Anarchists are under attack because their ideas are gaining ground

Anarchists are under attack because their ideas are gaining ground | openDemocracy
►http://www.opendemocracy.net/ourkingdom/alasdair-thompson/anarchists-are-under-attack-because-their-ideas-are-gaining-ground

The London Metropolitan Police have withdrawn an appeal to the public to report anyone with anarchist sympathies, admitting it was “badly worded”. But the climb-down is telling in itself: they did not seek to “stigmatise those with genuine political beliefs”, but to “gather information on criminal acts”. The conflation of anarchism and criminality is a key tactic in the state offensive against anarchists, driven by the fear that anarchist ideas are gaining ground within a new politics that eschews parties and favours direct action.

The most inspiring action over the three years since the financial crisis has come not from the traditional political parties or established trade unions but from spontaneous, unilateral action by workers and students: the workplace occupations, the day X student protests and university occupations and the direct action of groups like UK Uncut.

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These actions weren’t all organised by anarchists, or even necessarily organised along explicitly anarchist principles. But they showed the ability of the working class and those under attack to organise themselves without recourse to centralised authority and bureaucratic hierarchies.

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The world is changing. Though many of the ideas of anarchism are not new, as Paul Mason so eloquently described back in February, the social dynamic within which we interpret them has shifted. New forms of technology and communication are often lauded as harbingers of this change, and though it is wrong to say that they have prefigured or created these forms of organisation, they do help to facilitate horizontal structuring and allow us to bypass traditional means of control. The Deterritorial Support Group has described the fallout from the series of scandals to befall our elite:

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No one cause can be said to have changed the rules of the game, but a confluence of factors are emerging as the old economic and political order falters, pushing anarchist ideas to the forefront of a new wave of resistance.

#UK #uncut