
Anarchist Summer School, Glasgow, Scotland.

by Ian Heavens and Jack Campin

The Glasgow anarchist summer school was held on May 29th to May 31st,
in the Govanhill Neighbourhood Centre, Daisy St., Govanhill, Glasgow.
It was organized by Glasgow Class War, Counter Information (an Edinburgh
group who produce a freesheet), the Free University Network, Libertarian 
Social Committee and individual anarchists and libertarian socialists.

There was a turnout of two hundred to two hundred and fifty anarchists from 
all over Britain and elsewhere, including an Italian autonomist.  Bookstalls
from A K Press (Edinburgh), Northern Herald Books (Bradford) and various
local groups were on display.

Some of the workshops are reviewed here.  Others included:

	Popular Culture (including Mass Media),
	Philosophy of the Individual
	John Perroti and Prisoners' Support
	Women, Feminism and Revolution
	Workers, Class Struggle and the Unions
	Anarchist/Anti-Parliamentary History
	Scotland and National Liberation
	Sex and the Working Class
	Ireland and State Preparation
	Crime and Working Class Community
	Public Sector Pay Disputes,
	Community Resistance (including Water Privatisation/Poll Tax)
	Workplace organization
	Fighting the Law (including Asbestos)
	Successful Grafitti/Posters/Propaganda
	Italy: State, Corruption, new radical forces.

Anarchist films and videos were shown throughout the weekend:

- Despite TV, The Battle of Trafalgar; what really happened during the 
Trafalgar Square Poll Tax riot.
	
- The Jewish Anarchists; documents the Jewish immigrant anarchist movement 
in the U.S.A. and the 87 year history of the anarchist newspaper "Die Frei
Arbeiter Stimmer".
		
- Survival Research Laboratories - Maimed Artist; S.R.L. are San Francisco 
based performance artists who build machines that fight with each other.  
		
- The Wobblies; documentary charting the history of the Industrial Workers
Of The World, including interviews with many I.W.W. activists.

- Behold The Pale Horse; Gregory Peck as a character very closely based
on Sabate, the Spanish anarchist guerilla.
		
Impressions from Jack:

I was at the summer school on Saturday and Sunday, and went to four
workshops: fascism, anarchism & marxism, the New World Order, and computer
networking.

Fascism: about 20 people.  It hit me straight off that was a rather male
gathering (so was the whole weekend).  No very strong disagreements: the
points people made included these:

	- organized fascism is not a big deal in the UK and not going
	  anywhere fast.

	- one particular example of this is in Scotland where Protestant
	  Loyalism resists incorporation into British fascism despite having
	  substantial common aims (the British fascist parties being happy
	  to work with Catholic fascists from Europe who are poison to the
	  Loyalists).  In practice this doesn't make a great deal of difference
	  to us: the ruling class uses both in the same way.

	- this is not like the situation in Germany where the state has
	  chosen to use the fascists as a disavowable force.

	- anti-fascism in the UK, as practiced by the front organizations of
	  Marxist parties, is mainly about recruiting members and disregards
	  the real needs of the black working class.  They make a huge fuss
	  when one of their paper-sellers gets attacked but ignore the problem
	  of racist violence that isn't fascist-organized - either from the
	  police or from clueless elements of the white working class.

	- what it takes to respond to this is real community organization, an
	  unattractive option for a vanguardist as it means staying put in a
	  local community at the cost of upward mobility in some national
	  power structure.

	- some specific problems with vanguard anti-fascist groups: Anti-
	  Fascist Action in Glasgow has now split into two factions, an
	  anarchist one and one controlled by Red Action (a small Trotskyist
	  party who are trying to use AFA across Britain as a power base).
	  Searchlight (a well-established magazine now associated with AFA)
	  has long been used by MI5 and the police as a two-way channel of
	  information, thanks to its opportunistic anything-goes-in-fighting-
	  fascism stance, and (this emerged at the plenary on Sunday) seems
	  lately to have been used in attempt to smear Class War (see their
	  April 93 issue; there's a pamphlet about this that I haven't read
	  yet).  Searchlight also has a very limited concept of what
	  fascism is; you won't find them pointing to fascism in the
	  Israeli state.  Basically their line is that the destruction of
	  fascism should be the concern of the repressive apparatus of the
	  state and the working class should have nothing to with it but
	  look on.

	- Black bourgeois nationalist groups take the same line, e.g. the
	  Black Lawyers group in London that organized a disastrous march
	  through a heavily fascist-infiltrated area and got their supporters
	  hammered.  Again this seems to have been a recruiting measure; to
	  persuade the black working class that the only protection they can
	  expect is from the black nationalists.  White Trotskyist anti-
	  fascists are doing their level best to prove them right by doing no
	  organization whatever among the white working class.


Marxism & anarchism: I went to this one by mistake because I couldn't find
the room for the one about John Perotti and prisoner support.  Wish I'd
looked harder.  It started with a long and self-indulgent talk by Albert
Meltzer and continued with a mindless slugfest between a Trot who fancied
himself as sympathetic to anarchism (but...), a guy from Class War who
mistakenly tried to say something constructive and intelligent, and Robert
Lynn (the elderly Glasgow anarchist whose idea this summer school was) in
full tub-thumping sermon mode.  Do we really need any more meetings about
Kronstadt or whether Bakunin predicted the Soviet system?

The New World Order: I found this rather insubstantial.  The facilitator
tried something that might have potential for other meetings - collectively
constructing one of the conceptual network diagrams as described in Tony
Buzan's "Use Your Head" - but I don't think it worked here as the ideas
didn't emerge fast enough.  This does raise an interesting point: if he
didn't get that idea from Buzan (where I read it) he probably got it from
some management book.  Maybe there are other useful ideas there we could
pick up on?  After all, the ruling elite is quite capable of exploiting
non-authoritarian organizational techniques *among themselves* if they
further the control they exert *as a class*.  Maybe some of us ought to
take a stiff dose of anti-emetic and try reading some management
literature...

The social on Saturday night: OK but not exactly orgiastic.  I spent the
evening talking to someone I hadn't met for years, and quiet socializing
was what most people were doing.  This isn't what Glasgow is supposed to be
like!!!

General organization: bloody good.  I wasn't involved in setting this up
and the people who were must have worked their arses off.  Absolutely
*nothing* went wrong that I noticed.  The venue (a community centre) made
for some difficulties; we had to be out of the building in the early
evening, which disrupted the flow.

Ian's impressions:

Completely agreed with Jack on the excellent organization, a credit
to the Glasgow comrades.  The main hall was hung with a large
GLASGOW ANARCHIST SUMMER SCHOOL logo in red and black, and the names of
well known anarchists were plastered over the walls.  It was stimulating
to see so many anarchists together, and the continuity of the anarchist
tradition: Robert Lynn, a prime mover in the summer school was 69, and
Charlie Baird is the son of the Charlie Baird who was a secretary of the
Glasgow Anarchist group after the Second World War.  I also met an anarcho
syndicalist from Hull and an Oxford anarchist, both of whom were there with
their parents; really encouraging, I hope we all go out and breed lots of
tiny anarchists...the youngest attendee was my son Daniel, aged 13 months.

I attended the workshops on Latin American Anarchism and the Basque 
Struggle.  Both were run by anarchists who had spent some time in the
respective countries; Jake Lagnado, who spent last year in Peru and
Argentina, and a guy called Buzz from Glasgow, who had spent time in the
Basque country and Catalonia.  Their experiences and insights were very 
interesting,  though I felt the discussions did not get as far as they
could have done. 

Jake had some anarchist publications in Spanish and talked about the
movements emerging in Argentina and Uruguay after the collapse of
military government.  Buzz described the relationship of the CNT and
CGT to the Basque struggle; interestingly, the CNT's failure to take
a positive attitude to Basque independence has lost them influence.
He found some elements of the Basque independent movement to be
quite positive from an anarchist point of view.  I have an article
from Jake on Peruvian anarchism which should be available through
Spunk Press.

Spunk Press

The summer school was good for Spunk Press.  A hundred leaflets asking
for material were given out, and both publishers present agreed to
make their catalogues available to us;  A K Press have a really impressive
catalogue, over 100 pages, and it will be excellent to get this online.
Material is also being received from 'Here and Now', a Glasgow/Leeds
based alternative magazine, and Working Press, a London radical publishing
outfit.  Individual articles from the Glasgow group (including its 
'History of Scottish Anarchism') and others should follow.

Those using PCs to write articles and catalogues are often a bit
diffident about the fact, possibly as a result of the antitechnology
bias among anarchists, and did not see the point of and electronic
archive until explained to them; A K Press got enthusiastic when I
told them that up to ten million people could access their catalogue
if it was online - though how many would order their books is another
question.

Computer Networking Workshop

The Computer Networking Workshop was organized by Jack, Ian and Chris
Hutchinson from the Anarchist Communist Federation.  There was nowhere
near enough time to explain and demonstrate the potential of networking,
so that the aims of the workshops should probably have been more limited.
Also, setting up and tearing down the computer and modem in an unfamiliar
situation, with a strict time constraint on telephone access - combined 
with the fact that none of us are hardware buffs - made the online
demonstration an energy and time consuming operation.  We are just overawed
by the fact that we managed to get it working at all!  There are a lot of
lessons to be learnt from the way we ran the workshop; by demonstrating
the sophistication of the technology, it is possible to alienate people
rather than persuade them of its usefulness.  However, there was a lot of 
interest and useful contacts made.



