And Saint-Imier, where it was born, is where it went to die.
In 1872 in Saint-Imier the first anti-authoritarian international was organized. And since then the small village in the Swiss Jura mountains is widely understood as the birthplace of the anarchist movement.
In 2012, when i visited the gathering in Saint-Imier for its 140 years celebration, i found a fairly mixed crowd in attendance. Already back then the majority of the people were in their 20s and 30s, but over all, it was an exiting mix of all age groups. It was a beautiful gathering.
In 2023 for its 150+1 year celebration, i could not attend the gathering. Because of its ableist and ageist organizational structure. But from the reports that i received the overwhelming majority of the people in attendance was now bellow 30.
A short note on reports:
For someone like myself, who was excluded form attending, because of the structural problems with ableism and ageism, it was almost impossible to find information or to participate remotely.
And, believe me, i tried (short of joining the Telegram channels, which ——— don’t even get me started. I will never understand how a generally rather cautious even paranoid political group could use Telegram, of all the apps out there, to chat and thereby donate all their information to Putin?! Why!?????).
Sadly the radio streams were practically not listenable, too self-congratulatory, and hybrid meetings with remote video access were available only from one of the workshop rooms, which didn’t offer a good impression of the gathering as a whole.
In short, it was incredibly hard to receive reports. But let’s assume for now that the reports that i did manage to get were correct and it was indeed mostly a relatively young crowd that attended the RIA gathering.
End note.
This of course is not sustainable. Any political movement greatly profits from having mixed age groups among them. People from all ages are even needed, if a movement plans to thrive and have an impact on society at large. A movement only attended by younger folks will, at best, serve as a flow water heater, one that mostly serves this one specific age group while they happen to be in their “anarchist phase”.
And ten years later—they are no longer to be seen.
Ask yourself: Where were the people, who in 2012 had been in their 20s and 30s? No longer present.
The more interesting question may well be, why is this the case? If the gathering only managed to attract people bellow 30 this may well be explained, at least in part, by its ableist and ageist structure.
So the explanation is a structural one.
On the anarchy2023.org website up until recently the following statement could be read:
In a world that seems to be increasingly neutralizing radical protest – between repression, recuperation and control – it seems necessary to meet physically, as anarchists. In order to reflect collectively on the issues that matter to us, and in particular on the political and social evolutions [sic] of the last few years, and to continue to deepen the critiques that emancipate us.
The key formulation here being “necessary to meet physically”. This statement contains a value judgement, it creates a hierarchy. To meet people physically is valued higher than say to meet them via video chats or by other forms of digital exchange.
Even if i did agree, which i don’t, then at the very least a lot more attention should be given to building a structure, that would EVEN FUCKING ALLOW people like myself to physically attend. For this to be possible, during an ongoing global pandemic, a mask consensus would have been needed as the bare minimum. Great ventilation and HEPA-filters in all the rooms with indoor activity would have made it even better.
But that did not happen. For whatever reason.
But even if we ignore the ableist and ageist structure of the RIA/Anarchy2023 for a moment, the even more insidious problem is the suspicious, even paranoid attitude this movement has developed towards interested (for sometimes innocent and sympathetic reasons) outsiders.
First as a general observation, paranoid protectiveness tends to create a bubble, that, seen from the outside, seems even more suspicious.
Now, to be clear, of course i fully understand why anarchists need to be cautious in certain situations. Police repression is real. A suspicious attitude makes sense when planing something that is deemed illegal under the current (wrong) system. Direct actions, squatting, what have you, of course need to be kept a secret. However, attending an anarchist gathering is not illegal (yet), and should therefore be considered as an opportunity for outreach, for open communication, for mobilization.
Instead the RIA/Anarchy2023 preferred to hide inside their able-bodied bubble.
What we see so far is a paranoid movement comprised of mostly younger people in their “anarchist phase”, who are not willing to make the anarchist gathering safe to attend for disabled, chronically ill, neurodivergent and older people.
But why?
I still don’t understand how this could have happened.
But i do think it is a typical bubble phenomenon. The more paranoid a movement gets, the more it protects itself against outsiders, the more the focus gets shifted onto the in-crowd, the less it is able to see and address its own key flaws, even if they are blatant like ableism.
As i said in the title, i believe the anarchist movement went to die in Saint-Imier. In its birthplace.
Ableism alone, while this is a grave, even a fundamental problem, may not yet be enough to declare the anarchist movement dead.
But sadly there is more.
This group published their research one month before the gathering. After taking a closer look at the planned program, they found that it was riddled with a suspicious amount of workshops by anarcho-capitalists, bit coin bros, libertarians, beyond left and right anarchists, new age conspiracy conspiracists. Some of the worst among these workshops were cancelled since the article was published. But this did not change the fact that some of the main organizers of the Anarchy 2023 gathering were libertarians and anti-vax, anti-mask conspiracists.
This is indicative of a larger problem. There is so much confusion in the anarchist movement right now, that it has turned into a lazy free-for-all, a you-do-you, that is no longer distinguishable from neoliberalism. This clusterfuck sits so deep, the compass is so off, the mishmash so prevalent, that it may no longer be salvageable.
In short, i am now convinced that the anarchist movement has no future.
As a movement.
But even beyond that, i am now convinced the anarchist movement went to die in Saint-Imier in 2023.
Again as a movement.
150+1 year after it had been born there.
R.I.P. Anarchist movement.
The anarchist movement is dead.
Long live anarchy.
The anarchist core principles will forever live on.
Grass roots democracy, mutual aid, communal care, direct action, pre-figurative praxis and a lived solidarity with marginalized groups.
Staring today, i for one will now no longer care, if someone calls him/her/themselves anarchist·s, but instead focus on how they live according to its core principles.
It is sad, but it has to be said with such clarity.
All the people who attended the #RIA aka #Anarchy2023, knowing that it had an ableist and ageist structure, did not act in solidarity with the disabled, immuno-compromised and chronically ill, who could not attend, because of this.
All the people who attended Anarchy2023 and did not wear masks in indoor settings, even though 15’000 masks had been donated to the care team, behaved like the worst and most ignorant, ableist and eugenicist assholes.
This could just as well have been a right-wing gathering.
Without solidarity with the most marginalized people anarchy is nothing but a pose.
Without solidarity anarchy is nothing but a brand for a life-style phase.
Nothing.
A dead nothing.
Anarchy is dead.
Long live solidarity with all the marginalized people.
I received a critical response, that i think needs to be included here:
@antiall3s
Please don’t overestimate the importance of that meeting. It was quite young, but also very white and european.
Interpolating from that meetup to the global state of the movement is IMHO very Europe-centric and a bit arrogant.
@antiall3s
@anarchiasl Point taken. In its expressed intent this was an international gathering with the aim of looking at the state of the movement 150+1 years in. But as such i again think it was a huge conceptual error by the orga team to organize it in super expensive, almost unaffordable Switzerland with such a single focus on physical presence, instead of say a hybrid meeting on/offline, which would have allowed so many more people to participate.
@antiall3s
The whole concept was overromanticized from the start. There were however some useful inputs. For example: a few syndicalist workshops took place. Those people work quite local and benefit from international cooperation within europe the most, IMHO.
And to this i thought i had responded with this, but somehow this did not work:
@antiall3s
The interesting development for me is to see how many movements have adopted some of the anarchist tools and principles without even calling themselves anarchist, or at least not explicitly. Seen in parts of the ecological movements, land defenders, people defending the homeless, doing abolish cops-prison activism, indigenous and immigrant solidarity, queer/trans issues, BLM and other groups. In Mexico and Chile anarcho-feminist groups are doing inspiring work. A shift towards issue-based activism that is more or less based on anarchist principles, but away from a “movement”, that tends to create bubbles of people not even capable of seeing beyond their own nose.
[And look at me, of all people, forgetting to mention disability justice, sigh]