About

Some notes about the project

In Spring 2021 a number of us involved in anarchist politics here over the years got together (online) to talk about the current state of libertarian socialist ideas. In part we were interested in a wider discussion with like-minded people. Our objective has not been to launch anything new but to begin a discussion process which will hopefully lead to the forging of new links and the development of ideas.

We decided to write a number of articles to explore a libertarian/anarchist perspective on some current issues. And, fairly obviously, the response to the Covid pandemic jumped out as the first area to explore. Rather than using the traditional way of getting one or two people to go away and write an article/articles we decided to hold a number of conversations with a wider group of activists known to us, and to try to write the articles based on the outcome of those conversations.

We want to say a huge thank you to the comrades who joined in those conversations and to apologise for the fact that it has taken so long for us to actually write up the articles. This was due to a combination of our being busy with other things and the difficulties caused by the ongoing pandemic.

We have now reached the point where a couple of articles have been written and which we will publish over the next couple of weeks. We hope they will be of interest and that they might provide a starting point for further discussions. We know that there are plenty of activists contributing hugely to the growth and development of ideas and campaigns from an anarchist/libertarian perspective, we look forward to your feedback on these articles and we hope that over the coming period new opportunities for further discussions and development of ideas will emerge.

Finally, in the process of forming this collective we drew up some basic points of agreement, which we add here for reference.

What We Believe

The 21st century presents humanity with a stark choice - If we don’t end capitalism, capitalism will end us.

Our society is dominated and controlled by a small coterie of billionaires who wield power by controlling the world’s wealth and resources, thereby creating an ever increasing wealth gap and driving us towards environmental catastrophe.

The system gives us the illusion of influence via parliamentary elections every few years. But those elections change nothing fundamental. To build meaningful change, we can only rely on ourselves and our ability to unite in communities of solidarity based on self-organisation, autonomy and direct action.

Our desire is to replace capitalism with a society organised along very different lines. We want to build self-organised communities based on participatory democracy, and co-ordinated through a horizontally organised free federation based on solidarity and mutual aid. We seek to develop democratically run and managed workplaces and economy, and sustainable production and consumption - based on need not profits or greed.

This project aims to contribute to the discussion, development and strengthening of anarchist ideas, to provide a space to analyse and learn from one another’s struggles and to contribute to empowering the working class to forge a new society based on our common interests.