As we have seen, the Anarcho-Syndicalist Federation is a personality-driven microcult that dodges its own history while alleging to be the troo defenders of the libertarian class struggle flame. The resident anarchy guru of the ASF, Leigh Kendall, responded to this expose, not by addressing the issues raised with ASF history and its generally pisspoor syndicalist praxis with a predictable hatchet piece–or rather, he fed the party line to one of his obedient minions, who wrote a bunch of laughable shit. I’ll respond to that when I’m ready for some.
Hatchet pieces notwithstanding, the fact remains that the ASF is about its historical credentials but we’re still waiting on the other 11/12ths of its organisational history to go up on the website. Is that because “personality cult” only takes up one line? The personality microcult was still able to find time for the aforesaid hatchet piece though, which does figure. By contrast, the ASF grasp of the intellectual development historically of syndicalism and its early practical applications in Westen Europe seems like it could use work. We’re still struggling with federations of industrial federations, after all.
It seems funny also that the ASF never wrote up a history of the 1990s Tramways Dispute, even though it’s centre square in your drinking game. Is that because anarchist history is that of mass action and not the revolutions of leaders and new authorities and new systems of oppression? The centre square of the drinking game never once explored the experiences of people who participated, did they. Are any of them still around? Do you want to go and do something useful like record their oral histories of the whole experience at least numbnuts?
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