No to the EU, no to the CoMeCon (Council for Mutual Economic Assistance), yes to the free anarchist society!



During the campaign against the NATO summit held in Prague in November 2002, we witnessed a new, pleasant phenomenon. There were many more Central and East European anarchist groups and organizations involved in these actions than any time before in such action. Also we have seen that the strengthening anarchist movement in our region has the potential to establish a closer inner cooperation. That it has a lot to say not only to the anarchists in Western Europe, but also to the movement in the rest of the world and to the public as such.
Activists from the countries of Central and Eastern Europe became a supporting part undividable from the antiNATO campaign, and their activities were symbolically accomplished by the formation of so called “East European Anarchist Bloc.” This “Bloc” finally became one of the most visible parts of the protests, pronouncing its own message.
The message sounds clearly: “NATO and EU – Get out of Eastern Europe!” This message is the sound of the anarchist voice shared across the borders of national states. It speaks about our collective rejection of capitalism, militarism, patriarchy, and the state. We have a strong will and feel the need to work for our future cooperation. It has been a great experience for us to work together on the preparation of the antiNATO campaign with our comrades from different places of Central and Eastern Europe, and we would like to continue in this work in the future. We don’t want to stop communicating with our new friends, and we also want to deepen mutual help, especially during the coordination of different future activities.
We have a proposal towards these aims: Let’s organize a collective East European MayDay! Let’s celebrate the day of struggle for rights of common people together! Even though we will be celebrating in different cities, we will still do it together! We also suggest a motto all of us could share: “No to the EU, no to the CoMeCon, yes to the free anarchist society!” (But of course, we would like to lead a discussion over this motto and over this plan as such…)
There are two objectives of this collective action: To develop a deeper cooperation between different groups while preparing this MayDay, and to let our strong anticapitalist voice sound over the whole region we live in. We hope that this could be a start of a fruitful cooperation for the future.
This proposal should not be understood as some attempt to separate ourselves from our comrades form the west or elsewhere in the world – rather the opposite – if any group or organization from Western Europe would like to join us, it will be warmly welcome!
Our call to East Europeans has several reasons. First, the anarchist movement is not as interconnected here as it is in the rest of the world yet. Second, there is a strong connection among us due to the common history of state Bolshevik regimes, therefore we face similar specific problems in capitalism at present. So, these are some of the reasons, why we want to deepen our cooperation further.
Please let us know, what you think about our proposal. Join the collective anarchist MayDay 2003! Send this appeal forward to your friends, and other organizations that you think might be interested in this project!

MayDay 2003 – Shake the continent!

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Czech and Slovak Anarchist Federation
praha@csaf.cz, intersec@csaf.cz
www.csaf.cz, www.csaf.cz/english.php
P.O.Box 223
Praha 1 111 21
Czech Republic