A-Infos (en) UK, AFED, Organise - On Political Ecosystems (ca, de, it, pt, tr)[machine translation]

We recently had a few members of National Rebirth in Preston. They 
popped up with a table and some of their fascy literature and ugly 
flags, and attempted some conversations with passers by. They were 
spotted by members of our local antifascist ecosystem, who took photos, 
shared information in community group chats, and observed. --- I wasn't 
there at the time. Being a more militant organism in our local 
ecosystem, I would have happily gone down and told them to get the fuck 
back to whatever rock they crawled out from under and never return. We 
had a brief chat in one of our groups and opinions on National Rebirth 
are mixed: some consider them to not be much of a threat, or not a 
serious threat, but I am not so sure.

I took a look at their website and was particularly surprised to find 
some very transparent writings about their aims, strategies, and branch 
goings-on. All veiled with the usual fascist dogwhistles and 
indirections of course. There is one article in particular I found very 
interesting, and which I want to deconstruct here.

In "The Nationalist Ecosystem - It DOES exist, and it is a curse, not a 
blessing", Grand Wizard Alek Yerbury develops an analysis of the 
disconnects between 'nationalist' activists and local communities. To 
briefly summarise Yerbury's argument, he views "protests, demonstrations 
and street movements" and "'Auditing', 'Youtubing', and 'Streaming'" as 
"staple activities of this nationalist ecosystem" which is ultimately 
doing nothing but perpetuating itself, and will "never develop into real 
political power". Having recently read D. Hunter's "Chav Solidarity", I 
was surprised to find some parallels with his analyses, of the 
disconnects between "capital heavy" activists and people who are poor, 
working class, or criminalised. Hunter makes similar observations of the 
anarchist and leftist ecosystems from the other side, as a member of a 
local community trying to participate in what is in effect somebody 
else's political ecosystem. He talks about escaping from a violent and 
racist upbringing, only to find countless activists and activist groups 
unable to engage with him or people like him with anything but contempt. 
As he puts so eloquently:

I believe that the working class in this country has been thoroughly 
stratified, in a way which makes revolutionary change almost impossible, 
but I believe this can be repaired. It requires those who sit at the top 
of the pile to understand that they are living off bread crumbs, and in 
many cases I think they do, but what isn't recognized enough is that 
when they catch bread crumbs, others are going without. And for sure, we 
should want the whole fucking loaf, but people are gonna find it hard to 
fight for that loaf if they're hungry and it's gonna be even harder if 
they're being told what to do by people who are keeping the crumbs they 
catch to themselves.

Both Yerbury and Hunter point to the ways political activists of all 
stripes cut themselves off from the very people outside of their 
movements that they want and need to bring into their movements. For 
Yerbury, the "parallel society" constituted by the far right's 
organising activities are a distraction, "an echo chamber of pre-vetted, 
pre-screened people". His point is that the internal cultures we develop 
through our collective practices might bring us closer together, but are 
also inherently exclusionary, forming shibboleths, and presenting 
barriers to audiences and potential new members, who must learn our 
language, so to speak. For Hunter, radical leftist spaces may preset 
themselves as inclusive, while also completely lacking all the 
individual and collective interpersonal and structural skills that are 
needed to actually include people who are different from us. Further, he 
shows how this situation is a deliberate construction of white 
supremacy, cisheteropatriarchy, capitalism, and the class system:

If I was unable to pay my rent or feed myself in a socially acceptable 
fashion, or sub-culturally acceptable by squatting and skipping, would I 
be treated in comradely fashion? Perhaps. But if I lived with the stress 
of going day to day without knowing where my next meal would come from 
or where I would sleep, would I behave in ways that would be acceptable? 
If I was still being told I was worthless, would I be able to interact 
with the social movements, filled with those who look, move and sound 
just like the social workers, judges and those whose houses I robbed. 
Some of this is in my head, but it was put there by lived experience, 
and I have witnessed countless interactions and exclusions between 
capital heavy activists and those struggling for basic survival.

Interestingly, both the fascist and Hunter come to similar conclusions 
on what is to be done. Although this is perhaps not surprising, as both 
anarchists and fascists tend towards material theories of power. Yerbury 
highlights the importance of local community activism at the 
neighbourhood level, and working with people locally across political 
divides, in order to demonstrate "the value of their ideology". I find 
it interesting that he doesn't consider how that kind of work actually 
directly refutes all of their fascy nonsense. He continues by connecting 
local and neighbourhood organising to the typical fascist strategy of 
"taking power" by also advocating for his troopers to also get involved 
with community and local government meetings and the like.

Yerbury sees our neighbourhoods and our pre-existing organisations as 
opportunities for entryism. Hunter instead argues for growing and 
nurturing our relations with people in our neighbourhoods, with an 
explicit focus on cultivating respect and reciprocity across difference:

If you're a person who believes that the only way to save the planet and 
humanity is the total destruction of the white supremacist patriarchal 
capitalist system, or even if you just believe in living in an equitable 
and just society, where it's each according to their need, then you've 
got to understand how society as it is benefits you, and how you can 
redistribute those benefits to others in a way which allows them to 
fight back more vigorously.

I don't believe this occurs through large charities, which become 
institutionalized and embedded within the capitalist system, I believe 
it happens within our communities, by entwining our lives with those in 
our neighbourhood who are demeaned, punished and abused by the economic 
and social system we live in. Our neighbour's survival needs to become 
our survival. Doing this won't be easy, and even if we do it, it still 
won't be easy. We've been trained to emphasise difference, to see the 
ways in which we are not the same, whether that be in the way we 
communicate, the way we dress, or the way we spend our free time. We 
have been trained to be critical of others, to judge, to assume we have 
the answers and that we must teach rather than learn from those that are 
different from us, especially those who appear more powerless than us.

An elaboration of the differences can be found by further considering 
the practice of "social insertion" in Especifismo. From Adam Weaver's 
"Especifismo: The Anarchist Praxis of Building Popular Movements and 
Revolutionary Organization":

Social insertion[and social work]means anarchist involvement in the 
daily fights of the oppressed and working classes. It does not mean 
acting within single-issue advocacy campaigns based around the 
involvement of expected traditional political activists, but rather 
within movements of people struggling to better their own condition, 
which come together not always out of exclusively materially-based 
needs, but also socially and historically rooted needs of resisting the 
attacks of the state and capitalism. These would include 
rank-and-file-led workers' movements, immigrant communities' movements 
to demand legalized status, neighborhood organizations' resistance to 
the brutality and killings by police, working class students' fights 
against budget cuts, and poor and unemployed people's opposition to 
evictions and service cuts.

He goes on to state that:

Especifismo's conception of the relation of ideas to the popular 
movement is that they should not be imposed through a leadership, 
through "mass line," or by intellectuals. Anarchist militants should not 
attempt to move movements into proclaiming an "anarchist" position, but 
should instead work to preserve their anarchist thrust; that is, their 
natural tendency to be self-organized and to militantly fight for their 
own interests. This assumes the perspective that social movements will 
reach their own logic of creating revolution, not when they as a whole 
necessarily reach the point of being self-identified "anarchists," but 
when as a whole (or at least an overwhelming majority) they reach the 
consciousness of their own power and exercise this power in their daily 
lives, in a way consciously adopting the ideas of anarchism. An 
additional role of the anarchist militant within the social movements, 
according to the Especifists, is to address the multiple political 
currents that will exist within movements and to actively combat the 
opportunistic elements of vanguardism and electoral politics.

This is the key distinction between Yerbury and Hunter's position. 
Hunter and the Especifists seek to overcome all social barriers between 
ourselves and our fellow workers, residents, and community members, by 
building mutual relationships of solidarity and understanding across 
difference, and supporting the self-development of radical 
consciousness. In doing so, we build a network of liberated relations 
rooted in mutual struggle against domination. By contrast, Yerbury wants 
his followers to enter neighbourhood organisations and hijack and 
intensify any latent hierarchies, rather than pushing back against them.

So what can we learn from all of this?

Anarchists and radical leftists and fascists share a common front in 
terms of the site of their action, be that war or peace. That front 
consists of our streets, our neighbours' doorsteps, and all existing 
community organisations within which we can act with confidence and 
clarity around our values and motives. If you take Yerbury's article and 
swap out "nationalist" for "anarchist", it reads as a perfectly 
cromulent criticism of a lot of anarchist 'organising' and activity. 
That is not to say blackblocs, video essays, minor acts of joyous 
insurrection, and other practices within our countercultures are not 
without value, but rather to agree with Yerbury's underlying point that 
these things lack appeal to people who are less radical, and the more 
time we spend doing those things, the less time we spend in our 
communities, listening to and learning from less radical people.

If activists of all stripes start to take this understanding on board, 
what can we expect? First, an influx of activists into existing 
community organisations, along with the formation of new ones. Second, 
the potential for a wide range of conflict scenarios, as activists of 
different stripes clash in community spaces, and as radicals clash with 
liberal, centrist, and latent authoritarian views and structures. This 
potential for conflict is worrying to some degree, because generally we 
find conflict stressful and people of all stripes tend to want 
self-described community spaces to be pretty chill. A big part of what 
separates radicals from non-radicals, what some may describe as 
'militant', is one's capacity for conflict. Do you think you could 
tolerate the daily conditions of survival on the very edges, like D. 
Hunter did? Some can, scars inevitable, recovery and wisdom possible, 
but many more are killed by their conditions, what we refer to as 
'social murder'. Do you think you could tolerate a heated argument with 
your neighbour which threatened to destroy the wider neighbourhood's 
spirit and organising? The fragility and brittleness of middle-class 
activists and their interpersonal relationships is also a symptom of the 
class system. People are made fragile and brittle when they are given 
comfortable lives, a comfortable community, a gigantic comfort zone 
encompassing all of their material needs that they never have to leave, 
the neoliberal ideal where where we can get anything we want delivered 
to our door with the push of a button, and where we can cut ourselves 
off from any former friends, family, or associates because we lack any 
material dependence on them.

And that's not all a bad thing, voluntary association is a core 
anarchist principle, and I'm not saying we shouldn't strive to create a 
world where all can live safely and comfortably. But we have to 
understand how comfort comes into tension with struggle under our 
current conditions, and how comfort has been recuperated. In the 
neoliberal ideal, safety and comfort are choices mediated by capital: if 
you can pay for it, you can have it, whatever it is. And no thought 
given to any inequities. In anarchy, safety and comfort are things we 
find in our relations, each of which is completely unique and may take 
any form it chooses. At any one time, most of us have a few people we 
love, a few people we need, a few people we like, a few people we can 
tolerate, a few people we have to tolerate, and a few people we don't 
like or hate or otherwise just avoid at all costs. Whereas neoliberalism 
simultaneously erodes our relationships and our capacity for conflict in 
relationships, a relational anarchic ecological existence depends on 
both our relationships and our capacity for conflict within them. 
Therefore, developing our individual and collective skills for handling 
conflict, and learning to become comfortable with conflict, 
disagreement, and uncertainty to some degree, have to be some of the 
affects or outcomes of at least some of the activities within any 
community, either explicitly or implicitly.

I'm looking forward to talking to my neighbours and putting together a 
neighbourhood assembly at some point. But what I'm not looking forward 
to are the inevitable party political conversations around immigration, 
climate change, and policing. Part of what's put me off doing this work 
for so many years is that I'm sick of having to defend my existence and 
my views, and sick of having to tolerate and argue against all the 
mainstream political talking points. These are reasons why we need our 
countercultures and those precious few people who understand us or at 
least put the effort in to try. Part of this work requires learning the 
tools to create space for difference, learning those tools by working 
with other people, and learning how to share them and bring them into 
new spaces. A lot of those tools are about being able to communicate 
things clearly and gently, about being able to hold space for ourselves 
and for others, and knowing how to intervene when toes get stepped on. 
These are skills that are more often focused on by social artists and 
feminists than anarchists. I consider myself all of these things and 
more, and I am still learning.

There are other things to take away from this. One may be that we should 
take this as a call as anarchists for us to do more of this social work, 
as described by the especifistas, if only on the grounds that if we 
don't take up space in these organisations, that space will be filled by 
fascists looking to gain a foothold. Certainly in terms of developing an 
antifascist community early warning system, having a group of activists, 
each of whom are members of a few different community groups, provides 
huge grassroots infrastructural capability. Such a structure would not 
look dissimilar to the diagram of the "specific anarchist organisation" 
given by Federação Anarquista do Rio de Janeiro in their publication 
"Social Anarchism and Organisation".

Another thing to consider is, this analysis was only possible because 
these particular fascists have a publication culture, not unlike 
anarchist and socialist publication cultures, if not directly stolen 
from them. This raises questions in terms of information security. If we 
discuss praxis, if we are trying to motivate each other towards 
different actions through our writings, then do we reveal important 
information to our enemies when we do so via public forums? When our 
enemies do this, what can we learn from and about them? At the same 
time, we must be careful not to platform white supremacist 
cisheteropatriarchical capitalist imperialist perspectives, even and 
especially when critically analysing them. This article originally 
contained extensive quotes from Jerkbury, in an effort to present all 
the necessary material for readers to participate in the analytical 
narrative. However, I was asked by the editorial team if I could remove 
his words. I was grateful for their comradely critique and that gentle 
push back. It was a tension I had felt when originally writing the 
piece, and the experience only demonstrates in microcosm the importance 
of working in relation and in community.

Yerbury is correct that the "nationalist ecosystem" as he describes it 
is a barrier to his political agenda. Our own ecosystems are also 
barriers to our agendas via the same mechanisms he describes. What we 
need to do as anarchists is live in the real ecosystem of our actual and 
potential relations, which are determined by our physical location in 
our communities. We don't need to build a "parallel society", we need to 
live in our society as anarchically as possible. This is not to say that 
we should all become allistic extroverts who spend all our time in all 
our different communities. It would be ableist to suggest that anyone 
can do anarchist social work, and it would be poor strategy and 
exclusionary in many other ways to suggest that this is the only sort of 
work we should be doing. What is needed is a recognition as anarchists 
of the importance of social work, along with the mobilisation of 
resources to enable those of us who can do this work to do it as 
effectively as possible. An ecosystem is a collection of coexisting 
niches. The antifas running the fash out of town with ballys and bats, 
the Food Not Bombs stall on the corner with the vegan stew, the 
community litter pick, and the journalists reporting all of these things 
on the local blog, all of these are people responding to their 
environment in their unique ways.

They may not all identify as anarchist, but they all have that anarchic 
"thrust" that Weaver identifies. All of these are people who have found, 
or are finding, their niches in their local material ecosystems, real 
ecosystems made of people and land and roads and plants and water and 
food and conversations. In her book "Medicine Wheel for the Planet", 
Jennifer Grenz echoes Sean Wilson in identifying respect, relationality, 
and reciprocity as the three principles of Indigenous research 
methodologies. The ecosystem is healthy when it is anarchic, when it 
consists of respectful and reciprocal relations. Our groups and 
movements are not a separate political ecosystem that exists purely 
discursively, they are part of the actual, physical, real, material 
ecosystem of place. What we need to do is ensure that we are aware of 
who is around us, and then build the appropriate relationships with the 
appropriate people. Each of us should be able to do things in public 
knowing we, our communities, have each other's backs, even if we don't 
always understand or agree with each other. That's what solidarity 
across difference looks like, solidarity across differences between our 
subject positions in society, and solidarity across differences between 
our strategies, tactics, and ways of working.

SA

https://organisemagazine.org.uk/2026/08/05/on-political-ecosystems/
_________________________________________
A - I N F O S  N E W S  S E R V I C E
By, For, and About Anarchists
Send news reports to A-infos-en mailing list
A-infos-en@ainfos.ca
Subscribe/Unsubscribe https://ainfos.ca/mailman/listinfo/a-infos-en
Archive: http://ainfos.ca/en