Cities are often the focus of radical ideas – the audience is closer, more left leaning, the ideas find easier paths to resonate. But what of places like Ipswich, or Bury, or Lowestoft?
Depending on your focus, as an anarchist, how you build a presence will (obviously) have differences. Housing activists work under different constraints to trade unionists, or environmentalists, and umbrella county setups like ours, as projects to promote the broad political idea, are something else again (while ultimately wanting to catalyse all the above). But one thing is true for all – catchment matters.
Organising in cities is a very different beast from organising in a county town, which is different again from a small town or a village. In London particularly you get an awful lot of low-hanging fruit to build a group – nine million people, or an entire Switzerland, all within reach of a cheap Tube or bus ride. But you also get alienation, and a sense that you can walk away from things without consequence – there’s always another group you can join, or form, more in line with your particular ideals. Activism on a local level is actually often more difficult in the capital, because many key organisers are working on important-sounding national-facing political projects elsewhere, while others frequently have to move on as landlords kick them out or they get a new job.
In a county such as Suffolk, meanwhile, you have less than a tenth of the number of people (just under 800,000) living in more than twice as much space. If you lack a car (and many anarchists lack cars) your choices are a bus – expensive, unreliable and prone to not running after 6pm or on Sundays – or an even more expensive taxi. Connection is rarer, and harder to maintain. Ipswich, with its 145,000 people, becomes the de facto centre of activity, but is still nothing like London. The pool of political people is smaller (though there’s often more going on than you might expect), the range of views having to rub along to create a functioning group wider, the popular understanding of left (let alone left-libertarian) politics less embedded and socially recognised.
But there are also at least some bonuses – if you are in the town itself. You tend to live closer together and are thus more able to connect reliably. Your contacts tend to stay in the same place for longer. You have to be a bit more forgiving of foibles, because you can’t just disappear into the massed city, or switch to another similar group. Your stamping ground is easily identifiable, and mostly walkable (or at least cyclable). The problems are more about igniting a sense of possibility in a place that sits outside major power structures and has a limited history of radical politics, rather than wrangling a larger, squabble-prone scene.
If you are outside the county town, meanwhile, things become increasingly intractable. You can form a non-hierarchical co-op (as with various Radical Routes members or Old Hall), and there’s a surprisingly large number (without outing anybody) of anarchist-inspired projects around, including in rural Suffolk, which simply don’t use the name. Turns out people often quite like mutual aid and a lack of bosses, given the option. But many such enclaves struggle in the long term to survive people from the founding group leaving, or sometimes just ageing, because maintaining a stubborn adherence to political principle in the face of capitalism’s hegemony is hard, and finding people prepared to carry on that battle in small, dispersed populations moreso.
In regions with larger, more functional libertarian subcultures (some still exist in places like Catalonian Spain, or Carrara in Italy) such “spoke” communities get more backup, in the form of interaction with the active town “hubs” nearby. These provide an all-important sense of connection and refreshed optimism, and indeed exposure to larger number of people, with a higher possibility of recruitment for continuing the project.
For Suffolk Anarchists, while our last year of activity has almost entirely centred around Ipswich, it has put us in contact with people outside the county town, some of who have come in regularly to be part of our (very tiny) “hub” activities. But this obviously has its limits – Suffolk being a big, poorly-connected place, both the West and North of the county are inconveniently far away. So with this in mind, one of the things we’ve been talking about recently is the possibility of establishing connecting groups – more hubs – with the bigger towns also being the most obvious. Lowestoft in the North, Bury in the West, and maybe even Felixstowe in the corner.
While we’re still far too small (and overworked – come do interesting stuff with us!) to regularly be providing hordes of people, what we can do is be a promoter of and throughput for folks to get in touch with each other, and then support them as they get established.
Our first project on that front is likely to be Bury, as a handful of locals have been in touch already and it’s the obvious place for a Western bastion, helpfully sitting halfway between us and the bookfair-organising folks of Cambridge. We’ve already been asking round on socials (listed here), please do contact us either through those or via our email (suffolkanarchists@riseup.net).
Lowestoft, for its part, we have no names for (other than the historic anarchist character of William Barker), so we’re not as yet close to organising any meetings, but if you’re round that way give us a shout!
S
This article was originally posted on Suffolk Anarchists’ Substack here:
https://suffolkanarchists.substack.com/p/encouraging-anarchism-in-politically
