This years’ Libertarian Days in Dresden are over. With 25 presentations/workshops, 8 meals and over 400 portions together we managed to create the biggest anarchist event in our town. This year we had guests from France, Poland, Czech Republic, Ukraine, Belarus, Russia and even West Germany! Raging from international struggles to local organizing every presentation was well visited with estimated 400-500 visitors during the whole week. This year once again we got together with local CCC crew to organize the weekend LiTa/Datenspuren on the weekend, which attracted not only typical political left and anarchists, but also people from hackers’ scene, while Dresden leftists and anarchists could dive into hackers culture a little bit more (Datenspuren itself had extra 45+ events only on the weekend extra to our events).
Also this year, our friends from animal liberation dresden organised (as part of the antispecies networking in Dresden) the first antispeciesism camp in Saxony with over 15 events on the topics of intersectionality, veganism, anarchism and animal liberation.In total, there were over 85 left-wing and progressive events in and for Dresden during the whole week. Quite good numbers for a city with this reputation, we think!
Self-financing of the event worked pretty well (the biggest costs were paying for the road of comrades from other parts of Europe): we even managed to collect extra money, that will be used for donations to international projects and organizing next LiTa in 2024.
What didn’t work out this year was awareness structure. Despite huge show up of the people during the events (some of the places were not big enough to host everyone interested in talks) we didn’t manage to find enough people, willing to organize and run an awareness group. We find it very problematic as during the big events it is important to create awareness structures, being present in the space and creating reference points for those, who might not feel secure or experience discrimination during such events. We hope next year this will change with more people involved in organizing of this basic infrastructure.
We also ran a survey on whether libertarian days should be renamed into anarchist days next year. Even though the questionary papers haven’t been processed yet, exit polls show that most probably there will be no LiTa but AT DD next year, or something like that 🙂
All in all, we would like to thank every single person who participated in organizing this year, from food and cleaning up to making talks and workshops – you are all amazing and your activity shows that anarchy works despite all the challenges. See you next year! <3