PARTISAN!

Porco, Online

Anarchists are not immune from sectarian breakups. Often, if their organisation is informal, this will take the shape of an interpersonal dispute. For Black Flag Sydney, questions over priorities, commitments and political goals recently led the organisation to dissolve. Some wanted to focus more on “trade unionism” and merge with the proposed “Anarchist Federation” [See: “Australia’s Anarchists host conference and unity talks“]. This move apparently required ending their newspaper project ‘Mutiny’.

Black Flag Sydney formed out of an Anarchist-Communist reading group that started around 2019. Since then they have published 14 issues of ‘Mutiny’. A Black Flag member told me that the organisation was a joy to organise within around 2022. So what happened?

Well it’s hard to totally figure that out. The website has been dropped from the internet. Someone clearly stopped paying for the domain name as soon as they had their meeting. There hasn’t been a public statement about the organisation’s dissolution, either.

From what I can gather, certain members wanted to work on more “labour” focused politics rather than “social” politics. They almost posed this distinction to the collective as an accusation that “Black Flag Sydney” had been tarnished by a history of student politics, LGBT rights and climate activism. But this still doesn’t completely explain the liquidation of Black Flag, and their newspaper into an anarchist federation…

When it comes down to it, it sounds like nobody organising with Black Flag had the time or the energy to continue on. Their recruitment was waning and morale seemed low. I attended a reading group a few months ago that consisted of only 3 members, two of whom were relatively new. Where were the rest?

In the end, a large enough section of the collective was able to dispose of the project in favour of this “Anarchist Federation”. A concept which more veteran anarchists will point out to you is floated every five years or so. Other anarchist groups around Australia are contributing to this federation without liquidating (such as the Melbourne Anarchist Communist Group, MACG).

What is the purpose of these groups if they can only last a few years? What is being built? As previous articles in the Partisan paper have shown, this is not a unique Anarchist problem. It actually seems that the sect form and the all too common breakup is accelerating and affecting many sides of the socialist left. If a sect doesn’t break down, it calcifies into an efficient membership machine, who’s only purpose is to maintain its due paying membership enough to tread water above the suffocating pull of splits and depoliticisation. The RCO should be wary of falling into the same fate.