A-Infos (en) US, BRRN: The Platform at 100: Voices of Organized Anarchists Around the Globe (Vol. 2) V. Midada - Switzerland (ca, de, fr, it, pt, tr)[machine translation]

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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