Don't slam the door on the way out you fucking Maoists.

I wish there were more to indicate the reason for the organization ending - some sense of what was/is actually up. Weird.

I thought the quote in the text from the Batko Group was super-interesting. It's pulled directly from Some Notes on Insurrectionary Anarchism by Sasha K, so clearly the group had gotten over platformism...

The real reason that they have disbanded is because there were multiple accusations of sexual assault leveled at several leading members of the collective and they did not have either the resources or any kind of protocols or procedures in place that would allow them to effectively address the issue so they decided that the best thing they could do is disband.

Common Cause people at least had the decency of not turning into this kind of empty shell federation that leads to little good places. Their texts were sharp as well... rich in self-criticism of North American anarchist milieus among other things, especially for their endorsement of a critique of identity politics. But that's about it.

I think the issue with contemporary anarchist groupings and organizations is to be painting themselves in fixed, outer-worldly revolutionary abstractions taken from 100 years ago instead of building on what's THERE, on what they got and what they are in the real world, what they're into. Like Common Cause could have just called itself an « anarchist publications network » and that would have been way better and maybe more creative that way.

I hope that the platformists finally can acknowledge that the specific anarchist organization is just as problematic as any other group in this day and age. They need to acknowledge that their intervention in mass worker struggles only reaches the level of labor activism. They also need to acknowledge the segment of the population they target is not going to generate mass direct action because they more often closer to middle class than they are to a point worth fighting, at least as far as employment is concerned.

When people target workers, they aren't hitting them in ways that will generate anarchist results. The most destitute of workers might need more money, but usually issues are complicated and workers manage to scrape by. Union work acts as a competition in the labor market, almost a median. If the numbers are right and a section of the non-unionized worker market makes so far below unionized, union organizing suddenly gain traction. Most people don't want to be in unions because they take money from them and don't do anything for them. For an anarchist group to work beside unions is to work with another boss of the worker, despite all the rhetoric to the contrary. Union democracy is a joke and votes are rigged to favor the union bureaucracy. Organizing against the bureaucracy's point of view is just asking to look like a problem, that could face a lack of solidarity on the job versus the union's most active and vocal members for the bureaucracy.

Joining a union, working beside a union on a labor dispute, even the IWW, is locking yourself into struggles that might not be hitting the right veins of anti-authoritarianism that has to deal with work in America. It also is siding with a known recuperative and reifying institution, which steers workers towards its goals and failing that, to control the workers in any way they can to keep the viability of the union as a legal instititution secure. When the issue is work abolition, the end of compulsory labor and the choice of if and when to work without the threat of destitution or living as a grifter, unions only offer the barest of minimums. They can only promise money and piecemeal benefits, which both often disappear depending on the economic climate.

So while I don't know if Common Cause remained loyal to union organizing or solidarity with unions, I do know that NEFAC and several other lesser federations attempted to enter this realm as an anarchist intervention and these things made no real ripples that could not of been done by a non-anarchist group and there wasn't anything to differ a platformist from a liberal activist in these interventions, other than maybe imagery and maybe perhaps some criticism of how unions control labor protests and collaborate with law enforcement? This I do not know. I do know that anarcho-communists that haven't taken on some aspects of post-left critique to consider their role in relation to the left, tend to move more towards the left and away from their anti-authoritarian roots because what activity they do, it defines them and the logic of anarchism is best as a critic in these situations of control and not as an aid to the management of labor, a role unions are accustomed to.

Another issue seems to be anti-fascism. This old left position has been gaining traction lately, but without any real criticism, anti-fascism is easily steered by the authoritarian left and away from the kinds of ground that Crimethinc thought was important in their "To Change Everything" tour. It is seen by many anarchists as an entry point into becoming an anarchist, as many that are and were active in anti-racist and anti-fascist groups move into other anarchist projects. It protects some small subcultures from becoming fascist and there isn't really anything that seems likely to change in this regards, but these groups are just as likely to be steered into supporting any left position, like Trump being a fascist, or the libertarian party being fascist, or the Republican or religious fundamentalism or anything that has to do with the right wing. Speak with a common paralance that is out of sync with liberal and left jargon of whatever year it is and that person is in cohoots with fascism, is a racist and a white supremacist. Militant anti-fascism falls more in line as an executive arm of this kind of radical leftism than it does as an extention of an anti-authoritarian approach.