Liberty & Solidarity, the political organisation of which I was a member, has recently disbanded. 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 “platformist” anarchist organisation. From the off however we did things a little differently from our sister organisations in Anarkismo, 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 the WSM, 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 SMART 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.
Snowballs and Syndicalism 
Reblogged this on liberté ouvrière and commented:
La perspective d’un membre de Liberty and Solidarity sur la dissolution de son organisation. L’organisation britannique se voulant informellement plateformiste s’efforçait parallèlement de ne pas être étiquetée anarchiste, donc s’éloigner du mouvement anarchiste. Son témoignage n’est pas sans rappeler les dynamiques propres aux milieux anars d’ici et d’ailleurs: sectarisme, conflits entre groupes causés par le manque de diplomatie, lourdeur des structures pour les individus qui les porte, difficulté à recruter et à s’implanter en dehors des milieux militants de l’extrême-gauche. Ce document alimente mon impression voulant que l’organisation politique anarchiste n’est pas désirable ni utile tandis que l’important reste l’organisation concrète. La question à savoir comment s’organiser pour la lutte des classe sur des bases ouvrières et égalitaire reste entière malgré les initiatives d’organisation politique anarchiste. Selon moi, elle sera potentiellement résolue non pas sur des bases idéologiques ou politiques s’inscrivant en dehors des structures de masse de la classe ouvrière, mais plutôt au sein d’un mouvement fonctionnant sur les principes d’action autonome de la classe ouvrière. Ma perception suggère donc que les anarchistes ne s’organisent pas en dehors et/ou par dessus la classe ouvrière. Plutôt que d’agir politiquement sur des bases idéologiques, je crois qu’il est préférable que tout un chacun améliore ses propres conditions en tant que membres de la classe ouvrière comme les autres (quand c’est le cas!). Dans le cadre des luttes issues de ses propres lieux de travail ou communautés, promouvoir et pratiquer des modes d’action et d’organisation horizontaux/inclusifs, basés sur la solidarité et l’action autonome de la classe ouvrière est en soi une action politique bien plus explicite que les prises de positions idéologiques appelant au changement social.