Anyone know whatever happened to NEAN?

Question

Is it alive or is it dead? They never seemed to come to grips with if they were a network or an organization.

Answer 1

NEAN, the NorthEastern Anarchist Network, seems to of faded away due to lack of interest.  The same thing happened to the Midwest Action Network, which was also a largely anarchist group.  After some minor criticism from the Internet and a lack of participation from those that attended prior meetings, MAN didn't seem to want to restart.  There were also many other Midwest and Great Lakes based networks that might of made sense forming or threatening to form at the time.  NEAN and MAN seemed to of been inflated by the rebirth of Students for a Democratic Society, which also has faded.  It is my opinion (and could be fact if I could find time to discover proof) that anarchist interest in SDS was fleeting and these other groups were an attempt to be more specific outside the SDS, which had issues with old SDS individuals attempting to guide the group in the liberal directions they had taken, rather than recognize SDS was more anarchist in orientation than liberal.

Anyways, NEAN and MAN and many other networks all faded away before the Crimethinc/APOC controversy, which seemed to be the largest event of the time to redefine what it meant to be an anarchist.  Obama and the conformity of many anarchists towards electorialism killed much of the active anarchist involvement, only to be reborn through influence from Greece, the promotion of the Coming Insurrection, events in Oakland and then later Occupy Wall Street spreading.

All of this can be debated, but this seems to be the general trajectory of decline and rebirth of anarchists in the mid-to-late 00s.

Comments

This sounds like the same old story I'm familiar with from out in Cascadia - following '99 there was an attempt to do something similar with the Association of Northwest Anarchists, which was, ostensibly, a network of autonomous groups working on projects throughout the US regions of Cascadia. In truth there was an affinity group in Seattle, one in Bellingham, I think one in the suburbs of Seattle, some individuals in both of those cities as well as Tacoma (and maybe... MAYBE Olympia), and a list serve that was not actually connected to the association officially. However, initial problems arose when some of the folks from Seattle started pushing for an organization which would somehow absorb pre-existing anarchist projects (I recall a meeting where someone proposed that Left Bank Books, the Seattle Food Not Bombs group and I think Books to Prisoners could become working groups, to which the folks involved with all were like, "ummmm - fuck you."

Later, when some folks started arguing over the nuances of which -isms should and should not be explicitly included in the statement of principles, pretty much everyone but the Seattle ag walked away.

You might be not-very-surprised to hear that some of the same names cropped up trying to start the various failed anarchist communist federations in the Pac NW in more recent years, none of which are seemingly doing anything now, though if I am wrong, I'd love to be corrected ;)

These answers and comments actually are giving me thoughts on a question that i can't quite form, so I'll crowdsource it (ick! hate that term)- I am wondering about the tension between formal membership organizations, associations of autonomous groups and individuals, and even more informal alliances. Primarily why each fails, and how we can work to prevent the latter from becoming, over time, the former (or are associations just front groups for pro-organizational/leftist  entryists seeking to infiltrate the post-left/anti-organizationalist crowd), but I'd like to do it in a way that doesn't sound as snarky as all that.

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I don't think there is much grounds to put a lot of attention in networks and federations anymore.  As you seem to point out, there is a lot of wasted effort and a desire to force likeness when these large groups attempt to find a reason for unity when none existed beforehand.

A way to look at it is each (open/semi-open) anarchist group can make a list of contacts throughout the region to share their existence with in some face-to-face way on occasion.  Your anarchist acting troupe just wrote and practiced a play?  Your anarchist band just get a new set of songs lined up?  Your anarchist zine just published a new issue?  Share all of this and more at a regional gathering.  If there is anarchist media in the area, ask them to attend and attempt to record what is going on for the sake of posterity.  This seems to be more important than ideological or action based regional networks and probably would be more interesting to attend without the baggage of forcing unity beyond friendliness.

Answer 2

Pretty much dead, yeah, although it's listserv lives on. NEAN was actually a network of organizations, and after the two largest  of those, Pittsburgh Organizing Group and the Boston Antiauthoritarian Movement, both folded there wasn't a lot of energy left. It didn't help that the Noreaster (NEAN's newspaper) stopped publication due to burnout within the editorial collective. It also took a lot of work to organize the biannual (theoretically) assemblies and people began to feel that the result wasn't really worth it.

I don't believe the decline of SDS had  anything to do with NEAN's collapse, and as far as I remember NEAN never included an SDS chapter. The last assembly was in winter 2010, which I think was well after APOC and MAN had both disappeared.

Comments

MAN never had an SDS chapter either, but both were active during the same peak period around 2007-9, something like that.  I wouldn't say "well after" a year's difference isn't that long.  A listserv means crap, Revolutionary Anti-Imperialist Network (RAIN) had a listserv that lasted several years meanwhile the actual network was functional for three anti-war protests before collapsing.

When MAN was active, it seemed like NEAN was already in decline, but that could just be how I perceived it.  Don't get me wrong.  MAN had a much shorter lifespan, which I already went into, but NEAN wasn't even on the map by the time the APOC/Crimethinc thing happened.