New Flyer – Towards a Better Union

We have a new flyer ready to share with the world! Towards a Better Union lays out a critique of mainstream trade unionism and argues for a specifically anarchist and syndicalist approach to workplace organizing. It is designed to be easy to print on a work or home printer, being a single sheet of folded A4, so feel free to print your own. It is available along with all our flyers in more formats, like block black and white and booklet, in our Materials and Flyers page. Full plain text available below the pdf on this post.

Towards a Better Union London Colour A5Download

A BLEAK FUTURE

The trade union movement has been extremely important in furthering the desires of workers and improving our living conditions. This movement was vital in raising many workers out of the gruelling fourteen hour days, unsafe working conditions, poverty pay, and general degradation of the industrial revolution.

However, the modern trade union movement seems unable to extend or defend those gains. For many workers, the next decade looks like it will be bleaker than the last, and in the long term we may be slowly sliding back to the soul crushing working conditions of the 19th century. In the face of this, modern unions often seem to lack the ability to effectively stand up for their members. They are also often wracked with problems of internal abuse and a lack of accountability to their membership.

This pamphlet will argue that this failure is inherent to the way that modern unions are structured, and that in order to defend the interests of the working class we need to build a better kind of union with a radically different structure. However, before that, we will explore why the trade union movement developed in the first place and what the purpose of those early unions was.

CAPITALISM

Trade unions developed as a reaction to the growth of capitalism. Before capitalism, most families were broadly self-sufficient, either working the land as peasant farmers or creating things for sale with their own tools as craftspeople. These farmers and craftspeople were not free from exploitation, often owing a portion of their produce to an aristocrat, the church, or a craft guild, but they were often capable of providing for themselves as individuals, families, or communities without the aid of their exploiters.

Capitalism changed this. As technology developed and production became more and more dependent on expensive machinery, it became harder and harder to produce anything efficiently without access to that machinery. In this situation the vast majority of people could no longer be self-sufficient and provide for themselves with the tools they owned, and they had to sell their labour to those rich enough to own the buildings, machines, and other means necessary to produce.

Society became divided between workers in need of employment, and capitalists in need of employees. A worker who could not find an employer faced poverty and starvation, but a capitalist who could not find workers could sell their capital and live off the proceeds, giving capitalists the advantage. The capitalist also had an incentive to use this advantage to exploit workers, as capitalists are only in business to make a profit, and paying lower wages and demanding more work increases profits. This is the basis for the name capitalism; a society in which those who own capital hold power and run the economy in the pursuit of profit.

This was not just a quirk of technological development. The developing nation state also often forced poverty and dependence on many of its subjects; stripping peasants of land and giving it to the developing capitalist class, suppressing small craft production by law, and policing the developing working class. A population dependent on their masters to survive did not just enable exploitation by capitalists, but also enabled tighter control by governments.

UNIONS

With a capitalist class driven to exploit the workers, and the state siding with capitalists over the working class, workers needed their own organisations to fight for their interests. And while an individual worker might be replaceable, any workplace could be ground to a halt if workers resisted collectively. This gave rise to the first unions and the use of strikes as methods to fight for workers’ interests against a ruling class that saw them only as tools.

As unions grew, they also realised that what was true of the workplace was also true of the economy more broadly; one worker or workplace may be expendable within the economy, but a united working class could bring the entire economy to a halt, and not only put pressure on individual capitalists, but on the capitalist class as a whole and even the nation state.

This was the basis of trade union movement; the use of the collective economic power of the working class to fight for better lives for workers regardless of what capitalists or politicians wanted. However, the modern trade union movement has drifted far from this idea.

INDEPENDENCE

The original unions were not legally recognised. While this caused many problems for them, it also meant that they were independent from both the state and capitalism, relying on their working class membership for their power. They had to serve working class interests or they would lose their only base of support.

This is not the case for the modern trade union movement. Unions have become legal entities, and with this legal recognition the union movement has integrated itself into the state and social democratic political parties like Labour. However, that state has never reliably been on the side of the working class and even left wing governments often suppress strikes, as working class radicalism is as much a threat to state power as it is to capitalist profits.

This has put unions in an awkward position where they must serve two masters. Some of their power comes from the support of the workers, but some of it comes from recognition by the state. Many of the most disruptive tactics that a union might use to win disputes are currently illegal, and unions will be held liable if their members use those tactics. A legally recognised union must then police the militancy of its own members in order to maintain itself, even if this is against the interests of its membership. Unions have become an enforcer of government policy instead of an instrument of working class interests.

HIERARCHY

Trade unions could make such compromises with the state because their internal structure never really represented all of their membership. While most unions make a show of being democratic, that democracy means that, at best, a union can only ever represent a majority of its membership and can ignore the desires of minorities within the union.

Modern trade unions are also universally run from the top down, even if those at the top are elected. This means that the membership only has limited control over the leadership. Workers may elect them, but outside of elections the union leadership can do whatever it wants, and the membership has a little to no ability to veto the decisions of their leaders.

This leads to a situation in which trade unions do not represent their membership, but instead recreate the relationship between workers and bosses in a workplace hierarchy where the boss has the last say. The workers within a trade union do not collectively decide how to use their collective power in pursuit of their shared interests, but give up that power to union leaders who often use it to serve their own interests.

VISION

The development of a reliance on state recognition and an internal hierarchy means that the modern trade union movement does not reliably serve working class interests. Often unions suppress militancy and initiative amongst their own membership, allow people higher up in the union hierarchy to abuse their position, negotiate compromises with employers without a mandate from the workers they claim to represent, and act to preserve their relationship with the state and the stability of their internal hierarchy over taking action to improve the lives of workers.

But this failure has far wider consequences beyond practical day to day struggle. It also makes the trade union movement incapable of developing a consistent and useful vision of what a better society for workers might look like, as it cannot fully embrace the interests of the working class. When the state cares about its own power and the profits of capitalists over the needs of workers, which is the normal state of affairs even under left wing governments, the trade union movement suffers from conflicting loyalties, both between its members and the state, and between its rank and file membership and its internal hierarchy.

Mainstream unions may have been able to balance these competing interests when the system of state and capital was stable and growing and could afford to pay off the unions and the working class while maintaining profits. But, as that system starts to fail and become unstable, those old compromises fail with it, and unions are so firmly integrated into that system that they cannot advocate for anything that might destabilise it, no matter how much harm this failure causes the working class. Conflicting loyalties have left unions paralysed.

Compared to the early unions, which were often hotbeds of working class intellectual development and critique of state and capital, and helped develop radical ideas like socialism and communism, the modern union movement is in a sorry state. Modern trade unions are often deeply conservative organisations, incapable to radical change even when a radically changing world demands it.

BEYOND THE WORKPLACE

This lack of a broader vision has also isolated most unions from other social movements. Early unions were not only integrated into a broader working class movement of mutual aid, education, self-help, and struggles by renters and the unemployed, but also attempted to coordinate internationally in response to the increasingly global nature of capitalism.

The core insight that led workers to form unions, that workers had strength together and that solidarity was our best weapon against capitalism, has been lost. Most unions do not attempt to build networks or alliances with other workers’ movements or even other unions. Partly this is because the legal framework they have accepted often prevents things like solidarity strikes in support of other organisations, and partly this is because the union hierarchy is more interested in its own power within the union than building the collective power of the working class in the global economy.

The result of all this is that most modern trade unions are more like insurance companies than grass roots workers’ organisations. They often have very little rank and file involvement and treat rank and file initiative as a threat to the internal hierarchy. They have no coherent strategy to advance working class interests and they have no theory that might provide a basis for such a strategy. They are often more interested in controlling and suppressing any militant impulses among workers than helping us to fight for what we want. The trade union movement has failed as an engine of working class interests, and that failure is based in their adoption of internal hierarchy and their abandonment of independence.

ANARCHO-SYNDICALISM

None of this criticism is a rejection of the idea that workers should organise amongst ourselves in order to further our own interests. However, such organisation needs to be completely independent of the state or any other institution which might have conflicting interests with the working class. Our unions must serve our collective interests as workers first and foremost, otherwise they become a mechanism for controlling us.

We also need to avoid creating a hierarchy in which some people sit at the top the organisation and dictate to everyone else what to do. We need to build new unions on mutual agreement and mutual consensus so that no one can be ignored. We need to build them from the bottom up, with each local branch running its own affairs on the basis of the ideas and desires of its rank and file, instead of just empowering a new class of bosses over the rank and file.

However, we also need to look beyond the local branch and the individual workplace. We need to develop solidarity not just in the workplace, but between workplaces, and between workplace struggles and broader social struggles. The working class is strongest when we act together, and that principal applies from the individual workplace all the way up to the global economy.

We must also not be scared of the implications of our own power as the working class. The capitalist class and the state do whatever they can get away with, while we often tie one hand behind our backs and seek some kind of mythical “fair compromise”. The working class, if united and organised, could run the entire economy in our own interests without capitalists or politicians. This would be a genuine worker revolution instead of simply changing one set of bosses for another. Any organisation that genuinely represents working class interests should constantly push towards a worker controlled society, and develop the collective power of the working class until such a society can be achieved.

This approach to unions has a name. Because it is critical of hierarchies and all other forms of rulership and seeks to organise without resorting to that rulership, it is anarchist, which literally means without (an) rulers (archy). Because it seeks to build working class power though organisations in the workplace and the community, it is syndicalist, which comes from the French word for a workers’ union. Together, these two ideas form Anarcho-Syndicalism.

November Drop in Session

Need advice about an issue with your boss or landlord? Want support organising in your workplace or community? Want to talk about anarchism or syndicalism? Want to meet members of the group and find out how SolFed works? Just want to say hi? Then come see us at one of these drop in sessions.

The first session will be on Thursday, November 20th, 19:00 – 20:00, at the London Action Resource Centre (LARC), 62 Fieldgate Street, E1 1ES. If you can, please bring a donation for the space.

Reading Group 16 – Abolitionist Voices

For our sixteenth reading group we will be reading Abolitionist Voices, a compilation edited by David Gordon Scott. From the blurb:

Why have so many radical thinkers advocated for the abolition of prisons and punishment? And why have their ideas been so difficult to popularize or garner the political will for change? This book outlines several different approaches to penal abolitionism and showcases their calls for the ending of legal coercion, domination, and repression.

This exciting and innovative edited collection shows how abolitionist ideas have continued topicality and relevance in the present day and how they can collectively help with devising new ways of thinking about social problems, as well as suggesting alternatives to existing penal policies, practices and institutions.

We will be reading Abolitionist Voices over two sessions. This month we will be reading Part I and Part II.

We normally link to a free online version of what we are reading, but this month we could not find one. If you would like to join the reading group but can no afford to buy Abolitionist Voices, please send us an email and we will try and get something sorted for you. Our friends at Freedom Press here kindly offer the space for our use, visit them for radical books, news, and events.

The reading group will be meeting on Tuesday the 25th of November, 19:00, at Freedom Bookshop, 84b Whitechapel High St, London E1 7QX. You are welcome to come and join in the discussion even if you have not finished the reading.

Can Your Party Work?

Jeremy Corbyn’s and Zara Sultana’s new party, provisionally called “Your Party”, has caused a lot of excitement among the social democratic parts of the left. This new party is being touted as an opportunity for the left to launch a counterattack against a neo-liberal order that is increasingly disintegrating into fascism. But such hope is not justified by the history of left wing political parties. This history is littered with parties that have either rejected left wing principals and objectives or kept true to them but failed to achieve political relevance. It offers precious few examples of left wing parties that could both reliably take and maintain power and use that power for left wing ends. Is Your Party likely to be any different, or will it just be a repeat of the same old trajectory of disappointment and disillusionment that has characterised so many left political parties? Why do left wing parties nearly always fail to live up to their promises?

Gaining Power

The core strategy of all left wing political parties is to take state power and use that power to implement their vision of society. Any left political leader or organisation will always face other political parties or factions competing for state power, so they will be under pressure to be better at taking power than their competitors. This means that politicians and political parties are always locked in an arms race with each other to become more and more focussed on taking power above all else

When this competition for power conflicts with left wing principals, those principals must be abandoned in order to win. For example, the left champions the interests of the poor and disempowered, but the privileged sections of society, like big capitalists or high technocrats, are both more useful as immediate allies and more dangerous as immediate enemies. Left wing parties must often bend to the interests of the rich and powerful instead of the interests of the poor and powerless in order to gain power. For another example, the protection of disempowered minorities is a core plank of any genuine left wing platform, but from the perspective of gaining power many disempowered minorities are expendable by the very fact they are disempowered and minorities; their political support is worth less than that of those powerful groups that oppress and exploit them.

It will always be easier for a party that is willing to cooperate with existing power structures to gain power within them, and those structures are often both the main cause and the main beneficiaries of the injustices the left opposes. The more that Your Party attempts to uphold left wing principals and objectives, the less likely it will be to make the compromises needed to gain power. On the other hand, the more it attempts be become a serious contender in the competition for government power, the more it will find it has to abandon the left in order to out compete other political parties who are willing to abandon their principals, or hold ideologies that are more compatible with the game of power.

Keeping Power

If Your Party does somehow find itself in government before the leftism has been ground out of it, it will face additional systemic pressures that are likely to push it away from left wing ideals. This is because the state is not an abstract nexus of power that can be used towards any purpose, but a specific social structure that requires particular conditions in order to function. Any organisation that sees the state as its main tool to implement social change must put maintaining these conditions above any other principals and objectives.

And what the state needs in order to function is obedience above all else. A state can be kind, rich, and well run, but if it faces subjects who constantly disobey it and agents who ignore its orders, then that state is a failed state headed for collapse. On the other hand, a state can be cruel, poor, and dysfunctional, but as long as it has the obedience of its subjects it will be stable. Even democratic states are based on the obedience of minorities to majorities, and the obedience of citizens to their leaders in-between elections. Such obedience also requires certain structures to enforce and maintain it; systems of surveillance, propaganda, control, and violence to keep dissidents in line and prevent disobedience from spreading.

This is entirely incompatible with left wing principals and objectives. The obedient can not be free. The obedient are not equal to their masters. The obedient can have no solidarity with each other against those above them. The obedient must put aside their own desires, reason, and sense of right and wrong in order to obey. Obedience turns a human being into nothing more than a cog in a machine run by others, a tool be be used and abused by their superiors. The systems of control and violence needed to maintain obedience are also inherently repressive and degrading of those they target and isolating and corrupting of those who wield them.

This is a problem that the left has repeatability faced and has so far failed to overcome; social democratic parties within liberal democracies have always drifted towards becoming just like the liberal or conservative parties they compete with, and revolutionary parties that have attempted to creates a dictatorship of the proletariat have always drifted to becoming just like any other corrupt and exploitative dictatorship. They have failed to reshape the state, and instead have been reshaped by the state. To avoid this, Your Party will need a structure and strategy that radically departs from the failed left parties of the 20th century.

Pressure From Below

In an attempt to avoid these pitfalls, Your Party seems to be looking to bottom up movements to provide countervailing pressure to keep the party loyal to its proclaimed principals, and its provisional name as Your Party at least plays lip service to the idea of an organisation that is of the people and for the people. This bottom up pressure has always been a key element of successful left wing projects, as many leftward reforms implemented by past governments have been put in place only because those at the top came to fear the growing power of those at the bottom. Threats of disruption and even revolution from unions, protest movements, and community organisations have limited the ability of those in power to do whatever they wanted. Just as obedience is the ultimate source of state power and stability, disobedience has long been used by the left as a weapon to threaten the state and force it to compromise with the desires of its subjects.

However, there are very few bottom up organisations in our society right now. For the most part the trade unions are no longer based on workers cooperating with each other from the bottom up, but have become technocratic hierarchies based on member obedience, and are often in opposition to rank and file militancy organised from below. Likewise, most protest groups, advocacy groups, co-operatives, and left wing charities are top down hierarchies and can not provide pressure from below in order to keep the new party in line because the rank and file membership at the bottom is not the real locus of power within the organisation. All they can do is represent the interests of their leaders, securing them positions of power in the event that Your Party gets into government.

This hollowing out of bottom up movements has happened because bottom up organising and top down hierarchies are fundamentally incompatible with each other. The motivation that drives any bottom up movement is either to provide something those at the top of society neglect, or to oppose and resist impositions from the top. This demands an approach that accepts that those at the bottom both can and should cooperate to pursue their mutual desires regardless of what their rulers want, and so embraces disobedience to top down authority. Bottom up movements require disobedience, spread that disobedience, and are further empowered by it.

Left wing movements were founded on this bottom up basis, out of regular people organising together in their workplaces and communities against managers, owners, and politicians. Yet for the last hundred years the majority of the left has ultimately chosen securing state power over building or maintaining bottom up power, and has insisted that any bottom up movement is co-opted into a hierarchical structure or destroyed, suppressing disobedience, systematically demobilising and disempowering its own base, and sabotaging bottom up forms of power in order to maintain the power of the state. Your Party, as an electoral party that ultimately seeks state power, will inevitably be caught in this same contradiction; it may talk a good game about the importance of being member-led and building bottom up power, but it can not truly back up that talk without endangering the top down hierarchies that it seeks to take control of.

A Warning from History

Your Party’s attempt to mix bottom up and top down structures is not a new strategy. It is the same failed strategy that led to the collapse of 20th century social democracy; those parties attempted to base themselves in unions and working class social movements while simultaneously being strike breakers and protest smashers when in power, and even when out of power they have been very cautious in supporting any movement that might go so far as to undermine the power of the state. In Britain, the old Labour Party is often looked back on fondly as really representing the interests of the working class and the downtrodden, but its actual track record is littered of examples of it being at war with the base it built its support form.

During the years after World War Two, often seen as a high point of British social democracy, Labour was busy beating the trade union movement into obedience. Labour kept Order 1305, which restricted the right to strike during the war, for more than five years after the end of the war, only abandoning it in 1951 after a mass strike by dockworkers in support of union leaders who had been arrested under Order 1305. Between 1945 and 1950, two states of emergency were declared to deal with industrial disputes and soldiers were sent in to break strikes 18 times. Later Labour governments have likewise sought to restrain the power of the unions and other social movements, such as the 1964-1970 Labour government’s failed proposals to reduce union power. In return such movements have rarely shown Labour much quarter, with the 1978-1979 strike wave playing a significant role in the fall of the then Labour government.

Even the policies that Labour is lauded for have often had a tendency to undermine the long term bottom up power of the working class that is supposed to make up their base. The welfare state, for example, replaced a bottom up network of worker run mutual aid organisations that provided for things like healthcare or unemployment benefits. These mutual aid organisations were by no means perfect, but many of their problems came from the poverty faced by the working class leading them to be under-resourced instead of the workers being inherently incapable of managing their own institutions. Indeed, along with the early unions and co-operatives, these mutual aid organisations acted as one of the institutions that gave workers a practical education in the administration of their own affairs and cooperating for their own mutual benefit.

However, instead of policies that funnelled resources to these mutual aid organisations and allowed workers to remain in direct control of key welfare services they relied on to live, Labour followed a strategy of state welfare. This brought greater resources to bear, but at the expense of removing bottom up worker control over their own welfare provision, destroying existing institutions that fostered working class cooperation and developed their ability for independent organisation, and leaving the working class entirely at the mercy of whoever controlled the government for the provision of welfare. From the perspective of the workers, it is questionable if this was in their long term best interests. But from the perspective of ensuring obedience to the state, this welfare policy has been a great success. It has given the state another lever to use in order to control its citizens, and destroyed a potential hotbed of organised disobedience.

After the old workers movement of unions and mutual aid organisations had been dismantled or brought into obedience, the 1990 anti-poll tox movement used non-payment and street confrontations with bailiffs, police, and officials to win an important victory; the tax was scrapped and prime minister Margaret Thatcher was forced to resign. But the Labour Party could not support these tactics as they undermined the power of the state and its right to collect taxes, and the power of the state had to come before securing a victory from the bottom up. The Poll Tax movement was, over 35 year ago at time of writing, the last bottom up social movement in Britain that had the capacity to truly hold top down power structures to account, and since that point we have seen an accelerating erosion of the previous gains made by the left; workers get poorer every year, modern Labour have not only given up left wing ideals, but even any attempt at left wing rhetoric, and the mainstream British right are increasingly flirting with open fascism.

On top of all of this, Labour has a poor record on defending women and oppressed minorities. Many of the gains made in the supposed golden age of British social democracy were mainly gains for native white cis men, and the drive for real change on these issues has come from below; from feminist groups, anti-racist groups, and oppressed communities demanding justice. In so far as change has been achieved, it has only been on terms that preserve that state; we may all be treated as equals only as long as we are all equally obedient to the state. Labour’s track record on global justice is even worse, with Labour having always been just a militaristic and imperialistic as any other mainstream British political party. Such attitudes are key to maintaining the power of the British state that Labour is wedded to.

While Labour is the quint-essential British example of the failure of left wing parties to escape the logic of state power and obedience, you will find a similar story behind any left party in the world. From the post World War One German Social Democratic Party murdering revolting workers to stabilise the German state, to the more modern German Green Party’s support for expanding coal mining, to the shockingly fast capitulation of the Greek SYRIZA to demands from the EU it was elected to oppose, to supposedly communist China’s position as one of the main engines of global capitalism, to the old Leninist dictatorships’ complete suppression of any kind of independent worker’s power, this story has repeated over and over again and Your Party is poised to repeat it once more.

An Alternative Strategy

If we accept that top down hierarchies are incompatible with left wing objectives, then the left must focus on bottom up organising instead. Such organising has always been the main basis of left wing power, and the last century of co-option and suppression of bottom up movements in order to keep the state strong is one of the core failures that has led to the sorry state of the left today, having traded strong organic connections within workplaces and communities for a turn at the wheel of a state machine that is inherently incompatible with left wing objectives.

The left needs to rebuild rank and file power in the workplace. It needs to build bottom up renters unions, community organisations, and mutual aid groups. It needs to pour time and resources into anti-raid, cop watch, and anti-fascist groups which directly defend their communities. These groups need to be run on the basis of consensus between their membership instead of hierarchies of obedience. Such groups can fight for better wages, lower rents, and bring people together across lines of division through solidarity in strikes, protests, boycotts, and education that is embedded in workplaces and neighbourhoods. When these groups come into conflict with the state, the left needs to side with them against the state. And such conflict is inevitable; the state needs productive workers and obedient citizens above all else, and it can not allow people to shift the focus of their loyalty and their work to directly serving their own collective interests.

The left also needs to help create networks, alliances, and federations based on bottom up free association to allow local groups to communicate, coordinate, and cooperate on their own terms, instead of destroying their bottom up nature by subordinating them to some kind of top down control or founding a new electoral party off of their backs. These groups need to be nurtured into becoming stronger and better integrated without welding them onto hierarchies of power that have opposing needs and will inevitably demand the demobilisation or co-option of bottom up movements. With such structures in place, the left can push for real change regardless of who is in government. Tactics of mass disobedience and mass disruption can make unpopular laws unenforceable, hold capitalists and politicians to account, and force the government to act in the interests of its subjects out of fear that those subjects will otherwise become ungovernable.

A Future Without The State

When there is a bottom up workers organisation in most workplaces, a community organisation in most neighbourhoods, and they have the infrastructure that allows them to freely cooperate to tackle regional and national problems, then the left will have no use for the state any more; the bottom up organisations of the people will be strong enough to take direct control of society. Workers would have the ability to seize control of their workplaces and neighbours could seize control of their neighbourhoods, they could cooperate to run the infrastructure they jointly rely on, and do away with the current ruling strata of capitalists and technocrats. And when the state resists this, the left must side with workers and communities and abolish that now obsolete institution instead of defending it. Just as the coherent end point of state power is the destruction of all bottom up movements, the coherent end point of accepting bottom up power is a revolution that destroys the state, capitalism, and all other top down hierarchies.

This strategy is compatible with left wing principals and objectives and builds structures that reinforce left wing ideas instead of eroding them. It respects the freedom of all its members. Everyone involved is an equal participant. It is based on building solidarity between those at the bottom of society. It relies on and encourages independent action based on the desires, reason, and sense of right and wrong of everyday people. Its structures are built around enabling discussion, cooperation, and compromise. It develops the organisational capacity of the most oppressed and exploited instead of treating them as tools. Its end state is a society in which workers control the means of production, people control what they need to survive, there is no top down ruling class that exploits those below them, and there is no central power structure capable of imposing systematic oppression on minorities and dissidents.

Building towards a bottom up revolution may be the hard road to the world that the left desires, but it is a road that actually leads towards that world. On the other hand, electing yet another left wing political party into power is an easy shortcut, but it is a shortcut to nowhere that has only led to the near complete destruction of left power everywhere that it has become the focus of the left. Your Party is destined to fail even if it succeeds, as an electoral victory can only result in the party slowly turning into a new New Labour, smothering any bottom up upsurge in enthusiasm for left wing ideas, and a new generation of disillusioned leftists setting up another new left party to repeat this sad cycle over again… assuming we have not all been killed by fascists or climate disaster by then.

We need to break this cycle of building up political parties only for them to inevitably betray us in favour of the demands of the state. We need to put our energy into building bottom up power that can oppose capitalism without needing the support of the state, and can oppose the state itself.

Learning from the 1938 Stepney Rent Strikes – 29th October

A member of SolFed and the London Renters Union will be giving a talk on a little known case of working class direct action; the Stepney rent strikes.

The rent strikes organised by Stepney Tenants Defence League in the thirties saw barricades raised at blocks of flats and stopped evictions, got rents lowered and forced landlords to do repairs. What can we learn today from this exemplary movement? Come and hear tales of flour bombs and rolling pins and discuss the lessons of the rent strike for our movement today.

The talk will take place on Wednesday the 29th of October, at Pelican House, 144 Cambridge Heath Road E1 5QJ, from 7pm to 9pm.

Reading Group 15 – What About The Rapists?

For our fifteenth reading group we will be reading What About The Rapists by Dysophia. From the blurb:

“This short book is aimed at anarchists thinking about how to deal with abuses of power and acts of domination in their communities. It brings together a collection of articles representing different approaches to this problem, from transformative justice-based accountability processes to retributive-based acts of survivor-led retaliation.

Focusing on lessons learnt from experiments in this field and concerns that persist about these methods, it offers possible ways forward for those looking for grassroots responses.”

A free version of What About The Rapists can be found on the Dysophia site here and our friends at Freedom Press here have offered a 10% discount on physical copies for the reading group. Just quote “London SolFed Reading Group” or pop into Freedom for your general radical book buying needs.

The reading group will be meeting on Tuesday the 28th of October, 19:00, at Freedom Bookshop, 84b Whitechapel High St, London E1 7QX. You are welcome to come and join in the discussion even if you have not finished the reading.

New Monthly Drop In Sessions

We will be starting a regular monthly drop in session from this month. Need advice about an issue with your boss or landlord? Want support organising in your workplace or community? Want to talk about anarchism or syndicalism? Want to meet members of the group and find out how SolFed works? Just want to say hi? Then come see us at one of these drop in sessions.

The first session will be on Thursday, October 16th, 19:00 – 20:00, at the London Action Resource Centre (LARC), 62 Fieldgate Street, E1 1ES. If you can, please bring a donation for the space.

Reading Group 14 – Anarchy Works

For our fourteenth reading group we will be reading Anarchy Works by Peter Gelderloos. From the blurb:

Anarchy Works takes examples from around the world, combing through history and anthropology, showing that people have, in different ways and at different times, practiced mutual aid, self-organization, autonomy, horizontal decision-making: all the principles that anarchy is founded on, regardless of whether they call themselves anarchists. Well documented and expansive, this book is an inspiring answer to those who would say that anarchism is unrealistic, that it sounds nice but it couldn’t actually work. This point-by-point introduction shows that it already has.

A free version of Anarchy Works can be found on The Anarchist Library here and our friends at Freedom Press here have offered a 10% discount on physical copies for the reading group. Just quote “London SolFed Reading Group” or pop into Freedom for your general radical book buying needs.

The reading group will be meeting on Tuesday the 30th of September, 19:00, at Freedom Bookshop, 84b Whitechapel High St, London E1 7QX. You are welcome to come and join in the discussion even if you have not finished the reading or are jumping in half way through the book.

Reading Group 13 – No Spiritual Surrender Part Two

For our thirteenth reading group we will start reading No Spiritual Surrender: Indigenous Anarchy in Defense of the Sacred by Klee Benally. From the blurb:

“The most bitter medicines are the strongest. We end despair by ending what is causing our suffering: destroying what destroys us. After all, anti-colonial means anti-settler society.

No Spiritual Surrender is a searing anti-colonial analysis rooted in frontline experience. Klee Benally (Diné) unrelentingly agitates against colonial politics towards Indigenous autonomy and total liberation of Nahasdzáán (Mother Earth).”

We have been reading No Spiritual Surrender over two months. This month we will finish the book, starting from chapter eight: Indigenous-Rooted Direct Action.

A free version of No Spiritual Surrender can be found on LibCom here and our friends at Freedom Press here have offered a 10% discount on physical copies for the reading group. Just quote “London SolFed Reading Group” or pop into Freedom for your general radical book buying needs.

The reading group will be meeting on Tuesday the 26th of August, 19:00, at Freedom Bookshop, 84b Whitechapel High St, London E1 7QX. You are welcome to come and join in the discussion even if you have not finished the reading or are jumping in half way through the book.