The Venice Conference was an extraordinary display of solidarity and organisation. I strongly doubt that leftist' groups of such diverse opinions involving 3000 people under the vague rubric of 'anarchism' could have gathered for a week with such a minima! display of conflict, anger, factionalism, and harsh debates. Apart from a few incidents, particularly during the closing plenary, the conference was marked less by heated argument than searching discussion. The work done by our Italian friends and their associates from other countries was exptary for its dedication, efficiency, and foresight. The Venice conference was on every account a rare gathering of the libertarian left: numerically larger than anything that anyone couid anticipate, implicitly committed to searching discussion rather than ideological wrangling, marvellously organised to express every level of experience from major plenums, group discussions, cultural events, and entertainment in Venetian piazzas—a tour de force of coordination and logistics.

But it was also marked by paradoxes we cannot afford to ignore. The size of the gathering was evidence not of the strength of the libertarian left but in some respects of its weakness. That so many people had to

meet each other, to create their own milieu, partly at least reflects their isolation at home. One could be congratulatory that 3000 people gathered in Venice from many different countries if one is not reminded that we have few anarchist movements and no vital anarchist milieu in any country today. We had to gather together in large numbers to allay the feeling of isolation that we face at home. On this score, paradoxically, the si2e of the Venice gathering betrayed our numerical weakness and lack of influence in our respective countries.

Another paradox 1 should note rs that our relative restraint in dealing with conflicting views reflects in part the doubts that trouble us about our traditional anarchist outlook. Our revolutionary optimism has been dampened by the historic decline of the classical workers movement; the enormous growth of the State, reinforced'economy; the fading of insurrectionary models that guided anarchism and revolutionary socialism for more than a century (models that have been rendered meaningless in the West by the sophisticated and lethal armamentorium of the State); the extent to which the propaganda and socialization machinery of the prevailing system from schools to fnass media have effectively subverted the spirit of rebellion, much less revolution.

Disempowerment has become the malaise of our era, the feeling that the destiny of society no longer lies within the hands of the individual or even the collective. No less than most people themselves, we too feel that the social 'machine' is running without any visible human and rational control along paths that threaten the existence of society itself, indeed of complex life-forms on this planet.

Venice unfolded under the shadow of an eclipsing anarchist tradition of syndicalism and the hidden challenge of so-called 'new social movements' like ecology, feminism, anti-militarism, communitarianism, and urban concepts of what in England is called 'local socialism' and what 1 have designated for some twelve years as 'libertarian municipal-ism.' The old working class 'paradigm' of 'wage tabor versus capital' is giving way in much of Western society to new movements that cut across traditional class lines and strategies for social change.

In America and most of Western Europe, it is not the labor movement [indeed, apart from rare exceptions one can hardly speak of a revo-lutionary labor movement) but environmental, women's and peace movements which seem to be on the cutting edge of social change—and in England and parts of North America, movements for town and city autonomy. Such movements, far from being incompatible within the

anarchist tradition, originated that tradition as anarcho-collectivism and municipalism before syndicalism pushed this communitarian emphasis to the background. Venice seemed to be haunted by this earlier anarchist tradition and, at least, by the need to develop a perspective that would take account of new developments in capitalism.

If ! were asked what constituted the 'hidden agenda' of the Venice conference, I would be obliged to say that it was the almost unexpressed need to develop a libertarian politics in the classical sense of the term—not stagecraft, parliamentarism, party 'politics,' and the iike, but politics in the sense of managing the affairs of the po/is or, if you like, the 'commune.' This distinction between forms of local seif-management, an active concept of citizenship, municipalization of the economy, participatory forms of decision-making, and the confederation of localities as a dual power against the centralized State and economy ont he one hand and parliamentarism and Statecraft on the other has yet to be made in anarchist ideology or at least, fully developed in ways that deal with the new changes introduced by the development of capitalism in the later half of this century.

The Venice conference was left in a "state of suspension between the paradoxes I've described and the new needs raised by the closing of an old era and the opening of a new one. It was a magnificently organised conference, a stimulating one, an example of tolerance and elan in our movement —and it was an unfinished one. It requires theoretical study, development, honest clarification and exploration, and the practical application of new ideas, many of which are still inchoate, before we can say in a real sense that it is completed. The conference is still going on — not in any metaphorical sense that it is a 'living memory' but in the problematic sense that it posed crucial questions for anarchism that have yet to be fully explored and answered. I refer to the need for dealing with the 'new social movements' that still puzzle so many traditional Marxists and anarchists alike, the decline of older historical movements that were focused overwhelmingly on the productive sphere, and the need to formulate a libertarian politics that is neither Statist, parliamentary, nor 'social' in the sense of collectives and cooperatives, but municipalise confederal, localist, and counter to the centralized State and economy.

Murray Bookchin