On the 1st of February, 2025, the membership of Black Flag Sydney voted to dissolve the organisation.

Black Flag began four years ago as a means of bringing together anarchists involved in Sydney’s left wing scene that were dissatisfied with the doctrines and practices of the other socialist groups around us. Our commitment to organised anarchism helped re-establish the legitimacy of the anarchist communist tendency in this city, raising the profile of organised anarchism through our participation in a number of important campaigns. Copies of Mutiny have travelled around Australia and some of its articles shared across the globe.

We were, and remain, immensely proud of all we have achieved.

However, we’ve reached a point where we need to reassess ourselves as an organisation. Those around us would know that for the past year or so, Black Flag has been significantly diminished in capacity. In many respects, we have been dysfunctional. We’ve struggled to recruit and retain new members and make meaningful interventions in the campaigns we’re in. This embittered both ourselves and the people around us.

As anarchists, we believe that communism can only be brought about by the power of the organised working class wielded against capital and the state. This requires us to develop power at the critical site which will enable the working class to do just that – at the rank and file level in our workplaces.

For this reason, Black Flag always had a focus on class politics. Even though we were small, we were able to participate in a number of union campaigns and all of us made attempts to organise our workplaces. Even when we were intervening in social movements, we did so with a focus on bringing class politics to these spaces.

However, our ability to put our class politics into action was limited by our overall strategy. Black Flag’s orientation had always been towards Sydney’s left scene and participation in social movements. As a result, our union activity was often done on an ad-hoc basis, leaving the hard work up to the initiative of individuals, who would often get burnt out with the rest of the organisation unable to provide adequate support. We lacked the ability to collectively intervene in the union movement and draw in good comrades in our workplaces and in our unions.

We hold firm to the causes that we have organised for – anarcha-feminism, environmentalism, queer liberation and anti-colonialism. The task of an anarchist organisation is to relate these goals to the struggles of the working class directly. This requires a strategy that Black Flag was unable to properly develop.

The success of the Anarchist Communist Forum in Melbourne was a wake up call. We realised that we could not continue with old habits and expect progress. While this experience has been confronting in some aspects, it has also been exciting – seeing the accomplishments of the other anarchist communist organisations, particularly in their unions, has lit a fire underneath us and motivated us to do more.

It’s for this reason that we have decided to end the Black Flag project, and instead proceed ahead with the creation of a new anarchist communist organisation, devoted firmly to open activity within the working class proper, closely bonded to our comrades in Brisbane, Geelong, and Melbourne.

If you would like to join us in this process of starting something new, please email us at ancomsydney [at] proton.me.

To all our former members and fellow travellers: thank you, from the bottom of our collective heart.

See you all again on the barricades –

Black Flag Sydney