Hello, the other day I was talking with a local activist who told me about the challenges they had when trying to have anarchists work with other organizations, they is currently working on minority rights, and he told me how their organization is too far away from anarchist ideals and it’s hard to make cooperation happen.
For instance he works with immigrants, and this org is small and has leaders. While the anarchists think it’s no good. But in the end this means less strength to help people who are struggling.
I work with many anarchists who can work with people who aren’t anarchists, but I am aware that problems may arise. What challenges have you faced, and how do you deal with it ?
idk, i’m probably one of those classified as “hard to work with” occasionally!
example: someone in a group i was involved with wanted us to collab with a non-anarchist group. i wasn’t ok with it because that group was transphobic. they argued that it shouldn’t matter, as our groups agreed on the one issue the collab would be on, just not much else, and people should be capable of understanding that. i argued that it would likely make any trans people who are in our group or who might want to join us in the future feel alienated, unsafe, & unsupported, like we would not have their back and can’t be trusted to stand against transphobia. we were perfectly capable of doing this work without hitching our wagon to a group of bigots, and ultimately we did just fine without them. was i being hard to work with? on this matter, yes! to me, “left unity” does not mean excusing or enabling bigotry or other hurtful behaviours.
i think generally there are different degrees of compromise that we all have to juggle in the current system, but it’s really down to individuals (and groups of individuals) as to what they’re ok compromising on and what wouldn’t be ok for them personally. we can all make up our own minds about who we’re comfortable getting into bed with. i don’t think that’s something specific to anarchists though, pretty sure almost everyone does this in their daily lives.
from the sounds of it, with your buddy, the issue is trying to make anarchists do things how his org does things. these ones don’t want to compromise, which is fine actually, they’re holding to principles they feel are very important. if i were in his shoes i’d be trying to find a way to work alongside them, horizontally, rather than in a “we don’t want your input, just do some labour for us” way. is there a specific project that would complement the work your buddy does, but could operate independently of that org, that they can structure in a way that aligns with their values? something that he could reach out to them and say “hey, people in our community really need [thing], would you want to set up & run a project of your own to tackle this? what kind of support can we offer?” and if they’re still not interested then leave the door open & wish them well.