St-Imer International Gathering: Who's participating? Who's Going?

As far as I'm aware it's being organised by IFA. It will certainly include an IFA congress as part of the event.

I'm going.

Anyone up for making sure there is a meeting on international supply chain organising?

It seems that an international event is the perfect opportunity to discuss the possibilities.

Well if I happen to be in Switzerland around that time, I might end up going. I've been wanting to attend something like this for a while (even if everyone speaks french/italian or whatever).

There'll be plenty of people from the IFA federations that are involved in anarcho-syndicalist unions.

Previous IFA congresses I've been to had simultaneous translation into English from French, Spanish and Italian.

I think people are going to need and co-ordinate the travelling there from the UK groups, I wouldn't mind going with Solfed .... or AFED .... Libcom.org ....

What do we need to book for transport ....

I think some of this may have been answered on another post .... Doesn't matter had a busy week.

I'm going as are two or three other people from Ireland. I'm really looking forward to it. I think it'll be the best bit of my summer.

It'll be the fecking driest bit, at this rate.

It really is frustrating how little feedback we get on events afterward. It really would be a great help to all of us, to learn from whatever mistakes, or even (gasp!) successes folks have experienced. Instead, it all just disappears into the aether. Ffs people, if you put the announcement in, and you're at the event, tell us something about it after! If you're not there, obviously you have a good excuse, but someone should pick up the slack! And that's for ALL events, not just this one...
[Rant over.]

The WSM were live tweeting it.

Yes, I saw the separate statements. Guess they aren't translated yet. There were a few disturbing events around the conference which also caused the different groups to publish separately. I don't know if it's open info, but in any case, serious enough. Don't wanna get into though as I am sure they all would prefer to remember the positive things. In my opinion, the decision to make separate statements was one of the positive things of the event where several groups attempted in various strange ways to make unity statements. For example, a supposed "debate" on strategy anarchosyndicalist groups, instead of discussing anything at all, consisted of a round of autopresentation and then followed by a bizaare statement that it is good that we agree on a unity of action. I had to protest this as there had been absolutely no discussion and, besides that, people attended randomly, not as delegates with mandates of their organization, to a meeting which hadn't been scheduled and had not been proceeded by any discussion within organizations. (Perhaps some of the organizations present had these discussions on the local level, but certainly not the majority present.)

I'm hardly in a position to give any report though as mostly I was in closed or impromptu meetings and only attended one scheduled event.

In general, I am not a big fan of such events as I have no use for a synthetic anarchist movement dominated by people just hanging out. Much prefer working meetings; we have an urgent need to get organized. And I tried to spend my time that way. The anarchist carnival atmosphere was distracting and I sort of ignored much of it.

Big piss up?

So this was pretty much just a big gathering of whatever anarcho-tendency wanted to go?

Honestly I'd hold off on these presumptions. Barely anyone has posted yet. It seem there were lots of anarchists of many tendencies who also showed up along with the more organized groups. Personally I am waiting to see these statements by IFA, Anarkismo, etc and from delegates and comrades who went.

So,will Bakunin's spirit live again in new International or there are too much hippies?

What you made of it depended on you. During this there were the meetings of the organized tendencies. I don't know what the Anarkismo people were doing, but I assume they were trying to make good use of their time. IFA had a working Congress, so they were going about their business. However my impression of it was that it was not helpful for the efficiency of the work to have a Congress there since many of the people who should have been attending were off at other events.

My comment was about the population of the gathering in general, and this was dominated by the non-organized types. Because I suppose the IFA had no more than 100 people, with half that usually in attendance and I don't imagine that Anarkismo was more. So this was a small fraction of the participants.

I think another part could be considered serious anarchists, but not the kinds that are busy building the wider organizations. These must have spent their times in lectures, the bookfair etc.

If anybody speaks Spanish, there is an account with impressions here: http://www.alasbarricadas.org/noticias/node/21744. The writer is wrong about some things, and even writes that it was the first time in history that anarchists had a gathering. But you can get an impression from it.

Among that writers' criticisms were lack of translation at many events. I heard the same and, although I only attending one scheduled event and one event organized later, this was a disaster. There seemed to be no preparation at either to provide a translation, so the first question was if anybody could translate. Many people told that they tried to attend something but had to leave because they couldn't understand a thing.

The writer also criticizes some incidents with vegans and feminists, but given the fact that there was a sexual assault during the event and that there were groups of drunk and aggressive lifestyle anarchists behaving very badly at night and given elements of gender imbalance, there may have been reasons that feminists were disquieted. I did not observe any of those incidents or meetings with feminists, so I cannot say.

We also hear that the event cost about 100,000 euros to put on and that about 8000 francs too little was collected for food.

The writer mentioned the great success of certain lectures, which had even several hundred people.

However, I would comment on this. For example, the writer of that report notes that when we organize ourselves well, we can do great things and mentions a lecture with hundreds of people translated simultaneously into several languages. Only one hall was equipped with translation equipment. Then we hear that the topic of the lecture that hundreds of people attended was "Geography and Anarchy".

Back to my old post and my feelings about such events. Sorry, but we are facing a global attack against the working class. Meetings of the organized anarchists usually were 50 people, sometimes less. A meeting of all the syndicalist tendencies, representing tens of thousands of members (literally, if not more), was also like 50 people. And hundreds of people were listening to such things as lectures on geography and anarchy.

So I am of the opinion that most anarchists are disorganized, bogged down by petit bourgeois concerns, swamped in post-modernist, individualist and crap mish-mash of ideas, some viewing anarchism more as something related to history than the future. I personally am extremely alienated by this type of movement and this is why I said I spent my time trying to have more productive networking and organizing stuff for the future.

And, oh yeah, punk is dead.

I returned from St Imier yesterday.

It was many things, from the sublime to the ridiculous and Akai makes some good points. I'll add more detailed comments later in order to build up a suitable amount of tension on this thread

I can imagine how chaotic these events are, but I'm interested in IWA related discussions... where they useful? I've talked with anarcho-syndicalist comrade who was there and she had good impression (she said good stuff about CNT's (Spain) and FAU's presentations), but I'd also like to hear impressions from other people. Usually, these events are more of "festival style" (i.e. they are more about hanging out and making contacts then having serious discussions), but sometimes some interesting discussions can come up in small circles

I shouldn't open this can of worms, but can't help debating with syndicalist.

Syndicalist, this is some degree of cooperation between different class struggle anarchists, as you call them. But, I think that it really is naive of an old man like you to think something new would appear at an event like this. What was already there, based in real experience, remained. But were there is some distance, how could one expect change if there was little debate or, simply where positions clash.

I, for example, would have been glad if there could have been some talk of more cooperation with certain organizations, but, in order for that to have happened, we would have had to receive some proposal outlining what this would look like. This would have had to go through the whole organization. On an international level, through the whole international we are part of. As an individual, I can only tentatively discuss more cooperation with groups we already agreed to cooperate with.

On the other hand, as an individual I can participate in debates. However there weren't really any in my area of interest. Only autopresentation or debates on secondary issues.

In terms of organized tendencies, I am affiliated in one. (IWA). It was approached in a very strange way, which was literally that other groups decided to organize the event and listed it as one of the tendencies it was open to. In my opinion, the correct way to invite participation is rather to contact the organization with a more concrete proposal to participate, before publishing anything, giving it a chance to ask questions and vote on it. In our case, there was no decision to participate, although individual members of some sections attended. Some were delegated, some not. So, in the latter case, even though as individuals they could go and speak at events, it was not like they were representing any decisions of their organizations.

If organized tendencies want to cooperate with each other, then I really think a better way to approach it is to make some proposal about the cooperation, having time for debate, questions and positions. If there is then a meeting, it should be focused on that and the people attending should be representing the clear positions of their organizations. Going to some tiny workshop during chaos days will not make much progress in this area.

Finally, there is the issue of the sticky issues which create dissent and which in essence made it clear there would be no final common statement of some organizations. In particular, a sticky issue is the relation with the state. (As some of you may know, in my country we have people related to the movement who even run in elections. During my stay in St. Imier I got information again that members of the Anarchist Federation declared they would like to run in elections.)

An issue which was not told to many participants in the event revolved around the relation of one guy to the state, in particular to the police state. Because, among his various objectionable positions, as close as 5 years ago he was employed as a deputy to the head of police. There was perhaps a discrete meeting about this (although some people already put stuff on the internet). And, in a situation where many anarchists are quite uncomfortable with the pro-statist and reformist practices of some of the others, to sit and listen to people bagatelize this matter proved to be too much for some. As a matter of fact, a couple of people I spoke to, who before this did not have any hard negative judgments about certain tendencies, developed a few when faced with this situation and the fact that such people can play an important role in certain organizations.

Given those additional circumstances, I'd say that the people who expressed disgust really saved the honor of the anarchist movement.

Furthermore, I'd say that if people had left this meeting with a stance to be "all-united" and not to pay attention to "minor differences", like working for the state repressive apparatus, being financially dependant on the state or state corporate schemes, etc., etc., then we would have had two historic meetings in St. Imier: the first one where anarchists stood up for principles and thus split from more authoritarian tendencies, and a second one where anarchists could have resigned from principles and united with more authoritarian tendencies.

Glad that the second didn't really happen.

But yeah, I would have liked to have had more opportunity to work on common areas with those anarchists who aren't so shady.

To Kontr:

Yes, your comrade is right. In what was supposed to be a debate about syndicalist strategy, which had NO DEBATE, just some autopresentation or some ideological speeches, only the comrades from CNT and FAU (in my opinion) contributed anything concrete. Just some small bits, since the autopresentations were short. I didn't even try since I was suspicious about the event where none of the vertical or alternative syndicalists said anything at all about strategy, so it was clear for me they were not there to debate. In such a context, I had no reason to tell them too much.

Although the IWA was not a participant in the event, we met informally with comrades and tried to do as much positive networking, planning and talking as we could under the circumstances (ie, most of us were there just as individuals). I personally think the discussions in small circles were quite good and quite concrete, but, as you might understand, I can't really give a public account. If your friends want to tell you about them privately, I am certainly not against.

Anyway, it is good to know that the comrades found it interesting and I will tell the people who spoke about it. I am sure they will be happy that they were not just talking to the air.