Very rarely. We link to the site at C&S but I rarely look in. I’m on the AutOpSy list or whatever it is, but again a lot of the news there is only of passing interest to me.

I may be wrong but I assume the “Direct Action” mentioned here is the British anarcho-syndicalist organization that preceded the Solidarity Network. Its full name was the Direct Action Movement, or DAM. I knew a few of their members in Manchester in the 1980s, and Jordi, one of my fellow bloggers at C&S, was a member (He may well still be a member of its offspring organization, if it’s still going, although he’s back in Barcelona now and active in the CNT).

The Brinton book is worth getting hold of. I reviewed it, tangentially, here and there’s another here at Anarkismo.

“At that time, along with Anthony Woodiwiss and others, I was involved in the Socialist groups Direct Action and Solidarity. Both groups were libertarian, that is to say that their understanding of socialist politics was that it involved a prefigurative liberatory practice. Oppressions needed to be identified in their specificity, fought in a participatory democratic grassroots manner both outside and inside the movement. Struggles involving class, race, minority groups such as Romany travellers, gender, sexual orientaion, were all supported. At the time I read Durkheim reasonably carefully but engaged in what Althusser called a ‘dogmatic reading’. A few years later, I became increasingly dissatisfied with left Weberian sociology and disillusioned with Solidarity’s post-Marxist theory (grounded in the writings of Claude Lefort, Cornelius Castoriadis, Jean-Francois Lyotard, all members of Solidarity’s sister organisation Socialisme ou barberie), and by its failure to develop a democratic structure and, not unrelatedly, its inability to develop a strategic theory of practice.”