INTERVIEW WITH ANARCHIST COLLECTIVE

ABOLISHING

THE BORDERS

FROM BELOW

November/December 2005

Interview made for Slovenian anarchist magazine. Questions were discussed and answered by Veronika, Clony and Muri. English proof made by friend of the collective – Jason.

Short introduction of ABB and why you've chosen to write about situations in Eastern Europe?

ABB: We see that we have here two completely separate aspects asked in this question. This is because one can not take the ABB - an anarchist collective, and “ABB” – an anarchist journal from Eastern Europe (EE), as one and the same thing. ABB-journal is just one of many projects which the ABB collective does, however because of its strong borderless character the journal is the most popular of our projects, and actually the one which gave the name to the collective as a whole. We understand that we are speaking here specifically about the journal. Actually there many reasons why we decided to focus on EE, and we will mention at just few of them.

At first the collective was formed by people with East European past/roots who, already before ABB was formed, were actively contributing or supporting the anarchist and libertarian initiatives from there. So our work could be seen as kind of bridge between what is going on there and the progressive movements in Berlin, in Germany or even in whole Western Europe. But to put ourselves in such a bridge-position was a very responsible and heavy task, as well as … tactically wrong behaviour. Some of us thought: what sense does it make when most of the attempts of cooperation between the anarchists from west and those from east depend on or are based on our participation – it would make much more sense to help to establish more direct contacts and create a flow of information from both sides. In this sense we do not resign ourselves “to be a bridge” but we have begun to deal with it in a more conscious and therefore more effective way.

At the same time we strongly believed that most of the anarchist and libertarian groups or projects in Eastern Europe are finding themselves in quite deep isolation: isolation from the outside, in sense of a lack of continuous contacts with the western movements, but as well isolated within their regions, in sense of minimal exchange between groups in the region itself. It meant that the people could hardly learn from each other, motivate each other or just support each other.

Another inspiration was based on observation of how small and how mistaken is the knowledge of western libertarians about the realities, problems, struggles and resistance in Eastern Europe. This situation lead to an approach from both sides that led to strange misunderstandings and the good will from both sides burnt out quickly quite often. Most German, Italian, Spanish, etc. libertarians, were much better informed and therefore involved in the issues of far away Latin America as in the neighbour regions of Eastern Europe. There are of course many reasons for that, but still – we believed that it should change.

Finally, until we started with ABB there was no similar publication on the continent, however we knew about some less successful attempts of creating similar projects. We thought that the small, young but very dedicated, and in many cases very inspiring anarchist communities in Eastern Europe need one platform, in sense of wide-spread international publication, to present their visions, their struggles and their problems to the rest of the world.

Believe us, we had some more reasons to focus on EE but those mentioned above must be enough for someone who just needs some information on ABB and doesn’t want to study our ideological discourse too much. And maybe at the very end: isn’t ANY reason good enough to share the message of anarchism? The focus is important but the idea of propagating anarchist perspectives in general is even more important. One could take a focus on e.g. “homeless or jobless people living in Berlin and their opinions on state and capitalism” and after enough work-input and development of contacts one could make a great regular anarchist publication where these people could speak their words and which would be confronted with the anarchist analyses. Every approach is good enough to spread the anarchist perspective, we choose the EE because we found so many reasons to do it.

When and how did you start doing the project and how many people were in collective?

ABB: ABB-collective was formed in September 2001 after few meetings among east-European anarchists and libertarians living in Berlin. In short, we decided to put together our plans, ideas and capacities, and find the common base for collective activity for all of us. Everyone has as well a different idea of why s/he wishes to participate in such a group. Some of us stated e.g. that they could not find (for different reasons) place for themselves within the political jungle of autonomous and leftist projects in Berlin. You know, it has something to do with different political cultures and traditions. However, we have been and we are still working on other Berlin projects too, and are consequently trying to break the mental boundaries which separate “people from here” and “the immigrants”. But at the time when ABB was formed (2001) some of us felt that we would like to form the new collective, the clearly anarchist collective, by ourselves (instead of joining a different already existing “left-radical” group), as we understand each other much better anyway. We must have been about 6-7 persons when we started, and were basically a bunch of anarchists and anarcho-punx from regions called Poland and Lithuania. We were conscious of the fact that the more wide the spectrum of the topics we would be open for, the more likely our friends would join the collective immediately. So we decide to go on with both, the political and the cultural, as well as with publishing and street activities at once. And we were right – in the next weeks the group got some more people interested in participating. We started together many little projects like publishing this anarchist journal about which we are speaking here, setting up our own anti-repression support group, building up (literally) an info-shop/library/office at once, etc. From the beginning we started to take part in local struggles as well as organizing the info events and solidarity protests or benefits parties’. In the last 4 years some people left the collective and many other joined. At the moment the collective consists of activists from very different parts of the world, beginning with those who came from regions called Poland, Lithuania, Romania or Slovenia through those from places called Italy and Germany or those from South Africa or Tasmania. What is bringing all of us together are three things: Berlin - as a place we decided to live and be active; the visions of free anarchist society; and the will to go for it in collective way.

How did you organize the work inside of the collective?

ABB: There were already different phases within the group. We should start with the point that we consider our internal structure as an ongoing process – each month we learn the new ideas of how to deal with the work in the group and no decision is being taken as an ultimate one. For the moment the things look in following way: our work is based on the discussions and decisions which we are taking on weekly meetings, which takes usually about 3-4 hours. Then we have a second day in the week when some of us meet informally, in our info-café, to discuss in a more relaxed atmosphere various topics. In between we permanently communicate through the classical mailing-list. Than we selected ourselves into various teams of 2-3 persons each, which take care of specific tasks within the collective. These tasks are e.g. distribution of journal, working on website, working on prisoner support, printing benefit-stuff (from t-shirts to post-cards), or writing some texts/statements on various occasions. Then there are some tasks with which we deal together as a whole collective, e.g. editing the magazine or finances. We learned that the rotation of these minor tasks as well as the mutual support between different teams and persons are very important. We try to organise this in a way that everyone deals mostly with the stuff s/he likes to deal with. Than, we are continuously trying to improve our own skills through the mutual workshops within the collective, so that more people can learn more skills like lay-out, website-design, etc.

There is one more very specific aspect of our collective. As there is not one language in which all of us can communicate (most can English or German but not all of us in both cases) we are always carefully switching from one language to the other during our meetings. It sounds difficult but we got used to it, and we would say that it works pretty well. Another special aspect of ABB-collective is that some of us decided to leave Berlin (for a shorter or longer time) but declared readiness to continue participation. It means that besides the Berlin-core-crew there are always 2-3 persons who are in faraway lands, and with the help of the internet we are making our best so that they can influence the most crucial decisions and participate on different levels in our work. The regular report on the mailing-list from our weekly meeting is the key here.

Finally, in terms of the magazine, we cooperate with a network of about 30 correspondents from around Eastern Europe and with a network of about 100 distributors’ world wide. Here the communication goes mostly per internet, but our idea is to set from time to time the larger meeting of all correspondents (plus our collective) to meet face to face and discuss the future plans. We have already one such a meeting behind us. It took place during the PGA conference in Belgrade in summer 2004.

The last thing to say – we are trying to be very conscious of diversity of personalities, ideas, backgrounds and experiences of people within the collective. Just to let you know, the youngest person in ABB is 18 years old and is an anarcho-punk, while the oldest is about 60 and is the old school syndicalist. Some are very close to insurrectionist and individualistic traditions of anarchism, while the others more to platformist, federalist or syndicalist traditions. Some get in touch with anarchism through work with poor communities in South Africa, others through tradition of anarchist resistance in Italy, others through work within Solidarnosc Polish workers movement in the 80’s or through radical ecological activism in Tasmania (Australia), and some just through the punk or squatters movement. You can imagine that we always need to work strongly to reach consensus decisions. There are some very hard discussions and compromises but we learned to give ourselves enough time when necessary. Of course it costs us a lot of emotion, but this is for example why we often go after the meetings together to drink a beer and discover again friends and comrades, and not the opponents in each other. Finally, we support each other in our very personal troubles which are apart of the activism as well.

There was a short break in distributing of ABB. How did the re-organizing of the collective go? How many people changed? How many meetings did you need...?

ABB: Well, to be honestly - there was not only “break in distribution of magazine” but the break in printing magazine and in our activities at all. The only thing that we consciously never allowed to break down was the regular meeting of the collective. These meetings changed temporally their role from organizational meetings into a crisis-discussion-circle which allowed us to re-think a lot of issues regarding ABB. The reasons for that break, which we call “crisis within the collective”, were very complex and we have explained them quite exactly in our communiqués in spring 2005. So we will point out just the most important aspects, and we could split them into two groups: the theoretical and practical ones. Within the theoretical we asked ourselves: if the horizontal structure and collective sharing of responsibility is still alive in the collective and (as it was not the fact) what is the way to revive them? Why were some of us very disappointed with ABB? Were we able to carry this work with just 4-6 people (which were left at the time)? What were the main goals of the collective: was it publishing, or rather local activity, or anything else? Was it enough if we concentrate on organizational things, or did we want to lead regular theoretical debates within the collective? Actually, considering the variety of the positions within the collective, we found this last idea as a very interesting. According to these theoretical questions, and as result of discussion on them, the practical aspects appeared, e.g. getting new people involved; reorganizng our internal structure (new meetings structure, more sensible task sharing, sharing the skills, implementing the rotation principle, etc); improving some crucial parts of our work (distribution, website, local activities …) or founding the new financial concept – after 3 years of activity we had about 2000 euro debts and no money to go on with the next issues of the journal nor for other activities. Just to mention: the main idea at the beginning was to make an anarchist magazine and the eventual profits which it could bring put into local activities…

We needed a hell of a lot of meetings to get organised again. During the cold winter of 2004, for a few months, we just discussed everything from the beginning. Meanwhile, some new people, around 6, decided to join the collective for different reasons. Some of them were already somehow a bit involved in the project, some not, but, anyway, we all knew each other already, so we already had some trust and there was a nice new fresh air for the few “oldies”. All in all, we had a really good year full of new projects, also beside the publication of the courier; for sure we didn’t solve all our problems. People are always coming and going, it’s somehow typical of the DIY scene. There were also other very common problems which are from time to time always coming back, but the best solution is always to confront them keeping together as an anarchist collective, instead of let them eating your project as well as your positive energy: permanent confrontation is the key, in our small project, as in all the rest of life’s things.

How do you distribute your newspaper and do you think of making it public some day – selling it in shops and libraries or do you want to keep it underground? Why?

ABB: Well, at present we distribute it world-wide. It started with the whole of Europe, than north America and some places around the world where people asked us to send them the copies of ABB, e.g. South Africa, Peru, Argentine, Uruguay, Philippines or Australia. Most of the distributors are anarchists or libertarian projects/networks but in some places ABB is available in more public places like in regular book-stores which are open to the radical anarchist press. We would hope that this tendency (more public availability of ABB) happens everywhere but we have too small an impact on that – it is up to our regional distributors how much energy they put into propagating the journal. Here in Berlin, where our impact is directly, the distribution is pretty well organized, wide and is developing pretty well. We are selling ABB in 16 places in Berlin, from squat-bars through info-shops, alternative cafes and regular book stores. Thank to that we are selling altogether about 60-90 copies of each issue in Berlin alone. Well, in Berlin there are many anarchists and anarchism-friendly people and many people here read English, but it has to be said that we put a lot of effort into reaching all these locations and convincing them to take our magazine. Now it is mostly them asking us to bring more copies when they have sold out. In recent months we started to discuss the possibilities of reaching the wider spectrum of readers as well outside of Berlin. There are two crucial questions here. At first, there are some objections within the collective towards such a process – there is not “veto” on it, but just some justified anxieties. Secondly, we need to find a way to motivate our distributors around the world to put some more energy into more actively promoting ABB in their region. In here we can not forget that we are speaking of about 80-100 different distributors, mostly little DIY-projects, so it is a huge task to communicate regularly with all of them. But it must be mentioned that ABB never had ambitions to become a professional publication, as we really want at first activists and than maybe professional journalists to write for ABB. This leads to the fact that the articles and styles in ABB are always “weird” for the wide public which is used to the specific professional journalistic form of writing. But on the other hand, we don’t see a reason why we should get scared of or follow the main trend. If the internal work on the journal will develop progressively in the next months some changes towards wider distribution will definitely happen. Maybe we just need another 2-3 enthusiastic persons within the collective to push this task forward. Of course our correspondents have to be asked as well. This can be a main topic of the second EE-wide meeting of ABB, which may take place already in second part of 2006.

Have you seen any progress in connecting anarchist groups and activists due to your newsletter?

ABB: We think so, yes. We reckon that through our courier, people are for example, discovering more and more of each other, getting in contact, and recognizing that they are not completely alone out there. For instance, in a lot of the countries that receive our publication, internet access is not yet as common as in Western Europe. This means that a bimonthly newspaper like ours is an important way for the activists to get info and contacts about eastern European regions and the ongoing struggles, campaigns, the ideas...and getting then, consequently, inspired from all this.

A very interesting aspect is that the magazine which was made to basically build a bridge between the anarchists from the Eastern Europe and the rest of the continent, in between helps to connect the libertarians within the EE-region as well … something which we did not think about before we started the project. We could give dozens of examples. We’ve heard so many times that anarchists from different cities of the same region have heard about each other through our magazine.

But still: the connecting of activists is an important task but probably more important is a simple thing that ABB provides: the platform for an exchange of ideas, experiences, analysis and perspectives. Everyone is welcome to learn from each other and share the positive and negative lessons with the others. So connecting goes through this mental bridge in the first way.

However, probably we are the last ones which should be asked this question – our information about impacts of our publication is limited – people who are regularly reading this magazine should be asked. If anybody will make such a survey around the continent any time, we would be very glad to see the results.

What kind of articles you accept in your newsletter?

ABB: Basically, we do accept nearly all the material we receive… As we write on the second page of the courier, we do not necessarily agree 100% with the contents, but we feel is still important to publish them, for different reasons. As we said before, our collective is made up of anarchists, but our thoughts are not homogenous at all, although we think this is more a good force rather than an obstacle. So, in this sense, would also not be honest at all to operate some kind of "censorship" on the material we receive, in the sense of a political censorship. Our journal is for us a window on “wild” east European anarchism, as well a kind of open forum for the different anarchist political positions and analysis: we do not want, then, to dictate any editorial collective position. Our position is expressed in the first column of our courier, and people who write to us normally understand themselves to be inside those principles, which refuse the reproduction of sexist, racist, homophobic and fascist behaviour and aim to strongly fight them by any means necessary. So there is already a strong "dividing line" in order to start to have a relation with our project. But, for sure, our movement is still a lot of the time not much better than the criticised outside world, since we do also reproduce some of the hierarchical and power structures that we try everyday to put in question. So, what do we do usually, is write little introductions to some texts that, for different reasons, we repute as controversial, explaining why do we publish them, as well as making some criticism on them: you can see this, for example, in the ABB #21, concerning the use of sexist expressions in one of the article about Polish elections, but in all the issue you could find some similar things. And, clearly, we do accept just articles with their focus on eastern European struggles, from people who are directly taking part in that!

Of course we wish that all of texts are written generally from anarchist perspective as we are not interesting in spreading any authoritarian, state friendly, pro-bolshevik or pro-capitalistic crap. There is whole massive turbo-media-industry which already does this until it hurts. It’s happened very rarely that we are printing a text which is written from some dubious perspective but these are mostly the topics which our correspondents could not cover and at the same time we as the editorial team found the topic too interesting to be ignored. But wherever we smell the authoritarian note we write this short introduction we just told about.

But recently we started to face a new problem: problem of space in magazine. Already last issue was 60 pages heavy and we are getting more and more texts with each further issue. It increases our work as well as the costs of the journal. We need to find some better ways to deal with this aspect. There are different ideas to be discussed, from a stronger selection of the materials or asking the correspondents to keep articles shorter, or to leave the things as they are and just enlarge the editorial-team parallel with enlargement of the journal. But than again – by asking our correspondents to modify the way they are writting we need to remember that most of them are at first activists and than secondly “journalists” and we can not and DON’T WANT to expect too much from them on this terrain.

What is your opinion of the political situation in Eastern European countries and what do you think the future will bring?

ABB: We don’t know how much space you planned for this interview, but the question needs a very complex answer. Even if it is us, ABB, who for the last few years are bringing the common East European perspective back into the consciousness of the EE-anarchists (this because of similarities within the situation in which the EE-@-movements found themselves, as well as those of strong cultural, historical and political similarities) the political situations differ from country to country. An “Eastern Europe” concept, since we can talk about those from Poland until Kyrgyzstan, from Kosovo until Estonia, we cannot consider Eastern Europe absolutely as a homogenous block, because inside EE you can find completely different situations. For sure the more East you go, the more you can see how this capitalistic processes, which involved both an economic as well a cultural level, are still far from being settled and applied. But even this conclusion could be questioned. But then, we still can try to make some common analyses, however we can touch on just some aspects here. We think as well, that there is no way to keep the “political” analysis apart from “economical”, “social” and even “cultural” ones. Therefore we will answer this question in this more global way.

If you check our editorial from ABB#20, we were trying to stress some of our analyses. To some extent, there’s in some of the eastern European countries, who have already acquired their status in the European Union, the clear tendency to speed up the “equalization” to western European standards. We can see this both in terms of capitalistic reforms, which are on the daily order, as well as on a bit more “aggressive” foreign politics, say the involvement of some countries into the Iraqi war. These government and economical elites, they have generally to show to their western allies how open they are to change on an economical level, in the sense to guarantee to the western investors good facilities for their businesses. For all the European countries this process of the formation of the European Union meant just to make more facilities for the European economic market, as well as the creation of a stronger European police network and so on and on, not at all, for sure, a real opening of the borders. Neither was there an aim towards any positive social improvement. Eastern European countries have simply, due to their Soviet past, to speed up on this process, which because of this is taking a much wilder and destructive shape in comparison to other western countries that already started a lot of years ago to walk towards this direction. The European Union is also probably not too interested in developing its process into some eastern regions, at least in the near future. Just see how difficult already is the joining of Turkey, because of, for example, its strong Muslim faction: the European Union is interested just to extend itself until the “Christianity” borders, avoiding any confrontation with other too unstable regions eaten from too deep social and religious conflict, in which whom the neo-liberal super-power EU is not interested in taking any part in, beside just on an external military and economic level. What the future will bring in this matter, it is an open question. Maybe we could see a more widespread and wilder resistance than in western countries, in completely more exasperated forms (see, as example, the tensions and struggles in Poland) that most of western countries seemed, sadly, to have buried into their past. You can see, also in the insurrection in Uzbekistan or the very first phase of the “orange-revolt” in the Ukraine, as two different examples, how the social situation is completely instable and ready to explode at any moment, as if people would be sitting constantly on a sofa full of dynamite. We hope this sofa will be soon, globally, explode, towards some liberation and emancipative directions, and we hope anarchist activities and thoughts will be able to influence at least partly these directions. We definitely see some more potential for such social explosions in Eastern Europe as compared to the rest of the European continent. To acquaint you closer with our logic, let us have a look now at the socio-political aspects.

At the first look, everything makes for a very pessimistic picture. After almost half a century of living in quite similar living-standards, in the last 12 years the economical differences between the regions of EE became more and more visible. You can even hardly compare the situation of people living in Slovenia and Estonia with these living in some parts of Poland, Romania or, let’s say, eastern Ukraine. At the same time the gap between the minority of winners and huge majority of losers, of the capitalistic processes, is growing continuously in the whole region. One of the conclusions from first observations is that the process which we have called a “colonialisation of the EE” in our magazine about 2-3 years ago, leads to the economic dichotomy in the region, to a creation of arrears which trans-national capitalistic “world-makers” considered as worthy in keeping over the level of complete poverty and those about whom nobody cares. And this is a dichotomy which was always typical for capitalist and colonial processes all over the world. It leads, among others, to the fact that because of these economical differences the mental communication between e.g. the youth from different countries, becomes more difficult even if the physical possibilities, due to some liberation of border regimes, seem to be easier.

The creation of the second sort of the gap is of course as well typical for capitalistic processes but its dynamic in EE is unbelievable. The neo-liberal dogma put into practice by EU politics leads to this, that the gap between the classes (however some of us would appeal here for more conscious and critical use of the “class-concept”), produced in the last 10 years a whole list of other social gaps/borders we can observe in whole region. So there is not only this gap between the political and economical winners and the rest, but as well, for example, the new gaps in the region between the employed and unemployed people, between a (rapidly growing) population of immigrants and “local people”, between the old generation (generation growth before the transition) and the new (after transition) “yuppie-fied” generations, between people living a stable life and those who maybe still don’t consider themselves as poor but are living without any guarantees and perspectives towards their future. These gaps are playing an important role in daily socio-political life on the whole world but in EE we observe a common ignorance toward these growing and multiplying divisions between people. The obvious result of the creation of these divisions among the “the losers of the age of capitalism”, is the luck of developing any common consciousness towards the sources of the problem (that is why some of us are careful towards the class-rhetoric in here now). People are more often ready to fight each rather than to develop a common consciousness. It is a quite sad fact. By the way, if one reads the name of our journal/collective, there are as well these borders (and not only the nation-state borders) which we stressed in the slogan “abolishing the borders from below”.

But speaking on reasons of such development in the region we won’t be blind and blame just the capitalistic vampires. These are as well the people who make themselves the objects of the processes taking place around them. And this is very common for the whole of EE. Through the depoliticized attitude and common apathy towards self-determination they make themselves the objects, and therefore the victims. But of course we need to ask for reasons of this kind of popular behaviour. And here we are catching the very specific aspects of the EE. Whole self-determination and famous social solidarity was taken away from these people by the years and years of poisoning with the attitudes propagated by the politics of communist-states and the church propaganda, of which both institutions have an extremely strong influence on the population in whole region for decades. Instead of solidarity, self-determination, self-consciousness and creative social self-management, people are extremely brainwashed through nationalism, religious-conservatism, xenophobia, anti-Semitism (caucaso-phobia, gipsy-phobia, pure-rascism … it depends of the region), etc. These impacts led to the popular subordination and self-victimisation. The people are on the one hand pushed to the wall of exploitation, precariousness and poverty; on the other hand they are not able to think of escape, of alternatives, of resistance, or even of get together, because of the loss of these positive values. The state-socialistic training of subordination, readiness for self-sacrifice spread by church, and the trend of individualism brought about by capitalism, created here a mental-cocktail which seemed to make east Europeans the perfect mass-object for the contemporary processes of exploitation. It is a mental-cocktail which is pushing people towards disillusion and apathy. No ideas of effective resistance can be developed in such an atmosphere.

And this is in fact a very tragic situation, especially if one will discover the previously mentioned huge anti-authoritarian potential within these populations. What is the potential? The one which arises from exactly the same reasons as “the mental-cocktail of apathy”: from the traditional authoritarian pressure. This is the anti-thesis to the permanent political pressure from the side of the state and the moral one from the side of the church, which have aroused a wide sphere of customs which are cultivated in the whole region (with many variations). We are focusing and dealing a lot on these “customs” in our publication. There is, e.g. a very wide rejection of the entire political class in many regions of EE. There is e.g. a very negative attitude towards the state control organs (police, bailiffs, tax-sheriffs, etc.). There is e.g. a crisis of the electoral-system. There are thousands of ideas developed in the region on how to live and survive apart from the state and against the state influence. And these are all fantastic attitudes which people should be proud of and make the best of towards a better life. And it could be seen as a great basis for building a progressive anarchist consciousness within these populations. Yet, unfortunately, everything is cultivated for mostly individual purposes and there is completely a lack of social reflection in all these aspects. You can check ABB #18 (November 2004) for some interesting texts on this topic. So this is kind of a trap where these populations found themselves. They could easily reach quite far if they would turn their common customs, which are widely considered today as “criminal” or “anti-social”, into acts leading to social and individual emancipation.

But than the new-old political elites around the region have huge support from the west. The lessons from more than a hundred years of experience of “capitalist-crusade on the societies” are being served to the EE-elites, so that they could effectively avoid the awaking of the “emancipative barbarism of the east Europeans”. The new model of state (super state of EU) is being promoted as a new goal. The promotion of the contemporary “social movements” is another example. The reformist and trendy organisations (neoliberal-greens, ATTAC, conservative-syndicates, etc) which are just a piece of the status-quo, are being supported from above in order to canalize the frustration and make sure that disillusioned and frustrated “barbarians” will not discover the more creative and revolutionary forms of social resistance. So the potential we see remains de-activated.

You see, the situation is pretty crap, and in some regions even worse (e.g. Belarus or Russia) but to be honest: when was the situation in EE good for the common people? Us, we cannot give any example of such a period in modern history. So let’s look and act with rational optimism towards the future. One thing is pretty obvious: a big part of EE population considers the State as an ulcer on their social arse already without any anarchist perspective influencing this opinion. So maybe it is not so bad at all, we just need to think how to build a common language on that base.

What is your opinion of anarchist movements in Eastern Europe – the current situation, what should be changed and what is getting better?

ABB: Lets start with this: anarchist movements in Eastern Europe are just being born in the last 10-15 years and this is the biggest difference when compared to anarchist/radical-anti-authoritarian-left movements in the west. Without taking this fact into consideration any tries to estimate these movements do not make sense. One needs to understand as well, that the anarchism in EE is being born from nothing. All radical traditions, whether of physical or ideological sorts of inheritance from the previous generations, hardly exist at all (minimal exceptions are conditions in Bulgaria and ex-Sovets). Most of the contemporary EE-anarchists have no older comrades, have no own history, no theoretical publications from the past in their own language (or even less). The @-movement in the whole region was or never really existed or it was exterminated in 1915-1939 by simultaneous activity of Bolsheviks and fascists. Even in regions like in east-Poland, Ukraine or Russia where 80-100 years ago the anarchists were one of the stronger and most visible social movements – there is nothing left of these movements. It is as if they had never existed. Probably just a few people in these countries, some historians and the anarchists themselves, know about this fact. So these young movements now are starting from the very beginning in the meaning of all possible aspects: theoretically they need to develop their own concepts; in terms of structure they need to build and develop their first organisational units (little projects, first networks, ways of cooperating); in terms of action and agitation they need to develop forms which fit to the social-specifics of the region; and finally … there is nothing like “anarchism” (as we understand it) existing in the local peoples knowledge. So all together, this is about a totally new creation of anarchism what we are witnessing right now in the region. Actually, we are pretty sure that in 50 years our common daily activities of today will be assumed by historians as the period of creation of the second wave of anarchism in the EE.

According to what we said before about the mentality of EE populations, anarchists are finding themselves like an island in the middle of the social NOTHING. It is not easy situation. This popular apoliticalisation in EE reaches such a level that if someone starts to agitate, people take him as another agent who wants to abuse them somehow and from very beginning they refuse to listen. And they are often right: most of the “socially active individuals” here are ending within the establishment as soon as social credit will be given to them. But sometimes it is enough if somebody publicly uses words like “solidarity”, “organize”, “resistance”, “comrade” etc. … people automatically turn with their backs to such a person or call them at worst a sort of “bolshevik”. The common political language which anarchists around the world are using very naturally is completely discredited in our region. It means that not only theory and forms of actions need to be created but even the language in which anarchists could express themselves (and be listening) needs to be modified.

But than again, this whole situation opens up a lot of perspectives. If you look for example at the anarchist structures in the west you will see how homogenous this spectrum is there. If you look at the EE-anarchist structures you will wonder … there is incredible variation of personalities there: from punk, student, intellectual individual, angry 45 year-old unemployed people, some freaks, libertarian artists, some traditional @-platformist, angry revolutionary-feminist, lost immigrant etc. We try to trevel a lotaound the region and we can tell you: you will discover this heterogeneity from Bulgaria, through Poland through deep Russia. Actually, you will discover it even in our collective. People are less dogmatic, and are not looking too deep into some theoretical differences (which is not always necessarily good but definitely helps a lot in the period of “creation of the new”) but they simply agree on the rejection of capitalism, state-communism, and to a certain point, of authoritarianism in general. The political correctness is locked in the dark cellar and has not been fed ever since. The “natural” rejection of dogmatic attitudes and of political correctness makes them very close to the huge groups of society. And this helps a lot; otherwise the isolation would not be broken through during the next century.

Of course, the luck of the tradition, experience and theoretical background has its negative sides too. Some debates/issues are being quite delayed, e.g. towards sexism, feminism and patriarchy. The low theoretical level makes it difficult to take a serious part in the public discussions (on big public events, on media, etc) and in this way the possibility to share the anarchist ideas is being limited to the very small and spontaneous local actions, which usually have a good reception back among the people who could approach them, but the little number of activists, irregularity of these actions and their small scale, limit their impact on the general perception. Because of very young age of most of the anarchists in EE, there are almost no “personalities” among them which from time to time, in the crucial moments, could take a statement and show the anarchist point of view on the concrete topics, which view could reach thousands. You may laugh at us here, but we really think that in such countries as Poland, some kind of “Chomsky” (we mean someone who publicly considers her/himself as anarchist and speaks loudly about anarchist concepts) could shake the society. It is not that we are calling here for intellectual leaders, but a lack of possibilities to bring the concept of anarchy/anarchism to the wider spectrum of people is a common problem for anarchists in the region.

Another specific thing we see is the way of choosing the form of actions. Here we are a bit critical towards our comrades. We see too much of un-critical adoption of different forms of action on the EE-ground. Actions which can make much sense somewhere else do not always necessary fit well into EE specifics. This problem becomes especially crucial when we consider how out-numbered the EE-@-movement is. The small movements should more carefully deal with the activities they conduct as the capacities are very limited. So we suggest more cautious debates towards specific sort of actions before their adaptation into our daily activities. However, we think that “searching” is something natural in the period of “creation” and looking for new ideas is always positive. The question is how much consciousness is there within these processes? Finally, we won’t mention any specific examples here, just to leave this “discovery” to the local group.

One more important aspect to mention is that young EE-anarchists are just starting to build their first serious and continuously working projects, such as collectives of publishers, regular developing publications, long-term and wide-spread public campaigns/debates, etc. During the 90’s most of the energy of EE-anarchists went into little protests and small scale and short term projects. Some necessary theoretical and practical experience was gathered in these years and now, we believe, the phase has begun when the more serious and long-term oriented projects start. This is very good, because while the young people who are joining the movement keep the tradition of frequent street protests on, the theoretical, logistical and organizational basis for them, as well as for all other people is being established. What we consider as very important in such a moment is that both streams of activity stay in contact, exchange and support so that no divisions develop from the younger movements into the professional “actionists” and the “backstage intellectuals” and “anarchist managers”.

As well we would wish, and nobody can be surprised here, that EE-anarchists work borderlessly closer together and necessarily make this cooperation publicly known. At the same time, in order to avoid elitism and to protect us from the state repressions, this cooperation should leave the level of only individual-personal contacts, and reach as soon as possible the higher level of cooperating groups and movements, based on federative structures.

But than one thing can never be forgotten - the real development can be done only through the local progress and here some specific questions have to be raised. Among the others there is one: “After 80 years of invisibility, how can anarchism come back into a more present social perception?” And this is the best example for this, that anarchists in EE are facing the same problems as anarchists elsewhere. Having smaller capacities on the one side, and the closer contact with the common people as well as existence of astonishingly strong “pro-anarchist-customs” among the EE-societies on the other side, mean that EE-anarchists are facing quite different challenges during their struggle.

If we forgot to ask something....

ABB: We would just add that we were finally able to start to set up a free prisoners’ subscription service, which means that every prisoner that writes and asks for a copy of our courier can get it for free. Abolition of borders has to walk hand in hand with abolition of prisons!

We hope that the interview has been not too boring, and we would like to thank you for giving us the possibility to appear in your publication! We wish you a lot positive and creative time while working on your magazine. We would like to share the hope for better times with all people who also wish for it themselves, and remind people that everything lies in our hands. Let’s start to meet and speak about it, let’s organise freely together, and let’s derive a satisfaction and positive anti-authoritarian power from common struggle. For today, our little collective is made of about 12 persons from 8 different regions (called as a “counties” today). Just think about it: people from 3 different continents, coming from different cultures and traditions, and we all believe in anarchist social relations! That is why we would like to add that the only utopias which we know are those in which we are already living in and they are proving the totality of their utopianisms each day.

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