle against ‘other' oppressions and independent organisation by 
oppressed minorities as a core principle of a class struggle organisation since our 
inception 31 years ago, and this has become more concrete in recent years by inclusion of 
caucuses (for Gender-oppressed, LGBTQ and most recently for members who have disabilities 
or mental health problems), a safer spaces policy and production of a text on Privilege 
Theory. However, differing responses to the bookfair events, and a few years of tension 
preceding this within AF, has led to 12 of our membership (including all of our remaining 
founder members) leaving on the grounds that this has gone too far - it being diversionary 
from the class struggle, merely identity politics being expressed as inward looking 
sub-cultural disputes, whilst the majority of us who strongly disagree with that view are 
having to regroup in 2018 to consider the consequences for the AF and our movement (seeing 
as the Bookfair won't happen, with the 2017 collective having resigned). Gender politics 
will be a big part of this, as no doubt will be a more nuanced anti-colonial thinking.

Whilst the last paragraph may leave you thinking we may, after all, be overly 
self-obsessed, considering the grimness of the world as outlined in the earlier ones and 
seeming inability of our movement to have much of an impact on it, we are now in a 
position to move forward more effectively. In 2017 we published one issue of our paper 
Resistance focussing on housing after the Grenfell fire and practical work by tenants 
groups, benefits fightback and anti-fracking protests, also looking at organising within 
the gig economy, another common feature of working class existence in the UK. Our two 
issues of Organise! magazine tackled prisons and international solidarity in the first and 
the meaning of revolution in the second. We have been part of making regional bookfairs 
happen and have engaged in political campaigns where we live. We are committed to a 
revolution where liberation benefits all. As a key aspect of this commitment we are seeing 
that the structural barriers to liberation from history are plainer than ever, having 
witnessed how the authoritarian right (and left) have been acting with increased 
confidence over the last year. We would be pleased to work with others in the social 
anarchist and libertarian anti-capitalist movement, to develop ideas and make a real 
difference together.

http://www.afed.org.uk/2018/01/01/2018-in-with-the-new/

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