Workers Solidarity Alliance Holds 2012 Continental Conference

north america / mexico | anarchist movement | press release Thursday August 23, 2012 01:42 by sabotage - Workers Solidarity Alliance

A post-conference report from the Workers Solidarity Alliance's 2012 Gathering in St. Louis MO

This year’s WSA conference was a productive one for all involved. If at times arduous, it was for good reason, with a dozen attendees and delegates, all comrades working hard to decide not only our strategies for the year to come, but how to become more organized in the here and now. Below is a quick survey of the conference’s developments and insights that we wish to share with the larger class struggle and anarchist movements of which we are a part:

Our Internal Communications Committee gave a report and presentation on our new internal website which now includes a simple forum set-up and possible features which we hope to make available to our allies in the movement by making it open source. We also empowered this committee to research into methods for lightning voting (online) so we can better operate in real time to the crises of today.

Over the past year, WSA has also focused on developing our internal education curriculum. To those ends, a report of the curriculum from our Internal Education Committee was presented. We have high hopes that the curriculum will get implanted regionally and locally as well as through group video chat/conferencing. With the help of our membership, this committee is also developing writings for each section of our unity document Where We Stand.

Along these lines, we hope to reinvigorate our online publication ideas & action. We are looking to include reflections on daily life and everyday class struggle, as to not limit the webzine to solely news and theoretical analysis. As always, we continue to accept and publish articles from our comrades in social struggles and the anarchist movement.

Our conference also recommended to develop our Labor Commission with the aim of getting our organization more involved in labor organizing and teaching our membership how to do so. The conference strongly recommended developing campaigns to focus on the grievances of our membership around our direct material interests, as well as doing more international labor solidarity work. Along these lines, we will be undertaking a solidarity campaign with Domino’s workers who are organizing on the job with our comrades in the Australian section of the International Workers Association. Considering this, WSA is still interested in working closely with any militants from the CSAC Labor Working Group, our friends working within the IWW, as well as solidarity networks and other independent workers organizations.

There was also much discussion about how we can tighten up our operations and get more members involved in either the organization’s internal or external organizing. We made a big push to emphasize the need for our movement to focus on helping develop our less organized periphery cities and towns. We also think it is imperative that we focus on the development of our at-large membership and find ways to non-opportunistically develop folks outside of the organization around our libertarian politics.

The conference unanimously recommended that the organization vote to move forward with regroupment and the process to get there. Further, we have recommendations on how to make the process more transparent, democratic, and participatory for all groups involved.

Finally we have an internationalist plea to the libertarian and left social movements that we support our anti-authoritarian comrades in Syria. Below is a communique from comrades headed there hosted by our friends in Solidarity Federation (UK) http://solfed.org.uk/?q=international/from-a-syrian-ana...chist

For a world without bosses and borders of all kinds!

Workers Solidarity Alliance