Organise with the ASF

The ASF is a revolutionary union based on the principles and goals of anarcho-syndicalism. Our union is composed of workers, students, activists and rabble rousers of various shades and colours -- in other words, people just like YOU!

Our aim is not to take power and become yet another force of oppression and inequality, but to organise cooperatively and on an equal decision-making basis with others in the same predicament as ourselves. Our aim is to try to develop a union movement is our workplaces which more closely meet our desires, interests, goals and aspirations, rather than those of our union bosses and and our supposed labour representatives in Parliament. We are not interested in the conquest of political power, but its abolition. We are not trying to sell anything or tell anyone what to do; all we are about is looking for others of similar mind - that is, who don't want to lie down and take the shit which is piled on us day after day, week after week, year after year, generation after generation.

One very notable aspect of the ASF is the youth of its membership (the vast majority of the membership of the ASF is under thirty). One might put this down to the idealism of youth, or one might argue otherwise - that is, that it might be explained by our willingness to learn from the mistakes of past working class and radical movements, and to try new things.

One might seek to explain the youth of ASF members by taking note of the fact that most (if not all) of us have very likely seen our parents struggle all their lives just to get by, that we have learnt that most people, no matter how hard they work, can never achieve financial independence and security in a society whose stated goal is to allow the concentration and monopolisation of wealth in the hands of a select few.

In this situation idealism isn't an issue. When we consider the fact that the level of opportunity our parents had has disappeared long ago, then there is no reason whatsoever to assume that we have much chance of ever achieving personal, individual independence. This is assuming that we would want to anyway, since to do so is the equivalent of saying, "bugger you, jack, I'm all right."

So, where there is no hope and no desire to gain one's personal material independence while other people are forced to remaine conomically dependent on their boss - and let's face it, material independence means independence period, and independence is what constites the basis of our dignity, and one might argue, our humanity - the only real choice we have left is to band together, to organise our collective strength in order to regain what we have lost, to organise against the social institutions and the systems of wealth and decision-making distribution which deny us our independence, our dignity and our humanity.

The importance of anarcho-syndicalism to this need for a system of wealth production and distribution which guarantees the economic independence of everyone in society simultaneously lies in its libertarian character. Ends rarely, if ever, justify means; therefore ends must be consistent with means. If our end is social freedom, a freedom which exists for everyone and not just those with economic resources, then freedom must be the means. Rather than focus on the political realm, which implies politicking, reliance on leaders and political power games -- all that is worst in human nature, to put it differently -- we must organise on an equal-decision-making basis where our power is strongest; that is to say, where we can exercise our economic clout as producers of wealth. That is, of course, in the workplace.

Workers' unions organised on anarcho-syndicalist basis of collective decision-making from the base up, federation and confederation, rotation of immediately recallable delegates and direct action offer us two possibilities:

1) to be able to train ourselves in taking resposibility for our own lives through self-organisation and direct action taken on our own behalf, in our own name and in our own interests, against those who prosecte a class war on us daily, a class war which was been prosecuted against us for generations.

2) to take over production and distribution when our collective power is strong enough, to run it according to need and not according to profit.

In the latter case, the unions organised according to anarcho-syndicalist methodology will act as "facts of the future." The networks created in defence before this revolutionary transformation will in the future become the means through which workers' self-management, as oppposed to the capitalist mismanagement which now reigns supreme, will operate and attempt to more closely meet the needs of all, instead of being the means of enrichment for a few.

Our goal in the ASF, then, is to develop a grassroots, worker-run union movement through which we can properly defend our interests and provide a viable alternative to the business unionism which is so prevalent today. Instead of limiting ourselves to "bigger cages and longer chains," as the mainstream unions seem to do, we also want to form alternatives to the wage system which forms the basis of our exploitation as workers under capitalism.

This is not to say that we don't regard things like better working conditions as important, because we do. We merely aim to go one step further and remove the egoism, worship of money and fanatical greed which is the primary cause of most of the suffering in the world, and the reason why we have to wage a constant fight for a decent standard of living and respect for our diginity as human beings. A simple yet effective proposition, one might argue.

This is, obviously, a very brief and very general discussion of a few broad and basic concepts. For more information, contact your local ASF group or visit Anarcho-Syndicalism 101.