Federations and Networks

What is a Federation?

Federations are essentially unions of autonomous organizations and/or affinity groups. An anarchist federation can be viewed as the regional, or national, or international decision making body of the union (depending on the federation's self-imposed geographical limitations) and the collectives or affinity groups that belong to the federation can be viewed as autonomous union locals. Federations are formal organizations with constitutions, bylaws, and specific membership guidelines. There are three general types of federations that have been formed in recent memory, I will refer to them as "Specialist", "General Revolutionary", and "Synthesist" Federations. This terminology is in no way standard, but it is useful for purposes of description.

"Specialist Federations": Federations, like affinity groups and collectives, can exist to serve a specific role or achieve a specific goal. An example of a "specialist" federation is the Anarchist Black Cross Federation (ABCF http://www.anarchistblackcross.org/), which exists to do support work for political prisoners.

"General Revolutionary Federations": Federations can also be very broad in scope and focus on organizing around a particular political viewpoint, as well as doing organizing work and activism that embodies and advances that political view. An example of a "general revolutionary" federation is the North Eastern Federation of Anarchist-Communists (NEFAC http://www.nefac.net), which is a federation with a broad scope that does a variety of organizing and activism consistent with the principles of Anarchist-Communism.

"Synthesist Federations": An Anarchist federation that is "synthesist" is one that attempts to be inclusive of all Anarchist tendencies and bring Anarchists of all the varying tendencies into a single organization – a "synthesist federation" can be considered a subcategory of "general revolutionary" federations. The closest example of a contemporary "synthesist" federation is the defunct Love and Rage Federation.

Federation Structure

How a federation is organized and how it makes decisions is entirely up to the members of the federation. But, in terms of decision making, it can be safely said that all currently viable Anarchist federations use recallable delegates that are sent by their collectives and/or affinity groups to federation assemblies to make decisions that pertain to the federation as a whole. In terms of the what the specific internal structure of a federation is or whether consensus or direct democracy is used by the federation to make decisions, there are no hard and fast rules other than the structure and decision making method used by the federation must be consistent with the fundamental principles of Anarchism.

What is a Network?

A useful way to define anarchist networks is to compare it to an anarchist federation. Networks are far less formal than a federation (although, some networks are formal enough in structure to blur the line between network and federation), and they usually only require an agreement to a set of principles or the sharing of a general political viewpoint as a qualification for membership. Also, unlike federations which emphasize collective action and organization, networks emphasize autonomy over formal organization. This does not mean to imply that anarchist networks are not organized or that they are against organization. It simply means that their organizational focus is on allowing individual member groups to engage in actions that fit within the context of the network and utilize the network itself primarily for solidarity and support of the individual member groups as needed.

Generally speaking, there are two main types of networks: formal networks and informal networks.

Formal Networks: What typically makes a network formal is that it has a "global" decision making structure – meaning that, like a federation, there is an overarching body of delegates that make decisions pertaining to the network as a whole – in most other aspects formal networks are mostly the same as informal networks. A good example of a formal network was, the now largely defunct, Direct Action Network (DAN).

Informal Networks:

In the last 20 years, the informal network structure has been, hands down, the most effective method of anarchist organization -- as the wide variety of highly successful informal network organizations prove. The use of informal networks in the Anarchist movement has been so widespread and successful that, in sheer numbers of groups and members, this form of organization currently makes up the bulk of Anarchists organizations around the world. Examples of informal Anarchist networks are: Food Not Bombs, Earth First!, Reclaim The Streets, Anti-Racist Action, Homes Not Jails, etc.