As you may or may not know I have written enough material for a book and to be honest the spilt and you lot leaving holed Class War at an organisation level (if we had been more experienced and richer we would have coped better) but at the political level we had many success. I will claim and argue that it was us (and you lot too maybe, but we would have done it with out you and you wouldn’t have done it with out us) moved the Reclaim the Streets liberal Green type thing to an anti-capitalist stage which collapsed for various reason the most significant reason being the international holiday club that followed and more importantly the Iraq War and the traditional Left killing the anti-capitalist movement in their bid to control. But a success we can all claim is now civil disobedience groups (like UKUncut) and the like stand with our attitude of not being grasses and that is a battle we won (and the London group can claim to have done more than anyone- but very nice leaflet Birmingham group 🙂 ) and that is a battle fought in the early 90’s.

I will be covering a lot more than history.

Regards
James Walsh

We’ve actually bumped into ex-CWF comrades in just about all the movements and events that have taken place in the UK over the last 15 years. Indeed the reason we argued to dissolve Class War was to rid ourselves of the institutional baggage it had built up. We argued that this was preventing us recognising these movements as ‘active class struggle politics’ and so in turn preventing us from participating in and influencing them. Looking back I think the dissolution of Class War and the MayDay 98 conference played a useful role, feeding into and shaping the emergence of the anti-globalisation cycle of struggles in the UK.

I think the reason we now feel the need to revisit that history is that, following quite fundamental changes in the world sparked by the economic crisis, there seems to be some political realignments taking place. Just as there was at the end of the 1990s. We can see the self-dissolution of the Climate Camp as a symptom of that and indeed you can see the same sorts of tensions and accusations flying around that process as emerged when we were dissolving Class War.

Dissolving an organization is difficult because it goes against all the processes of institutionalisation that groups and parties build up over the years. The really interesting question is why Class War was able to dissolve itself at the point when it was the biggest and most dynamic of the ‘anarchist’ groups. None of the other groups of that period were able to even consider doing the same. I suspect part of the reason for this lies in something that has largely been written out of Class War history – the influence of autonomist ideas in the organization. One of the original groups that coalesced around the Class War paper were called London Autonomists, indeed early issues talk in terms of “us autonomists”. There were also some very influential visits by Italian autonomists to London Class War and return visits back to Italy in the late 1980s. One of the basic tenets of Autonomism is that we should always start with the current shape of the struggle: it is from this that you can work out the changing composition of the class and it is this that provides guidance as to the best contemporary forms of action and organisation. This approach is a reversal of the usual state of affairs, which is to start from the needs of the Party (even if it calls itself a federation) and then look to see how the struggle can facilitate those needs.

I think the move to dissolve fits into the best parts of Class War, an inheritance that we should try to emulate: namely the desire to have an effect on the struggle, the willingness to ‘get our hands dirty’, to try things out while rejecting the politics of purity. Of course we now have other inheritances to consider. The anti-globalisation period is over and with it the fetishisation of ‘open’ networks. The question of political organization needs to be re-opened and the inheritance of past generations of struggle needs to be reconsidered.

And, of course, very selective. I can still remember finding out about the secret meetings which were held in London, open only to some ‘comrades’. The decision to ‘dissolve’ the group wasn’t embarked on democratically or openly, but pursued behind the backs of quite a few members. And, of course, putting out issue 73 and subsequent claims that CW was no more did no favours to those who didn’t share your analysis and felt there was life yet in the CW beast.

The strangest thing about the split in ’97 in retrospect is the disappearance from active class struggle politics of so many of the then members who promised so much would emerge from Smash Hits and Bradford 98. People in London who remained within CW have since been heavily involved with groups like MA’M, Fitwatch, the Whitechapel Anarchist Group and now ALARM. We’ve brought the CW way of doing things to a new generation of people, both within and outside ‘the movement’. By contrast, those who sought to dissolve CW have themselves been conspicuous by their absence since Bradford 98.

And it’s irrelevant that news of its death again looks premature. What’s really timely is thinking again about the politics we tried to capture in CW#73, and the reasons we felt it was time for a re-alignment.

Class War really wasn’t bothered about political purity, and that was liberating. Given a choice between “right” or having an effect, it went for the effect every time. This left it open to accusations of “stuntism”, but from another perspective you can say that it was willing to experiment, to gamble, in order to make things happen. That’s a far cry from the usual approach taken by the Left and the anarchist movement. Class War wasn’t “anarchist” (it made that point again and again), it just saw anarchism as one of the traditions it drew on. And because it wasn’t anarchist, it wasn’t scared of offering leadership. Not “leadership” in the Leninist sense of leading an ignorant and incapable working class to the promised land. But leadership in the sense of getting your hands dirty, kicking up shit in the hope of helping prompt something much bigger. And also leadership in the sense of picking up (“cheerleading”) the stuff that was already going on – amplifying it and trying to generalise it. Politics for Class War wasn’t a specialist field for pointy-heads or professional revolutionaries.

Obviously, it made mistakes along the way. And part of its long-term failing was that its anti-intellectual streak came to dominate, so that we were left fairly helpless in the face of new movements. But that awkward streak was part of its charm. Hard to pigeonhole, uncontrollable, dangerous, and always on the verge of becoming something else… if Class War is really dead, that wouldn’t be a bad epitaph.