How to organize locally and nationally

Why organize on a higher level? How to avoid or reduce informal power structures? Who is organizing? What structure is helpful in order to organize beyond certain social strata and age? What have been successes and failures in the organizing process? The idea for the discussion is to share ideas what kind of organizational processes could consolidate and increase movement activities in the US.

Marcus Graetsch and Dario Azzellini have been long time activists in Berlin. They will share their experiences of organization and coordination as local group (FelS, with some 80 active members) and as a nation wide coordination structure (the IL with some 800 active people).

FelS (For a leftist current, http://fels-berlin.de) is a collective founded in Berlin in 1991. FelS helped to build the IL (Interventionist Left, http://www.dazwischengehen.org/) a network of 23 different collectives and magazines all over Germany. The IL is the biggest movement network in Germany. It organized Blockupy Frankfurt in 2012 and is organizing more European protest in 2013. It was one of the main organizers of the anti-G8 protest in 2007 and the annual blocking of Europe's biggest Nazi march in Dresden, it participates in the anti-nuclear protests. FelS develops concrete political interventions on the territory (as for example anti-racist mobilizations with refugees, anti-climate-change activities or organizing at a job center through militant research) and coordinates with other movements around Europe.

FelS has argued in favor of non-hierarchical organization and the need of broader organization and coordination structures since the beginning. Therefore it developed with time an interesting internal working structure as well as it participated in several attempts of building a national coordination until the initiative of the IL succeeded.