Lesser known IWA Groups

Regarding the NSF, it has no paper, publications,websiite, meetings, locals, anything in fact that we would regard as normal agitational activity. To pretend that they do things differently in Norway is rediculous. It is a paper organisation with a few (3 or 4) old men from the 1970's probably who have no intention of doing anything than sending e-mails of solidarity. Go to Norway, find out for yourselves. They are as moribund as the Awareness League, that other great IWA joke, and have been for decades. The IWA does itself no favours by having joke sections as members, let alone hosting the Secretariat!

The Awareness League are no longer considered a section AFAIK

Who is this insulting lying moron gwry?

The last IWA Congress recognised that the Awareness League are no more and are no longer part of the IWA, despite numerous efforts to contact them.

Regardless of the NSF's web presence or lack of it, it is not how you judge whether a group is active or effective. They have proved themselves capable of functioning as the IWA Secretariat, a task which should not be underestimated. I think you are seriously misreading the situation.

Regards,

Martin

Well it is true that NSF doesn't have a webpage and they seem to be of that generation that is a bit alienated from the web. It's a bit of a shame because over the past year, our web portal (CIA) has had a very big readership from Norway, of all places. And since we suppose there is only a couple of Polish anarchists there, it looks like these are probably just immigrant workers looking for news. There may be a potential to talk to such people... but first you've got to get a website up. I don't think there is a lack of people to help them, but they probably just don't get the importance of it.

Gwry, if you build an anarcho-syndicalist federation in a country with no anarchist tradition whatsoever and reach thousands of members, then after going through a military dictatorship and being banned and hunted down your federation manage to still have thousands of members, then you can come here and talk shit about Awareness League. You obviously don't have a clue about how the situation is on Nigeria (even in the IWA no one seem to know it) and neither on the IWA, so just shut your hole. Reading about the history of the AL is very educational, you should try sometime.

And hats off to people who don't give up and keep on going after so many years despite of low membership and support, and yet still got what it takes to pick up this HUGE responsibility which is being the secretariat of the IWA.

What's with this size fetish, anyway?

Very wierd email comrade. While I may share some of what you might be saying, to insult folks is not very productive. But I gather that is not the nature of your email.

I guess when you will hit your 50s you will be an "old man" as well. The hand of time stops for no one, you know. Well, being of that generation, I think we have paid and are still paying our dues. Maybe not with the same piss and vinegar as a 20-somethin', but still doing what we can. But please inform us of your level and nature of activity, maybe we might find something to "joke" about as well, should we choose to be ageist or politically judgemental.

In terms of the AL, well, I helped to develop contacts with them They were no "joke". It is a pity they couldn't maintain themselves, but many others have not been able to as well.

I will say, if the "joke" was that the IWA kept them on the "Friends" list too long, there's prolly a truism to that. But I am told they (and anyone else) can only be added or removed after a full Congress determines if they have a pulse or not.

"the groups were sabotaged from the inside - a guy named Leonardo Morelli became secretary and started stealing money from the IWA "

I remember this. This was both quite an internal Pro-COB blow and shock for us outside. Morelli was supposed to have had been active with railworkers. Those of us in the IWA
(WSA was then a section) did a lot of support work, etc., etc. for them.

I recall a Pro-COB group kicking about in Bahia for a while after that disappointment with Morelli.

It looks like this guy is Morelli. No wonder.

This article about the history of COB seems interesting. One of its references is an interview with Morelli conducted in 1989 by Mondo Libertaire which was translated by Sam Dolgoff and published in Libertarian Labor Review #6 under the title "Revolutionary Unionism in Brazil Today: The COB". Does anyone have that magazine?

What do you mean bite “size fetish“? Size doesn't matter, if you are writing a leaflet or are running a blog. I an worst case scenario, you can do this by your own. So size in this context does not really matter. But size does matter if you enter an industrial conflict. Once you cannot convince and/or organize an important portion of your fellow workers at the workplace, a conflict will propably end up in little more than some sort of a suicidal action for you and your comrades. So in this context size does matter.

What I mean is I don't think we should expel small groups like gwry suggested and that small groups are not necessarily useless. It's preferable to have a small group in a place fighting in anyway it can while trying to grow than to have no group at all.

Robot, this isn't 100% accurate. It is true that the size of membership can be a decisive matter, but not always. I know of situations where unions with a sizeable membership were not able to do anything while smaller ones which kept more militant were. I could make a list here, but I know you already understand this is true, so I won't bother.

I think issues are getting confused here but I understand the point that you are trying to make and that is that some connection with industrial conflicts and the need to grow as an organization. But I also see another relation and that is that involvement in activity which requires the interaction and participation of more people helps to grow. If you are consistant about that type of activity, as opposed to activity that can be done at home by individuals or by tiny groups, then you are more likely to see an increase in membership.

There are no strict formulas though and a lot does relate to some objective factors such as history, location, mood of society... There is something very similar to the dynamics of inherited wealth where some people are born into situations and places where there are already relatively large groups, long traditions, an alternative infrastructure, even basic things like a few books already translated in a language... (And I do not find it funny that it is usually people from come from these priveleged situations who are complaining. Furthermore, over the years I have caught out many people complaining about other people's lack of activity who have had no real experience with these things themselves... also not funny.) It isn't easy for others. I knew one comrade from AL and also I will say it was no joke at all for people to organize in those conditions. I can even say that the local Nigerians where I was living at the time used to tell such stories of political and social repression that they were astounded about their very existance - and I understand that they went under due to a changing political situation which forced the most active ones into exile. We have to remember that while some people can comfortably wake up and go to their anarchist local that somebody else set up years ago, look through dozens of books that many people have written and published, meet with others on a regular basis, there are people all over the world who are in isolation, struggling to get the first activity going.

Of course I will not pretend though that everybody puts in their best effort or goes about developing in a logical way. There are certainly lots of organizations out there that could benefit from developing a plan to participate in more concrete activity and actually implementing it. Here I won't bother trying to criticize others - in my own organization there are more and less active groups and I can see perfectly well that sometimes people are just not sure how to start activity when they are just a few people, sometimes it is just a psychological thing and they don't even try. I think the reality of the matter is that if you get one or two people someplace where nothing existed before, the great majority will never do anything and sit around and whine about how there is no movement. There is only a small minority of people who will keep plugging at it. It's a bit of a challenge to get everybody up and running and from what I understand, even in neighbouring lands to us, where collectively there are a lot more people than we are, not every local group is active. So I think what we could be concerned with is rather seeing is there are ways to support or encourage these people's activation.
If not, fuck it and move on.

Actually, WSA has it in our library. But don't ask for a scanned copy, cause I don't think that would be possible. Perhaps a photocopy, but no scan.

A photocopy is good enough!
Thanks!

Email me with your postal address.

I can be reached at: syndicalistnyc [at] gmail.com

Oh, yeah, I'm interested! Let's talk! That seems a pretty long interview, but I can advance the answer to your last question and state that COB doesn't have any kind of relationship with any especifista group.

Right now we're busy preparing the Fouth Brazilian Workers Congress, so we will focus on material related to that for now, but more things will come soon.