A- INFOS

HAPPY TWELFTH BIRTHDAY A-INFOS:

In February of 1990 anarchists convened in the Dutch town on Venlo to examine the state of international cooperation. They found far too little of it. The groups present agreed on a loose network of information exchange and thus was born the A-Infos network. Originally an European network the web of connections soon spread to other continents as well. They began by publishing print versions of the A-Infos Bulletin. On Septmember 6th, 1995 activists in Canada and England decided to make the leap to the internet, and this was born the A-Infos of today. A-Infos is now a multilingual (13 languages in total) invaluable resource for the international anarchist movement. It has deliberately eschewed the bells and whistles of other anarchist websites, and delivers its messages in plain text only. Yet...it is the most timely, readable and mercifully crank free source of immediate information available to anarchists today. It is certainly the most multinational of them all. In sum it serves the international anarchist movement in much the same way that other news agencies serve the popular media, and it is unparalleled in this function.

The A-Infos project has been deliberately restrictive in its editorial policy, and quite openly so. Because of this it has escaped what can only be described as the frank insanity that has overwhelmed so many other projects such as various Indymedias. As they say in their Vision statement...

"The A-Infos Project is coordinated by an international collective of revolutionary, anti-authoritarian, anti-capitalist activists, involved with class struggle and who regard it as a total social struggle.These are people who conceive of themselves as revolutionary class struggle social anarchists, anarcho-communists, libertarian communists, syndicalist and others who hold similar opinions but use other labels. ...

"The specific kind of anarchism we talk about and promote is the anarchism of the Haymarket martyrs and those expelled by Karl Marx from the First International for criticizing his authoritarianism and the elitist, vanguardist degradation of the masses of the working class. We do not support the kind of anarchism proposed by some pseudo-modernists and pseudo-"revolutionaries" who regard symbolic activity as a substitute for mass struggle, or the kind of anarchism of "humanists" who hold other tasks as equal or more important than the revolutionary struggle for abolishing the capitalist system. A-Infos work is not inspired by egoistic and egocentric individualism, primitivism, "free capitalism without a state" or even a state without free capitalism- who oppose the present capitalist order but do not offer instead a viable model of modern social order of freedom, equality and solidarity. It is not enough for individuals and groups to use an anarchist label for their texts to be distributed by A-Infos....

"A-Infos has a role to play in the world anarchist movement. Information is strength. A-Infos helps to build a sense of an international movement. A-Infos is, to a certain extent, one of the few international organizational tools of the movement. But to keep this role it must stay a tool in the service of the international movement and not a free-for-all information service. ..."

The full vision statement can be read on the A-Infos website. For more on the history of A-Infos see http://www.ainfos.ca/org/history-en.html . Information on syndicating A-Infos (which Molly has been trying and failing to do) is available at http://www.ainfos.ca/syndication/Syndication_Of_A_Infos.html. The people at A-Infos have announced their 12th birthday with a renewed call for people interested in participating in the project. They are looking for collaborators who can

-contribute posts

-translate posts already distributed on A-Infos in other languages into English

-translate posts already distributed in English into other languages

If you are interested send an email to a-infos-en@ainfos.ca