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Class War issue 81: The Problem Of Revolutionary Activity And Social Democracy - Or A Review Of 'Reflections On Mayday'
published by Mayday 2000, PO Box 2474, London, N8 0HW.
While life is quite comfortable for most people in western society, and we have the trappings of the welfare state, and we all know revolution isn't around the corner (except the SWP), it is going to be a hard struggle to articulate that not only can our lives be so much more than they are, but revolutionary change is a necessity if our lives, or at least our descendants' lives are not to be reduced to chaos, crisis and poverty.
While most organisations in the Leninist tradition contribute in various economic struggles, they fail to push the autonomy of the working class and the liberty of individuals within the class.
Class War and the anarcho-community movement have faced up to this and also to the need for constantly changing tactics as the state and the ruling class, with their superior resources, learn to cope with the ways that we struggle. Class War's unique role as a newspaper was articulating the interconnection between youth disillusionment, industrial disputes, profiteering and corruption and other direct attacks to our class such as the Poll Tax. We showed how fighting back can be empowerment.
The problems we face will not go away, and this article was brought about by a critique of the contributions to 'Reflections on Mayday'. This pamphlet prints people's 'reflections' on the Mayday event last year and contains a broad range of ideas - reactionary (e.g. the useless articles by AB, Jim Bendell, Kirk and others had no worth in them whatsoever - why we are even thinking about them is beyond us) and progressive (or a combination of the 2 - like the article reprinted from Do Or Die no. 8 - their article in Do Or Die no. 9 about Mayday was far better). It reveals that the same issues occur time and time again, and also reveals the true class composition of what passes for the anarchist movement.
"Mayday 2000: A Festival of Anti-Capitalist Ideas and Action" was exactly the same as other events, and even J18. It was a very partial mobilisation of the possible sources of fightback there are available. From being one of the leading sectors of working class revolution, the miners ("miners" meaning wives, relatives and communities) in their northern heartlands are not even considered to be worth approaching. They (class enemies) say, and it's incredible that people even within the anarchist movement listen to this nonsense, "that the miners were defeated and that there's next to none left anyway". This was dealt with in issue 80 of Class War, which said that the miners were not exterminated, the struggle is still going on now and today in these regions with people and communities who are often very highly class conscious. That we are currently divided is not the issue, just how we are best to go about composing the working class struggles is...
The article placed at the beginning of the pamphlet is obviously the one that the publishers think is most important and it's a shame that so much faith is placed in the radical tourists calling themselves the "Bash Street Kids". No analysis, seemingly however radical, is worth a bean unless it is situated in the real movement of the working class and our class composition. The main mistake the Bash Street Kids make is that of confusing the anarchist movement or "our movement", as they call it, with the revolutionary movement of the working class (for this is the only group capable of overturning the capitalist society). For the Bash Street Kids to extend their radical ideas outside this real movement of the working class shows their misunderstanding of the tasks facing us all.
Overall you have to have a lot of patience to wade through a lot of these irritating articles, that show there has been no development in our movement's class composition and ideas for some time now.
The problem is that anarchists have elevated their ideal (an anarchist society) into a strategy that is thought to work (if only we could discover it) in this society. This chasing of the 'Holy Grail' is plainly nonsense, and in fact represents the worst subsituationist and depoliticised parts of anarchist impetuism. Anarchist activity must be able to work in an everyday manner where people live and work, and deal with the problems we face if we really want to participate in a mass movement (and not a movement of the ghetto). For example, to get somebody who has been framed out of prison it will probably be best to work within the system (collect evidence, write to newspapers/MPs etc) and not storm the walls of the prison (a classical anarchist tactic that is only possible in times of crisis). We must utilise all sorts of strategies to build and include people in our movement if we want to succeed in the long term. This 'social democratic' activity does not make you any less of an anarchist for we still agree on the final goal. Persuading the anarchists against their obsessions and hedonism is a hard task though.
At the beginning of the pamphlet, there are some good points, and some worthwhile debate that is worth continuing, but the deeper you dig, the more irritating and barking articles crop up with increasingly regularity.
Back to issue 81 contents
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