Another view

Hi,

If anyone's interested/hasn't seen it before this article about the conference appeared in the last Mutiny zine (not written by me).

It's not my/ Mutiny's opinion but hopefully can spark some discussion, reflection & thoughts.

Tim

Over the Easter long weekend, people gathered in Melbourne to talk about anarchism & anarchist organising in Australia & the region. About sixty people were there – often enough to fill the front room of the former radiator workshop that the Melbourne Anarchist Club recently bought & is working to turn into an ongoing political space.

The conference had been called around a proposal to form a regional anarchist federation. This proposal was discussed a lot over the weekend, & a decision was made not to form a federation at this stage. Instead, it was seen as something to continue to work towards, & a number of structures were set up to help ongoing communication. One of these was a commitment to regular regional meetings, at least in Victoria & NSW – see the ad elsewhere in Mutiny for information about the upcoming Sydney meeting. There was also a communication network decided on, through which groups can keep in touch with what’s going on, & a couple of online communications structures for groups & individuals to share news, information & proposals.

Alongside these discussions, there were a number of conversations called around particular projects. The gathering provided a space where projects could kick off, including a ‘militant research’ network, organising for protests against the arms fair in Adelaide in November, a newspaper about anarchist analysis of climate change & networks for skill-sharing & distribution for people putting out publications.

I could tell you what I thought about it, but that would be an exercise in self-indulgence & probably bad journalism. Also, then I’d have to write heaps. Instead, this article is an attempt to compile a bunch of ad-hoc surveys of different people who were there. It’s not a perfect sample (it’s skewed towards the people I could get in touch with at the last minute to make the deadline). But I did my best, & I talked to people from Sydney, Melbourne, Canberra & Adelaide; people who were part of organising & people who weren’t; people who went as part of a collective & people who didn’t; & people who have quite long histories of involvement in anarchism in Australia & people who came along because they wanted to see what it was all about. I also took into account the report posted by the Melbourne Anarchist Communist Group at http://www.ainfos.ca/en/ainfos20677.html. If you were at the conference – or even if you weren’t - & you have something to add to this discussion, please, write a letter to the zine.

What was good

Overall, people were happy with the convergence as a space to meet people, to have political discussions & to make practical connections.

“The best thing was the general discussion that flowed out of workshops, the conversations that went on after – the fact that the political discussions did continue over beer.”

“Basically I [went because I] was pretty sure I disagreed with a lot of the way socialist/Marxist groups organised, but [was] finding the lack of theoretical, big picture discussion in groups I was organising in frustrating. […] [I] expected a small turnout, and a pretty low key, rabbly mob- I didn't really think the big picture discussions I was after would happen...but they did!

“There was one meeting in particular between MAC and Jura about the bureaucratic stuff of running a space that just snapped everything into focus for me; imagine being able to call on other anarchists for that kind of advice all the time. It demonstrated to me that there is a real need for anarchists to work together on the basis of mutual aid, and all this politics and theory is just bullshit to fill the time. Okay, maybe that's an exaggeration, because there's obviously a need to spread anarchist ideas and discuss these things, but just seeing how this practice can really work was great to see happening right in front of me… and we were talking about fucking tax and GST!”

“I was very pleasantly surprised, at a lot of things, like the turnout, the diversity of ages and backgrounds of people there, the relevance and immediacy of discussion, […] Talking to older and younger people about politics was especially valuable as I’m stuck in my university bubble a lot of the time.”

“The best thing was being able to call out for a meeting & everyone come to it, & then we were able to talk about whatever. It was really good for kicking off some good practical planning.”

Divided Expectations

While people generally went to the conference mainly expecting to be able to meet people & to break out of the geographic &/or political isolation many felt, there was clearly a division about what people thought the purpose of the meeting was & how much it was connected to the Federation proposal.

A Melbourne participant & organiser wrote:

“I guess I expected both the individuals and groups to have asked themselves what a federation would be good for, and if they could see benefits for establishing these relationships with others, they would come to the conference. … MAC was only really interested in taking to anarchist groups about the possibilities of federating, and the initial call-out got us pretty excited that others were thinking along the same lines. That call-out was revised later on to be broader than, I think, we could find useful in terms of our project; we're explicitly anarchist and primarily wish to work with other anarchist groups, although obviously not exclusively.”

A counterpart from Sydney, on the other hand, said:

“We thought about it as a more open conference for people who broadly agreed with the common politics. That yeah, it was a conference focussed around a proposal to form an anarchist federation, which could end up being a more politically closed organisation, & maybe wouldn’t include everyone at the convergence, but that the general questions we also wanted to talk about – what the hell should we be doing right now? – was something that it was worth talking about with more people. I guess I felt like we were going into it more with the idea that the federation was a proposal, but I wanted there to be discussion in quite broad terms about whether it was a good proposal, whether it was the best way for us to work together, & what it would actually mean to do so. So I’m disappointed that Sydney, I guess, didn’t put more effort into talking that through with Melbourne & the people they’d been talking to, who sometimes took the response of one small collective as an indication that they wouldn’t be welcomed by the conference as a whole. Cos that’s caused some problems since.”

There was also division about the participation of individuals in the conference structure & the proposed federation. Someone from Melbourne said they found disappointing “the extent to which "federation" in the anarchist sense was misunderstood (or deliberately obscured) and the tendency for individuals and non-anarchists to drive the agenda away from this discussion. On reflection, it seems there was an attitude that if organised anarchist groups go ahead and co-operate or create agreements with each other that this is somehow authoritarian.”

“Myself and most other members of my group expected (and expected to be disappointed) that there was no consensus understanding of what an anarchist federation is.”

A Sydney participant said they were disappointed by “talking to many individuals who I think are totally awesome and having them tell me that they were alienated and felt like they totally lost enthusiasm because of the group centric nature of the talk and that whether individuals would be allowed or not was really disappointing.”

Another Sydney respondent said:

“I also think there was a lot of time spent arguing over the question of how individuals would fit into any federation structure – or rather, a lot of time spent arguing against it, when I’m not really sure there ever was anyone at the convergence arguing that individuals should be part of a federation. But there were people arguing for finding other structures that would allow isolated individuals to keep in touch.”

Class Politics

One of the other major points of discussion in the lead up to Easter was the question of class politics. As someone said, they strongly anticipated that “we would not be able to resolve” the key question of the “relevance of class/ what it means to be a worker.” However, many people found the discussion & the chance to explore these tensions in more depth encouraging.

“An excellent discussion on class occurred on the third day. A lot of people had criticised class analysis on the second day, but when we got down to the actual discussion the next day, a lot of ideas were clarified. Several others from a range of different groups were putting forward arguments that seemed to be based on a genuine working class position.”

“Something that came out of the talking was a focus on class struggle and a class analysis as almost pre-requisite, while I kinda agree, I think further talk about race, especially Indigenous struggles here in Australia (the violence at the beginning of the founding of all nation-states) and also gender [is necessary].”

Conference structure & dynamics

People generally felt that the conference ran fairly smoothly, but that there were many things that could have been improved.

“I think there were some effective experiments in interesting techniques in making it decentralised & horizontal.”

“The gender imbalance, those in attendance and talking, was skewed towards men.”

“I wish I could have had more time to talk to people there.
More time for discussion on common politics.”

“Yeah, so the crap facilitation (I mean the lack of clarity and purpose, not necessarily the facilitators them/ourselves!) and lax attitude to the agenda served to make some sessions very boring, especially when a few people would go off on some long, largely irrelevant tangents. I think the dwindling numbers of the course of the conference reflect that. Having said that, maybe the format was all wrong for our purposes, and the problems stem from that. I'd be interested in hearing what others think about it.”

Talking & making history

“[I liked] talking to/listening in on, discussions of the recent history of protest in Australia, like s11, stuff like that, from an anarchist perspective.”

“[I was disappointed that we didn’t talk about] previous examples of existing anarchist federations and how they might relate to what we can create, [there was] very little discussion of previous Australian attempts to create anarchist federations. But in some ways it was heaps cool. It was still historical.”

“I’m mainly glad it happened – I think it was really a good step for anarchists & associates in this country to start trying to work these things through together, instead of only meeting at activist crisis points.”

The future

While the conference didn’t end with the creation of a federation, participants generally felt that what came out of it were good steps towards future organising.

“I am quite energised over the conference!”

“It seemed to create some kind of a commitment to a political project that wasn’t there at the start – people seemed to have been encouraged into further activity.”

“From a MAC point of view, I think it made us realise that there's a very real possibility of federating locally.”

“Though the Conference demonstrated that general level of consciousness and maturity in the Anarchist movement in Australia is still very uneven, but there are a number of serious groups and individuals and the balance is shifted gradually and strongly towards a higher level than we have seen before.”

“I was glad we decided not to federate. [I’m] wary of the tendency of left groups to splinter over differences of semantics/organising methods, rather than genuine political opposition. And I think it's a good thing to build regional area networks first, accept that this process will be slow (there’s still a lot of networking to be done just among Sydney groups for example), and that that is a good thing.”

“If a federation exists, it will be because of necessity and practice, not declaration.”

Great write-up Tim, thanks (for posting; not writing).

Mutiny zine : http://www.mpi-web.net/mutiny [404 error!]

Would be really neat to see Mutiny available online...

Confused

	@ndy wrote:
	Great write-up Tim, thanks (for posting; not writing). Mutiny zine : http://www.mpi-web.net/mutiny [404 error!] Would be really neat to see Mutiny available online...

Mutiny have consistently supported us here in Wangaratta with continuing to post issues that we can photo-copy and distribute in the local libraries etc.

We would be happy to help them in this regard any way they need, indeed if they get around to passing me their banking details we are keen on making some donations.

Will definitely be picking up a stack of mutiny on my way through after climate camp. Will the july issue be out? i'll settle for june Smile

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