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I came in after 9/11, and it seemed to young me like an interesting time for a post-anti-globalist anarchism. I remember there being a healthy mix of tendencies at the North American Anarchist Convergence in Athens, OH. Class war types, Bookchinites, primitivists, and post-leftists were all in attendance. Some French ultra leftists even showed up, possibly just to argue with Lawrence Jarach (j/k, sort of).

Later in the decade gatherings, convergences, rendezvous, etc., of varying degrees of size and consistency became more common. Was it inevitable that enthusiasm for them would dim? Even the non-anarchist National Conference on Organized Resistance, as well as similar regional affairs, are long gone, at least in my neck of the woods. I used to know anarchists in nearby states just by their faces. This is not the experience of baby anarchists today.

The bookfair model seems to me like a poor replacement. Gatherings can be large or small, urban or rural, sober or drunken, transaction-friendly or strictly anti-market. A bookfair is static where a gathering is very adaptable across different locations, tendencies, and populations.

I don't know if the larger sort of non-partisan anarchist congress would be possible today, though. It would either be a very small affair for oldsters or a total social media shit show. I would love to be proven wrong, though!