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is a political organisation aiming to build workplace and community democracy through direct action and struggling with all those fighting for change.
We stand for the power of workers and local people against the bosses and politicians in order to bring about radical social change, to build a society based on freedom, democracy and cooperation.
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A group of 50 people made up of activists, sympathisers and homeless, struck last Saturday November 8th. The entire first floor of a derelict council block in Finsbury Park, North London, was taken under their control at midday. The space, now known simply as the Community Squatting Project, is being heavily renovated to provide housing – at least one homeless family have already moved in.
I’m writing this at the request of another L&S member who pointed out that lots of what I have been doing over the last few months is political and worth recording. I already knew it was political to a point, and I had started writing up action reports and articles on the place I’ve lived for the half a year several times, but it always fell apart after a few lines because it felt too personal to express properly.
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Hackney Heckler - new quarterly libertarian, working class (etc etc…) free paper launched in Hackney. The Heckler is the paper of Hackney Solidarity Network (HSN), which has been running since January 2008 following a post Anarchist Bookfair meeting in Dalston attended by members of
This year I was privileged to attend the 8th annual conference of Autonomous Action, an anarchist group with branches across Russia, Belarus and the Ukraine as an observer representing the Anarchismo project.
The conference was held at a secret location in the Ural Mountains where a campsite was set up from resources laboriously carrieduphill over a 6 hour hike. This was a necessary precaution police attention and in addition provided economical conference accommodation in a country were poverty is widespread.
Understanding motive forces and the motors of change
In almost any training session on how to organise, the concept of whether to pick a campaign (for organising purposes), and the merits of different campaigns, and what criteria to choose the most important campaign for organising purposes is examined. Almost every activists knows (well, almost every activist SHOULD know), whether they are active in a trade union or workplace organisation, or residents association or community organisation, or whether they are trying to kickstart such organisation, that a successful campaign must be winnable. That is an interesting concept and one that the more impressionistic left will argue contradicts 'anarchism's' or 'socialism's' need to demand the impossible. While of course this particular objection is mere rhetorical moralising and impressionistic, it is an interesting question in that it posits the conflict between our need as a class seeking our own emancipation, and the possibility of pathways to victory which require us to take steps that at present are not winnable. We would do well then to examine what we know about ladders of engagement, critical mass, conformity and leadership dynamics, as it is important for revolutionaries to frame our actions not solely in the here and now of campaigning necessity, but also to visualise how this work moves our class forward towards revolution, and how best to optimise for this outcome in the here and now.
