AIT: a proposito di un congresso …

In lingua inglese.

USI-AIT denounces what happened during the latest “IWA Congress” in Warsaw.

Also on this occasion, who claims to represent the IWA has confirmed its characteristics: bureaucracy, authoritarianism, paranoia, sectarianism.
As known, three sections (USI-Italia, CNT-Spain, Fau-Germany) have been expelled, sections which, by themselves, account for over 95% of IWA members, while another section, FORA-Argentina, has been temporarily suspended because of its non-alignment.
Who decided this? A dozen seemingly “national” sections (in some cases with fewer than ten members, or a little more), something that no one can deny. Together they count perhaps 300 affiliates, to be generous. For some of these, no reports of any semblance of activities, nor of fight.
In particular, we denounce the activities of individuals – we don’t mean “entire sections” since you always see the same four people – members of ZSP (Poland) and Kras-(zprom) (Russia), the latter section which exists only on the web and of which we know only a single individual initiative, a conference in a state university, while many other people in Russia live under the effects of Putin dictatorship…
To justify this, as dismal tradition (it seems we’re listening to the ravings of Stalinist Comintern), now they accuse us of … reformism!
What reformism?
How to reconcile this term with the actual activities that we carry out as anarcho-syndicalists? The insults and lies are the only, ridiculous tools that these comrades, of the web and not of the streets, have.

To misrepresent IWA turning it into a specific political ultrapurist, dogmatic and ecclesial organization means to have no real contact with the problems of workers, it means to have a great confusion between specific political organization and anarcho-syndicalist organization, it means not to give meaning to the words and what you do. A project which – without denying anything and without stepping back on anarcho-syndicalists practices and values – Italian proletariat won’t support as a silent spectator.
But today, just look at the propaganda tools of actual Secretariat: offenses are added to other offenses, without any restraint for the historical truth, listening, respect and logic, and we won’t forget it…

We also want to highlight the career of actual secretary: adhering to IWA only in December 2009 (!) after creating a union split in Poland, in just six years she has succeeded to destroy IWA itself! The first accusations against this improvised “freelance” turning up out from the blue and attending more places at once (…), came from those who challenged a personalistic use of a still non-existent IWA fb page. From then on, the accusations coming from various sections about attempts to infiltrate into other unions’ internal discussions, then widening them up to create splits that could and should rather have been avoided.
Over the past two years, at last, piloting the expulsion of all those who are not aligned, ie historical and larger sections, that seeing this decline and having a real basis to account for, felt all these contradictions. At the same time, she has taken possession of IWA enormous fund, the result of the sacrifice of so many comrades especially from the sections expelled today, which she manages in a very questionable way (…) At the latest Congress, ignoring the libertarian practice of rotation of offices, the IWA secretariat has remained to ZSP.
If we think about what is (or what was) IWA, and to what today it has been reduced, with historical and larger sections expelled, and a present made of totally irrelevant sections which don’t represent any threat for bosses and governments, but which managed to take the cash … it’s wrong to think badly, however, this “career” raises strong suspicions…
Today instrumentally – and for pure status quo maintenance purposes – they rinse their mouth with words such as anarcho-syndicalism and international solidarity. On the other hand, we personally pointed out those guys’ “internationalism in solidarity” when they refused to help USI (thus returning only a very small part of all that we paid, unlike them) in its project of self-managed and outside the institutional circuits aid for earthquake victims in central Italy, among which there are also USI comrades.
We will not forget this thing, which will remain an everlasting disgrace to these little leaders and their little flock with hands up to vote.

Those who lived through the involution in IWA of the last years will have noted that bureaucratic and authoritarian drift: a constant and obsessive vote on points and sub-points, by getting the majority and minority, without any possibility of debate and focus on real problems of the working class.
This factory of votes doesn’t belong to us, as we reject the logic of party majority constraints against the autonomy of the sections: we remind you that anarchosyndicalist Internationalism was born just in opposition to the despotism of self-proclaimed central offices.
Today in the simulacrum of IWA there is a real power bloc of Lilliputian sections, which, thanks to a Victorian era voting system, prevents a more weighted federalist representation of all workers. Seven Slovaks friends vote and thus count, for this absurd logic, more than 6,000 Spanish workers; three Russian are equal to 1000 German and Italian workers. Is this the anarcho-syndicalism they are talking about today?
Just as we don’t like the paranoia of the enemy: those who, instead of fighting, confronting with other workers, worry obsessively about fictitious “parallelists” anywhere – first others, today, of course, us – or above all are interested in the relationships with other unknown sections and constantly threaten expulsions, arouse us only boredom and pity. Is this the revolutionary syndicalism of which they speak today?
Those who knew them, know exactly who they are.

However, since we are very different from those sectarians, we want at the same time to reach out to all those sections, still inside actual IWA, which have always cooperated with us until the other day: in contrast to these people, we know what do they mean respect, autonomy, stories, paths, relationships. This is why, for us, the comrades remain the same, even if the roads, we hope temporarily, divide, and we know how to distinguish the authoritarianism of individuals from the reality of entire unions. The big Idea that we carry in our hearts, of a free and liberated world is bigger than the meanness and the interests of a few servants of power.

Now we will focus on the reconstruction of a real and not virtual IWA, in conflict and not made of slogans, horizontal and federalist and not centralized, transparent in the system of membership quotas and voting and not interested; a coherent International, in which the members can find a space of confrontation between different experiences of struggle and not a self-proclaimed directional center to which you have to homologate, at risk of excommunication and expulsion.

USI was founded in 1912 and it’s a member of IWA since 1922; this is our story.

What has happened is very serious, and we invite all libertarian workers of the world to think seriously about what is happening. At the same time, however, we hope that this phase is announcing a better future, free from bureaucrats and full of hope and struggle.

USI-AIT