Finding our way in the ZAD of Notre-Dame-des-Landes with the words of Miguel Amorós

A March 2018 interview in which Miguel Amorós discusses his anti-development concepts, the global trend towards mega-urbanization, the destructive tendencies of capitalist development, Latin American populist governments and their social basis, the civil society movement, and perspectives for a movement to create a better world. (Libcom.org 17/04/2018)

If Amorós does not speak directly to the ZAD in the interview, his radical politics points to de-industrialisation, de-urbanisation, de-centralisation … what could be taken as the proliferation of ZADs.

An earlier text by Amorós however does, written after the french government’s decision to abandon the airport project for the ZAD; a text that retains all of its relevance. (Libcom.org 17/04/2018)

We close with a video-interview with Miguel Amorós, in spanish.

Miguel Amorós interviewed by Rubén Martín for El Informador(Guadalajara, Mexico—November 2017)

According to Amorós, many of the changes that are supposedly taking place, only seem to be taking place. For this anarchist theoretician, society is confronted by a situation that requires the dismantling of the entire capitalist system in order to create new ways of relating to one another.

Listening to and reading the works of the libertarian thinker Miguel Amorós, allow direct access to the most lucid and radical critical thought; the experience is like being on the receiving end of a hail of hammer blows against beliefs and assumptions that purport to question modern society. Amorós repeatedly dismantles positions that claim to be critical of capitalism: sustainable development, de-growth, the alternative based on the workers movement, not to speak of the “civil society” platforms or the weak thought that arose from postmodernism—none of them, according to him, leads to a way out of the capitalist catastrophe. Modern capitalist society is a machine that produces harmful phenomena from which it is only possible to escape by dismantling the whole system and creating other social relations.

Amorós says that a subversive movement capable of bringing about revolutionary changes must have an anti-development, anti-state, de-industrializing and autonomous orientation. The big cities must undergo de-urbanization; the contemporary metropolis is a territory that produces “accumulations of solitary masses” who want security, but are incapable of winning freedom. The subjects of this possible revolutionary transformation will no longer be the working class masses and their allies, but those who have been marginalized by the State and capital, as well as the traditional peasantry and the indigenous communities of the world.

The critique that Amorós offers is a total critique of capitalist modernity, and this critique has its roots in libertarian thought, in the unorthodox theoreticians of the left, in the contributions of those who are critical of the capitalist technological system, in the Situationist International, and particularly in his own past and his participation in the struggles of the Spanish workers during the late 1970s, as well as in the anti-nuclear and environmentalist movements; the synthesis of these factors took shape in the Encyclopedia of Nuisances collective, in which Amorós participated with Jaime Semprun, among other militant thinkers, during the early 1980s.

The ideas of this Spanish anarchist historian and militant, who was born in Alcoy, Alicante, in 1949, fell like seeds on fertile soil when Amorós visited Guadalajara this past November, under the auspices of the Cátedra Jorge Alonso, co-sponsored by the University of Guadalajara and CIESAS [Centro de Investigaciones y Estudios Superiores en Antropología Social—Center for Advanced Studies and Research in Social Anthropology]. His most recent book, Contra la nocividad. Anarquismo, antidesarrollismo, revolución [Against Nuisances. Anarchism, Anti-Development, Revolution], was published by Grietas Editores, affiliated with the Centro Social Ruptura of Guadalajara, on the occasion of his visit.

***

Rubén Martín (RM): You have said that we live in a world dominated by the crisis of “industrial-development oriented society”. How is this crisis manifested?

Miguel Amorós (MA): In the latest phase, the crisis is global; it is manifested on every level: it is an economic crisis, an energy crisis, an environmental crisis, a demographic crisis, a crisis of culture, a political crisis…. That is, it is a multifarious crisis. It has various facets. It is generalized.

RM: You have also said that modern capitalist society has become a producer of things that are harmful. Could you elaborate on this?

MA: Look, the alleged benefit conferred by the commodity always has another side, its concealed harmful effect, and harmfulness is always the dark side of the commodity. What happens is that, at a particular moment of capitalist development, the productive forces become destructive forces, or they are more destructive than productive, and this is when the harmfulness becomes manifest. Harmfulness was our translation of an English neologism adapted to French, nuisance, which means anything that is harmful, bothersome, irritating. Harmfulness means: the harmful effects on the natural environment, on the human personality, on the way we live together, on cities….

RM: The destruction of social bonds….

MA: Yes, that is a clear instance of harm; so is the bureaucratization of the world, the development of nuclear power, and especially everything that is harmful to our health. But ultimately harmfulness is a broad concept that was used precisely to characterize the principal feature of modern production.

RM: What kinds of harmful conditions are produced by the modern capitalist mega-city?

MA: The world we live in is in the process of becoming 100% urban, that is, the whole population is being concentrated in urban systems, in megalopolises. Like Shanghai. It’s an enormous metropolitan region, no one knows where it ends; or Mexico City, or Tokyo, or Sao Paolo. The cities are constantly growing, they are no longer cities: they are non-cities, instead; the more or less collective kind of life that they once made possible has disappeared. More than ever before, they are gigantic machines that waste energy, squander food, and require an enormous supply network for everything; at the same time, however, they are the perfect places to conduct business. In global capitalism a city that has fewer than 100,000 inhabitants is not viable, economically it is a wreck. Then these small cities become satellites of other, larger, cities. You can no longer speak of a city within 40 kilometers of a metropolis, for example, here, in Guadalajara, let’s take as an example, El Salto; look, it’s a city in which the sociability that once existed, no longer exists, there is no social fabric. There is an accumulation of solitary masses. There is atomization, and along with atomization the typical psychological effects are produced: people get sick, the absence of communication gives rise to psychoses, neuroses, depression. There has been a dramatic increase in the incidence of this kind of illness. And then there is industrial food: now we know what food additives contain, detergents, the new kinds of gasoline, the new fuels, because we breathe them, we eat them, and then we pay for it with cardiovascular disease and cancer. In the not-so-distant future almost everyone in the “developed” world will die of cancer, of a heart attack or from a stroke, when they don’t die in car accidents or take their own lives. This is the death sentence that has been proclaimed against us.

RM: And, because the cities are privileged spaces for accumulation and private profit, can they also be privileged spaces for emancipation and freedom?

MA: No, the city as it currently exists cannot be a space of freedom. A space of freedom is a space that is capable of self-government, of exercising autonomy; its minimum condition is that the people who live in that space are acquainted with each other and interact with each other. This does not happen in a large city, but it was once true of the neighborhoods of the cities, and that is why the working class cannot be understood as a class unless one also takes into account its life in its various neighborhoods. Today, low-income neighborhoods still preserve a community spirit—even if it is strictly oriented towards survival, and not always. But, in general, the way people behave in a big city is totally anonymous and isolated. What is being produced is a lack of empathy, that is, a total indifference towards other people. If you see someone suffering, it makes no difference to you. You don’t suffer with that other person. This is a new phenomenon. Human beings are characterized by humanity, and empathy was the form this humanity assumed: when you see pain, you feel pity. Today the law of the jungle rules: it’s not a class war, it’s a war of all against all. This is not what happens in communities, quite the contrary, but this is just what is happening in today’s cities. Not a hundred percent, and of course not to the same extent in Latin American cities as in European cities or as in Japan, where it is even worse. Phenomena associated with anomie of this type are becoming more widespread, more intense, and this makes a city that is, from the standpoint of physical and mental health, unviable. This sensation of suffocation, of loneliness, is not experienced in the rural areas, it is experienced in the cities.

RM: Politically, this has an enormous impact, because this absence of empathy and bonds facilitates the work of domination.

MA: That’s right. Look, those who are lonely are afraid. They value security, not freedom. They only know a private, atomized life; they cannot even imagine a public, collective life that is really lived in common and is based on solidarity.

RM: What do you think about the series of progressive governments in Latin America in the early 2000s?

MA: Capitalist development was impossible under the traditional oligarchy; so these populist governments guaranteed the survival and development of capitalism, which they made compatible with a certain amount of investment in the welfare of the popular classes, which have been the beneficiaries, within capitalism, of more government social programs, financial assistance, education, healthcare, etc. The State and its social services were modernized to conform with the prevailing capitalist standards. The oligarchy could not have done this. This new autocratic caste, when it is in power, divides and controls the popular classes by co-opting their representatives, and then it becomes a civil service-technocratic caste, which is the leading caste of these progressive countries, oriented towards capitalist development, and which really lives on exports—like the others, the old oligarchy. But they aren’t exporting coffee or beef: hell, they’re exporting minerals, wood pulp, fuels, soybeans, etc. It is an extractivist caste that is playing the same role that the oligarchic bourgeoisie of the past once played, but, except for Venezuela, with better results. The political model of the old oligarchy had become obsolete, so this caste opted for this approach. This political caste furthered the modernization of Latin American capitalism.

RM: In response to the failure of liberalism and of the orthodox/vanguardist left, purportedly civil-society oriented political tendencies have emerged. You have criticized them. Why?

MA: The economic development promoted by extractivism (the intensive exploitation of the territory) increased the buying power of certain sectors of the population; it eradicated—or mostly eradicated—hunger; it created, or actually expanded, the middle class. A middle class that, above all, was derived from the bureaucratization of the state, from the civil service, from the public employees of large enterprises and banks, etc. While this middle class accounts for between 30 and 35 percent of the working population in Latin America, in Europe it is 80 percent. Here the middle class is still small, it is still developing, and is on the side of the popular classes. This middle class is populist. It is not conservative, like its counterparts in France and Germany, for example. This middle class is leftist. Of course, its leftism is a lie. The middle class is never really leftist, it does not want any kind of revolution, it does not even want a profound change within the present system. What it wants is to preserve its level of buying power, so that it will not be affected by the current crises as it was by the mortgage crises, the crises of the real estate sector, and the bank crises in Europe. The solution based on neoliberal policies condemned these intermediate sectors to starvation, as in the time of the rise of the Nazis, when the impoverished middle classes formed the base of the fascist party. This is the base of the new social democratic parties, the ones that I call “civil society” parties, because they speak a language that has nothing to do with proletarian language, with classes, with socialism, with expropriation, with self-management: they don’t use that kind of language.

RM: With respect to the case of Podemos, in Spain, you have said that “instead of changing everything, they have reinforced everything”. That is, they have instilled a breath of fresh air of legitimacy into the political system.

MA: Yes, they criticized the system on television, but they have gone on to become part of that system and they are proving it. What Podemos is doing—and this is what Syriza [in Greece] is doing, and what the Portuguese left coalition and Mélenchon in France are doing—is striking poses and demobilizing. The core group of Podemos is Stalinist, but quite a few of its new militants are unemployed professionals who come from the neighborhood movements, the movement against evictions, activism “lite”, moderate environmentalism….

RM: From the movement of May 15, 2011?

MA: No, 15M was students protesting because they were going straight from school to the unemployment line. The protesters in 15M were complaining because the parties did not represent them, they wanted a party that would represent them. Podemos presented itself as their party, the party of the citizens, of those who prefer casting a vote to engaging in struggle, but all it did was to simply entrench itself in the pseudo-parliamentary regime, attracting all the adventurers who were on the rebound from the other parties, including anarchists. Generally, they followed the course of accommodation. Now they have advanced from fighting against the political caste to fighting only against the right-wing party, the People’s Party; now they are themselves part of the political caste.

RM: What is the basis of radical critical thought in these grim times?

MA: There is no shortage of ideas. We have a lot of ideas, not only the classics—Fourier, Mikhail Bakunin, Karl Marx, Peter Kropotkin, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, Landauer, Rosa Luxemburg, Anton Pannekoek, Karl Korsch, Georg Lukacs—there is a long list of anarchist, socialist and Marxist thinkers who have played a role, and I am not saying that all of their work is directly applicable today, but they have formed a part of this emancipatory thought, in a way, so to speak, that connected the working class with reality.

RM: And the contradictions, the social conflict, the class struggle….

MA: Sure, the contradictions and so on. When the social movement was in decline, thought did not disappear. It continued in two directions: one, artistic, by way of expressionism, Dadaism, surrealism, situationism (the last of the great vanguards); and on the side of sociological critique and philosophy, the Frankfurt School, Lewis Mumford and the whole American school of urban planning, Günther Anders and Walter Benjamin, philosophers and thinkers who have appeared, who have been concealed, and who are not classifiable in schools, like Jacques Ellul, who is very important for the analysis of technology and its function. We certainly possess enough theoretical resources to educate ourselves sufficiently. The problem is that these people are thinkers whose work remained isolated from a workers movement that was too weak to appropriate it and use it. A few anthropologists, like Marcel Mauss and Pierre Clastres, carried out major reevaluations of the experiences of the indigenous peoples. But what is lacking is a unitary view. These ideas evolved in isolated institutions, they was disconnected from the social movements. The social movements have been colonized by the obsolete ideas of a previous era: by doctrinaire anarchism, by Leninism, by Stalinism, by nationalism, ideologies that are dead but that force, that make the movements more pragmatic and also more sectarian when the time comes to define themselves.

RM: A contemporary revolutionary project should no longer posit the working class as the central subject. “Today the worker is the basis of capital, not of its negation”: these are your own words. What would a revolution look like? If such a thing is possible.

MA: Look, I think that there are subversive elements; I won’t say revolutionary elements, because there is no revolution without consciousness, and it will take a long time for the masses to arrive at a way of thinking that is presently far removed from them. What is lacking is the mediating organizations, debates, publications, speakers, journalists, writers; we still need educational thought, and, above all, we need readers and organizers who won’t let themselves be bought. But it is clear that there are two factors that must be taken into account for the creation of a revolutionary subject that would take shape in a separate world within this world: those who have been excluded from the labor market, or the self-marginalized; those who, although they have not been excluded, abandon the labor market and choose to live on the margins; and the non-industrialized peasant classes. The traditional peasant classes, not just indigenous peoples, but also homesteaders or settlers, those who till land in common, or simply farmers, the landless, or those with land, with only a little land … they are the fulcrum of the defense of the territory, the class struggle of the 21st century.

RM: They are your revolutionary subjects, but what contents will a radical revolutionary project have at the present time?

MA: I would use the word orientation, rather than contents. A revolutionary, anti-development movement must have a decolonizing orientation, it will have to be directed towards the locality, it will have to have an anti-statist, de-industrializing and autonomous orientation. That is, it must reinforce, during this phase, a horizontal, integral society in the sense that all activities will form part of a whole (politics, economics, education, culture…). Therefore horizontal, autonomous, integrated, fraternal, balanced, egalitarian, anti-patriarchal and decentralized.

RM: Are you optimistic with respect to the possibilities of achieving these goals, despite the barbarism within which we are now immersed?

MA: There are people who are optimistic. I am inclined to think that there are collectives that are susceptible to moving in this direction. Of course, when you talk about resettlement, de-industrializing, ruralizing or de-urbanizing in an abstract sense, it’s hard to make yourself understood. And I don’t say that the change will take place overnight, but simply point towards an orientation: we should move in the direction of reestablishing an equilibrium between the cities and the countryside, dismantling the urban agglomerations, industries, extensive distribution networks—this would imply alternative types of production and supply—means of mass communication, repressive and judicial apparatuses, administrative bodies…. These are processes that are contrary to the prevailing dynamic, and they will take place during a period of transition, because capitalism has destroyed so much, that rebuilding an equitable society in freedom, without a Market and without a State, will be a very costly endeavor.

 

Interview published online on March 1, 2018

Translated in March-April 2018 from a copy of the Spanish original obtained from Miguel Amorós.

A copy of the Spanish text is available online at: kaosenlared.net

ZAD’s Victory – Miguel Amorós

On January 17, 2018, the French Prime Minister announced the cancellation of the gigantic construction project to build a useless airport on land in the municipality of Nôtre Dame des Landes. The joy and happiness unleashed among the resisters of ZAD,1 farmers, occupiers, neighbors, friends and sympathizers, reached its clamorous peak at the festival of February 10, the date marking the expiration of the Declaration of Public Utility for the stillborn Nantes airport. It was a moment to celebrate an indisputable victory and to enjoy something that does not happen very often. Of course, everyone knows that the struggle is not over, for the State will not allow its plans to be stymied that easily and will attempt to reconquer the lost ground sometime in the future, and will threaten legal action, plan evacuations, and initiate divisive maneuvers and measures to normalize the situation. Nonetheless, the 1,650 hectares of “bocage”, a kind of rural landscape of hedgerows and sunken lanes characteristic of the Atlantic seaboard, will be preserved, and with them, the commons, the new ways of life and social relations alien to the logic of the commodity that have been established among its inhabitants. The ZADist defenders have resolved to build barricades every time that the powers that be try to recover the territory, and to build a more free future around an Alternative Agricultural Zone.

The airport project is as old as the protest that has always accompanied it, but the protest took a qualitative leap forward by abandoning legalistic procedures and engaging in creative occupation instead. In the summer of 2009, the name, ZAD—Zone to Defend—was popularized, and since then the repression directed against the occupiers and the local inhabitants was enforced in earnest, until its culmination on October 16, 2012 with “Operation Caesar”, a deployment of police forces that failed miserably and only served to increase the local people’s solidarity with the resistance. Against all odds, the inhabitants of the area have been able to reconcile their interests, overcome their disagreements and present a united front against all the anti-ZAD initiatives of the multinational corporation, VINCI, its local cheerleaders, judges and authorities. A community of struggle was consolidated, supported by numerous committees all over France. In one way or another, over the years, solidarity proved decisive at crucial moments, mobilizing huge demonstrations, and it is this persistence that forced the State to yield. ZAD was victorious. The largest and longest-lasting occupation in Europe succeeded.

The struggle against the project has now reached a new stage: what is needed now is to preserve and extend the legacy of the struggle, develop alternative infrastructures, and engage in self-management of a liberated territory. The main thing is: to maintain and to reinforce the institutions of self-government, to avoid institutional traps and to resist the pressures of the market economy. In short, to forge links, to establish moral bonds of commitment, cooperation and mutual aid: what the sociologists call the social fabric. The struggle has ceased to be a principally defensive one, and has now become a constructive action based on non-developmentalist relations. Much has been accomplished (support networks, workshops, collective gardens, kitchens, radio, seed banks…), but there is still much to do.

It is also necessary to prevent ZAD from degenerating into a marginal gesture, or from succumbing to its internal contradictions. A “customary assembly” was created in December of 2017 to mediate internal conflicts that arose as a result of divergent practices. The same assembly drafted a list of delegates to represent the different components of the resistance in order to meet with the emissaries of the State. These delegates cannot make decisions, but are limited to expressing the mandates of the assembly (a document that consists of six points). The assembly makes the decisions. It demanded, for example, amnesty for those who were threatened by expropriation or expulsion for defending the bocage, the unhindered right of the occupiers to remain to participate in the struggle, and a moratorium on the purchase and sale of land for at least three years, in order to prevent privatization that would militate against the collective experience. All to bring about a future without an airport based on the mutual respect of coexistence amidst a diversity of opinions.

The ZADists do not devote much energy to negotiations; they know that they are swimming against the current and that the most they can hope for is to keep the enemy at bay, and gain time to posit new, more firmly-rooted forms of coexistence on the terrain. They are aware of the fact that the mobilizations have not ended, and that there are still problems that divide the occupiers, such as, for example, the question of the creation of a legal entity to represent the movement; and finally, they know that the movement’s internal equilibrium is fragile and the enemy’s resolve is strong. Without mentioning any other incidents, yesterday the gendarmes evicted the occupiers of the Lejuc forest, who were trying to stop a project to bury nuclear wastes in Bure (Meuse). No one can ignore the fact, however, that the movement has proven that it can stand up to adverse conditions; that it can concentrate sufficient forces to resist and turn the tide of events; and finally, that fighting is not a waste of time, and that, sometimes, you can even win.

Viva ZAD!

For a free and self-managed society!

Miguel Amorós
February 23, 2018

 

  1. Zone to Defend [translator’s note].

Translated in April 2018 from the Spanish text obtained from the author.  The original spanish text can be found at Kaosenlared.org.

Video: Interview with Miguel Amorós (in spanish) – El antidesarrollismo en perspectiva

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