I love being an anarchist. Why? Because whatever bigger city you go to, you’re bound to find a liberated space inhabited by your siblings-in-arms. It’s like you’re part of a big family — always bickering, but when the worst comes to worst you always have each other’s backs.

And you can rely on the fact that if you’re stranded in strange territory, there is always someone who will share a beer and local knowledge with you, and if you’re in need of it, a couch. You’re family, after all.

But despite all of us sharing the same general goals — liberation, solidarity and all that — you can find different ways of working towards them wherever you go. If you cross a national border and meet with the anarchists there, you will find that they have entirely other methods of abolishing that border than your own group might.

It makes sense, of course. Different environments require different tactics.

But on my travels I saw some things that might work just as well in Cologne as they do in Belfast or Barcelona — we simply hadn’t thought of them before!

The things we can learn from each other are almost infinite. Ask the libertarios of Barcelona Sants about resisting eviction and how to connect with a working-class neighbourhood.

Ask Sinistra Anticapitalista in Italy about how to work against the housing crisis.

Learn about the squatting hotlines in Brescia, syndicated strike action in Paris, the newspapers in Madrid, the radical bookstores in London, the antifascist gyms in Athens.

It’s truly incredible what we can come up with, and to every problem that the elites and capitalism confront us with, the radically free are quick to find a creative solution.

With the means of oppression globalising, our resistance has to follow the same development.

We have to connect with each other and learn about things that already exist in our own environment, and those that are yet to come. Union busting, to name one example, is rampant in the US, and elites in Germany and the UK are going heads over heels to apply the same tactics here.

We need more connection between activist communities, locally and globally. International — or rather antinational — conferences and actions are something we cannot leave to our enemies only. Let’s spend some of our funds on sending each other greeting cards of love and rage, so that when global capitalism attempts to crush us, we have the united power of anarchists everywhere to fight back.

From Europe to South America to Asia and everywhere else — we are the Antinationale!

La Maupin

This article first appeared in the Winter 2017 issue of Freedom Anarchist Journal

Pic: Mark Robinson