1. First, what is the meaning of your organization's name? --- Midada: Midada means "Change" in Romansh, which is a Romance language spoken only by around 60,000 People in a distinct Region in the far East of Switzerland. Nevertheless it is one of the four official languages in our country, beside German, French and Italian. For us, our name signals our fight for an overall change in society while honoring the cultural diversity we encounter in Switzerland.
2. You are one of the newest anarchist communist organizations in the organizational dualist tradition to emerge in Europe in recent years. Can you briefly discuss the process of founding Midada?Midada: We emerged out of a shared sense of disappointment with the existing anarchist structures in our region (Bern and German-speaking Switzerland in general). Many of us felt that the predominant forms of organization were not adequate for building a serious, lasting movement.
After receiving the founding document of Die Plattform in Germany we became increasingly interested in the Platformist tradition of organization, which offered a framework for unity of theory, tactics, and collective responsibility which we had found lacking in our previous experiences of anarchist organization. At this point, we started an extensive process of discussions and debates about what we wanted to build and how. In this process we got increasingly influenced by the ideas of especifismo, which is why we started engaging in concrete social work in our respective areas already before officially founding the organization.
In looking back now, that practice was not secondary but far more central to how we developed politically. With these experiences behind us, we felt ready in 2024 to hold our founding congress and officially launch our organization. Upon going public we laid the groundwork for our collective work going forward, which remains our biggest focus to date: Coordinating our social work while developing a political school for new militants so that our ideas can spread and our movement can grow.
3. Switzerland has a special place in the history of the anarchist movement: the first congresses of the International Workingmen's Association (IWA), also called the '1st International', were held in the country. As well, it is where the international split into its state socialist and libertarian socialist factions. All of this in addition to Switzerland being the final resting place of Bakunin himself. How does this local history inform the DNA of your organization?
Midada: We do notice that Anarchism has a big influence on the radical left in Bern compared to other cities in German-speaking Switzerland. In Romandie (French-speaking region) remains a group of Organisation Socialiste Libertaire (OSL), founded in 1983, that was once a federation with a bilingual agitation journal. In the region of Zürich there was also until not so long ago another group from Platformist tradition called Libertäre Aktion Winterthur. Both had an influence early on in our process. Our pre-foundation organization form was called Libertäre Aktion and we used texts translated by this organization too. As for OSL, despite the language barrier, we rapidly found ourselves working together within the grassroots union movement.
On the international level, we benefit today from decades of extensive work from part of OSL since the 80's (together with other organizations from broader organized anarchism and anarcho-syndicalism like the french AL, the Italian FdCA, the Uruguayan fAu, the Spanish CGT amongst others), which placed Swiss organized anarchism (especially from our current) into a sort of "privileged" position. And of course, Bakunin's ideas remain very important for us and our political education. This is why we try to uphold the anarchist tradition here in the city as we feel some international responsibility to honor our predecessors.
4. How does the Platform inform the organizational structures and strategy of Midada?
Midada: As already mentioned, our organization is rooted in the Platformist ideas and we still feel deeply connected to the Platformist tradition. The main reason for shifting towards Especifismo was the joining of a comrade who arrived during the discussions on our future program. At that point, Especifismo gave us many new Ideas and it seemed more compelling to us. On one hand we wanted to acknowledge and pay some kind of tribute to the extensive work of our comrades in South America, their practice, their history of course, but also the effort to develop the formulation on the ideological and theoretical levels. And on the other hand, we felt particularly inspired by the trajectory of Especifismo in Latin America in recent decades and fAu's history since its foundation.
But to be perfectly clear on the matter: we are influenced both by Platformism and by Especifismo and we consider them both different expressions of the same Bakuninist core. But it makes our task somehow easier to adapt Especifismo to our reality because it comes from a more "recent" historical experience than the Platform. To conclude, we are also perfectly aware that our task is to develop an organization and a strategy which are suited for the challenges we encounter in in the region and the times we live in.
5. What areas of mass organizing are members of Midada involved in?
Midada: Most of our members do their social work in grassroots syndicalism. Not out of principle, but as a consequence of our analysis regarding labor and syndicalism in our country, where bureaucracy has developed to such an extent that any combative strategy at mass level is, in our view, impossible to develop within the so-called "main unions". Our grassroots union might be modest in scale for now, but it offers room to develop a syndicalist practice and strategy. In our region, the movement has existed since the late 90s. Maybe we played a part in the renewal of interest toward syndicalism in recent years, but it is in particular all the day-to-day work and dedication from tens and tens - at the national level hundreds and hundreds - of syndicalists, old, less old and new, that made grassroots syndicalism grow quite spectacularly (or at least well beyond our expectations) in recent years, especially in the German-speaking region. We live in challenging but also quite promising times.
Other militants of Midada are active in the climate/environmental front, embedded in one of the biggest climate justice movements in Switzerland, with local chapters in different regions of the country. It has strong grassroots characteristics and emerged in the international context of 'Fridays for Future' in the late 2010s. Our militants in this movement focus their work on connecting the fight for climate justice with the syndicalist movement, out of the analysis that at this convergence lies one of the biggest potentials to build a long-lasting revolutionary influence on society.
6. What is your relationship to other revolutionary groups in Switzerland, whether anarchist or not? What about outside of the country?
Midada: At the beginning of our work we had some formal meetings with other revolutionary organizations which are not part of our tendency. But while educating ourselves and doing social work, we noticed that most of the revolutionary organizations in Switzerland are not attractive for us to work with because they have a different approach in their militant practice. Mostly, it would be contradictory to our goals if we were to work with them publicly or share, to some extent, their style of militancy. That said, there is one organization in Bern called Plattformistische Jugend (Platformist Youth) with which we have a very strong connection. With them we share social fronts and coordinate our work in these spaces through regular joint meetings as well as educational events.
We are also, as already mentioned, quite close to the OSL in Lausanne (French-speaking region). But in general, where we work best with other currents of the broader left is in the social spheres. The experience and practice we accumulated over the last years showed and confirmed that healthy unity, common work, and alliance are strongly rooted in practice and social insertion. Of course, we still have a lot to experience and to learn, but for now this is what we can conclude on the question of relationships with other organizations.
On the international level we are member of the International Coordination of Organized Anarchism (ICOA) and the ECOA at the European level, where we have been collaborating with sister organizations already before publicly founding our organization. This allowed us to learn a lot from our sister organizations all around the world and managed to establish strong connections to the especifist organizations of Latin America as well as our platformist sister organizations in the rest of the world and in our neighboring countries.
7. What have you learned from your early days as a formal political organization? If you were beginning again, would you do anything differently? What are you most proud of related to this process?
Midada: We think our biggest insights regarding organization in a dualist mode have come from our work in the social sphere, which some of us developed only a few years after starting to organize together. This leads us to the conclusion that right from the beginning it is very important that everybody interested in building an Especifista/Platformist organization should be involved in social work, organized and with mass-level orientations (not to be mistaken with the reproduction of disarticulated activism within "class struggle topics"). Otherwise, the theoretical "understanding" risks being misunderstood. It is practice that informs ideology and theory. This knowledge can be gained only by doing the actual work and being present in the social sphere.
Furthermore, we learned that taking small steps together as a collective is much more important than advancing rapidly as an individual and eventually leaving the rest of the organization behind. This brings us to what we are most proud of: being patient in the development of our political organization and thus building something steady and stable. Because while we built our theoretical and tactical unity in a slow and patient process, we observed other organizations and currents come and go, advancing and growing quickly, but then struggling and imploding just as fast. Finally, we hope that with our approach we are able to grow in a healthy way and move forward in the tradition of our Especifista role models in Latin America.
https://www.blackrosefed.org/platform-interviews-vol-2/#midada-switzerland
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Source: A-infos-en@ainfos.ca
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