i helped out quite a bit with the kitchen for the feral visions gathering in southern oregon back in 2003 (i think it was). that was a really fun and informative experience, despite the few stressful scenarios that came up during the gathering.

there were, at peak, maybe 100-125 people camped out all around the national forest we were in. it was a spectacular location, and there were many really interesting folks there.

it was the first time i saw the BASTARD folks do their shadow puppet performance, mocking (mostly hilariously) numerous well-known - to us anyway - anarchist personalities, especially jz. i sat near him, and though he did laugh several times, i remember him bitching about it later.

there were some really good workshops (most of which i missed, unfortunately), and the highlight of the whole thing - for some of us - was going to be a face-to-face debate between jz and wolfi. primitivist vs non-primitivist anti-civ perspectives, personified. there were at least 25-30 people sitting in a circle, chomping at the bit for some meaty dialog. it was so pathetic and uninteresting that after some short period of time, wolfi got up and said "this is pointless, i'm going for a swim", and he headed to the lake. i don't recall exactly what was even said prior to that, but knowing both of them personally, i suspect that jz was incapable of actually engaging with the critique being expressed. jz may be a cunninglinguist, but wolfi is a masterdebator. ;-)

the other thing i remember is the whole security culture impact on that scene. there was some serious paranoia, and given that the green scare was just getting ready to kick into high gear, it was understandable. though i personally would have probably wratcheted down the paranoia just a touch. we did get two visits from cops, but nothing came of it.

what i took from that experience, regarding gatherings, is the double edged sword of having an open gathering like that. on one hand, you get to meet folks you would not otherwise have met. on the other hand, you get to camp/eat/talk/hang with folks you do not know and have no reason to trust. one person was escorted out of that gathering, having repeatedly acted like a cop, taking notes at discussions, etc. fuck that shit, i'd rather have a camp-out with folks i know (and folks they know). smaller than an open gathering, but MUCH more fun and less stressful.

maybe i am just showing my age.

bottom line: anything that gets folks (esp urban folks) out into the wild has great potential, imo.

"Taking notes during discussion, etc"

Also seen this used as grounds to eject someone for being an "infiltrator" and it seems extremely flimsy to me. Hopefully that etc covered a lot of other sketchy behaviour too.

Author of the totw here: I'd be willing to bet that defacto safe spaces were created as needs arose, as opposed to the proscriptive way they are deployed now. That is part of what I wonder about. Would a gathering even work out? Are anarchists so fractured on sectarian lines that it would be a big stinking litter box? I'm not sure. I'd like such a thing to be possible.

Much as I love the BASTARD Conference, it generally pulls a certain crowd. I am in that crowd, but I enjoy engaging with folks not in that crowd sometimes.

i'd love to find some way to meet other people who desire anarchy....even just a few people would be great..

I wish all gatherings were mosh pits of wild abandonment with the heavy beating thrash of drums and guitars drowning out the spokesperson.

I came in after 9/11, and it seemed to young me like an interesting time for a post-anti-globalist anarchism. I remember there being a healthy mix of tendencies at the North American Anarchist Convergence in Athens, OH. Class war types, Bookchinites, primitivists, and post-leftists were all in attendance. Some French ultra leftists even showed up, possibly just to argue with Lawrence Jarach (j/k, sort of).

Later in the decade gatherings, convergences, rendezvous, etc., of varying degrees of size and consistency became more common. Was it inevitable that enthusiasm for them would dim? Even the non-anarchist National Conference on Organized Resistance, as well as similar regional affairs, are long gone, at least in my neck of the woods. I used to know anarchists in nearby states just by their faces. This is not the experience of baby anarchists today.

The bookfair model seems to me like a poor replacement. Gatherings can be large or small, urban or rural, sober or drunken, transaction-friendly or strictly anti-market. A bookfair is static where a gathering is very adaptable across different locations, tendencies, and populations.

I don't know if the larger sort of non-partisan anarchist congress would be possible today, though. It would either be a very small affair for oldsters or a total social media shit show. I would love to be proven wrong, though!

Wolfi, yes! Yes!

Sorry to break it to you, interesting anarchist gatherings happen all over north america every year. You just aren't invited.

The question here is really comparative. Why were gatherings relatively successful in the 1960s-90s, and why are they less successful today? One can also add here: why are there other times and places, where gatherings do not/did not happen?

I think we can all answer very easily why there were not/are not anarchist gatherings in Stalinist Russia or ancient Rome or contemporary China or Somalia, and why there weren't specifically anarchist events in stateless societies or among slaves in the deep south. There's clear political, cultural, economic, technological, geographical issues – gatherings don't happen if there's no anarchist movement or if anarchism is indistinguishable from life in general, if above-ground activity is immediately repressed, if people are working too long or can't travel outside limited areas or don't have spaces where they can gather. These are probably keys to today's decline as well.

Yes, paranoia is an issue... we now know that an event with 100+ people will almost certainly have one or more undercover cops in attendance. People have lost the sense that it's possible to have sufficient security through for example not bringing phones or waiting to reveal locations until the last minute. Also people are more aware that the strategy of control is not just about bringing charges and trials. Just being seen at an event can damage social credit (e.g. justify putting someone on a watchlist) and this has a chilling effect because it's hard to avoid. It's not necessarily the degree of real risk which has an effect, so much as the loss of the subjective feeling of being in a space outside the system and its norms.

Yes, idpol/”safe spaces” is an issue... we've seen how this plays out at various bookfairs (London, Montreal, SF, Seattle...) and places like EF!, ABC and CrimethInc. The problem isn't just that idpols try to take over and impose leftist rules – it's also that they disrupt and attack events which refuse to, and fight amongst themselves about which leftist rules are the right ones. And it's the added stress caused to organisers (who are already doing lots of free work for little reward) of the resultant pressure and flak.

There's background sociological issues as well. Fewer anarchists. Blurring (due to low political awareness and education levels) of the difference between anarchy and various statist ideologies. People having busier lives. More irregular working hours. Widespread psychological distress, leaving people burned-out or otherwise incapacitated at the wrong times. People not feeling the need to communicate offline because of the intensity of social media. People being hypervigilant and easily triggered. People going out less. People having a more geographically scattered friendship network. A lot of millennials live most of their life on the internet, they don't have the previous experience of everyday friendship networks, hanging out in the street or at the pub or whatever – and this makes it harder to take the step of going to a gathering. Also I think most people in the past joined local scenes or affinity groups first, and only went to big events later.

Also, in some ways “the gathering” is a very 60s or 90s thing. The specifically anarchist events were a subset of a much wider field. As well as the really anarchist stuff, there was also a lot of anarchistic stuff on a much bigger scale – festivals, convergence spaces at protests, hacker conventions, etc. And all of these spaces are in decline, for very similar reasons (repression + commercial recuperation + safety-first paranoia + idpol + coordination problems). And we're also seeing other political tendencies – everyone from the far-right to social-democrats to jihadis – moving away from gatherings towards online networks and/or small cells. This suggests to me that it's not an issue with anarchy specifically, it's a contextual shift.

Ultimately, I think there were structural underpinnings to reproducing the 60s-90s type of anarchy – which make it possible for instance, to get 150 people in the same place at the same time in a fit state to do anything interesting. Dole autonomy and/or regular jobs with decent hours. Affinity as a normal aspect of life. Episodic rather than pervasive stress. Pre-existing desires which are not just effects of capitalism. Clear limits to the state's capacity to surveil and repress. We lost a lot of these underpinnings during the 2000s. We can't have the structures without the underpinnings. We need to either rebuild the underpinnings or create different kinds of structures.

was discussed by the gathering on the Proles of the Round Table most recent podcast (#22). It is a Marxist gathering. However, Marxism and Marx were rarely mentioned: it is more of Andrea (Andrea @andrea_lakota on Twitter) talking both in American and her native language about history, white imperialism, cultural colonialism and much more. Well worth listening to. I am relating this to you as you have written 'Fight for Turtle Island.'

Gatherings are still the greatest way to break open the gang gimmicks -as long as they aren't set up by specific gangs themselves- for how their social dynamics tend to be "flattening" relations in putting back people on equal footing (what the gang structure works against, self-servingly, as it is turned inward). Centralization is a problem... especially when it's roughly always the same crowd of spooky lefties, it's pretty good argument to stay away or at least not get really involved.

Ever since the '90s I observed the rise of the "affinity" group paradigm, that really, as I had somewhat foreseen, evolved into a validation of the retrograde tribal politics. I dunno what an affinity group was supposed to be, but what it became over the years was just another type of closed, private, insular gang who tends to be disconnected with the world around. The fact that these well-resourced groups have closed shop to the "outside world", that they also stopped taking couchsurfers or squatters in an open fashion is quite revealing.

The age issue has also increased in weight. Or maybe I'm just getting old. I have seen open events on the public place that were definitely of anarchist character lately, but since they were set up by youngsters this got pretty uneasy for randos, and especially older ones. There's a bunch of preconceptions kids will throw at you if you're a guy in your '30s-'40s and aren't a hippie of sorts. Social stereotypes are heavy and only a radical change in the way we connect to others (i.e. the social bond... the sociological analytic concept) can do this. Therefore gatherings should rely on one or a few rites or referents that bind people on equal footing, which subvert their views of age, ethnic, gender cleavages. The formalized structure of assemblies has been doing that, but anarchists know how counterproductive and overall depersonalizing that is. We need some more playful and non-dogmatic means.

I think this would be great to have more face-to-face, non-mediated, de-internetized interactions. To me the advantages outweigh the costs. It is difficult to navigate, of course, but I think we just need to be with each other. They needn't be political either, because everyone is an anarchist in some way. The more the merrier, any way to get people in circles and create good communication.

First time posting here. I have been organizing in small ways with this group that is bookchinite mostly but they are calling for a Congress of Local Movements in September in Detroit (https://www.symbiosis-revolution.org/launch/). They are really trying to bring a broad front across anti-capitalist community groups. I have some issues with their ideas, mainly direct democracy, but I think their is alot of potential in bringing people together. While organizing with them, so far they have not reached out to a number of anarchist orgs like the Long Haul, Wooden Shoe, any infoshops although some members of MACC NYC are involved. Since Symbiosis is securing a free space for people to stay and getting free food together and their will be many organizers there, I think this is a chance where we can make some space for the anarchist network to gather face to face.If this symbiosis group does take off and actually start to build a strong network, it would be nice to be a part of it. If it doesn't maybe something else will come out of it from anarchists gathering together, at the very least a few new friends and some fun. Anarchists would also not necessarily have to participate in the Congress but instead could organize side by side with it, and their is currently no agenda yet scheduled for the congress.

I'm a pretty young anarchist and new to much of it, mid Atlantic, east coast region. I was reading Anarchist History Nerd Brigade's Zines on Love and Rage Network conferences , and was really inspired.(https://anarchisthistory.noblogs.org/files/2015/09/lnr-disconnections.pdf) I tried emailing them (the nerds) but I think they are defunct. I saw the link for this webpage on their website today and came here right as you posted this article, which was pretty cool :) I think having a low risk continental anarchist gathering would be really awesome to bring people together and give people the chance to talk and build affinity outside the internet, and in a more discussion based setting. I know there is a lot to figure out, security, safe(r) space policy, content, goals, but the first thing I can do is put the idea out there. Let me know what you all think?

I was 16-17 when we were organizing NAAG. 9 months of planning, pitfalls, interpersonal tensions, awkward divisions of labor, fundraising, and so on. But it came together, and it's pretty cool to read about someone attending now, in 2019.

I think the question you pose is an interesting one; my take these days is that people should do the kind of organizing that engages and inspires them. That means embracing a true diversity of tactics, allowing our anarchist organizing to take many forms, to be plentiful and diffuse; from picnics and potlucks to reading groups and protest, road repair, community gardens and clothing swaps. Not to mention getting involved in non-anarchist organizing, specifically solidarity work and harm reduction. There is no silver bullet perfect praxis.

I wrote a zine about the experience of organizing NAAG, and that reflection ended up sharpening a lot of my criticisms of radical leftist organizing at the time. All the usual stuff - Why is everyone under the age of 35? Why is this gathering 95% white? Why is it 75% men?

NAAG has given me some interesting memories (anyone remember those two kids who decided to jump on the trampoline half-naked during the downpour on Monday morning? And that kid got his teeth lodged in his friend's head? What a time to be alive...). I'm still friends with several of the co-organizers, but I'm curious if anyone made lasting connections at the gathering (I don't think I did.) Ultimately, for the amount of blood sweat and tears that went into NAAG, I'm not going to be organizing something like that again for a while, but I'm in a totally different stage in my life. I'd rather help my fellow anarchist friends organize their weddings, or help them take care of their kids (answers my teenage self's question about "Where are all the anarchists over 30").

Anyway, people should organize the kind of work that speaks to them, gives them joy, resonates with the communities they're a part of. A lot of people just want to talk and explore ideas together, and while it's great to experience that at a national gathering of anarchists, facebook groups and reddit forums will also do in a pinch.

Great TOTW picture, btw, got a nice chuckle out of it..

I like the general idea of holding gatherings, and am especially interested in anarchist gatherings that aren't ultra-controlling and cringe-worthy. It goes without saying that there will be presumptions and behavior that attendees won't find acceptable. My suspicion with anarchist gatherings though is simply the fact that they are political in nature, and people who get into this kind of thing use terminology to polarize and start completely needless confrontations. For example, lets look at the "green vs. red" binary that exists in the anarchist space. This intellectual border still exists because both the greens and the reds respond in a reactionary manner to certain things being said. Anarchists pride themselves on getting shit-deep in conflict, but these conflicts are often just spooky and delusional, and the labels they use to identify themselves don't mean much of anything anyway.

I used to be an activist and went to organizing meetings and I honestly never thought they were worth my time, I never like the idea of setting parameters for conversations or delegating speaking time/expertise. Sober emotions are much better for understanding the feel and the energy of what goes on in a social situation. I'm also not down, in general, with threatening people and getting heated about debates unless it remains somewhat playful and humorous.

"down with threatening people"? Who is? I mean, seems a strange thing to do at an @ social gathering without a damned good reason. I only threaten the threateners

I helped host a number of gatherings in the late 90s/early aughts. Anywhere from between 20 to 85 people showed up. It was by invitation/word of mouth only for several reasons. 1) We didn't want to be overwhelmed by numbers in terms of food, shelter, size of space, requirements etc. 2) It ensured some degree of likely intimacy and or affinity. 3) It emphasized meeting people that you could see again to do stuff with because most of them probably lived within a shared geographical region. 4) Helped keep cops out.

These gatherings led to events, projects, friendships, activities, actions and relationships many of which continue to last to today, 20 years later.

I think that informal gatherings drawing primarily from local social webs and simply based around sharing ideas, food and skills are 'better' than book fairs or conferences or national forums/symposiums, especially if the idea is to encourage future anarchic activity and lasting relationships where you live.

PS. (At a more recent gathering one of the very first things that happened was a round intended to give everyone the opportunity to state the pronoun they preferred. This was mostly pointless because there were dozens of people in the space and therefore no way to remember who preferred what pronoun. It was just a leftist ritual. It also set a liberal/Idpol tone that emphasized hostile/competing differences/categories.)

Its gud that stuff like this exists so that us sheepish pathetic types can try to find sex partners.

I'd like to arrange a gathering of bona-fide nihil-esque individuals and put them all through my mosh pit initiation to sort out the posers from the real abyss surfing crew!!

Was William S. Burroughs at the gathering in Lawrence, Kansas or had he already reached The Western Lands by then?