I recently had the opportunity to attend a regularly-scheduled meeting of CAN (the Chicagoland Anarchist Network), where I was able to observe first-hand the workings of a putative "anarchist" group, and I would like to offer here, in this public forum, a brief critique of the event , in the hopes of stimulating further discussion on this topic both within and outside of CAN.

On a warm, sunny Saturday, the CAN members elected to meet in a sterile, dreary third-floor conference room, which, to me, indicated a lack of imagination and spontaneity, since it would have been easy, and pleasant, to carry on the discussion outside at that time.

Although there were no more than a dozen people present, the format of the meeting was (un)surprisingly rigid. As I walked in, I noticed a board off to one side with a list of topics to be discussed, each one being numbered, and with a set number of minutes of discussion time allotted.

In addition, one of the CAN members had been chosen to act as "facilitator", which meant that he decided in what order people would speak, and would time them in order to keep all "discussion" within the schedule.

Given this type of structure, it was virtually impossible for any type of real, spontaneous conversation or exchange of ideas to develop, since people were not so much talking to each other as they were filling up their allotted time with whatever comments they had to make.

So much for the meeting process. As for the content of the meeting, I heard nothing that sounded particularly exciting, inspiring, or thought-provoking. One of the longest topics "discussed" was a proposal for Points of Unity - a kind of group statement of belief, rather like a party program; the question of why a group of anarchists should be interested in such a boring political device was not considered. Several CAN members each offered their own proposed "Point", and each one was extremely bland and inoccuous, which is only to be expected, when one is searching for the lowest ccommon political denominator. They, the "Points", were, in fact, just a typical radical/progressive laundry list.

To sum up, I saw very little at this event to differentiate it from various other leftist meetings I have attended over the years, where group identity and a fetishism for formal structure take precedence over any concern for individual initiative, creative thinking, or spontaneous action.