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Title: Looking Back on Liberty & Solidarity Author: Snowball Date: September 27, 2012 Language: en Topics: platform, strategy, community organizing, dual organizationalism, IWW Source: Retrieved October 18, 2012 from http://snowballsandsyndicalism.wordpress.com/2012/09/27/looking-back-on-liberty-solidarity/
Liberty & Solidarity, the political organisation of which I was a
member, has
. Consequently I think it is worth sharing some thoughts here on its
successes and its failings.
I was a member of L&S for four years, from its founding conference where
we adopted our constitution, to the this September’s, when we formally
disbanded the organisation. During that period I was national secretary
for two and a half years and also held the post of education secretary.
The Anarchist movement
Starting at the beginning, L&S very much came from the anarchist
movement. All of those involved initially considered themselves
anarchists and the project at that time was to build a “
” anarchist organisation. From the off however we did things a little
differently from our sister organisations in
, the platformist anarchist international grouping.
For starters, though far more common even just four years ago than it is
today, we refused to follow the standard leftist model and produce
propaganda paper. We felt that such initiatives tended to largely be a
waste of time, with small print runs and little by way of tangible
results.
Similarly, and scandalously to some in the anarchist movement, we tried
to avoid political labels, preferring instead to describe what we
actually believed, rather than whichever “ism” might be appropriately
assigned to us.
Our relationship with the anarchist movement proved to be a difficult
one. Because of several L&S members having split from the AF not long
prior to the foundation of L&S there was already much bad blood, and
L&S’ political trajectory, moving us away from the anarchist movement,
did not help matters. Perhaps it would have been better if we had made a
clean break at that early stage, however at that point in time we still
thought of ourselves as anarchists, even if the rest of the anarchist
movement didn’t agree with us.
Our reputation in the anarchist movement was also tarnished by some
cock-ups on our part, including some less than diplomatic behaviour from
our own members. The blame for poor relations does not rest squarely on
the shoulders of L&S however, the sectarianism of the anarchist movement
meant that our organisation was soon the subject of various conspiracy
theories which went largely unchallenged. In part this was to do with
the closed nature of L&S, with our internal discussions kept private by
our members. On reflection I think it would have served us well to have
been more open and had more of our discussions in public, but given the
attacks being directed at us from the anarchist movement the instinct to
batten down the hatches was an understandable one.
We took the decision to take little heed as to what the anarchist
movement thought, after all, 99.9% of the working class weren’t
anarchist, so why should we care what this tiny minority thought? The
problem however was that we were still in many ways part of the
anarchist movement. For some branches the anarchist social scene was
still the norm, and even where this wasn’t the case, the largely
anarchist dominated IWW was the prime focus of our industrial strategy.
Industrial strategy
Many L&Sers had first met each other through involvement in the IWW and
indeed it was the shared project of the IWW that strategically united
L&S for the first couple of years. Initially we were concerned with
helping win an international delegates convention so that the UK section
of the IWW would have fairer representation. This process involved
conflict with corrupt bureaucrats such as Jon Bekken and his
Philadelphia IWW cohorts.
Whilst the delegates convention was being won we also wanted to play our
part in growing the IWW domestically. The IWW had adopted as its
official strategy a focus on building the union as a dual card union in
the health industry. We eagerly set to work on this, doing our best to
assist IWW blood service workers in their fight to stop blood centre
closures.
In a bid to support our strategy many L&S members got jobs in healthcare
and most wound up in UNISON, the largest healthcare union. As part of
our work within the mainstream labour movement we also participated in
the National Shop Stewards Network and helped initiate the NSSN
syndicalists grouping within it.
Our participation in the NSSN however proved sadly short lived.
Sectarianism from the Socialist Party who held a majority on its
executive meant that the network was soon forced to split, leaving the
NSSN a shallow SP front. In retrospect splitting at this point may have
been a mistake, it certainly left us out in the wilderness in terms of
our industrial strategy, with progress in growing the IWW as a base
union slow to nonexistent. We had also failed to grow our influence in
the IWW, being regarded with suspicion by the majority of IWW activists
due to our bad relations within the anarchist movement.
Internal organisation
Our platformist roots showed most prominently in our constitution, which
started out life as a copy of that of
, our Irish sister group. Reacting to the structurelessness and
disorganisation of the anarchist movement from which we had come we were
keen to ensure that we had a well structured and democratic
organisation. The organisation was to be composed only of those who were
active in pursuing one or both of our dual strategies, workplace or
community organising.
This allowed us to experiment with new ways of organising ourselves. We
implemented “battle plans” for branches and disparate members, which
were to be derived from an overall national battle plan. These plans
consisted of
targets to be achieved over the next year, this way we could monitor our
own progress. This approached forced us to think strategically in the
near term, about what we wanted to see and what we thought was realistic
to achieve within one year. Unfortunately we never quite managed to get
the system working properly. Part of the issue was that politics is
obviously unpredictable, a more flexible planning mechanism better able
to cope with the unforeseen might have been more implementable.
Another good idea that didn’t quite work out was the decision we took
early on to concentrate on growing through the “mass organisations”, the
unions and community groups we were involved in, rather than through
recruiting from the anarchist movement. Sadly recruitment was something
we never managed in great numbers, with most of our new recruits coming
from the anarchist movement in spite of our decision to look away from
it. Partly I think the issue was it was a rather big jump, from being a
trade union member to joining a disciplined political organisation. Some
broader interim organisation would have been useful to enable potential
recruits to politically develop and to allow us to work with allies who
perhaps might never join our organisation.
Our failure to recruit meant that the organisation stayed roughly the
same size, with structures like branches proving difficult to maintain
and less useful with fewer members. This resulted in L&S becoming
something of a burden rather than a help to its members, with smaller
branches seeming somewhat pointless. Nationally the organisation had
been useful at coordinating our work within the union movement, but when
we lost direction in this arena after our withdrawal from the NSSN this
left the organisation with less purpose. On the community side of things
this had always been a more disparate form of activity less likely to
benefit from a national organisation.
Our concern that the organisation was becoming a burden rather than a
useful tool stemmed from our now syndicalist perspective that a
political organisation was only valuable in so far as it helped
strengthen and influence working class organisation. Rightly, we always
prioritised this goal over building our own group.
In the end though we decided to disband the organisation we also
concluded that we still held a lot of shared ground. Hopefully in the
coming years former L&S members will stay in touch and work together for
our still common goal; the elevation of the working class to power in
society.