by Philip Rizk
On the morning of January 25, 2014 as people trickle into Tahrir Square, it is once again important to realize where we point our gaze to understand a bit of what is taking place in Egypt. A discourse of terror has scared many into supporting with blind faith a military leader who claims to be able to re-instate the good old days of stability. This discourse of fear also has the opposite effect and across the population there are those who are not falling for the terror trap.
Four short texts on the latest NO TAV arrests: 1 - When the enemy speaks clearly 2 - The world as they want it 3 - Letter from Mattia, Niccolo, Claudio 4 - Call for a nation-wide day of mobilization
*When the enemy speaks clearly*
There was something in the air. This past December 9th comrades Chiara, Mattia, Claudio and Niccolò were arrested and ccused of attempting to dismantle a part of the TAV (Turin-Lyon high-speed rail) construction site of Chiomonte on the night between May 13th and 14th, 2013. Nobody knew who inside the movement was going to be damaged by this and for what articular reasons. But the way the TAV supporters responded in the press and all major media left no space for doubt – it was lear there were going to be major consequences. Another red flag was the fact that Chief Prosecutor of Turin, Giancarlo Caselli, announced he would retire early: it’s hard to believe that such a prominent figure would leave the scenes so quietly.
by Those from the Friday Discussion, January 2013
Dear fellow travellers in struggle,
With this letter we want to pick up some of the questions that came up in the discussions on counter-insurgency at the antimilitarist camp against the GÜZ.1 First we’ll look at the instrumentalization of victims – in this respect, we like to present to you a very informative text about the war in Darfur, which can be read as a kind of blueprint of a strategy of legitimization in the war on terror. Moreover we will talk about collective memory, about our shared knowledge of those who step up to become our enemies, about their changing and yet old familiar strategies – as well as about our own perception of them, which is also undergoing changes that lead to different assessments and consequences. The pending question above the particular aspects of this letter was posed by a comrade right at the start of the discussion on Friday: „What do you want from US then?“ We like to take up this question as central thread, as it shows that we succeeded, despite bumpy moments in the presentation, to put into focus what we think is the crux of the matter, if we really want to stop the war.
To develop and keep up a dual-track strategy, that, simultaneously with the attempt to understand and to fight the ongoing war in all its actually atrocious existence, always taking as the point of departure our own life in wartime, a point of departure as completely personal as it is collective. To come to a realistic evaluation of our possibilities to act, we think it is necessary to acknowledge that which we have not chosen: That we are in a state of war everywhere in the world, even if the international division of labor distributes suffering unequally. The acknowledge of this point should not to be mistaken for a self-righteous „Yes to war!“ combative bathos, which despite feeling less helpless nevertheless gets stuck in a twisted understanding of our situation, swapping the places where power and powerlessness are to be found in our lives in a confused manner. Put rudely: Those ruling us don‘t give a shit which fantasies of omnipotence we devote ourselves to, regardless of whichever fantasy we like better, be it the pose of the wise prophet of peace or that of the apocalyptic nihilist warrior. Both serve the function to shift our desire for self-determination to spheres far out of our reach, while we can barely face up to even the most tiny changes in our everyday life.
Command of the Zapatista National Liberation Army, Mexico – December 30, 2012
To the People of Mexico:
To the People and Governments of the World:
Brothers and Sisters:
Compañeros and Compañeras:
In the early morning hours of December 21, 2012, tens of thousands of indigenous Zapatistas mobilized and took, peacefully and silently, five municipal seats in the southeast Mexican state of Chiapas.
In the cities of Palenque, Altamirano, Las Margaritas, Ocosingo, and San Cristóbal de las Casas, we looked at you and at ourselves in silence.
Ours is not a message of resignation.
It is not one of war, death, or destruction.
Our message is one of struggle and resistance.
by Blabiush / Tahrir International Collective Network, 10.07.2013
So you are confused? Maybe because the complexity of every society is confusing, especially in its turning points and the process of change. Anyway let’s try to answer some questions and accusations which emerge now and provide another perspective on the current situation.
First. Was it a revolution or not? Yes, it was and still it is. When you see 30 million highly motivated people on the street, you cannot talk just about the isolated decisions of power holders. Tamaroud is a grassroots movement, even though its aims are reformist and it gained the quick support of main opposition players which each wanted to gain benefits from changing the situation (it is obvious and was obvious, we exist in reality), and without this support the movement wouldn’t be so successful.
by Philip Rizk
The short answer is “No.” A longer answer follows. What happened in Egypt between 30 June and 3 July was not a coup against an elected government. It was another attempt by the generals to co-opt Egypt’s January 25 Revolution. The situation’s complexity and its globally and ideologically charged nature makes it hard to see the forest for the trees, here is my view on why the revolution is far from over:
For several years we have provided servers and communication infrastructure for the left. We have done our best to keep the servers safe and have resisted requests for user data by the authorities, using various means.
In short: we try to offer a liberating form of communication within the capitalist internet.
We have always seen the internet as a resource for our struggles and at the same time recognised it as contested political terrain, and we have acted accordingly. We thought that most on the left saw it the same way. But since more and more people on the left have been “using” Facebook (or Facebook has been using them), we are not so sure any more. Instead, our political work has been seen as lacking and exhausting. Encrypted communication with autonomous servers is not perceived as liberating but rather as annoying.
Speech at Boston College, 18 November 1970
Power to the people, brothers and sisters. I would like to thank you for my presence here tonight because you are responsible for it. I would be in a maximum-security penitentiary if it were not for the power of the people.
[Huey P. Newton] Chairman, for Ericka Huggins, for Angela Davis, for the New York 21 and the Soledad Brothers. For all political prisoners and prisoners of war. On the 28th and 29th of November we will have a People’s Revolutionary Constitutional convention in Washington, D.C. We cannot have that convention if the people do not come. After all, the people are the makers of world history and responsible for everything.
How can we have a convention if we have no people? Some believe a people’s convention is possible without the people being there. As I recall, that was the case in 1777.
Tonight, I would like to outline for you the Black Panther Party’s program and explain how we arrived at our ideological position and why we feel it necessary to institute a Ten-Point Program. A Ten-Point Program is not revolutionary in itself, nor is it reformist. It is a survival program.
Proposition 1
It is impossible to be everything we are supposed to be and to do everything we are ordered to, and when we try the failure we are doomed to is neither interesting nor enjoyable. To take the path of breaking with everything is the only worthwhile end, even if it is hopeless.
Everything is what is ordinary. It is hard to find a glimmer of anything alse in life, anything that would suggest an Outside. Everything is the way that things are organized, but it is also a command. An order to do and to be. Everything is ordinary in the sense that everything is ordered. And Everything is ordinary in the sense that everything tends to act as an order.
The order is that you must be Everything. So you fail at everything. You endlessly work towards he monstrous goal of accomplishing everything.
You will never get there.
We will never get there, and yet we are still here, still doing and being. Still ordered: organized and ordered around; organizing and ordering others around. That is all that Everything seemes to be.
by Jasper Bernes
Why Occupy? This is the question I want to answer in what follows. I ask, in this regard, not just about the tactical or strategic benefit of the outdoor occupation, but about the causality of the Occupy phenomenon in its entirety. Why did it arise at this particular moment and not some other moment, in this particular form and not some other form? Why did the occupations unfold in the way they did? Who took part and why?
When
First off, the question of timing. Why now? Or rather, to put it in more pointed terms, since the economic crisis has ushered in a newly volatile and riotous age, why did it take so long?
by Instances of Revolutionary Action / Disobedience Movement
Revolutionaries of the world,
On the occasion of the World Social Forum which will be held in Tunisia during March 2013, we believe that the liberal reformist approach opted for by the organizing bureaucracy of the Forum will in no way lead to a revolutionary project for the people of the world. Even though the event is presented as an opportunity for the revolutionaries coming from all corners of the globe to meet, we deem that the ultimate objective, namely the collapse of the capitalist system, will not be taken into consideration.
This Forum will take place in a highly critical time in the history of the world; social movements and uprisings are sweeping capitalism off its feet. Rage against the system does not recognize frontiers and geographical taxonomy of East and West. The so-called democratic states are as threatened by these risings as the worst dictatorships; the question to be examined is what are the driving forces of these revolts from Spain to Egypt and from Greece to Tunisia which are jeopardizing the capitalist states?
by Peter Gelderloos
by Wolfi Landstreicher
From the time anarchism was first defined as a distinct radical movement it has been associated with the left, but the association has always been uneasy. Leftists who were in a position of authority (including those who called themselves anarchists, like the leaders of the CNT and the FAI in Spain in 1936-37) found the anarchist aim of the total transformation of life and the consequent principle that the ends should already exist in the means of struggle to be a hindrance to their political programs. Real insurgence always burst far beyond any political program, and the most coherent anarchists saw the realization of their dreams precisely in this unknown place beyond. Yet, time after time, when the fires of insurrection cooled (and even occasionally, as in Spain in 1936-37, while they still burnt brightly), leading anarchists would take their place again as “the conscience of the left”. But if the expansiveness of anarchist dreams and the principles that it implies have been a hindrance to the political schemes of the left, these schemes have been a far greater millstone around the neck of the anarchist movement, weighing it down with the “realism” that cannot dream.
Enemy behind window. Cover, aim, shoot. At cyberspeed, the Laser-Duel-Simulation-System informs those in combat in real time. One man down, another hits his target. One man will continue training, another will remain on the ground in the steppe of Saxony-Anhalt. The German army but also soldiers from most of Nato armed forces train at the GÜZ Altmark. They learn how to invade and occupy a village in Afghanistan, Kosovo, or – following Nato prospect on wars to come – any old city on Earth. In 2012, construction will begin for a city of 500 buildings, with streets, an airport and a subway. This to train for urban warfare under any circumstances in neighborhoods, city centers, slums, industrial estates and shopping malls.
International anti-militarist camp – 12.-17. September 2012 at the GÜZ Altmark (germany) – Discussions and actions against the Combat-Training-Center of Bundeswehr and Nato.
(more…)
by Alex Trocchi
taken from the book revolt and crisis in greece – between a present yet to pass and a future still to come
by tiqqun
“We can imagine a time when the machine of governance would replace — for better or worse, who knows? — the insufficiency of the minds and devices of politics that are customary today.”
— Father Dominique Dubarle, Le Monde, December 28th, 1948
“There is a striking contrast between the conceptual refinement and dedication characterizing scientific and technical reasoning and the summary and imprecise style that characterizes political reasoning… One even asks oneself whether this is a kind of unsurpassable situation marking the definitive limits of rationality, or if one may hope that this impotence might be overcome someday and collective life be entirely rationalized.”
— An encyclopedist cybernetician writing in the 1970s.
by International autonomous committee against capitalist normality
by Pierleone Porcu
A revolutionary project must comprehend the destruction of all of the structures that have been built by capital. A perspective that aims to save the technological aspect of present day capitalism, believing it can be put to good social use, would mean to conserve a system of knowledge that has come from military research. Revolution cannot come about only in the parts of social reality we do not like, it also means opening up new spheres of human knowledge.
by Comrades from Cairo
To all those in the United States currently occupying parks, squares and other spaces, your comrades in Cairo are watching you in solidarity. Having received so much advice from you about transitioning to democracy, we thought it’s our turn to pass on some advice.
Indeed, we are now in many ways involved in the same struggle. What most pundits call “The Arab Spring” has its roots in the demonstrations, riots, strikes and occupations taking place all around the world, its foundations lie in years-long struggles by people and popular movements. The moment that we find ourselves in is nothing new, as we in Egypt and others have been fighting against systems of repression, disenfranchisement and the unchecked ravages of global capitalism (yes, we said it, capitalism): a System that has made a world that is dangerous and cruel to its inhabitants. As the interests of government increasingly cater to the interests and comforts of private, transnational capital, our cities and homes have become progressively more abstract and violent places, subject to the casual ravages of the next economic development or urban renewal scheme.
Research and Destroy
I
Like the society to which it has played the faithful servant, the university is bankrupt. This bankruptcy is not only financial. It is the index of a more fundamental insolvency, one both political and economic, which has been a long time in the making. No one knows what the university is for anymore. We feel this intuitively. Gone is the old project of creating a cultured and educated citizenry; gone, too, the special advantage the degree-holder once held on the job market. These are now fantasies, spectral residues that cling to the poorly maintained halls.
Incongruous architecture, the ghosts of vanished ideals, the vista of a dead future: these are the remains of the university. Among these remains, most of us are little more than a collection of querulous habits and duties. We go through the motions of our tests and assignments with a kind of thoughtless and immutable obedience propped up by subvocalized resentments. Nothing is interesting, nothing can make itself felt. The world-historical with its pageant of catastrophe is no more real than the windows in which it appears.
Committee for De-nuke General Strike
I can’t cope OH OH I can’t cope, Anymore ……
On behalf of students, informal workers and the status-less of the world, we call for a general strike, an immediate suspension of all labor, demanding immediate termination of all the nuclear power plants and abandonment of all the atomic weaponry productions. If not now, when can we begin our lives without nuclear power? If not Japan, suffering as it is under the nuclear disaster, which country can express aspiration for the world without atomic energy?
Sanya Workers Welfare Center + + + Sanya Struggle Committee + + + Anti-unemployment Struggle Committee
1:
There is no need for much phrasing about the devastating damages and tragedies caused by the earthquake of 3/11, as well as the coming catastrophic situation. At this moment, we, the coalition of self-support groups of homeless and underclass workers in Sanya, the vicinity closest to the stricken areas in the north within Tokyo metropolitan district, consider the situation as un-ignorable and will begin a new campaign to support refugees. Herein are three tasks for the struggle:
A) To create a support system by and for the people
B) To support the refugees from the stricken areas, and fight together for their/our rights and autonomy
C) To support the future refugees to be created inevitably by the effects of this calamity, and fight together for their/our rights and autonomy
All Freeters’ Union
“Unexpected Situation” is the phrase repeatedly used to rationalize deaths of tens of thousands of people caused by the recent disaster. This man-made calamity, I repeat, the worst man-made calamity is being rationalized with the single phrase, which still leaves hundreds of thousands individuals exposed to radiation and millions’ livelihoods destroyed.
The current state was never unexpected. Many people have repeatedly taken assumptions and given warnings over possibility of this very situation. The severe accident at the nuclear plant, hydrogen explosion and the massive radiation dissemination, following earthquake and tsunami, had been publicly warned by many, not limited to anti-nuclear activists or nuclear experts.
The disaster was folded within the capitalist system itself.
The following article was published March 10 on the blog “En route!Nouvelles de l’insurrection libyenne…”
We barely have news from Libya since yesterday. We only heard that on the front line fightings occurred on the outskirts of Ras Lanuf on the night of March 8th to 9th. Many insurgents had fled the city believing that it was soon taken back by Qaddafi’s forces. […] We take advantage of this lack of information coming from Libya, to publish an article that was sent by friends present in Egypt (Cairo). This concerns the eviction of Tahrir Square (that was still occupied since the end of January). Eviction that was almost not mentionned in the Western medias, and for a very good reason: it did not seem to be any journalists there.
On Tahrir Square in Cairo, the median strip is still occupied by tens of tents. This village is fenced and the entrance is guarded by its occupants. Anyone who wants to go in has to certify that he is neither a policeman nor a resident from an unfriendly neighborhood, and that he is not in the least malicious. For few days, many undercover cops, sent by the government, try to discredit the Tahrir Square implacable occupants by spreading rumors, slanders and confusion about what is happening here.
Russell Means
The following speech was given by Russell Means in July 1980, before several thousand people who had assembled from all over the world for the Black Hills International Survival Gathering.
The only possible opening for a statement of this kind is that I detest writing. The process itself epitomizes the European concept of “legitimate” thinking; what is written has an importance that is denied the spoken. My culture, the Lakota culture, has an oral tradition, so I ordinarily reject writing. It is one of the white world’s ways of destroying the cultures of non-European peoples, the imposing of an abstraction over the spoken relationship of a people.
So what you read here is not what I’ve written. It’s what I’ve said and someone else has written down. I will allow this because it seems that the only way to communicate with the white world is through the dead, dry leaves of a book. I don’t really care whether my words reach whites or not. They have already demonstrated through their history that they cannot hear, cannot see; they can only read (of course, there are exceptions, but the exceptions only prove the rule). I’m more concerned with American Indian people, students and others, who have begun to be absorbed into the white world through universities and other institutions. But even then it’s a marginal sort of concern. It’s very possible to grow into a red face with a white mind; and if that’s a person’s individual choice, so be it, but I have no use for them. This is part of the process of cultural genocide being waged by Europeans against American Indian peoples’ today. My concern is with those American Indians who choose to resist this genocide, but who may be confused as to how to proceed.
Assessment of the files about the “militant campaign against G8” – (file number 2 BJs 10/06-2) – October 2007
About some investigations for “terrorist association” in Germany…
This is an analysis done based on the thousands of files produced by repressive authorities while investigating some militant actions (mostly arson attacks) happened mostly between Berlin and Hamburg in the last years, which they relate to the “Militant Campaign against the G8 Meeting 2007 in Germany”, a campaign called on from some clandestine groups in 2005 (there is an extensive documentation on this both in english as in german language on the web).
They tried again for the second time to criminalize a book, “Autonome in Bewegung” (“Autonomen in movement”), which is an extensive report, written from different authors, which offers an overview about the first 23 years of activity of the “Autonomen” in Germany.
They considered it to be the “bible of the militant autonomen” (ndt: militant in the german context stays for a confrontative, pro-direct action attitude, not to be confused with the use done in other countries where it stands for affiliate to a party, political organization or for a self-sacrificing attitude) a mean of indoctrination for recruiting new militants.
A political proposal from the accused of Tarnac
“The Great Springtime of the Arab Peoples”; “revolution on the march”; “democratic transition”; “end of dictatorship.” The great discourse machines have been switched on, and they’ve got to be kept working full-time in order to present the overthrow of the pro-western regimes of the Maghreb as new victories for the West, as an unexpected victory for its values.
The revolutionary fervor that has recently overtaken the most prudent of editorialists first of all shows the intense immune-system reaction that the events have brought about within the dominant discourse. A violent paroxysm of pro-orientalism has popped up now, to put a kind of containment zone between us and the uprisings taking place as quickly as possible; and people marvel at these “revolutions,” so as to all the better sidestep the obvious facts they bring up so plainly – so as to all the better dissolve the unrest they stir in us.
Whatever illusions they’re trying to preserve must be pretty important to them for them to go making apologies about the insurrection as much as they have, glorifying the non-violence of a movement that burned 60% of Egypt’s police stations. What a nice surprise – the primary information channels are apparently now being run by friends of the people!
by some friends of Prometheus
Concerning the social war in Greece and the end of an over here and over there
The mirror of social peace begins to crack. The European social democratic management is expiring and the current political classes take notice of it. While in some other countries the legal bases for this shift have already been voted in the parliaments under relatively peaceful circumstances, the enmities in Greece took an unexpected width. This conflictuality could be put under the banner of the usual social movements against the dismantling of the welfare state, were it not that it is tending towards something very different. An agreement with the state in the logic of the old social pact seems to become less and less probable because there is no economic, political and social base left for it. We are experiencing something new. Accustomed to struggle against the social pacification and its consensus, we might now be facing a new form of management tending towards a climate of war. Therefore it is all the more necessary to develop new perspectives, to venture some new hypotheses on social war.
by a dissident exiled in North Africa – with assistance from the CrimethInc. Workers’ Collective
Egypt Today, Tomorrow the World
North Africa is in revolt. As usual, the most striking thing is how familiar everything is: the young man with the prestigious degree working at a coffee shop, the unemployment and bitterness, the protests set off by police brutality—for police are to the unemployed what bosses are to workers. These details cue us in that what is happening in Egypt is not part of another world, but very much part of our own. There are no exotic overseas revolutions in the 21st century. Make no mistake—though these events dwarf the riots in Greece and the student movement in England, they spring from the same source. To keep up with events, we urge you to read http://www.occupiedlondon.org/cairo and http://www.anarkismo.net/article/18645. But for these uprisings to offer any hope, we have to understand ourselves as part of them, and think and act accordingly. To that end, we’ve solicited this analysis from a comrade in North Africa.
The Revolution in Egypt: The End of the New Pharaohs?
Ex-dictator Ben Ali flees in his private jet from crowds chanting for regime change—the hated Egyptian police stations long used for torture in the name of “anti-terrorism” are burned down—men and women armed with kitchen knives organize neighborhood self-defense against the police—the army refuses to fire on their families in the streets.
What is happening—first in Tunisia and now in Egypt—is the beginning of the wave of full-scale revolutions that will inevitably follow the global financial crisis of 2008. Taking place in the wake of the failed “War on Terror,” these revolutions combine the latent force of massive numbers of unemployed youth with the dynamism of modern communication networks. They signal the conclusion of the decade of counter-revolution that followed September 11, 2001. Although they continue the exploration of new technologies and decentralized forms of organization initiated by the anti-globalization movement, the form and scale of these new revolutions is unprecedented. Largely anonymous groups are using the ubiquitous World Wide Web to spark leaderless rebellions against the pharaohs of the global empire of capital.
Slogans from a violent central London demonstration on December 9th, 2010 plus a note on a wall slogan by Patrick Cheval
by Dave & Stu’: December 9th, 2010
The violent, inspiring ‘student’ demo in central London on December 9th 2010 was the most imaginative demonstration we have ever been on including the annus mirabalis of 1968. The Trotskyist left were very much pushed aside, even the clued-in but all too reductive ultra-left hardly made a mark, as what was blatantly uppermost everywhere both in a genial, friendly but vandalistically spirited atmosphere and in many a homemade, stuck together, often gloriously-penned, cardboard placard was a kind of open-ended situationist influenced communality; an individual collectivity you knew was just right because it felt right. There was also a fair amount of spray-canned slogans on the base of the statues in Parliament Square: Things like: ‘Demand the Impossible ‘ (very 1968) and ‘First Greece then Paris now London in Insurrection’ followed by ‘ I wish I could say beautiful things but I can’t’ – when they just had and hauntingly!
It’s clear. The Party of Order seeks, with all the forces at its disposal, to have us return home. On this point, at least, the unions and the government are of one accord. Doubtlessly banking upon our most miserable inclinations, our insidious predilection for the emptiness and absences in which we have so perfectly forgotten how to live and struggle. Here they are mistaken. We will not go home; we who are everywhere homeless. For if there exists a single place that we might deem inhabitable, it’s within this event, in the intensities taking shape therein, thanks to which we are living. In accordance, above all, with the means we will be able to provide ourselves.
It’s clear. An insurrectional process gathers strength to the extent that the givens that make up its particular understanding of reality become, imperceptibly, blaring truisms. Being given that Capitalism is a universal lie, the form of its negation, inversely, will be that of a plurality of worlds combined jointly by the truths that hold them together.
+ + + The apocalypse is upon us + + + The spectacle of Green Capitalism: Of markets and carbon markets + + + Ecological fascism + + +
“The slogan ‘Revolution or Death!” is no longer the lyrical expression of consciousness in revolt: rather it is the last word of the scientific thought of our century. It applies to the perils facing the species as to the inability to of individuals in a society where it is well-known that the suicide rate is on the increase. The experts had to admit, reluctantly, that during May 1968 in France it fell to almost nil. That spring also vouchsafed us a clear sky, and it did so effortlessly, because a few cars were burnt and the shortage of petrol prevented others from polluting the air. When it rains, where there are clouds of smog over Paris, let us never forget that it is the government’s fault. Alienated production makes the smog. Revolution makes the sunshine.”
Guy Debord, A Sick Planet (1971)
The apocalypse is upon us
All of us secretly desire for this world to end. The grand illusion of western civilization has always been the myth of progress, namely that the flow of history would beneficiently and infinitely extend into the future.
For more than three weeks, a high scaled social movement is underway in the country. Pension reform has been it’s starting point.
We are well aware that everything is being done to make the weapon of striking less effective. The state uses the tools of law – legal obstacles and requisitions. and on the other hand, the atomization and segmentation resulting from the last thirty years of re-structuring of capital tends to neutralize the destructive capacity of the strike. The days of mass protest, to their limited effects, had the main interest of the base finding it’s legitimacy to grow and go beyond the framework imposed by the unions.
The following communiqué was written by comrades who briefly occupied the Opera at the Place de la Bastille, Paris on Saturday.
During the last days numerous initiatives have begun to flourish everywhere: secondary schools, train stations, refineries and highways have been blockaded, there have been occupations of public buildings, workplaces, commercial centers, directed cuts of electricity, and ransacking of electoral institutions and town halls…In each city, these actions are intensifying the power struggle and demonstrate that many are no longer satisfied with the forms of actions and slogans imposed by the union leaderships.
A text from the general strike in Barcelona, end of September 2010
The authorities affirm that it was an anti-system group, youth with a squatter asthetic.
But no. We were us…
This us that the police vans chased hysterically for hours in the city without being able to find us. This us that applaud when the windows of Corte Ingles (a major shopping center chain in Spain) were smashed.
This us that took up the word in the first assembly held in the expropriated bank in Catalunya Square, saying: “I am almost fifty years old. I have been on strike for almost four years, after having worked my whole life. I am desperate but this occupation has returned the smile to my face.”
Politics is the art of separation. Where life has lost its fullness, where the thoughts and actions of individuals have been dissected, catalogued and enclosed in detached spheres – there politics begins. Having distanced some of the activities of individuals (discussion, conflict, common decision, agreement) into a zone by itself that claims to govern everything else, sure of its independence, politics is at the same time separation between the separations and the hierarchical management of separateness.
This summer 200 people met for one week in Tarnac. From of their discussions emerged the following communiqué,
Standing up he says: “The counter-insurrection is not only the doctrine of intervention of western armed forces in Afghanistan, it’s the very nature of all government. The injection of such and such elements of language into circulation, urbanism, organized distraction, economic fables, everything emerges from the fear of losing control over the populations.” She responds to him: “Where I come from the government has such a fear that the people will begin to organize themselves due to the crisis, that they force the unemployed to run free bike-repair workshops in the streets, to recuperate used objects and to patrol the streets together with the police. The territory is occupied preventively.”
L.
In the country we were born in, there is nothing liberated or free. In Italy, as it is the case a bit anywhere else, we are about to attend an unprecedented »authoritarian turn«, which is about to implicate every aspect of our lives. We find ourselves facing a totalitarian and totalitarizing apparatus of propaganda and control, a system that crushes and paralyses us. Resigned and used to »captivity«, it deafens and blinds us for the suffering of ourselves and others. In the tragedy, there would be some paradox comfort to be found, if one could state that cynicism got the upper hand, but reality is much worse: What is taking its course here is a process of dehumanization of the individuals, it is the antechamber of barbarism.
some Roveretan Anarchists
summits & countersummits – PDF
The Illusion of a Center
Capitalism is a social relationship and not a citadel for the powerful. It is starting from this banality that one can confront the question of summits and counter-summits. Representing capitalist and state domination as a kind of general headquarters (it’s a question of the G8, the WTO or some other such organization) is useful to those who would like to oppose that managing center with another center: the political structures of the so-called movement, or better, their spokespeople. In short, it is useful to who propose merely a change in management personnel. Besides being reformist in essence and purpose, this logic becomes collaborationist and authoritarian in method, as it leads to centralization of the opposition.
Anyone can put an end to tossing about in the slavery of what they don’t know—and refusing the sop of empty words, come to daggers with life.
—C. Michelstaedter.
Life is no more than a continual search for something to cling to. One gets up in the morning to find oneself in bed a mere matter of hours later, a sad commuter between lack of desire and fatigue. Time passes, spurring us less and less. Social obligations no longer seem to break our backs as we have got used to spreading the weight. We obey without even taking the trouble to say yes. Death is expiated by living, wrote the poet from another trench. (more…)
in memory of Lambros Foundas, killed by the police
Athens. Greece. At two thousand kilometres distance. A nearly bankrupted Greek state and an economy that doesn’t function anymore. On the advice of the European Union, the ruling socialist party calls for a series of economic measures and restructurings. The ministers swear it will take “blood, sweat and tears”, (more…)
by Wolfi Landstreicher
Submission to domination is enforced not solely, nor even most significantly, through blatant repression, but rather through subtle manipulations worked into the fabric of everyday social relationships. These manipulations — ingrained in the social fabric not because domination is everywhere and nowhere, but because the institutions of domination create rules, laws, mores and customs that enforce such manipulations — create a logic of submission, an often unconscious tendency to justify resignation and subservience in one’s everyday relations in the world. For this reason, it is necessary for those who are serious about developing an anarchist insurrectional project to confront this tendency wherever it appears — in their lives, their relationships and the ideas and practices of the struggles in which they participate. (more…)
by flesh machine // ego te provoco // comrades
During the last two months, the strategy of counterinsurgency developed by the greek state since December has passed to a new phase of totalisation. If we speak of counterinsurgency and not of repression it is because the former in contrast to the latter is not so much a military type intervention, as an integrated political and social technology producing consent, fear and defeatism. It aims not at the immediate annihilation of the insurgents, but at the removal of their living space: the conceptual, affective and cultural plane of the insurgency. (more…)
Insurrectionary anarchism is not an ideological solution to all social problems, a commodity on the capitalist market of ideologies and opinions, but an on-going praxis aimed at putting an end to the domination of the state and the continuance of capitalism, which requires analysis and discussion to advance. We don’t look to some ideal society or offer an image of utopia for public consumption. Throughout history, most anarchists, except those who believed that society would evolve to the point that it would leave the state behind, have been insurrectionary anarchists. Most simply, this means that the state will not merely wither away, thus anarchists must attack, for waiting is defeat; what is needed is open mutiny and the spreading of subversion among the exploited and excluded. (more…)
by Reformgroup of the Reformgroup South-East
This text was written as a discussion text for the Autonomous Congress in Hamburg in October 2009, the first in 15 years. . [http://autonomerkongress.blogsport.de]
The time to always assure ourselves of our own certainties has to come to an end
To some our words might sound harsh. This happens easily if it´s the people you love that are at stake, those with whom we have discovered many liberating thoughts in the past, those with whom we have tried out ways of changing both ourselves and the world. Shared attempts, that, as small as they may have been, we still hold more than close to our hearts. If one or the other critique hits you, try to keep this in mind and don´t immediately jump into a defensive position. We want to keep going together, otherwise this text would not exist. (more…)
by Alfredo M. Boananno
I am always somewhat embarrassed when I begin a talk, at least to start with. And this embarrassment increases in the case of what we mistakenly call conferences, or as one more modestly tries to camouflage them, conference-debates. After all, it is a question of someone turning up from elsewhere, perhaps from another generation, as though they have rained in from the past. Someone who stands in this classroom to give a talk and strangely, even dangerously, resembles those who hammer your brains with quite different intentions. If you listen carefully however you will find that, beyond appearances, there is a considerable difference in the concepts I am about to outline. (more…)
by Alfredo M. Bonanno
Introduction
This book was written in 1977 in the momentum of the revolutionary struggles taking place in Italy at the time, and that situation, now profoundly different, should be borne in mind when reading it today.
The revolutionary movement including the anarchist one was in a developing phase and anything seemed possible, even a generalisation of the armed clash.
But it was necessary to protect oneself from the danger of specialisation and militarisation that a restricted minority of militants intended to impose on the tens of thousands of comrades who were struggling with every possible means against repression and against the State’s attempt — rather weak to tell the truth — to reorganise the management of capital.
That was the situation in Italy, but something similar was taking place in Germany, France, Great Britain and elsewhere. (more…)
by Plan b Bureau
Thesis 1
We define the metropolis as the compact group of territories and heterogeneous devices crossed in every point by a disjunctive synthesis; there is not any point of the metropolis, in fact, where command and resistance, dominion and sabotage are not present at the same time. An antagonistic process between two parts, whose relation consists in enmity, totally innervates the metropolis. (more…)
by Aden Marcos
I never met anybody who said when they were a kid, ‘I wanna grow up and be a critic.’ – Richard Pryor
We believe there are some who take action under animal liberation’s very broad banner that are just as concerned as we are with completely transforming this society based on exploitation and misery. However, we find many within radical and anarchist circles acritically embracing animal liberation philosophy and veganism. These ideas have maintained an inertia and perpetuance that have unfortunately met little challenge, especially in North America. We hope this critique will provide some starting points toward greater critical thought and theoretical reflection, tools that will be required of us if we are to take effective action against domination and exploitation. (more…)
by Zig-Zag
In 1995 a month-long standoff occured in ‘British Columbia’ between natives and the police after a local ranger asked the police to evict a sundance camp. In a firefight on September 11, police fired tens of thousands of rounds and blew up a truck. Although lightly armed, the warriors suceeded in disabling a ‘Bison’ armoured personal carrier used by the police. Like most of B.C., Secmepmec territory remains unceeded. (more…)
by Zig-Zag
During the summer of 1990, a 77-day standoff occured in the mohawk territories of Kahnawake and Kanehsatake/Oka, near Montreal. Mohawk warriors confronted over 2000 Quebec police and 4500 Canadian soldiers…
This communique was given out by a portion of the Black Bloc during the march to the Bella Centre on Saturday at the protests against the U.N. COP-15. Shortly after releasing this communique, windows of the Danish stock exchange and Foreign Ministry were broken. When the police attempted arrests, the Black Bloc was physically prevented by some members of Climate Justice Action from joining the “System Change Not Climate Change” bloc. While the COP15 is over, the debate over the role of internal policing and the “non-violence” code of Climate Justice Action has just begun in the European autonomous movements. (more…)
by Wolfi Landstreicher
Introduction: A few definitions and explanations
Any potentially liberatory struggle among the exploited and dispossessed must be based on autonomous self-organization. As anarchists, who are also usually among the exploited, we have every reason to participate in and encourage these struggles. But since we have specific ideas of how we want to go about our struggles and a specifically revolutionary aim, our participation takes the form of an intervention seeking to move the struggles in a specific direction. Having no desire to be any sort of vanguard or leadership or to be caught up in the joyless game of politicking, we find ourselves in a tension of trying to live our conception of struggle and freedom within the context of an unfree reality, of trying to confront the real daily problems we face with our own refusal to play by the rules of this world. Thus, the question of autonomous self-organization and anarchist intervention is an ongoing problem with which to grapple, refusing to fall into easy answers and faith in organizational panaceas. (more…)
by the Invisible Committee, January 2009
Everyone agrees. It’s about to explode. It is acknowledged, with a serious and self-important look, in the corridors of the Assembly, just as yesterday it was repeated in the cafes. There is a certain pleasure in calculating the risks. Already, we are presented with a detailed menu of preventive measures for securing the territory. The New Years festivities take a decisive turn—”Next year there’ll be no oysters, enjoy them while you can!” To prevent the celebrations from being totally eclipsed by the traditional disorder, 36,000 cops and 16 helicopters are rushed out by Alliot-Marie[1]—the same clown who, during the high school demonstrations in December, tremulously watched for the slightest sign of a Greek contamination, readying the police apparatus just in case. We can discern more clearly every day, beneath the reassuring drone, the noise of preparations for open war. It’s impossible to ignore its cold and pragmatic implementation, no longer even bothering to present itself as an operation of pacification. (more…)
As long as the present social order exists, it will be impossible to avoid interaction with the various facets of the power structure. Those of us who call ourselves anarchists need to choose to make these interactions clearly adversarial and conflictual, reflecting our desire to destroy the power structure completely. (more…)
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