JUST beyond the wrestling crowds of the Manchester Xmas Markets and the site of the current play 'The Producers' featuring 'Springtime for Hitler' at the Royal Exchange, in down town Salford on Saturday the 1st, December another knock-about farce took place seemingly provoked by a bunch of political drama-Queens at the Manchester & Salford Anarchist Bookfair.
Based on the info on the Twitter, the website MUMSNET at around teatime on the night of the Manchester Bookfair, set up a thread which opened with the following:
Reports that Helen Steel and another woman were
surrounded and physically dragged out of (another) anarchist bookfair
for wrongthink
Since the night of the Manchester 'anarchist' bookfair not much else has been in evidence explaining why Helen Steel and the other woman were excluded from this event. Northern Voices approached the bookfair organisers, and others questioned the Partisan Collective, the managers of the bookfair venue for an explanation, but answers came there none. What we know of what happened comes mostly from comments on Twitter and MUMSNET.
This year's incident in Manchester follows the series of conflicts at bookfairs that started at the London Anarchist Bookfair in October 2017, when a dispute ensued between certain transexuals and some feminists over the distribution of leaflets criticising proposals in the new legislation on the Gender Recognition Act. During that case Helen Steel somehow became involved arguing for free speech and the right to debate the issues.
Since that time Helen Steel and others who think like her have been labeled 'TERF's', and it is understood that the Manchester venue 'The Partisan' does not allow space for TERF's.
After the disaster of the 2017 London Bookfair and the later conflicts at other 'anarchist' bookfair's like Manchester, Milan Rai the editor of Peace News wrote an editorial in the December-January 2018 issue entitled 'How to destroy our own movements': 'Activists need to find better ways to struggle with each other and to fight with each other, argues Milan Rai
"People ask me how we would defend the bookfair from a fascist
attack, but I’m not worried about them out there. I worry about what we
might do to each other in here." – one of the organisers of the London
Anarchist Bookfair, on 28 October. 'A few hours later, a group of trans rights activists stopped some
feminists handing out leaflets that they found oppressive to trans
women. A nontrans woman, Helen Steel, objected to this censorship. 'About
30 trans rights activists then surrounded Helen Steel and shouted at
her for having stood up for the leafleters. 'The confrontation went on for a long time. Some people (including
members of the bookfair collective) surrounded Helen Steel to protect
her from possible assault. An unknown person then tripped the fire
alarm, leading to an evacuation of the building.'
The consequences of this conflict between trans-rights activists and feminists still prevails as was evident in Manchester earlier this month. But it is a symptom of a wider problem of the inability of the broader left to communicate owing to a righteous arrogance which has developed within its ranks. It is inevitably that today an ideology which roots itself in an orthodoxies such as political correctness and identity politics was bound to suffer from the inconsistencies of its own contradictions.
JACOB Reese-Mogg sprang to the defence of the Class War anarchists around the ancient activist Ian Bone, who were busy querying the wages and working conditions of Reese-Mogg's kid's Nanny.
Others súch as the Archbishop of Canterbury, strongly criticised the stunt tweeting:
'This is appalling. There are plenty of ways you can tell MPs you disagree
with them. But targeting their children is shameful and disgraceful. We
are – and must be – better than this. We'll be praying for @Jacob_Rees_Mogg’s family at @lambethpalace chapel this evening.'
Yet Mr Rees-Mogg* told LBC: 'I wouldn't get too excited about it.'
He added: 'It was a few anarchists who turned up and it wasn't very well organised. It wasn't terribly serious. 'We
are a free country. They weren't violent. They aren't admirers of mine.
I am in public life and not everybody is going to like me. That is a
reality of public life. 'I'd have preferred it if it hadn't
happened but I don't want to get it out of perspective. I think much
worse things happen to many other people.'
What is ironic about this noble defence of the right to protest and free speech by the Tory MP Mr. Reese-Mogg, is that the Left has been much less tolerant. For example in 2012 at the London Anarchist Bookfair, a number of members of the then Anarchist Federation led bizarrely by the former Oldham teacher, Sally Hyman, raided the Northern Anarchist Network bookstall and stole some books *, a month later a man with Jewish ancestors was accused of being an anti-semite and pushed out of another anarchist bookfair in Manchester, and more recently at last year's London Anarchist bookfair a woman famous for her part in a campaign against McDonald's burger chain was attacked by a so called tribe of transsexuals for defending free speech, since then the bookfair organisers have cancelled future bookfairs.
* Jacob Rees-Mogg is the son of William Rees-Mogg, who edited the London Times in the 1960s, when the anarchists were very active and influential in the peace movement. In his editorials at that time he had many thoughtful things to say about the anarchists.
A recently expelled member of the now fragmented 'Anarchist Federation' wrote a complaint about the group last August on libcom, he or she concluded the long epistle by describing the background of the organisation thus:
'Bureaucratic, formalistic,
bereft of ideas, willing to accept a group of leaders because they have
organisational power and its members do not, because they occupy all
spaces within the Federation, allowing no space to other ideas. When it
attempts educational work it is like being in school: there are things
that members must learn and learn to repeat back but never to discuss,
to explore, to refute or reject; that is not allowed.'
This individual account seems to form a basis for what is now happening in the AF, by suggesting the membership organisation was a sort of Sunday School for anarco-commissars who are only capable of cookbook analysis of an half-baked Marxist type..
Anarchist Bookfair Blues
Following the wild attacks on Helen Steel, and what have been described as the 'Radical Feminists' at the London Anarchist Bookfair last October, some elements of the Anarchist Federation outside London began issuing statements and signing open-letters condemning the organisers of the London Bookfair for their tolerance of critics of the proposed amendments to the Gender Recognition Act. The provincial groups which put the names of their factions to the open letters attacking the Bookfair organisers calling for 'disassociation' included such bodies as the 'AFED TRANS ACTION FACTION'; 'Edinbugh;Anarchist Federation'; Liverpool A.F.; and South Wales A.F.
At the same time there was a deafening silence from the A.F. high-command around Nick Heath in London. Clearly the open-letters published by the provincials were seen in London for what they clearly were, compositions of gross ineptitude.
What very likely followed were attempts by Nick Heath and his Metropolitan elite to get things under control by urging the bumbling provincials to withdraw their corny compositions attacking well respected anarchists like Helen Steel and the Bookfair organisers. Events resulting in the recent resignations of the central core 'communist anarchism' faction, is now demonstrating that that the attempts to get a grip on the provincial supporters of the Trans hotheads failed.
In this way the A,Fed embrace of the exotic Trans identity tendency has resulted in a disaster which would have been a little local difficulty in a bigger body like the Labour Party, but among the tiny tribes of political anarchism it represents the virtual extinction.from the body politic. By embracing gender politics Nick Heath and the AF have gained a few members, but ultimately it has bit them on the arse.*
Fleas Pretending to be Elephants!
On the 20th, November 2017, just over 3-weeks after the London Bookfair debacle the Anarchist Federation issued a Statement which included the following observations: 'The AF regrets that the opportunity has probably been lost to
transform the London Anarchist Bookfair – which in recent years has
developed into one of the most important and representative anarchist
events globally – into an environment where this situation cannot not
reoccur. Whilst the right of people to choose their gender identity is
not up for debate, discussion about the relationship between different
oppressions and their relationship to the wider class struggle are
nonetheless important.'
This is the kind of froth that the general public, if they troubled to
read it, will find wearisome, but to the people inside the bubble of the
interpretive community it may sound impressive. It's full of froth because their Statement is rooted in humbug and hypocrisy. It's hypocritical because members of the AF have often been at the centre of the troubles at the Bookfairs up and down the country.
In October 2012, Nick Heath dismissed the theft of books from a book stall at the London Bookfair by some AF members as 'an unofficial action by some people in the AF'. In December 2012, Nick Heath was at the Manchester Anarchist Bookfair orchestrating Barry Woodling expulsion through an Emergency Exit where he had to climb down a Fire Escape. In October 2013, there was an AF reported altercation outside the London Bookfair against Ciaron O’Reilly accusing him of being a 'rape apologist' for supporting Julian Assange. The Manchester Anarchist Bookfair took place without incident because of a deal struck between the management of the People's History Musuem and an editor of Northern Voices. In 2014, the Manchester Anarchist Bookfair was hit with problems because it became apparent that Ronnie Marsden of the Sol. Fed., Peter Good (Cunningham Amendment) and others were operating a lifetime ban against Barry Woodling, a lad of Jewish origins, who Mr. Marsden from 2012 has accused of being an 'anti-Semite', In 2015, the management of the People's History Museum, after Baron John Monks became involved, finally banned the anarchists around Ronnie Marsden from having any further Bookfairs, and as a consequence there was no Manchester Bookfair that year.
When in December 2017 Tony Wood, one of the distinguished organisers of the London Anarchist Bookfair, was interviewed on Dissident Radio in London** about the decision not to hold another bookfair in 2018, he referred to ongoing conflicts at bookfairs over the last 5- years. It is noticeable that during that period the tiny Anarchist Federation with little political clout in main stream politics, has been close to the centre of the bookfair disputes with the possible exception of the Syrian / Kurd conflict in 2016.
* On the Moral Maze, it was estimated that the Trans constituency
nationally represents about 0.1% of the population, A relatively small
social community, but one substantially larger than the AF membership,
which must be very nearly two in one million or less than 100 in total. In this situation it is not surprising that the gender politicians out-voted the Sunday School League class struggle types.
** Listen to Radio interview on
Northern trade unionists confront police at Roberts Arundel
IN Nov 2006,the anarchist historian, Nick Heath* reflected upon his experiences in the UK anarchist movement since the 1960s, and the lessons on organisation and politics he finds valid for anarchists today. His observations include the idea that '[o]rganisational responsibility and discipline should not be
controversial'. [see 'The UK anarchist movement - Looking back and forward'posted on libcom].
Part
way through his long account he ponders the problems of the failures of
anarchists since its high point in the early to mid-1960s
during the rise of the peace movement: 'One of the shortcomings that they had highlighted was the lack of
industrial activity. As Brian Bamford, whom I do not often agree
with, has pointed out: “At the time of disputes at Roberts-Arundel
in Stockport**, Pilkington’s Glassworks in St Helens***, the strikes and
stay-in occupations at Upper Clyde Shipbuilders and in engineering,
the miners struggles in the 1970s, the anarchist influence was tiny”
(Freedom 6 August 1994)'
This year it is the 50th anniversary of the Roberts Arundel strike in Stockport, and Stockport Trade Union Council has put on an exhibition to commemorate the occasion.
At the time of the strike at Roberts-Arundel in 1966, mentioned in the above quote from Freedom, the Manchester Anarchist Group [MAG] was far bigger than the small International Socialist body with only 20 members locally and most of whom were students. Both Colin Barker and his then friend and fellow sociologist John Lee, who later like me became an ethnomethodologist, were anxious to engage with me and some of the local working-class anarchists. They knew that I had been involved in the national strikes of the engineering apprentices in the early 1960s, and still edited the apprentice paper Industrial Youth that came out of those disputes; both Colin and John were keen to collaborate with us with a view of building up their own I.S. group. The trouble then was that most of the Manchester anarchists in the MAG didn't have any affinity with factory workers and trade unionists. They were good on peace demos etc. waving their black and red flags, but it was as if they were frightened of engaging with genuine workers at their places of work.
When I was sacked for supporting the apprentices at Robinsons in Rochdale in 1965, the MAG refused to come down because they said they didn't want to be 'authoritarian', and tell the apprentices what to do! Again in 1966, when I was given my marching orders at Tomlinsons up Milnrow the MAG held aloof yet again steering clear of the factory gates. In similar circumstances I doubt that Colin Barker and I.S. would have been so timid, but by that time I had already decided to return to Spain, where I had a job waiting among the more practical and proletarian Gibraltar anarchists.
Under the influence of Ron Marsden, and Alan Barlow**** when the Manchester anarchists discussed the Roberts-Arundel dispute at a meeting at Mother Macs pub in central Manchester, the meeting was swayed and persuaded to not attend a support meeting called by the International Socialists [IS] to support the Roberts-Arundel strikers, the reasoning at that time being that they didn't want to swell the support for the trotskyists in IS. This is significant and relevant to what Mr. Heath is saying, yet I believe both he and Colin Barker draw the wrong conclusions in arguing that the anarchists and international socialists needed a national organisation or party.
In an interview with Colin Barker, now a retired sociology lecturer, in 2015 in the publication RS21 (Revolutionary Socialism in the 21st Century) vividly describes the situation he found himself with the IS in 1966 at the time of the Roberts-Arundel dispute: 'We
were a group of about twenty people. We’d got the building workers,
and we were talking on very friendly terms with one or two CP
engineers. By then I think we’d recruited one or two. We look as if
we’re going to recruit significant numbers of militant workers to
the branch – I don’t want to exaggerate, but we’re a little bit
confident, a little bit rooted. We’re distinctive. We don’t know
that you can’t do things – that’s quite important, we don’t
know of any limits to what we can do. So we take initiatives, try
things out, sometimes they don’t work and sometimes they do. This
is in ’67 – the next year of course everything changed.' (rs21on
Clearly the advantage that the Manchester International Socialist had in 1965 was not that of a mass organised party, but rather that of disciplined organised body but rather an imaginative tendency that was willing to act on its own initiative. By acting outside the box the IS was enabled to have a great impact in regional industrial disputes such as Roberts-Arundel in Stockpost and at Pilkingtons in St Helens.Meanwhile, the Manchsester anarchists who were so heroic in the peace demos in central Manchester were too timid when it came to turning up at the factory gates.
Drawing up a neat historical narrative
Like all historians
Mr. Heath provides us with neat narrative to explain what was wrong, and
how the anarchist decline could have been avoided in the past, but also
how its continuing fall in the present and in the future can be
stemmed: i] The historic issue, according to Mr. Heath, was that there was 'The increasing frustration with the swamp of pacifism, liberalism
and vague humanism'.
ii] Two now
defunct bodies entitled ASA (Anarchist Syndicalist Alliance) and ORA
(Organisation of Revolutionary Anarchists) were potentially Mr. Heath's
ideal tools for social change, but he writes the 'ASA ran
out of steam pretty quickly'.
[I personally was one of the
founding members of this short-lived ASA organisation, which was set-up
around 1970 from remnants of the old Manchester Syndicalist Workers
Federation, and went on to play a role in the Courtaulds Arrow Mill
strike involving mainly Asian workers in Rochdale, and later to successful campaign for shop stewards in
textiles inside the National Union of Textile & Allied
Workers*****]. iii}On the other hand, Heath writes that 'The ORA had started moving away from
the swamp as a result of the dockers and miners struggles and the
influences of French libertarian communists.'
Mr. Heath quotes from an ORA booklet entitled 'Towards a history and critique of the anarchist movement in
recent times' by K. Nathan. R. Atkins, C. Williams [ORA pamphlet no1.
1971]to support his diagnoses about the rise of Trotskyism and the fall of anarchism in the late 1960s and earlier 1970s: 'The IS [the International Socialists which later became the SWP] would
not have attained their size and influence such as it is if a decent
libertarian organisation had existed. It is an unholy mixture of
libertarian and Leninist groups. The attempt by Cliffe (sic) to
compete with IMG by out-trotting Mandel will make this alliance
increasingly unstable. BUT do we have any capacity to attract these
comrades? In fact, the flow has been the other way. Good comrades
(for the most part industrial militants rather than students) have
been lost without anyone attempting to understand why.'
He argues that that was a
true analysis and remains so today. Hence, he claims, that in
spite of what he calls 'the decline of Leninism' it was a 'lack of effective organisation', that has meant that anarchism will be at a standstill
until we rectify this problem of organisation.
What
this shows is that Nick Heath has a mechanistic Marxist approach to
organisation that is rooted in a form of deterministic thinking that is
part of the problem. The main problem among the anarchists, which has
been amply demonstrated in most recent times at the London Anarchist
Bookfair etc., is a psychological inability to engage with real people
in the real world. Some of the left don't have an engaging relationship
with working people. This has been a long term problem which no amount
of management, membership cards, statements aims and principle, mission
statements, or tick lists can solve.
Because Mr.
Heath has been a white-collar office worker (a librarian) for much of
his life he looks at the problem in a top-down way so that all he comes
up with are cookbook solutions. In the same way his close colleague
Mike Ballard - now a retired local authority housing manager - has a similar
cultural problem. Commenting in another essay entitled 'Anarchist communism in Britain, 1870-1919', on the libertarian organisation founded in 1960 called 'SOLIDARITY', Mr. Heath writes: 'Their wilful failure to translate this into the establishment of a
national organisation was a disaster, as International Socialism (the
precursor of the Socialist Workers Party) was able to build on this
territory abandoned by Solidarity (and by the Anarchist Federation of
Britain). They failed to engage as fully with the Anarchist movement as
much as they could have, as their contributions at meetings and
conferences could have considerably strengthened the class struggle
current within it.'
Thoughts on aspects of northern anarchism
There were some protests from southerners and Mr. Heath's type of 'organisational anarchists', when on November 2011, Sidney Huffman wrote his interesting 'Message from a North East Anarchists' on libcom:
'We believe the anarchists may actually be the single largest radical
tendency in the North-East and wider North, yet we remain largely
invisible, rarely initiating action ourselves and instead just tagging
along in ones and twos with events organised by the left and liberals.
We have repeatedly found anarchists who have joined Trotskyist parties
simply because they couldn't find an organised anarchist presence here.
Older comrades coming out of premature retirement spend 6 months looking
for political anarchists and cannot find any during that time. It is
not good enough. If we are serious about change, we have to step up and
make ourselves visible.'
What's interesting
about this statement and some of the protesting comments that followed
it, is the implied organisational and activist nature of what is being
proclaimed. Sidney Huffmann writes about 'tagging along in ones and twos' on other people's events tail-ending other left protests.
In response to Mr. Huffman, Tom Harrison wrote on libcom that the 'SF [Solidarity Federation] and AF [Anarchist Federation] have been turning out regularly at the sparks
strikes/demos/blockades in London, bolstering picket lines and generally
providing the much needed solidarity for these workers. There was a
particularly good SF turnout at the sparks demo on November 9th ... just
watch this vid
and you can see their placards at many point. We're also organising and
attempting to link student militancy with worker militancy.'
Mr.
Heath will recognise from this that despite his efforts nothing has
changed today from the stagnant pond from which anarchists seems unable
to escape. Of course, anarchists in London may have put out more flags
as seen on the video on the electrician's demo, but that is not news.
What would have been news would have been if like Tameside Trade Union
Council they had been in the forefront of the campaign against the
blacklist moving motions to the TUC, manning lonely picket lines in the
early hours since 2003, in the DAF dispute or at the Manchester Royal
Infirmary in 2009. If Mr. Harrison is saying the anarchists are a kind
of rent-a-mob available on street demos well that is part of the problem, because
despite all the talk of organisating they don't seem to have the
initiative to build serious enterprises themselves apart from bookfairs.Now because of narrow-mindedness of some anarchists even bookfairs are becoming a problem for the anarchiststo organise.
What Mr. Heath failed to grasp when he considered the Roberts Arundel strike (in his quote from Freedom
above) was that the lesson from that strike was that the Manchester
anarchists in 1967 failed to engage with the workers in dispute because
they were afraid of real workers at the factory gate. They didn't know
how to address a real worker then, and they still have problems today.
Even in the run up to the campaign against the blacklist in the
naughties people like Nick Heath's mate Mike Ballard, a former housing
manager at Manchester City Council, was describing the Manchester
electricians as not being involved in class struggle because they were
taking 'individualuist' actions by setting up pickets
rather than collectivist actions. Mr. Ballard came up with that claim
at a meeting of the NAN in Burnley, of course it was before the
Information Commissioner made his successful raid on Ian Kerr's office
in 2009, and before Kerr pleaded guilty for keeping an illegal data-base
at his trial at Knutsford Crown Court.
Abstract Anarchists & the ethnographic approach
The
folly of the mechanistic managerialist approach of both Mr. Heath and
Mr. Ballard is evident given that the subsequent development of the
struggle of the 'Boys on the Blacklist' in Manchester,
which Tameside TUC has been in the forefront of since 2003: had this
handful of electricians often acting in opposition to the official
union, using their own initiative not engaged in a series of small
pickets around Manchester after 2003, the office of the Consulting
Association, managed by Ian Kerr, would never have been raided by the
Information Commissioner in Droitwich Spa in 2009. Consequently, the
blacklist with over 3,000 names of building workers would never have
been exposed.
In the mid-1970s, the criminologist Ian Smith and other anarchists used to talk about the contrast between the 'sectarian syndicalists' and 'shop-floor syndicalists' in the ASA, Now we have very opportunistic 'abstract anarchists' like Mr. Heath and Mr. Ballard to contrast with more ethnographic approaches of others anxious to listen to the public.
What
Nick Heath may have in mind when he envisages a future anarchist
organisation is something like what Ken Weller and member of SOLIDARITY, talked about when he described the influence of the British Communist Party in 1956: 'People can’t realise how big an apparatus it was. There were the
embassies, the Friendship Societies, the printshops, the front
organisations, the unions; 120 were employed by the Electrical Trades
Union alone. There were all the agencies of the Soviet government, Tass
[the Soviet news agency], the Moscow Narodny Bank, all these sorts of
things were full of people; I mean, the Soviet Weekly alone employed a
network of people who were distributing agents for the paper, and so on.'
It
must have been exactly like George Orwell said in the 1930s about it
paying some folk to adopt a commie position, but to accomplish that kind
of body among the anarchists would require something more substantial
than what Nick Health has to offer with his own small-scale Anarchist
Federation (AF) with all of its one hundred members paying their fees,
and with perhaps a possible trans-gender platform to stand upon with its
own estimated constituency of 0.1% of the national populous. That
would in any case be a very different approach from that experienced by
anarchists in the early 1960s, when anarchism was at last part of a
genuine social movement; that is the peace movement and the Committee of
100.
With the 'People in the Streets', as Vernon Richards described the peace movement in Freedom in the 1960s, the anarchists had a significant role to play on Ban the Bomb demos and in the Committee of 100 sit downs. Yet
when the social struggle moved to the picket lines, trade unions and
factories after the Roberts Arundel strike in 1967, where the communists
had the great advantage, the Manchester anarchists had very little
grasp of what was required. Only in the struggles for shop stewards up
in Oldham and Rochdale in the failing textile industry such as at
Courtaulds Arrow Mill in 1972, did the anarchists of Manchester have an
impact, and then again in London in the building workers' struggles,
anarchists like Peter Turner had a role to play. None-the-less, in the
significant disputes of the late 1960s at Pilkington Glassworks in St
Helens, Upper Clyde Shipbuilding [UCS] and in engineering sit-ins,
the miners struggles in the 1970s, the anarchist influence was tiny.
* Nick Heath leader of the Anarchist Federation.
** Roberts Arundel strike from 1966-68 of engineering workers against dilution and cheap labour.
*** Pilkington strike in St Helens of glass-workers in the Municipal & General Workers Union [now GMB] in which the workers, frustrated by both the union and the bosses, attempted to set up an independent union.
**** Ron Marsden and Alan Barlow came to Manchester in 1964 and joined the Manchester Anarchist group [MAG], which was then meeting st that meeting in the Lord Nelson in Salford. The MAG had been founded earlier by Graham Lee and James Pinkerton, then International Secretary of the Syndicalist Workers Federation [SWF]. Marsden from Preston, and Barlow originally from Liverpool, had recently become members of the SWF, and were hoping with the help of the Liverpudlian Vincent Johnson also of the SWF, to form a faction within the MAG and drive it in a 'class struggle' direction.
***** COURTAULDS INSIDE OUT: CIS ANTI REPORT No.10. Produced in co-operation with The Transitional Institute. ******
N.V. Editor: the comment below was written on libcom following the Dave Douglass statement by MH who is an editor on the libcom website. The MH comment seems fair and reasonable. What is more interesting is the swift breakfast-time response from Rob Ray or Simon Saunders, the somewhat half-baked anarcho-syndicalist editor of Freedom when he's not acting as a hack for the Morning Star. We have no hesitation in doxing a juvenile pen-pusher such as Simon a former public schoolboy from East Anglia who admitted he had difficulty getting his head around the concept of syndicalism, not having even one working-class bone in his body. Meanwhile, Rob Ray/ Simon speaks of 'stirring'! He might well, many people are now saying the FREEDOM COLLECTIVE STATEMENT is feeble minded, and it seems the COLLECTIVE is split over it. ******
MH Nov 21 2017 00:36
Well those comment pieces/statements on the London Bookfair
keep rolling out, although with some glaring ommissions - AFed &
SolFed nationally, Freedom collective amongst others?
Anyways here's Dave Douglass writing in Northern Voices on 17 November.
He's a former striker in 1984/5 miners strike & NUM activist. He's
also spoken at a variety of Bookfair's including London several times.
He's toyed with anarcho-syndicalism, and flirted with Class War in the
distant past, these days he's more of a historian (i think). He may come
over as a bit rough & ready for Libcom towers, but that shouldnt
reduce the validity of his viewpoint. So grit your teeth and read on:
Quote:
SORRY END TO A GREAT INSTITUTION
by Dave Douglass (South Shields}
THE annual Anarchist Bookfare in London was for many many years the
highlight of the Anarchist and radical Marxist calendar. It brought
together the most splendid , vivid fascinating and eccentric, profound
and trivial, exciting and profane, hilarious and spiritual assortments
of people. They came in thousands, they bathed in the rainbow variety
of factions, tendencies, visions and issues. Workshops and
presentations, entertainment and discussion filled the entire day as the
crowds crammed past stalls laden with literature and art, T-shirts and
stickers, posters and badges, cards and calendars, a myriad of
interesting and unique stuff you would never find anywhere else under
one roof. The Vegan food commune outside the venues hawked the most
interesting of pastries and butties, tatties and cakes, rich wonderful
chocolate cakes and angel cakes which tested the will power of the most
dedicated of health freaks. In my own judgement the Anarchist bookfare
almost vied with the Durham Miners Gala (almost) in terms of ‘not to be
missed’ events. Ancient aud Anarchists rubbed shoulders with the
Mohican punks of yesterd-a-year, born again hippies, young activist, and
what a Glasgow paper talking of the anti polaris demonstrators of the
60’s called ‘ beardies, weirdies and lang lagged beasties’
Read the full piece here - http://northernvoicesmag.blogspot.co.uk/2017/11/sorry-end-to-great-institution.html
Northern Voices has a couple other bits on the Bookfair - here and here
- note the second (Letter in Weekly Worker) contains certain factual
errors, the most obvious being that the writer says Helen Steel is a
member of the London Bookfair Collective. This is not true, and never
has been, as far as i know.
******
Rob Ray [or Simon Saunders] Nov 21 2017 08:33 I'll break my silence on here briefly to note that Northern
Voices are habitual doxxers and liars, and their admin tried quite hard
to get someone from Freedom arrested after he himself had assaulted our members. I'm mildly surprised Dave Douglass would want much to do with them tbh [to be honest].
As for "glaring omissions" if groups do or don't want to make statements that's up to them, tbh [to be honest] this smacks of stirring a bit.
AN annual book fair that has served for more than three decades as
the most important meeting point for the British anarchist movement
has become the latest casualty of widening splits over the issue of
transgender rights.
Organisers say that they
no longer have “the appetite or the energy” to stage next
year’s London Anarchist Bookfair, following fraught scenes at the
event last month. A group of feminists were confronted by other
activists who accused them of distributing “transphobic” leaflets
that promoted prejudice against transgender people.
The acrimony follows highly publicised splits in universities,
women’s organisations and political parties over the issue. Lily
Madigan, a 19-year-old who has just won a vote in Kent to become
Labour’s first women’s officer from a transgender background, has
been at the centre of a row within the party.
The executive committee of another constituency Labour
party resigned this month in solidarity with Anne Ruzylo, a women’s
officer who claimed she had been the focus of complaints by Madigan
and others.
This weekend it emerged that Madigan is applying to join the Jo
Cox Women in Leadership programme, launched after the murder of the
MP to encourage female participation in politics.
Meanwhile, the Women’s Equality party has confirmed that its
executive committee is considering complaints about one of its
members, Heather Brunskell-Evans, an academic whose invitation to
speak at King’s College in London was cancelled after she took part
in a discussion on transgender issues on Radio 4. On the programme
she called for caution to be exercised in relation to children who
expressed confusion over their gender. Brunskell-Evans said the party
told her that three members had alleged her “conduct” on the
programme had “promoted prejudice against the transgender
community”. She is also alleged to have said on Twitter: “we have
to #ROAR about the harms of transgenderism for children and young
people”.
The leaflets handed out at the
Anarchist Bookfair suggested that predatory men might be among those
who choose to call themselves women, and might abuse the system by
gaining access to women-only spaces such as refuges. Trans activists
say the issue is being used by opponents – some of whom they label
“terfs” (trans-exclusionary radical feminists) – to sow the
seeds of hatred.
The increasingly angry disputes follow government proposals to
streamline the process for how people can change their gender, under
the Gender
Recognition Act (GRA). A public consultation is to be held on
speeding up and demedicalising the process, with the current need to
be assessed and diagnosed by clinicians seen by some as intrusive.
Choosing whether one is a man or a woman is a matterof self-identification, trans activists assert.
ACTIVISTS needto find better ways to struggle with each other and
to fight with each other, arguesMilan Rai
'People ask me how we would defend the bookfair from a fascist
attack, but I’m not worried about them out there. I worry about
what we might do to each other in here.’ – one of the organisers
of the London Anarchist Bookfair, [said] on 28 October.
A few hours later, a group of trans rights activists stopped some
feminists handing out leaflets that they found oppressive to trans
women. A nontrans woman, Helen Steel, objected to this censorship.
About 30 trans rights activists then surrounded Helen Steel and
shouted at her for having stood up for the leafleters.
The confrontation went on for a long time. Some people (including
members of the bookfair collective) surrounded Helen Steel to protect
her from possible assault. An unknown person then tripped the fire
alarm, leading to an evacuation of the building.
After the bookfair, there was sharp criticism of the
organisers. The collective have decided not to organise the London
Anarchist Bookfair next year. We’ve published lots of relevant
documents in this issue, in full or (in one case) nearly in full, to
give PN readers the chance to make up your own minds about what’s
happened at one of the most important radical gatherings in
Britain.
We believe this conflict has wider significance
for grassroots movements for change, not just in Britain,
Steel
by name
Our starting point is that standing up
for free speech is necessary and important. It is appalling that 30
activists gathered to threaten someone for standing up for the right
to leaflet. It is shocking that people in the crowd shouted ‘ugly
TERF’, ‘fucking TERF scum’, ‘bitch’, and ‘fascist’ at
her because she refused to accept their harassment of two women
leafleters. This kind of bullying is completely unacceptable. (The
word ‘TERF’ is now mostly used as a derogatory term meaning
‘someone with transphobic views’. It originally stood for
‘trans-exclusionary radical feminist’.) It’s shameful that
groups have issued statements of solidarity with the trans rights
activists without criticising this intimidation.
When
Helen Steel stood up for freedom of speech, when organisers of the
bookfair helped to protect her, these were courageous and principled
acts.
We shouldn’t allow anyone, whether the government
or any activist group, the right to dictate what ideas should be
allowed to circulate. Freedom of speech is deeply connected to
freedom of thought. Most of us discover what we really think by
talking with others, by expressing ourselves, and then hearing other
people’s responses. Everyone should have the chance to find their
own political truths, to make mistakes, to grow and to stand on their
own feet intellectually.
There is an old slogan: the
answer to bad speech is more speech. In 1969, US anarchist Noam
Chomsky wrote: ‘a movement of the left condemns itself to failure
and irrelevance if it does not create an intellectual culture that
becomes dominant by virtue of its excellence and that is meaningful
to the masses of people who, in an advanced industrial society, can
participate in creating and deepening it’.
Our arguments
should become dominant by virtue of their excellence, not because we
have shouted down the other side.
Shutting down debate –
by shouting people down or blockading a talk or triggering a fire
alarm – can be seen as a lack of confidence, a lack of belief that
you have the arguments to win the argument.
Free
speech
Defending someone’s freedom of
expression is not the same as approving of what they are saying.
Chomsky points out: ‘If you’re in favour of freedom of speech,
that means you’re in favour of freedom of speech precisely for
views you despise. Otherwise you’re not in favour of freedom of
speech.’
When should free speech be limited? Chomsky
stands with the US supreme court ruling of 1969 which said that
speech should always be protected from legal punishment except when
people are trying to incite, and likely to produce, ‘imminent
lawless action’ with their words. According to this standard, the
law should not be used to stop or punish speech that justifies or
advocates oppressive violence in general. The law should only be used
against speech when those words are being used to try to start an
actual violent attack right here, right now (‘imminently’).
Whatever
else you might say about them, none of the gender-related leaflets
passed out at the bookfair either justified or tried to incite
anti-trans violence. The nearest the bookfair came to imminent
violence was when 30 people surrounded Helen Steel.
It has
been claimed that what was written in these leaflets was a form of
violence. This is to bend the meaning of words completely out of
shape. Offensive or oppressive speech is not violence.
If
you choose to define oppressive speech as violence, and if you accept
the right of violent self-defence, then it is justified to carry out
violence against pretty much everyone, because we all say things that
are oppressive or that can be seen as oppressive.
Yes,
hate speech can help create a climate of intolerance and hatred which
encourages violent attacks. That doesn’t mean hate speech is
violence or that it should be subject to legal punishment. (We’re
not saying the leaflets were hate speech.)
How to
destroy ourselves
In our last editorial, we
described how conservatives, liberals, socialists and communists all
helped to create an authoritarian climate in Germany in the 1920s and
1930s, paving the way for Nazism (PN 2610–2611).
The
socialist SPD banned meetings, newspapers and demos. The communist
KPD broke up meetings. Together, they undermined democratic habits
and independent thinking within German working-class movements,
leaving them paralysed when the Nazis came to power.
When
we stop public discussions, either through the law or through some
kind of force (like a fire alarm), we move politics away from debate
and persuasion, what pagan activist Starhawk calls ‘power with’,
towards the world of force and compulsion, what Starhawk calls ‘power
over' others. If politics turns into a ‘power over’ game, the
winners will be those who are most brutal. That outcome won’t
favour any kind of feminist.
Every time disruption or
threats make it impossible to hold a public meeting – whoever is
speaking, whatever their views – we undermine free speech and we
weaken our already weak movements for change.
We need to
find better ways to struggle with each other and to fight with each
other, to disagree deeply while continuing to work together where we
can. We need to create bigger, stronger activist organisations,
independent media, radical publishers and bookfairs. We need to
support the London Anarchist Bookfair, not destroy it. We should be
inspired how it makes freedom work.
Editorial note: In five articles ([1],
[2],
[3],
[4],
[5]),
Peace News is documenting the free speech conflict at this
year’s (2017) London Anarchist Bookfair. The origins of the
Anarchist Bookfair are briefly recounted here,
and the issues concerning free speech are the subject of this issue's
editorial above.
ANOTHER Bookfair, another outrage! On Saturday 2nd December 2017
two gentlemen calling themselves, “Veg” and “Under the
Pavement”, assisted by assorted other subterranean botanicals
physically assaulted and ejected two anarchist comrades from the
“Manchester & Salford Anarchist Bookfair”.
As bystanders witnessed, the
pair had done nothing to disrupt proceedings yet were set upon
without rhyme nor reason.
Another Isolated Incident?
Anarchism is viewed as an essentially violent, destructive and
irrational pursuit by most normal people in Britain and the
organisers of this “Manchester & Salford Anarchist Bookfair” (2.12.17) are
evidently the latest self-proclaimed “Anarchists” to add
substance to this popular prejudice.
Bookfairs in London, Bristol and
Manchester, Liverpool’s Casa Club and London’s Angel Alley have
all witnessed violent attacks on comrades in recent years and almost
every anarchist website is littered with foul personal abuse.
Generally, perpetrators hide behind anonymity or pseudonyms such as,
“Battle Scarred” or “Under-the-Pavement”, pseudo-identities
that reinforce perception of anarchists as juvenile, aggressive
phantasists. Anonymity encourages irresponsibility and fuels fake
courage. In the 1960’s anarchists were popularly perceived as
tolerant, morally courageous, peace-loving individuals, now
sociopaths are to the fore and good comrades have allowed themselves
to be pushed aside.
Another Brick from the Wall
I live in rural Wales, but apparently I’m banned from both
FREEDOM (ironic) BOOKSHOP and “Manchester & Salford Anarchist Bookfair”
because both cliques dislike my opinions and that’s the crux of the
current malaise. When the Soviet Empire collapsed it torpedoed the
popular appeal of Marxist politics and many youngsters who would
formerly have drifted into some variety of Trot organisation instead
attached themselves to Anarchism as it appeared untainted as well as
sexier and more street cred. Down the line we’ve ended up with the
lunatics running the asylum. The wall might have been torn down but
these faux anarchists are reusing the bricks as brickbats.
I don’t
propose an inquisition, banning, censorship or blacklisting (all
currently in operation in Angel Alley) I merely appeal to decent
anarchists to kick open the closet and speak out. When you have to be
positively vetted before you can join the so-called “Anarchist
Federation” and to register and accept the party-line before you
can post on “Lib-Com” or “Freedom” it’s clear that
free-speech, tolerance and fellowship have given way to narrowing
ideology and party-building. Our clothes have been stolen by the
intemperate and intolerant. By people who refuse open debate.
Prior
to the Manchester debacle Messrs “Pavement & Veg” received
formal applications from one anarchist (not myself) to host a
workshop on “Toleration in the Anarchist Movement” and another
from Tameside Trades Council offering a workshop on “The Blacklist
Campaign” (with the prospect of Ricky Tomlinson, one of the
blacklisted Shrewsbury Pickets taking part). Neither offer was taken
up, no excuse was provided.
Northern Voices remains a rare outpost of tolerant, outspoken
anarchist opinion that positively relishes a frank exchange of views
but the bigots keep quiet and prefer to operate in the shadows. I
challenge “Veg & Co” to come forward and explain themselves
and maybe even have the courage to do so in their own names but I
suspect I’m more likely to get an answer from a carrot in my
fridge.
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