The International Anarchist Defence Fund turns one year old this month so to celebrate, the IADF shares some thoughts on anarchist solidarity work and the issues that influenced the collective’s creation.
Our collective solidarity structure provides support to anarchists and anarchist sympathisers around the world who are persecuted or find themselves in a difficult life situation because of their political ideas or activities. Everyone in the collective – probably just like everyone else who is reading this article – has been either involved in existing solidarity groups or faced repression themselves. Therefore, when we were thinking about creating the Fund, we masterminded it as something that would be solving a bunch of problems related to solidarity in our ranks.
First of all, we should say that the Fund is not a competitor of existing solidarity and antirepression structures, but rather a complementary option. The A-Fund doesn’t claim to be a group that offers long-term support or legal advice, educates activists against interactions with the police, etc. as many ABC groups do. We only provide one-time financial help and some informational support.
Why do we think it’s important?
Here comes the first issue with solidarity, and it is an unequal distribution of resources. The contexts we are born into, and our backgrounds influence the amount of potential financial support we can give and receive. It’s not only about your family or professional privilege, but also the solidarity tradition in the movement, availability of activist infrastructure or just activists around, the ways the state uses to suppress people in your region, connections of your movement with international groups, etc. The mixture of these factors results in having people who enjoy extensive support and collect money on their fundraisers in no time, while we never hear about cases in regions that are not so good in international languages and Facebook promotions. The A-Fund is established to shatter the status quo and provide easier access to international money globally. This is one of the reasons we are trying to be accessible in terms of language – our website features seven languages at the moment with more coming.
