The anarchist’s recent arrest continues a long story: ten years ago today, his prison hunger strike brought the country to the edge of insurrection on the anniversary of the 2008 uprising
~ Neil Middleton ~
The recent arrest of Nikos Romanos, following the widely publicised explosion in an Athens apartment, took place in the run-up to today’s anniversary of the start of the 2008 Greek riots. Six years later, in 2014, Romanos was a dedicated insurrectionary serving a prison sentence for bank robbery.
A Report and Video Footage from the Streets of Tbilisi
Tuesday, December 3 marked the sixth consecutive night of clashes between police and anti-government protesters in Tbilisi, the capital of Georgia. We offer the following short report and video footage courtesy of Georgian anarchists.
Perspectives on the Conflict from Western and Northeastern Syria
The Syrian civil war has remained largely frozen since 2020, owing to a precarious balance of power between various factions with various degrees of support from Russia, Turkey, Iran, and the United States. Over the past few days, however, taking advantage of the ways that Iran and Hezbollah have been tied down by conflict with Israel while Russia has been distracted in Ukraine, the anti-government forces Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) have seized Aleppo and intensified their campaign against the dictatorship of Bashar al-Assad. While Assad has been responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people and his downfall would be welcome, this development poses new dangers.
As we have explored before, the situation in Syria is complex, and the same events can look very different from different vantage points. In order to triangulate a reality informed by many views, we present here a perspective from participants in the revolution in western Syria alongside a report from anarchists in Rojava, the northeastern region of Syria.
Joan Busquets Verges, a former guerilla fighter, stands in Plaça de Sant Felip Neri in Barcelona, where damage caused by bombing in 1938 can still be seen. Photograph: Jordi Matas/The Guardian
“Being an anarchist now is no different from 50 years ago. It’s a philosophy and a search for truth. What I want is unity, of Europe and, were it possible, of the whole world, without frontiers, a world in which we all understand each other.”
During this month of November, Joan Busquets, ‘El Senzill’, has visited Spain to present his claim as a victim of Francoism.
In this post, you can find the chronicle of the event and the recording at the FAL (Anselmo Lorenzo Foundation) on the 19th, the press conference in Barcelona and a conversation between him and the historian and researcher Dolors Marín.
On the morning of 19 November, the CGT had called a rally in front of the Congress of Deputies in Madrid. A group of National Police officers, expressly warned, prevented Joan and several activists from unfurling a banner prepared for this rally. No member of parliament, no party, deigned to leave the building, the seat of the ‘sovereignty’ of the Spanish people, to welcome a person who gave years of his life for freedom.
Demonstration against the mega-water basins at Sainte-Soline, 29th of October 2022. – UGO AMEZ/SIPA/UGO AMEZ/SIPA
The great social measure of the Commune was its own working existence.
Karl Marx, The Civil War in France
The French people seem to have understood this need wonderfully well, and the something new, which was introduced into the life of France, since the first risings, was the popular Commune. Governmental centralisation came later, but the Revolution began by creating the Commune — autonomous to a very great degree — and through this institution it gained, as we shall see, immense power.
Peter Kropotkin, The Great French Revolution 1789-1793
An increasingly combative current of ecological struggle has pushed questions of space and place, territory and its defense, to the forefront of today’s political imagination. These issues, and the politics of space more generally, have long been a focus of Kristin Ross’s writing, reaching back to her first book on Rimbaud and the Paris Commune. As her new book, The Commune-Form: the Transformation of Everyday Life (Verso 2024), hits bookshelves this fall, we reached out to Ross to discuss Les Soulèvements de la terre, federated communes, and how to reclaim the revolutionary offensive in a climate of anxiety and despair.
Former president Donald J. Trump speaks at his rally at Madison Square Garden in New York on Sunday, Oct. 27, 2024. | Angelina Katsanis/POLITICO
The most striking political phenomenon of our recent era, which some rightly call the era of authoritarian leaders, is the rise of the extreme right in the partycratic/party-dominated capitalist countries. Some prefer to call it the radical, ultra-nationalist or populist new right, and the more belligerent, the neo-fascist right. For some reason, a disappointed and angry crowd, some of them workers, who feel hurt, discriminated against or insufficiently cared for by the institutions they had trusted, turn to this political option. Neither Franco, nor Hitler, nor Mussolini have been resurrected, even if historical revisionism casts their regimes in a nostalgic light and encourages a relative understanding. This is a very modern phenomenon. For a better understanding of it, it is necessary to study the context in which it has occurred in order to reveal one by one the factors that have contributed to its emergence and development. First of all, the disappearance of the labour movement.
A man stands next to stranded cars, following floods in Sedavi, Valencia, Spain, October 31, 2024. REUTERS/Susana Vera
A 2014 restatement of the meaning of “anti-developmentalism” by the Spanish activist and author, Miguel Amorós, which he defines as the new form of the “modern class struggle”.
Anti-developmentalism: What It Is and What It Wants
In one respect, anti-developmentalism emerged from the critical re-evaluation of the period that ended with the failure of the old autonomous workers movement and with the global restructuring of capitalism; it was thus born during the seventies and eighties of the last century. In another respect, it arose amidst the incipient attempts at ruralization that had taken place during that same period and in the popular mobilizations against the presence of factories emitting pollutants in the core urban areas and against urbanization projects and the construction of nuclear power plants, highways and dams. It is simultaneously a theoretical analysis of the new social conditions that takes the contributions of ecology into account, and a struggle against the consequences of capitalist development, although those two aspects do not always proceed in tandem. We may define it as a form of critical thinking and an antagonistic practice born from the conflicts provoked by development during the last stage of the capitalist regime, which corresponds to the merger of the economy and politics, Capital and the State, industry and life. Due to its novelty, and also as a result of the spread of submission and resignation among the de-classed masses, reflection and combativity do not always proceed hand in hand; one postulates goals that the other does not always want to fight for: anti-developmentalist thought envisions a global strategy of confrontation, while the struggle is often reduced to tactical considerations, which only benefit domination and its supporters. The forces mobilized are almost never conscious of their historical task, while the lucidity of critique is likewise not always capable of contributing to the development of consciousness in these campaigns.
Hannah Hoch, Cut with the Kitchen Knife through the Last Epoch of Weimar Beer-Belly Culture in Germany, 1919
The ecologists play the same role, on the terrain of the struggle against harmful phenomena, that the trade unionists play on the terrain of workers struggles: mere intermediaries interested in the preservation of the contradictions whose regulation they assure; smooth-tongued negotiators adept at haggling (in this case the for the revision of the rules and rates of environmental damage replace the percentages of wage increases); mere defenders of the quantitative at the very moment when the economic calculus is extended to new domains (air, water, human embryos, synthetic sociability); they are, ultimately, the new commissars of submission to the economy, whose price must now include the cost of “a quality environment”. One can already discern the outlines of a redistribution of territory between sacrificed zones and protected zones, jointly administered by “green” experts, a spatial division that will regulate the hierarchical access to the commodity called nature. Radioactivity, however, will be for everyone.
…
The movement against harmful phenomena will triumph as a movement of anti-economic and anti-statist emancipation or it will not triumph at all.
With this post, an address to those who would prefer to create worlds which they could continue to create and recreate, rather than those who would but manage the catastrophe of generalised alienation, we close our celebration of the 40th anniversary of the publication of the first issue of the magazine Encyclopédie des Nuisances.
And without any idea of intellectual thraldom, it is our conviction that the Encyclopédie remains powerfully relevant.
To conclude then, a final post … on this occasion.
It is good to reflect on a phenomenon that is both familiar and unfamiliar to us, but which, as often occurs in such cases, can provide us with useful indications for our life among others: exile. Legal historians continue to debate whether exile – in its original form, in Greece and Rome – should be considered as the exercise of a right or as a penal situation. Insofar as it is presented, in the classical world, as the faculty granted to a citizen to escape a penalty (generally capital punishment) by fleeing, exile seems in fact irreducible to the two major categories into which the sphere of law can be divided from the point of view of subjective situations: rights and penalties. Thus Cicero, who knew exile, could write: ‘Exilium non supplicium est, sed perfugium portumque supplicii’, ‘Exile is not a punishment, but a refuge and a way of escape from punishment’. Even when it is eventually appropriated by the State and configured as a punishment (in Rome this happens with the lex Tullia of 63 BC), exile remains de facto an escape route for the citizen. Thus Dante, when the Florentines instituted banishment proceedings against him, did not appear in court and, anticipating the judges, began his long life as an exile, refusing to return to his city even when offered the opportunity. Significantly, in this perspective, exile does not imply the loss of citizenship: the exile effectively excludes himself from the community to which he nevertheless formally still belongs. Exile is neither right nor punishment, but flight and refuge. If it were configured as a right, which in reality it is not, exile would be defined as a paradoxical right to be outside the law. From this perspective, the exile enters a zone of indistinction with respect to the sovereign, who, by deciding on the state of exception, can suspend the law, and is then, like the exile, both inside and outside order.
Precisely insofar as it is presented as the power of a citizen to place themselves outside the community of citizens and thus to situate themselves with respect to the legal order on a kind of threshold, exile cannot fail to be of particular interest to us today. For anyone with eyes to see, it is obvious that the states in which we live have entered upon a situation of crisis and the progressive and unstoppable disintegration of all institutions. In these conditions, where politics disappears and gives way to economics and technology, it is fatal that citizens become de facto exiles in their own country. It is this internal exile that must be reclaimed today, transforming it from a passively suffered condition into a chosen and actively pursued way of life. Where citizens have lost even the memory of politics, only those exiled in their own city will make politics. And only in this community of exiles, dispersed in the formless mass of citizens, can something resembling a new political experience become possible here and now.
Totalitarianism, however, does not so much promise an age of faith as an age of schizophrenia. A society becomes totalitarian when its structure becomes flagrantly artificial: that is, when its ruling class has lost its function but succeeds in clinging to power by force or fraud. Such a society, no matter how long it persists, can never afford to become either tolerant or intellectually stable. It can never permit either the truthful recording of facts or the emotional sincerity that literary creation demands. But to be corrupted by totalitarianism one does not have to live in a totalitarian country.
George Orwell, The Prevention of Literature
On the false claim that Haitian immigrants are killing and eating local pets in Springfield, Ohio, repeated on numerous occasions during the U.S. presidential elections:
“If I have to create stories so that the American media actually pays attention to the suffering of the American people, then that’s what I’m going to do …”
J.D. Vance
“I was just saying what was reported that’s been reported and eating other things, too, that they’re not supposed to be.”
Donald Trump
The Prevention of Literature
George Orwell (Polemic, January 1946)
About a year ago I attended a meeting of the P.E.N. Club, the occasion being the tercentenary of Milton’s Areopagitica— a pamphlet, it may be remembered, in defence of freedom of the press. Milton’s famous phrase about the sin of ‘killing’ a book was printed on the leaflets advertising the meeting which had been circulated beforehand.
Miguel Amorós: The likely causes of the rise of the extreme right in the capitalist world
The most striking political phenomenon of our recent era, which some rightly call the era of authoritarian leaders, is the rise of the extreme right in the partycratic/party-dominated capitalist countries. Some prefer to call it the radical, ultra-nationalist or populist new right, and the more belligerent, the neo-fascist right. For some reason, a disappointed and angry crowd, some of them workers, who feel hurt, discriminated against or insufficiently cared for by the institutions they had trusted, turn to this political option. Neither Franco, nor Hitler, nor Mussolini have been resurrected, even if historical revisionism casts their regimes in a nostalgic light and encourages a relative understanding. This is a very modern phenomenon. For a better understanding of it, it is necessary to study the context in which it has occurred in order to reveal one by one the factors that have contributed to its emergence and development. First of all, the disappearance of the labour movement.
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