Poetry against the state

Luis Andrés Bredlow (left) and Agustín García Calvo

From Lundi Matin (#420, 18/03/2024), we share below an interview with Luis Andrés Bredlow and a memorial to him by Anselm Jappe (Lundi Matin #115, 30/09/2017) after Bredlow’s death. Our hope is that these may serve as a modest introduction to an author who is largely unknown in the English speaking world.


We take the opportunity of the publication of Luis Andrés Bredlow’s Essais d’hérésie by Éditions Crise & Critique editions, to publish the translation that we received of an unpublished interview dating from 1995 and briefly present this author whose work we have published before, with the article “De la machine sociale à la révolution biologique”. For a more detailed presentation, we refer the reader to the portrait “Souvenir de Luis Bredlow” that his friend Anselm Jappe wrote at the time of his death.

Luis Andrés Bredlow (1958-2017) taught the history of philosophy at the University of Barcelona. Poet, translator, essayist, philosopher, specialist in Parmenides, after having contributed to the dissemination of Situationist ideas in Germany from the end of the 1970s through the journal Ausschreitungen, which he co-founded with the publisher Klaus Bittermann. He also participated in the Barcelona magazines Archipiélago, Mania and Etcétera, in which he published numerous articles of social criticism, as well as translations of texts of critical value theory. We owe him, among other things, a translation of the passage “The fetish character of the commodity and its secret” from Marx’s Capital (introduced by Anselm Jappe), an edition of Max Stirner’s Minor Writings [Écrits mineurs], commented translations of the works of Gorgias and Diogenes Laertius, an introduction to the philosophy of Plato and that of Kant, as well as a critical edition of the Parmenides’ Poem, in collaboration with Agustín García Calvo. In addition to the Essais d’hérésie, the reader will be able to read in French his article “La contradiction et le sacré” published in issue nº 6 of the journal Jaggernaut, as well as his introductions to the works translated into French by Agustín García Calvo (La société du Bien-être, Le pas de côté, 2014; Histoire contre tradition. Tradition contre Histoire, La Tempête, 2020 ; Qu’est-ce que l’État?, Atelier de création libertaire, 2021 and Apophtegmes sur le marxisme, Crise & Critique, 2022).

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Giorgio Agamben: The experience of language is a political experience

From Quodlibet (16/02/2024) …

How would it be possible to really change the society and culture in which we live? Reforms and even revolutions, although they transform institutions and laws, relations of production and objects, do not question those deeper strata that shape our vision of the world and which would have to be reached for the change to be truly radical. However, we have daily experience of something that exists differently from all the things and institutions that surround us and that conditions and determines them: language. We are primarily concerned with named things and, yet, we continue to talk in vain and, as is often the case, without ever questioning what we are doing when we speak. In this way, it is precisely our original experience of language that remains stubbornly hidden from us and, without us realising it, it is this opaque zone inside and outside us that determines our way of thinking and acting.

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After Pantin: Judith Butler

From the Verso Books Blog (14/03/20249 …


In response to remarks they gave at an event in Paris earlier this month, Judith Butler has received hate mail while Zionist publications have attacked them. In this article, Butler defends and clarifies their position.

This article was originally published by Médiapart on 11 March.


My sojourn in France this academic year has been full of interesting twists and turns. First, an event was cancelled by the Mayor of Paris in early December on anti-zionism and antisemitism in which I had hoped to draw a distinction between the two. The event was rescheduled to take place at Pantin and many people arrived for the conversation on that topic that I had with Francoise Vergès, Michèle Sibony, Olivier Marbouf, producer and author associated with the Relais de Pantin. The sponsoring organizations included two anti-Zionist Jewish groups, and several other left organizations. After the event, Paroles d’honneur posted a recording of the event, and then critics circulated an extracted portion in which I am featured as saying that the attacks perpetrated against Israelis on October 7th was part of a resistance movement. I proposed that we think about Hamas not as a terrorist group, but as part of that movement. What the extract failed to include was the next part of my argument, namely, that we can, and must, disagree with the tactics of such a movement, and that my view is that the atrocities committed then, and the genocidal actions of the State of Israel, are both to be opposed.  I then went on to talk about non-violence and what it means, emphasizing that my aspiration for the region, shared by many others, is a form of governance that would embody principles of equality, justice, and freedom for all, regardless of religion, race, national original.

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Für das Leben, gegen den Tod/For life, against death

Malak Mattar, Mother Nature Embracing the Boy and His Horse, 2023

From Freedom News (12/03/2024) …


Writing from Vienna, Christopher Hütmannsberger grapples with the current state of confusion in the German-speaking Left around the genocide currently unfolding in Gaza and argues that this is a litmus test for understanding how people respond to oppression.

There are those days that seem to cancel out everything else. Days that make all your prior wants or even needs seem small and insignificant. Days that make any and all former plans void. A break so clear that seemingly all our memories from before that day change, and suddenly, we think back to a time when things were carefree.

As if they ever were.

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Fredy Perlman: Anti-Semitism and the Beirut Pogrom

It galls me that a new Fascism should choose to use the experience of the victims of the earlier Fascism among its justifications.

Fredy Perlman

We return to the work of Fredy Perlman, this time with the Israeli genocide of Palestinians in Gaza as background. Perlman published this essay in 1989 and it remains painfully and tragically contemporary.

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Germany: The Fight against the Tesla Gigafactory

From the CrimethInc. collective (08/03/2024).


Some Occupy the Forest, Some Shut Down the Power Grid

For several years now, locals, anarchists, environmentalists, and others have been engaged in a struggle against a Tesla “gigafactory” in the small town of Grünheide, only five kilometers southeast of Berlin. This is the biggest factory producing electric cars for Tesla in all of Europe. Many important issues converge in this conflict: the struggle between global capitalism and local ecosystems, the question of what counts as “sustainable” and who gets to define it, the power that billionaires like Elon Musk have acquired and are using to reshape our society in line with their authoritarian vision.

Four years ago, the government of Brandenburg overruled popular opposition to permit Tesla to destroy a forest in order to build the factory. Now, Tesla is seeking to expand the facility at further cost to local forest and groundwater. Two weeks ago, a majority of residents of Grünheide voted against Tesla’s proposed expansion.1 According to the law, however, the final decision is up to politicians, not the locals.

Shortly after the vote, activists established an occupation in the forest that is to be destroyed to make way for the factory expansion. A hundred people are now occupying the trees with a variety of structures. Thus far, the police have observed them but have yet to undertake an eviction.

On the morning of March 5, 2024, a power pylon caught fire near Steinfurt, directly south of the Tesla gigafactory in Brandenburg. The act of sabotage temporarily cut off electricity to thousands of households in various parts of Berlin. It also halted work at the Tesla factory for at least a week, likely costing the company hundreds of millions of euros.

A communiqué appeared claiming responsibility in the name of Vulkangruppe—“Volcano Group”—a clandestine anarchist group said to have been active since 2011. The group has claimed credit for burning a power cable in Berlin-Charlottenburg in 2018 and cutting the power supply to the Tesla factory construction site in Grünheide in 2021, among other actions.

Here, we present an interview with a participant in the forest occupation alongside a translation of the communiqué by Vulkangruppe, in order to offer multiple perspectives from the movement against the Tesla gigafactory.

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2023 in Chile: 50 Years of the Military Coup

From the CrimethInc. collective (07/03/2024).


Neoliberal Consolidation after the Revolt of 2019

In 2019, an uprising broke out in Chile, wresting control of the streets from police and politicians. Eventually, the authorities managed to redirect this momentum into an effort to replace the constitution, itself a relic of the brutal dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet. The attempt to ratify a constitution more aligned with the values of the demonstrators failed, however, illustrating the risks of channeling grassroots movements into seeking change through institutional means.

As a result, a resurgent right wing has regained the initiative in Chile, while the left politicians who came to power have subordinated themselves to the market and the police. To this day, Chile is governed according to the constitution that was introduced as a consequence of the military coup. In the following account, members of the Anarchist Assembly of Biobío trace this story through the end of the year 2023, chronicling the consequences of the cooptation of the uprising of 2019.

Perhaps the moral of this story is that, rather than simply attempting to reform the ruling institutions, the participants in movements for liberation must understand themselves as the ones who must directly implement the changes they desire.

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The Politics of Women’s Blues

Bessie Smith

We share two texts on women’s blues as a radical questioning of sex, gender and race in the racist and hetero-patriarchal social relations of the United States. In the first, which provides the title to our post, Hazel V. Carby considers the sexual politics of women’s blues and focuses on black women as cultural producers and performers in the 1920s. This is followed by the first chapter of Angela Y. Davis’ brilliant work, Blues Legacies and Black Feminism: Gertrude “Ma” Rainey, Bessie Smith, and Billie Holiday (1998).

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For March 8th: Judith Butler on Gender

Judith Butler in Barcelona’s Centre de Cultura Contemporània de Barcelona (2018). Gender and sexuality for teenagers: Discussion with Miquel Missé and 300 students

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For March 8: Gender is a Weapon

Benjamin Clemens, Immolate, 1912

Gender is a Weapon: Coercion, domination and self-determination

Sally Darity

(From The Anarchist Library)

I was on the bus recently, and a guy about my age got on the bus and sat across from me. He and some others were looking out of the bus windows at some men in red dresses. We didn’t know why they were wearing dresses, but the guy across from me said, “That’s scary.” Another guy said, “Whatever, as long as they don’t come on the bus.” I wanted to say “what’s so scary about men in dresses?” But worrying that I might look enough like a dyke to him to get shit for it, and worrying that the effort and fear involved with confronting someone might make me cry, I didn’t say anything. I just wondered. What makes a guy in a dress so scary? And what about homophobia, transphobia, or whatever you want to call it without knowing why that guy was wearing a dress, causes men to bond by shit talking about it? There are many ways in which we are taught what our appropriate gender is, and when someone feels threatened by a gender identity or expression, we can guess that there lies the key to our struggle.

Gender is used against us, but we can also use it to free each other and ourselves. If we start undermining the rules and constraints of gender, we can more successfully fight patriarchy and domination. By writing this, I hope to plant seeds of gender rebellion, solidarity, and gender freedom.

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