The Revolution will not be televised
So what should tempt us to think that the Internet in particular would be a place where today’s revolutionary awakenings would take place? And certainly we are not so short-sighted as to seriously consider this to be the case. Nevertheless, we observe with a certain uneasiness that both the real and the virtual spaces of exchange among anarchists of the German-speaking contexts are fading away. Even though individual projects still receive some attention and almost every tendency of informally organized anarchism has created its own web presence – even though there are still one or two printed and regularly published newspaper projects and dozens and dozens of brochures, books, flyers, newspapers, posters and stickers which are connected to the anarchist idea and wander from hand to hand among comrades – we ask ourselves, to what extent these succeed in carrying the anarchist debate into the public more than sporadically, in the (desperate) attempt to inflame at least a few hearts with the spark of the anarchist idea.
Repeatedly in the past it has been proven that if there is no better alternative, platforms like de.indymedia also have to be used for anarchist exchange. The problem is that anarchist contributions are often deleted there or – perhaps even worse – stand beside deeply authoritarian submissions that absolutely contradict the anarchist idea. No wonder: de.indymedia has always been a platform of the left and will consequently remain so. The fact that more and more decentralized (radical left) alternatives to de.indymedia are currently developing is, in our view, just as incapable of remedying the problem as other strangely conceptualized attempts to create synthesist platforms or even websites of unified organizations selling themselves as contributions to an anarchist debate.
So we want to try with this website, beyond any attempt to pursue synthesist thoughts, to open an informal forum of anarchist discussion, which includes the numerous existing web presences of anarchist projects as well as texts that have not been published on other websites before. It is part of an attempt to engage differing positions in a mutually beneficial debate, not to indifferently juxtapose the contradictory, and we are not afraid to end this attempt should it ever become that.
We choose the form of a web presence reluctantly, in the absence of a realistic perspective to launch a similar project in print or in the form of real encounters, at least in a way that would be accessible from the outside. However, we support all such projects and will likewise discontinue ours at any time should a more appetizing alternative appear on the horizon.
In this sense: Feel free to participate as you see fit and let’s raise the German-speaking anarchist debate to a new level.