1945 – 1994
At the end of the war the Anarchist Federation of Britain (AFB) was formed and started to produce a magazine, Direct Action, from 1945.
Although not specifically an anarcho-syndicalist organisation it was heavily influenced by anarcho-syndicalist ideas and considered joining the International Workers’ Association (IWA), the anarcho-syndicalist international.
In 1950 leading lights from the AFB formed the Syndicalist Workers Federation (SWF). The SWF began by attacking the Labour government and its nationalisation proposals.
It also forcefully made the point that, even if nationalisation was extended to all industry, it could only result in state capitalism.
Far from promoting workers’ control, it was argued this would allow a new “boss class” to emerge, whose power would result in control over rather than workers’ ownership of industry. They argued that workers within the nationalised industries would soon find their conditions and wages lagging behind the private sector.
Instead of supporting nationalisation, they argued, workers should organise on the same basis of class struggle, irrespective of whether the workplace was in state or private ownership.
The SWF attempted to link workplace militancy to a revolutionary perspective and it consistently argued for independent industry-wide unions to both co-ordinate day to day struggle and pursue the long term aim of replacing capitalism with a society based on direct democracy and workers’ control.
It also called for workers to organise internationally, joining the anarcho-syndicalist International Workers’ Association (IWA) and playing a role supporting exiled Spanish dissenters against the regime of fascist dictator Francisco Franco.
Eventually, following a Mob beating of key organiser Tom Brown over his role in a community campaign against their brothel activities in Paddington that left him permanently invalided, and collectively exhausted from fighting the dominance of the Communist Party and trade unions, the SWF fell apart. By the mid 1970s it consisted of just one active group in Manchester and a few isolated supporters.
The death of Franco in 1975 however re-energised the Spanish CNT and the IWA more generally.
Manchester Syndicalist Workers Federation joined a number of independent anarchist groups based around Black Flag magazine and solidarity groups which had been helping the Spanish resistance to found the Direct Action Movement (DAM) in 1979.
DAM was highly active through the 1980s, particularly during the miners’ strike of 1984-85, which followed a decentralised structure and showed the relevance of syndicalist ideas to working class struggle. The excellent work done by DAM members won them the respect of many striking miners.
The middle to late eighties saw DAM throw itself into a number of other disputes, including at Kent Messenger, Silent Night Traders and the printers at Wapping.
In response to a strike at lighting firm Ardbride, DAM members mounted a consumer boycott of Laura Ashley, its chief customer, which was taken up internationally through the IWA. Union bosses called off the strike at a critical moment, losing the organisers their jobs.
The DAM was also involved in a number of campaigns where it had an arguably disproportionate influence to its modest numbers. In the anti-Poll Tax movement (1988-91), the only challenge to takeover attempts by Militant Tendency, a Trotskyite group that had infiltrated the Labour Party, came from the DAM.
DAM played a role in the founding of Anti-Fascist Action (AFA) in 1985, was part of a walkout against the expulsion of anarchist group Class War in 1986 over spurious infiltration claims, and helped re-launch AFA in 1989 on a militant footing after its degeneration and split.
All these experiences led the DAM to develop a new industrial strategy based on direct action, workplace assemblies, and strike committees. The first step was to form “industrial networks” of activists in industries whose long-term aim was to form an anarcho-syndicalist union.
A pamphlet, Winning the Class War, was published in 1991 and the continued development of the Industrial Networks led to the creation of the Solidarity Federation (SolFed) in March 1994.