The Relations Commission of the International of Anarchist Federations (IAF-IFA) is continuing to carry out its activities during the current global pandemic. Across all territories, the delegates of our Federations have virtually met to make a point on the commitment of social and organisational anarchism in this worldwide crisis.
The plunder and destruction of nature, the exploitation and impoverishment of whole societies, the war operations, the death of millions of people from hunger and deprivation, the exclusion and confinement of people in concentration camps and prisons reveal the criminal nature of the state-capitalist system. The brutality of this authoritarian model of social organization becomes today, within the global pandemic, even more blatant.
While our activists are trying to maintain their social and political work alive in different forms, and mainly thanks to technology despite generalised confinement rules, some common concerns have been shared, as follows.
- While acknowledging the need for social responsibility in taking all the necessary health precautions that all individuals should adopt to protect themselves and the others, we denounce the authoritarianism and militarism of all those governments which are addressing health issues through military and police repression, and through the suppression of civil liberties and the enhancement of totalitarian forms of social control. This is especially the case with those governments that have taken advantage of the situation to impose authoritarian changes.
- We denounce the search for profit of capitalists and ruling classes, who are pushing for restarting production independently, regardless of workers’ safety, and we support those strikes and spontaneous workers’ mobilisations that took place worldwide to refuse the logics of profit and to foster direct action.
- We denounce the rising of domestic and sexist violence fostered by home confinement measures and stand as usual against patriarchy, sexism and homo/transphobia.
- We denounce the nationalistic rhetoric deployed in most states and stand in solidarity with migrants, who often suffer and risk more than others due to the inhuman and shameful conditions of the detention camps.
- We stand in solidarity with prisoners and against all prisons, camps and totalitarian institutions, whose murderous nature is specially revealed by this pandemic.
- We denounce the conditions of people in poverty and of all the unemployed and precarious workers who are carrying the burden of social injustice all over the world, and risk death from hunger in some countries, while they seem to be the least concern of their governments and ruling classes.
- We stand in solidarity with healthcare workers and all the workers who are performing duties essential for everyone’s life, operating often without the necessary protections and guarantees, paying often with their lives for the inefficiencies and mistakes of state and administrative apparatuses.
- We stand in solidarity with all those peoples and communities which are resisting state warfare and repression, from Chiapas to Rojava, and whose burden is currently worsened by Covid-19.
- For all this, we call for increasing the bottom-up experiences of mutual aid, solidarity and sharing that are taking place worldwide, in order to perform the only practices which can be effective in tackling the current global challenges.
These forms of reciprocal help amongst the weakest in society, the poor, the elderly, all the ill-treated, exploited and discriminated groups and individuals must expand. More strongly than ever, we need to support all such concrete experiences which aim to transform our daily lives, including solidarity cooperatives, alternative and libertarian schools, occupied spaces, spaces of solidarity and alternative exchange, as well as all the initiatives informed by mutual aid and libertarian social transformation worldwide.
- While it would be impossible to summarize all the concrete experiences which are being supported by our comrades and federations in different countries and realities, some partial examples of ongoing experiences in mutual aid can include: Creating groups of mutual aid that help one’s community/house/neighbourhood to cope with the virus, for instance with distribution of food, protection equipment and medicine; Opening up new spaces for living and for making cultural activities, including occupations of spaces by homeless peoples; Circulation of books, journals and other supports and explanations to deal with the crisis; Promoting and practically implementing anticapitalistic alternatives to the existing economic system such as solidarity shared funds; promoting activism to support abused and vulnerable groups such as indigenous people. And much other that cannot be listed here.
The state-capitalist system that condemns millions of people to death by hunger, disease and war, is not fighting against the evolving pandemic but for the preservation of the privileges and power of the political and economic elites.
Suffering the current situation like everybody else, we anarchists of the IFA confirm and continue our worldwide fight for justice and freedom, to go ahead building day by day the new world that we bring in our hearts.