CONGRESS OF THE ANARCHIST FEDERATION:POLAND:

The Congress of the Anarchist Federation of Poland took place on February 17th to 18th in the city of Szczecin, Poland. The report of the participants follows,

"This Congress attracted special police interest; we were informed that the police visited the space the day before and probably left a listening devise. They also decided to visit the space but left after people explained that they weren't invited and nobody would talk to them.

The Anarchist federation accepted two new sections: FA Dublin(Molly Note:I assume this refers to Polish workers presently resident in Ireland) and FA Pila. For the first time, observers to the Congress probably outnumbered FA members. Unfortunately attendance from the sections was rather low with only groups from Lodz, Warsaw-Praga, Gorzow, Krakow, Poznan, Silesia, Szczecin and Torun attending.

Special attention was paid to upcoming campaigns including protests and calls for a referendum on the placement of a US missile base in Poland, mobilization to the Rospuda Valley, May Day and the G8. It was also decided to hold a few days of anti-militarist actions around the time of the anniversary of the war in Iraq.

It was decided to hold an anarchist integration camp in Poland at the end of August. Other discussions and campaigns discussed included actions in defense of refugees, a proposal to but land for an ecological village and ways to promote direct democracy.

A number of internal and organizational matters were also discussed and decided. Many ideas were discussed relating to increasing participation inside the Federation and improving the information flow and cooperation between sections. It was also decided to do more to utilize existing resources and to publicize things like the collective secretariat more widely.

The next Congress will be held in the fall in Krakow."

Molly Note:

Anarchism has actually experienced a dramatic growth in Poland in recent years. The website of the Polish Anarchist federation can be found at http://www.fa.most.org.pl . The Polish FA is very much like the French FA as it is a "synthesist" organization that brings together anarchists from a variety of theoretical perspectives. The website has an very out of date English section like most anarchist websites in Eastern Europe. Translations to French or Spanish are non-existent. What the Poles are proving as we speak is that it is "possible" for a dynamic synthesist federation to exist and have a real presence in the world. It's hard to say if their experience(or that of the French FA or the Italian FAI) is directly transferable to North America as the ideological divisions here are much deeper than in Europe. But it at least shows that such a method of organizing is applicable in at least some places.

Molly