“Together Against Capitalist Wars and Against Capitalist Peace!” May 2024.
After a promising start on Wednesday 22nd, things appeared to fall apart on Thursday. After an event hosted by Kites not Drones, news of cancellations came as the original Congress Centre, secured, and paid for in February withdrew at the last minute to the consternation of delegates,
It was at this point the various visiting comrades decided to proceed with a parallel program in the absence of confirmation of alternatives. This group of around 50 secured spaces on the Friday to initiate discussion and debate.
59 predominately anarchist groups were invited to the ‘official’ Congress. 10 decided to work with the parallel group (for easy ref calling itself the ‘Self Organised Assembly’ or SOA.), 8 of them exclusively. Whilst not all the invitees were able to attend, the remainder that did continued to focus on the Congress weekend.
The context was hard for outsiders to grasp, but threats and provocations had preceded any events compelling the organisers to issue the following statement:
“The organizing team …has been facing provocations and sabotages for a long time, which are supposed to complicate the organization of the anti-war activities… we are watching the attacks of our opponents grow in intensity.”
AnarCom made the decision to devote its limited resources to meeting and discussing with specific groups who had approached us while waiting for further news on the Congress venue.
We remained in contact throughout with both the Organising Committee and comrades from the Czechoslovak Anarchist Society (CAS), gaining insights from their experience. From them we learned:
“The anarchist movement in the Czech Republic has been in crisis and in retreat for several years now, including the split over the war in Ukraine. Afed has few members, but it has strong media coverage and background (autonomous centres, contacts to ex-anarchists, nowadays left liberals at universities).
So, when they started to preach pro-war propaganda, the anti-militarist voice was not heard, and they poisoned the thinking of many people – especially the youth.”
There was general consensus the loss of the first venue was attributable to sectarian (or rather pro war partisan) sabotage.
Additionally: “…there was an anarchist bookfair in Prague this weekend. It’s very well attended, last year about 2000 people passed through. We, as anti-militarists, were not invited, as it was co-organised by Afed and the Ukrainian Solidarity Collective were performing there with their pro war propaganda.”
There may have been a lot more going on for them than we were privy to. It is worth remembering as context that Czechia is a firm supporter of Ukraine in the middle of an election, next to a country (Sovakia) which just had an assassination attempt on its PM.
We were able in part to attend the relocated Congress on Saturday and participate in some discussion. There were around 50 people there at any one time and litterature stalls. It took place in an ecology training centre with lunch provided and amenities for other refreshments. We had not seen the majority of attendees before.
Amongst key topics were the splits in the so-called movement, the division of our class through the exploitation of culture-wars and the centrality of the action of our class rather than our own efforts to change the forces on the ground.
Though good examples of blockade actions at some Italian ports in conjunction with unionised workers were shared – acknowledging the implied limits of ideology and bureaucracy on the potential for more.
A recurring question from the Wednesday to the Saturday had been “what can we do?”. We suggested this question be turned around to ask ourselves “what are we doing?”
Only we can answer this ourselves on the ground and our defining geographies and political and social circumstances will inform us of resources and potential.
Continuing security concerns had led to request for mobile phones not to be used to communicate for the Sunday session which we were unable to attend as unfortunately we couldn’t access the email links notifying us.
Other comrades continued their parallel program throughout and elements of the SOA were working on some form of communiqué by the time we left. We look forward to seeing the outcome of the work of that group.
We have continued to liaise with comrades – perhaps a coalition of the willing – to draw learning from this and to find common ground for a joint statement, primarily relating to the wars and the veritable split in our movement. We will report more on progress on this in the coming days.
AnarCom Network 