A-Infos (en) Russia, Moscow, Invitation to the first conference of the Autonomous Action (Initiative for a common libertarian communistorganisation in the area of former Soviet Union)

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Invitation to the first conference
of Autonomous Action, from 14th to 16th of
February 2003,  

Dear comrades!

Autonomous Action invites you to its first conference
to be organised in Moscow from 14th to 16th of
February 2003. The goal of Autonomous Action is
to form a common libertarian communist organisation
in the area of former Soviet Union. Autonomous
Action was organised in its first general meeting in
January 2002, until then it had existed two years
as a project.  Currently Autonomous Action has
local groups in dozen or so cities of Russia and
Armenia, and supporters in Belarus, Lithuania, Kazakhstan
and Ukraine. Read more about us from our
website at www.avtonom.net

In our conference we will discuss political situation
in the countries of former Soviet Union, chances to
resist authoritarism and capitalism, strategy of
libertarian movement in our countries as well as common
projects of Autonomous Action. Conference is not
for discussing organisational documents and
principles of Autonomous Action, they are
dealt in general meetings which is a superior
decisionmaking mechanism of Autonomous Action.
Next general meeting will be organised in the
summer of 2003 in South of Russia.

Joining Autonomous Action is not a condition to
participate to conference. Instead, everyone who
agrees with general line of our manifesto (see end
of this message), and who does not claim that the
current Autonomous Action is a harmful project for
 the libertarian movement is welcome to participate.
Harsh criticism against separate points of our activities
and program is not a barrier either.

It is first of all up to those willing to come
as guests to define if these conditions are fulfilled
in their case, but conference may exclude any guests
if there is a special need for that. If you are
not sure if the conditions are fulfilled in your
case, you may contact the Moscow group of Autonomous
Action, who is organising the conference, and ask
their opinion. However Moscow group has no right to
do final decision.

Guests and members of Autonomous Action have equal
rights to participate any parts of the program,
but guests have no right to vote where at least one
member of Autonomous Action so demands.

It is possible that Moscow group of Autonomous Action
organises an open seminar or street action in the
dates around the conference. Unfortunately yet no
decision has been made about this, you may get more
current information about plans from our contact adresses.
We are also still searching places for conference and
party of solidarity. If you are willing
to participate, please contact us as early as possible,
expecially if you need a nightplace.

One should take with oneself dishes, sleeping bag and matrass,
food or money for that and something for taking notes.
 Most likely participators of the
conference will have to pay a fee of about 2$/euros
to cover costs of rent.

First general meeting of Autonomous Action made
a resolution against intoxication during conferences
and general meetings. Organisational group of the
conference has a concensus, that this time
following this resolution is a special necessity.
Organisational group is responsable about the space,
and has no material means to compensate possible
damages. In sleeping places, issue of intoxication
is to be decided with hosts, but
in the space of the conference ban of alcohol
and narcotics will remain force also during nights and
evenings. Organisational group has decided, that
opened bottles and drugs will be confiscated,
and destroyed if there is no other way around. Of course
we hope that participators are conscious enough
to avoid using such means, and first of all take
care themselves about the order in the conference.

What is said above about intoxication does not
concern the party of solidarity to be organised
in the end of the conference.

Contacts of the organisational group of
the conference:
e-mail: kuzja@ecoline.ru, u10740@dialup.podolsk.ru
P. O. Box 13
109028 Moscow Russia
(do not write name of
the group to envelope.
Do not republish adress
without this note!)

Preliminary program of the conference

Friday 14th of February, 19.00-22.00

1. Organisational questions (discussion
about program, selection of note-takers
and facilitators, prohibition, food,
guests etc.)
2. Reports of delegates about situation
and activities in their locations

Saturday 15th of February, 11.00-19.00

1. Discussion about situation in former Soviet Union,
strategy and tactics of the anarchist
movement today
2. Working groups. This far the following working
groups have been proposed:
a) Anti-fascism
b) Ecological protests
c) Labour conflicts (including
discussion about development of
www.antijob.nm.ru website and its paper
version, Radical lazybones)
d) Anti-war movement and anti-militarism
e) Anti-patriarchalism/anti-sexism/feminism
f) Movement against global capitalism and
Peoples Global Action-network

3) Reports from the working groups

Sunday 16th of February, 11.00-19.00

1. Discussion about journal "Avtonom",
redaction, website of Autonomous Action and
other publications.
2. Discussion about integration of new members
to organisation, symbols of the movement,
buttons, t-shirts.
3.  Discussion about functions and activities
of coordinatory council of the Autonomous Action
4. Propositions for next referendum of the
Autonomous Action
5. Summer general meeting of Autonomous Action
6. Party of solidarity (circa 20.00)

Program might be changed in the first day
of the conference. If person who proposed a
theme may not be present and did not defined theme
clearly enough beforehand in written form or
explaining it to another delegate, conference
may refuse theme due to unclarity.

Propositions from Chelyabinsk group to be added
to program:
1) Discussion about relations to other anarchist
organisations
2) Monitoring of revolutionary situation in the
regions
3) Discussion about founding of a communitarian
fraction inside Autonomous Action

Send your propositions to adress of the organisational
group above.

MANIFESTO OF THE AUTONOMOUS ACTION

WHO ARE WE? Autonomous Action - it is a community of people, for whom
"freedom without Socialism is privilege and injustice, and Socialism without
freedom
is slavery and brutality". We consider that the most
important thing
in life are not the consumption of goods, making a career, reaching
reaching positions of power and making money, but creativity, real human
relations and
personal liberty. All of us, be it workers and the unemployed people,
students and
pupils, employees and marginal elements, have one common unifying element -
to protest against
any power of a man over another man, state, capitalism and
officially spread bourgeois "culture". A desire not to be a wilful nut in
the mechanism of the System - to collectively resist it, to demand free
self-realisation.

OUR IDEALS AND OUR AIM. Autonomous Action against any form of domination and
discrimination, both within the society and in our own organisation. The
current system
of domination is tightly interlaced with repressive state apparatus,
industrial capitalist economical structure and authoritarian and hierarchic
relations between people. We see, that every state is an instrument of
oppression and exploitation of the working
majority for the benefit of the privileged minority. Power of state and
capital is suppression of personality and
creativity of each and everyone. This is why for us libertarian (free,
stateless, self-governed) communism, a society without domination, is the
necessary structure of society. The closest aim of Autonomous Action
is to create a tradition and basis for a new humanist culture, social
self-organisation and radical resistance against militarism, capitalism,
sexism and fascism.

HOW WE ARE ORGANISED. Our goals may be reached only when aims and means
meet.
 This is why our organisation has a federative
structure,
which excludes leadership and hierarchy, denies inequality
of the participators, centralism, strict division of functions, which
ruin initiative, destroy autonomy and suppress personality. Our
ideals and organisational principles are wide enough not to make
us a sect, and concrete enough to allow co-ordination of actions, common
tactics and aims and successful decision about tasks we engage in
. Our structure,
conditions of membership and mechanism of decisionmaking are defined
in detail in the organisational principles of the Autonomous Action.

HOW WE TAKE ACTION. Members of Autonomous Action support direct
action. In order to reach our goals, we do not participate in the fight for
power,
for a seat in parliament or for arm-chairs of state officials.
We realise our goals in direct order, by a wide spectrum of
non-parliamentary
and cultural action, if necessary revolutionary by form and content.
Autonomous Action is a common front, subdivisions of which, each in their
own directions, realise
an attack against repressive relations in different social
movements, in all spheres of social and
individual life - at the same time building new relations, without
domination and submission. Autonomous Action recognises the right of society
and individuals to defend
themselves and to resist against exploitation.

WAY TO OUR GOAL. We recognise a multitude of ways to reach our goals. The
way might be one of
revolutionary insurrection self-organised by the working masses, a general
strike or a more or less gradual disappearance of the institutions of power
and capital in favour of self-governing structures of alternative civil
society, and so on. Life itself will define, which of the methods will
be most effective and timely. But a society without domination may never be
reached through reforms and legislative acts of parliaments and governments,
initiatives of inter-state and corporate structures, representatives of the
privileged and the ruling class. Our strategy is REVOLUTIONARY in the sense
that it comes from below, from the very bottom structures of the
society, and does not operate with the mechanisms and resources of the
system;
in the sense, that it does not demand partial changes in the system, but
its destruction and change as a whole.

OUR ALTERNATIVE. Centralised bureaucratic machine, national and global
capital and the consumerist mass culture which they have given rise to, that
is the system supressing us, and it's not only immoral and unjust, but it
also leads the present human society to an ecological and cultural
catastrophe and to war.
Sharp change of direction has become an urgent necessity today. This is why
we propose a radical alternative to existing
order of things, based on humanism, liberty and equality.
 Our goal is not to
"set up a divine kingdom on Earth", but only to open a road to real social
development.
 In such a
society some of the present problems may remain, and some new may appear,
but it will in any case be more equal, human and free than the present
one, and in certain circumstances, becomes almost the only alternative to
approaching catastrophe. Simultaneously, our alternative is not only a goal
of the distant future, for which we are fighting for, but
a society which we are creating here and now through everyday resistance.
This alternative is fixed by the following ideals and directions of our
activity, which every participator of Autonomous Action expresses according
to his will, whereas her or his actions comply with goals of Autonomous
Action and do not contradict the ideas of this manifesto.

IDEALS AND DIRECTIONS OF ACTION

ANTI-AUTHORITARISM

Against every form of dictatorship, leadership, authoritarism, centralised
bureaucratical apparatus, police excesses. For right to participate in
making decision on any question influencing our destiny. For
minimisation of vertical and maximisation of horizontal relations inside
the society. For decentralisation of the governance, local autonomy, direct
grassroots democracy and federalism. For free federation of self-governed
individuals, groups, communes, regions where organs of the co-ordination,
when they are necessary, are independent councils or other institutions of
social self-governance, formed by assemblies not according to principle of
presentation, but according to principle of delegation and imperative
mandate - with the right to immediate recall delegates. FOR COMPLETE
LIBERATION OF EACH AND EVERYONE! YOUR FREEDOM IS SENSELESS WITHOUT FREEDOM
OF THE OTHERS!

ANTICAPITALISM

Human race, undivided in its natural state, has become divided between
masters and powerless exploited majority. We stand for liquidation of the
class society, wage work, humiliation and exploitation of human by another,
power of money, imperialism. Against the dependence of human from the nature
of
"market relations". Products should not govern people, in contrary people
should use products sensibly and cautiously. Society should get over the
catastrophical logic of the bourgeois production.
Against growing power of transnational corporations and international
structures of the capital. For workers' governance and control in
production. The wealth and resources of society should be accessible to
everyone, not only to the governing elite. For people's self-governance
without
capitalists and bureaucrats. For organisation of property by the principle
"from
everyone according to their capacities, to everyone according to their
needs", keeping in mind the production limits given by the society and
saving the equilibrium and diversity of nature. Capitalism, as a system
of all out war, profiting and humiliation has only one historical
perspective - death of humanity and planetwide ecological catastrophe. And
in
the best case, immersion to gulf of "civilised" barbarism. Capitalism
may not be reformed.

ANTI-FASCISM, ANTI-NATIONALISM

Fascism, racism and nationalism are means of bourgeoisie and bureaucracy to
provoke people against each other, and to divide them to different races
and nations, to hide mastership. To create profits
and maintain power of bourgeoisie and bureaucracy over the society. We are
internationalists. Only organising workers in international scale may not
only challenge power and capital, but also give them a decisive death blow.
World should be multi-coloured, not brown! For a world without borders and
national states, one in it's multitude of cultures and traditions. For a
world with multitude of personalities, collectives, communities and regions,
no to a downcast world of national and religious hatred, racial prejudices,
chauvinism, xenophobia, unified and closed "national culture". For
protection of national and cultural minorities against discrimination and
fascist terror. For radical counter-attack against neo-nazis and
national-patriotist ideologists and organisations. For foundation of
anti-fascist shock troops to physically confront fascists.

ANTI-BOLSHEVISM

Negative experience of "real socialism" in countries like USSR, China, Cuba
etc. does not in any case discredit ideas of libertarian communism. It is
not possible to create free society and solidarity through authoritarian
party structure seizing the state power, with dictatorship of any party
apparatus or
self-appointed "avant-garde". Against Bolshevik principles of the
organisation. For organisational structure,
based on libertarian principles of mutual respect, equality and solidarity.
Organisational structure should be image of things to come in the society,
foundation of which we are trying to reach.
We see, that regimes in so called "socialist states" were nothing but
rude form of global tendency towards state-capitalism, a system in which
bourgeois economical relations, wage labour as well as psychology remain.
The only difference was that capitalist was one and collective - the
governing party elite. Only difference between "socialist" and "western"
capitalism was the form of capitalist accumulation. Libertarian experience
of the Makhnovist movement, Spanish revolution, Tolstoyanism, independent
labour movement etc. showed with which zeal Bolsheviks try to root out any
anti-authoritarian, really communist movement.
We are against any ideal and organisational unity with Leninists
(Stalinists, Maoists, trotskists etc.). For close co-operation with
non-authoritarian socialists, anti-party left communists and libertarian
Marxists.

SELF-GOVERNANCE

Forms of self-governance may be
a) means of production seized by the workers to become common property,
functioning with libertarian model of organisation;
b) libertarian communes;
c) other institutions, founded on regional, functional and other principles.

Such forms of self-governance could be effective method to found the basis
of
social alternative to the present society.

ANTI-MILITARISM

Against state army as a system of violence, instrument of governance of
ruling class and instrument of integration of young men to patriarchal,
authoritarian and hierarchical systems of domination.
Against forced conscription. We should not defend state and government,
which only
exist in order to humiliate us. Boycott military call-ups! Trash all draft
cards!
For an alternative of general armament of workers and people's militias,
without hazing, humiliation of human dignity and prison regime. For full
control of the society over military specialists. PEACE TO THE WHOLE WORLD!
FREE PEOPLE DO NOT HAVE TO DIVIDE IT!

ECOLOGY

Against non-sustainable exploitation of the nature for profit of the few.
Against industrial system of organisation and power of the technocrats. For
development from all directions and inculcation of the
alternative technologies. For foundation of ecological settlements and
harmonisation of the relation
between human and the nature. For decentralised, humanist, balanced
production for interests of the people, with protection of the environment
for the future generations, with gradual abolition of the industrial
technologies. Active support to social ecologists in their struggle,
participation to ecological actions and campaigns. NOT MORE, BUT BETTER! NOT
EXTERNAL, BUT INTERNAL! NOT TO OWN, BUT TO BE!

FEMINISM

Against sexism - humiliation, violence and discrimination against women and
men based on their sex.
Against patriarchy - authoritarian structure of any class society, where
mostly proprietor-men have power in all key spheres of the society, "female"
is
always subordinated to "male", and family has a function of
of reproduction and socialisation of the labour power.
Against sexist stereotypes, family despotism, homophobia, porno industry and
ageism (discrimination
on the basis of the age). For active participation of the women to the life
of the society, and possibility of individuals themselves to control their
own bodies (and reproduction in special). Every human is equal and unique
socially, sexually (in her/his gender) and age.

NEW HUMANIST CULTURE

Against hypocrisy and repression of the official mass culture,
commercialisation of the creativity, power of
the show-business and "amusement industry". Against manipulation of the
conscience and behaviour of any kind and form. Against elitism of the
culture and hierarchy of its institutions. Global support to any kind of
uncommercial creativity, experimental art and pedagogic. For support of the
initiative of people, who already now want to live according to
unauthoritarian
principles. This kind of initiatives are important not only for escape from
the reality, but also to gather experience of free and sensible
relations.
For foundation of squats, housing collectives, artist communes, autonomous
cultural and information spaces, organisation of mass festivals of
alternative culture. CULTURE SHOULD NOT IMPOVERISH OUR LIFE. LIFE SHOULD
BECOME BIGGER THAN IT IS!

ANTI-CLERICALISM

We, without conditions, support full "freedom of spirit", for every man's
free search of world outlook and faith. But we should do our best to resist,
without using mechanism of rule, those ideological systems which
bring hatred, xenophobia, nationalism in society and transfer individual to
an
authoritarian and dogmatic person. Many religious ideas are connected to
such kind of systems.
Even more resolutely we are against hierarchical church organisations,
pyramidal and authoritarian
structure of which may not serve interests of liberation of human
individual. Such churches serve only one goal - fortifying human both
physically and in spirit. One of the most serious and powerful churches of
such kind in Russia is the Russian Orthodox Church, which already long time
ago transformed into a powerful capitalist and bureaucratic corporation,
receiving from the state both financial and ideological advantages.
Against using needs of man for explanations about universe in the interests
of business and
power.

HOW TO START RESISTANCE?

Do not wait, take action yourselves. Concentrate your efforts to any
direction you desire and feel close
to yourselves. Find adherents among your friends, work- or schoolmates.
Start from little, main thing is that you have some real issues to organise,
such as publication and distribution of papers, formation of worker's
unions, organisation of squats, communes, alternative information centres or
participation to a strike, anti-fascist struggle, protest camp, meetings,
pickets or rock-concerts. The main thing is to take action, not to be based
on the state or bourgeoisie, to take action against them and independent
from them.
It is necessary to connect other groups and initiatives, maintain
informational and organisational connections to adherents in the whole
country and abroad. That brings you confidence and power.
Send materials about your life and struggle to our paper "Avtonom", which
covers struggle in the whole libertarian sphere. BE COURAGEOUS! LIVE FULLY,
FREELY AND STRONGLY! RESIST! REMEMBER,
THAT A SMALL GROUP OF FIGHTERS MAY START AN AVALANCHE!


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