The ASF After 1989

The Anarcho-Syndicalist Federation is a personality cult that grew out of interest in syndicalist approaches to class struggle amongst Australian anarchists in the 1980s. It is deeply unfortunate that this is the adjective best suited to the demonstrable means by which it operates, but the history of the ASF tells little else.

Visitors to the ASF website will note that its history section is beset by a paradox: on the one hand, it displays proper concern for the role of immigrant fighters who kept the flame of libertarian class struggle burning, of the Jack Grancharoffs and the Antonio Jimenezes. For his part, Tony Jimenez had a printing press in his garage; yours truly made good use of it to get Noam Chomsky and Rudolf Rocker booklets made up when the anarchist press was out of action back in the day.

On the other, the ASF history section is incomplete; it ends at 1989. The subsequent 37 years remains to be accounted for. We do well to recall that the ASF was founded in 1986, which means the history outstanding dwarfs what has been sitting there apparently about the entire time the site has been up by a factor of what, about 12:1?

The funny thing about that is that yours truly is uniquely positioned to be able to fill some of that history in, having been a part of it. Apparently I played a part in the reformation of the ASF around 1996–some 7 years after the ASF history ends. I didn’t intend for that to happen, I sure as shit didn’t intend to wind up in what the ASF was, but that’s what did happen, and maybe that’s part of the story in and of itself.

Normal 20 year olds start punk bands. Yours truly started a website: Anarchosyndicalism 101, around 1996. I made a point of registering an domain with “anarchosyndicalism” in it so you could see “anarchosyndicalism” in your address bar in Netscape Navigator. That didn’t seem to hurt the project of raising the profile of anarcho-syndicalism on the interwebs. The red and black spoke to me; I was out in the world of work, experiencing the world of bosses, and wanted to organise for class struggle minus the bosses who were the problem in the first place.

At the time, there was an anarchist internet server in Brunswick. It was on dialup. The collective were rad; they taught me html. I marked up anarcho-syndicalist texts and put them up on Geocities. I got on one of the anarki.net chat groups and asked if anyone was interested in anarcho-syndicalism. I’ve devoured heaps about fighting bosses without turning into new ones and now I think I want a chance at a fair fight with these fucks for once. It’s not about how much hot air we can blow, it’s about what we do . . . I mean, I think I just wrote “does anyone want to form a group and do something” but that was what I mean, you know.

The first meeting of anarcho-syndicalists in Melbourne in 1996 was at the house of a expatriate member of the Catalonian CNT, Jorge Garcia, who lived at the time I think in Brunswick. The first ASF meeting was in a suburban backyard, amidst corrugated iron fence and overgrown garden beds and broken bricks. The other attendee was an individual by the name of Leigh Kendall, who to this day remains the self-appointed leader of Australian anarcho-syndicalism.* If I had known at that time what I know now, I would not have continued that association.

Less a discussion around the politics of work and class struggle, this initial meeting at Jorge Garcia’s house became a crash course in the historical grievances of one faction in an organisational split. It was weird we were out of doors in light of the lack of oxygen. For my part, I was excited about syndicalism as a way of reaching other workers without a bunch of alienating Leninist dogma, as a way of agitating and educating others in a cooperative way that had the potential to actually reach people because it gave one fuck about their personal and class autonomy. We didn’t need to indoctrinate anyone, we just needed to appeal to what they already knew: work sucks.

*Kendall will tell you that anarchism is an verb, not a noun, and that as such it means being organised and working as a group. He’s right. He just won’t mention that he reserves the right to interpret the meaning of anarchism for everyone. If you were wondering where the syndicalism and the focusing outward on the class struggle and the strategy of promoting the self-activity of the working class went, well, so was yours truly.

I never got a goddamn word in edgeways. The extremely sectarian and dogmatic tone of the initial meeting set the tone for the group that followed. There was no discussion in the group around what syndicalism was, what its relationship to anarchism was, what the relationship between syndicalists and the working class should look like, nothing. There was not even discussion of a name to call the group; the cult leader determined for all of us that it would be called “The Anarcho-Syndicalist Group of Melbourne.” I personally thought it was a stupid name; it applied a label to itself rather than applying the principles to class struggle. It was doctrinaire.

Even at this early stage I was already getting fairly used to being bulldozed, so I just followed along. Needless to say the ASG-M remained sterile and insular as it treated anarcho-syndicalism as a moral code for more-revolutionary-than-thous preceding class struggle more than a praxis born of and through class struggle. The main activity of the ASG-M was hanging out at the Retreat hotel after fortnightly meetings and drinking beer; we often had more people turning up to drink beer than were interested in turning up to ASG-M meetings or anarcho-syndicalism as a strategy of class struggle.

It was also frustrating; I personally was super keen to do outreach and agitate, which I was already doing on my own. We had our own printing press and would have had no trouble producing an A3 broadsheet. I was always being told to cool my jets, like I was too much of a hothead for the wizened adults in the room who had no idea even how to use desktop publishing software. The ASG-M needed to consolidate its own before expanding, which apparently meant many hours sitting in a pub listening to Leigh Kendall talk at length about all of his favourite topics: the tramway dispute of 1990 and his glorious leadership thereof being not the least of which.

Other favoured topics were the enemies of the ASG-M, some of whom I personally had never met. The main villain was Mark McGuire and the Sydney ASF, held accountable for the split by privatising union resources in the form of the ASF paper, Rebel Worker (the Sydney ASF are now the “Anarcho-Syndicalist Network”). If memory serves there were issues with an article on class reductionism at one point, presumably reflecting criticisms of middle class liberalism from civil rights activists in the US. Liberals hate talking about class; apparently no one wanted to have a conversation around whether class hierarchy predates 1492 and the modern period dominated by world capitalism. Patriarchy certainly predates the Conquest, no arguments there. None of this was discussed at the pub. No way known you could get a word in edgeways.

Other favoured topics were the “fake anarchists” who had departed the ASF. Two in particular were Margaret and Peter Riley, two former ASF Melbourne members who went on to help rebuild the IWW after the 1986 split. As challengers to Kendall’s organisational bullying, ASF apostates, and peers who had comparable experience of events like the 1990 tramways dispute, the Rileys typically came in for particular vitriol. Amongst other things, Kendall continually attacked them for writing a letter to the Barricade Books collective at one point advising that he was a disruptive influence who was wont to try to control everything and drive people away, as though this was defamatory. While Kendall plays the victim amongst his minions, he no doubt neglect to mention being asked not to attend Melbourne Anarchist Bookfair meetings. By class struggle anarchist feminists who do not join the ASF.

Jeremy Dixon was a Melbourne ASF member who had supported McGuire in the brouhaha over class reductionism that eventually tore the organisation in two. We were both undergrads at La Trobe around the same time. I talked to Jeremy a bit, not knowing anything of bad blood, and contributed an article to Rebel Worker, which got me in Kendall’s bad books for consorting with the enemy. He was a good dude; he was kind of a hippy with an overgrown beard and he was another one of these anarchists who are afraid of shoes for some reason, but he didn’t have a mean-spirited or nasty bone in his body. Unlike his detractors. He has suffered fucked up tragedy in his life as well, which everyone on the Melbourne left knows. I did lend him my copy of Nationalism and Culture and got it back damaged though. That’s me being petty Jeremy, Pepperidge Farm remembers when you fuck with my books.

It was like this for years. It was always, cool your jets, we need to gel as a group . . . We need to have read the collected works of Rudolf Rocker and Bakunin and Kropotkin and all the histories of the Spanish Revolution and Jeremy Jennings’ Syndicalism in France and get every last detail about the 1990 tramways dispute before we can think about the practicalities working class self-activity and independent unions. I went out to a picket with a Spanish comrade who was hanging around what had become the ASF by that point, without any of the leadership, and we provided practical solidarity, enquiring into the state of the struggle while handing out donations of supplies we had collected. I’ll never forget, because it was the first and only time it ever happened: someone on the picket asked what group we were from, and listened when I explained what anarcho-syndicalism was. Maybe we should have gone back. It was just so off the beaten path.

I like an increasing number of people eventually got sick of trying to organise inside a religious cloister and bailed out for the IWW. Obviously coming around to the reality that I had bailed out on the cult for good, Kendall put out some kind of slander saying I was a fake anarchist, I knew nothing about organising unions because all I did was sitting around in pubs drinking fucking beer apparently. I did also have a breakdown over one of the few women who ever joined the ASF not replying to an email; I emailed her hello about 10-15 times, a really inappropriate and creepy number of times. I went insane thinking I had phrased the hello wrong, and that’s why I wasn’t getting a response. Sorry Alexia. I kept trying to rephrase the hello to make it sound right, because it was obviously wrong. I was all of 20 or 21 and not in therapy. I think this turned into me being a fake anarchist who spent all his time drinking beer instead of organising unions and giving his attentions to the only women in a toxic sausage fest of a personality cult. I dealt with fallout from keeling over sideways on my own.

There’s more to tell but it has taken over a week to get this far and life is short. There’s always something else to recall about how weird things get inside a personality cult. We eventually got to make stickers! The ASF has a presence on Facebook and never posts photos of actions because it ever goes to anything it doesn’t organise itself, which is usually limited to pub crawls anyway, and it does one action a year to reclaim wages to look active. It does appear to do excellent international outreach, though in the case of genuinely exciting developments like the Bangladesh Anarcho-Syndicalist Federation, the main obstacle appears to be translating Rudolf Rockers’ entire corpus into Bangladeshi.

There were a few congresses; the ASF has had more congresses than it has current members. This ratio only ever gets worse. By my count it has had at least 3 turnovers of the entire membership. It has membership turnover that will participate in booking out restaurants that steal wages, but won’t ever rejoin the ASF. Kendall gets bored and picks members off one by one. At one point he was having dramas because another member of the ASF, George Madwog, had suddenly become extremely hostile towards him COMPLETELY OUT OF THE BLUE. I and another member was around at his house one day and he was carrying on about needing to put oil on the stove to deal with this psycho. This is someone we all knew. George Madwog had been a founding member of the Barricade Books collective and did Food Not Bombs every week. We never saw him again. I saw him years later running a stall at a shopping mall in Melton; he was cagey talking to me, and I didn’t press hanging around. I’ve tried finding George online, to no avail. I’m pretty sure we would have a lot to talk about cultwise.

Kendall still owes me the $500 I lent him to press up CDs of his shit reggae too. His understanding of syndicalism doesn’t appear to include confederalism, which is strange because it’s in the name of the Confederación Nacional del Trabajo. It’s not the Federación Nacional del Trabajo. Federation is the name of Kendall’s signature tune, not Confederation like you’re organising federations of federations. It’s in literally every history book on the CNT, you’re not allowed to start addressing practicalities of autonmous unionism until you’ve read them all. Kendall has a pecuniary interest in running me down to the tune of the favour I did him.

I was doing this shit when I was 20. Normal 20 year olds start punk bands. A punk band might have gotten gigs and been a good form of creative self-expression.

If you’re 20 and reading this, do start a band instead of joining a cult. You’ll be better off in the long run. You might even be able to avoid psychos spending their lives and yours running you down to protect a sausage fest that likes beer.