Origins
The Federation was founded as the Anarchist Communist Federation in March 1986 by the Anarchist Communist Discussion Group, which had coalesced around two anarcho-communists who had returned from France and began selling the pamphlets of the defunct Libertarian Communist Group tendency, and members of Syndicalist Fight. The group aimed to provide an anarchist intervention into working class struggles such as the Miners' Strike, and was closely involved with the Anti-Poll Tax community-based campaign at the end of the 1980s and unemployed struggles through the Groundswell network of claimants' action groups. There is also a student membership, of whom many, including non-student members were involved in the series of university occupations that began in the beginning of 2009 and swept across British universities in opposition to the Gaza War as well as the 2010 Student movement against reforms in further education.
It changed its name to the Anarchist Federation in the late 1990s, though advocacy of Anarchist communism remains at the centre of its politics. Despite this, there are a number of members who do not identify specifically as anarchist-communists, but are libertarian socialists, council communists and so forth. The Anarchist Federation places itself amongst a continually developing current of autonomous working class struggle. Important influences on the Anarchist Federation's politics include The Organisational Platform of Libertarian Communists, the Manifesto of Libertarian Communism, Solidarity and the anarchist communist currents within the Spanish, Russian and Ukrainian Revolutions. The Anarchist Federation continues this tradition of agitation within the workplace and community, rather than attempting to gain prominent bureaucratic positions in trade unions, local councils and other institutions, unlike a number of socialist and communist parties and groups. It promotes grassroots direct activism against the state and capitalism and is run in a horizontalist manner.
Key Anarchist Federation principles include a commitment to class struggle as a method of abolishing capitalism and the state, and a rejection of the strategy of vanguardism. The Federation is affiliated with the International of Anarchist Federations. The AF have two regular publications, Organise!, the twice a year theoretical journal of the organisation, and Resistance, the monthly bulletin written by its members. They publish pamphlets under the publishing titles Anarchist Communist Editions and Stormy Petrel.
The AF logo, which depicts two clasping hands above flames, is inspired by a salute used by anarchists during the Spanish revolution. The element of flames can be seen to refer to quotes by both Mikhail Bakunin and Buenaventura Durruti.
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- "The passion for destruction is also a creative passion." - Bakunin
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- "We are not in the least afraid of ruins. We are going to inherit the earth. There is not the slightest doubt about that. The bourgeoisie might blast and ruin its own world before it leaves the stage of history. We carry a new world, here in our hearts. That world is growing this minute." - Durruti
Read more about this topic: Anarchist Federation (Britain And Ireland)
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