Le visage est présent dans son refus d’être contenu./The face is present in its refusal to be contained.
Emmanuel Levinas, Totalité et infini
To be or not to be masked? Depending on the jurisdiction, this remains a choice before the COVID-19 pandemic. In others, masks are mandatory in all spaces outside the house (enforced with varying degrees of rigour). As signs, they are polysemic: they suggest caution, the need for distance, a barrier before the risk of contagion; they are a vestment of solidarity with others (“I will not make you sick”), with care and health workers (“I am helping those who fight the disease”); they may indicate the infected; they are signs of fear. Independently of their varieties, they warn of danger, the danger that each person is to everyone else. Like a sovereign border, they trace a protective line around the face, the physical person, beyond which there is a threat and behind which the individual face vanishes.
Life and times at the Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone
Shane Burley
Following a long tradition of left revolutionary praxis, protesters in Seattle have declared a cop-free autonomous zone in the heart of the city.
Over the past few weeks we have witnessed one of the largest uprisings in recent US history. The police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis, Minnesota, brought millions of people in the US and around the world out into the streets in aggressive demonstrations. In cities across the country, police precincts were set on fire, corporate stores looted, and as the police turned their sights on the protests, the numbers only grew.
In Seattle, Washington, confrontations with protesters in a gentrified part of the city known as Capitol Hill led to law enforcement’s retreat from their office. Organizers and community members advanced on the area and transformed this eight-block segment of the neighborhood into a collective space, which they soon called the Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone (CHAZ).
This Is Anarchy: Eight Ways the Black Lives Matter and Justice for George Floyd Uprisings Reflect Anarchist Ideas in Action
Since Minneapolis police brutally murdered George Floyd on May 25, 2020, demonstrations have exploded across the US and the world. Millions of people have taken to the streets to demand justice for George Floyd and Breonna Taylor and an end to police violence and terror, underscoring the need to eradicate systemic racism by radically transforming our society. Within 24 hours of the explosion of protest, the President of the United States claimed that anarchists and anti-fascists were responsible for the unrest that has occurred in cities across the country.
This move to blame anarchists and “antifa” is intended to discredit these popular uprisings while demonizing and isolating the participants. Yet the ways that the prevailing order has failed almost all of us are clearer than ever. Outrage and protest have spread far beyond any particular ideology or group. As tens of thousands fill the streets of scores of cities, it is obvious that anarchists are not responsible for organizing these demonstrations. The demonstrations and the unrest accompanying them represent an organic response to a widely felt need.
At the same time, this organic groundswell of momentum, based in reproducible tactics that anyone can employ, embodies anarchist models for social change. Many of the practices and principles that have been fundamental to this movement have long been mainstays of anarchist organizing.
Here, we explore the anarchist roots of eight principles that have been essential to the success of the Black Lives Matter and Justice for George Floyd demonstrations, seeking to center Black initiatives that reflect anti-authoritarian values. For background on Black anarchism specifically, we recommend Lorenzo Kom’boa Ervin’s Anarchism and the Black Revolution or the more recent Anarkata Statement.
This text is co-authored and co-published with Agency.
“Rather than running off as the police intended, the protesters stood their ground. When they were forced back by tear gas, they advanced again as soon as it cleared. They reclaimed ground repeatedly, and it took the police more than an hour to drive them back. This was only the beginning…”
MOURNING
I was sitting on a park bench in the sunlight with my mask on. My daughters sat next to me, staring out at the empty park and the fountain with no water in it. Little birds hopped around the park looking for scraps of food.
We sat in silence, just listening to the chirping birds and the buzzing insects. This was the first time we’d been able to spend any time outside together since the pandemic came to Minnesota. My eldest daughter was intensely anxious, fearful that going downtown would expose her to the virus. She was breathing heavily, trying to control her fear, although she’d been almost desperate to take a walk to the park.
A man in a wheelchair came rolling by and nodded silently at me. I nodded in reply, and he turned his wheelchair around to face us from about fifty feet away. Then he picked up a trumpet and started playing – a long, lonesome, mournful, note. It sounded like a lament, a song of mourning. Maybe for the city, or maybe for the world.
The city felt dead, a quiet and almost empty place. The whole world felt the same to me, like we’d been boxed up apart from each other for such a long time that there was nothing to do except to mourn together, staring at each other from fifty feet away.
Just two days later, a black man named George Floyd was murdered when Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin knelt on his neck for eight minutes while Floyd begged for his life. Three other officers helped Chauvin murder Floyd, and the killing happened in front of multiple witnesses.
As of June 9th, six blocks in Seattle—including an empty police precinct – have fallen under the control of protesters and declared an “autonomous zone”.
Solidarity in Seattle’s Autonomous Zone: Building community power
The capitalist class in American society has been in a state of denial over the growing disenfranchisement of the people who live here and create all the wealth. BIPOC communities and the LGBTQ+ community have been mistreated and abused for the entire history of the United States. In doing so, the capitalist class has sold the working class down the river with a worldwide war on the workers, the most recent wave of attacks begins with the founding of the World Trade Organization, and it is here where the story of Capitol Hill picks up.
Bonsoir. There are twelve new Renzo Novatore writings, never before in English, now included in Distinctively Dionysian’s remaining spring ’20 issues. Due to the volume of new translations of both Novatore and Bruno Filippi, we created two 24-page stand-alone issues et one 78 page booklet to be released alongside the Summer issues.
Here is one of the pages taken from the second issue of Spring 20, for your pleasure. May click or right-click this PDF link to view et expand.
Color is not a human or a personal reality; it is a political reality.
James Baldwin, Down at the Cross
The Anarchist movement in North America is overwhelmingly white, middle class, and for the most part, pacifist so the question arises: why am I a part of the Anarchist movement, since I am none of those things? Well, although the movement may not now be what I think it should be in North America, I visualize a mass movement that will have hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions of Black, Hispanic and other non-white workers in it. It will not be an Anarchist movement that Black workers and the other oppressed will just “join” — it will be an independent movement which has its own social outlook, cultural imperative, and political agenda. It will be Anarchist at its care, but it will also extend Anarchism to a degree no previous European social or cultural group ever has done. I am certain that many of these workers will believe, as I do, that Anarchism is the most democratic, effective, and radical way to obtain our freedom, but that we must be free to design our own movements, whether it is understood or “approved” by North American Anarchists or not. We must fight for our freedom, no one else can free us, but they can help us.
Lorenzo Kom’boa Ervin, Anarchism and the Black Revolution
One of the most important lessons I also learned from anarchism is that you need to look for the radical things that we already do and try to encourage them. This is why I think there is so much potential for anarchism in the Black community: so much of what we already do is anarchistic and doesn’t involve the state, the police, or the politicians. We look out for each other, we care for each other’s kids, we go to the store for each other, we find ways to protect our communities. Even churches still do things in a very communal way to some extent. I learned that there are ways to be radical without always passing out literature and telling people, “Here is the picture, if you read this you will automatically follow our organization and join the revolution.” For example, participation is a very important theme for anarchism and it is also very important in the Back community. Consider jazz: it is one of the best illustrations of an existing radical practice because it assumes a participatory connection between the individual and the collective and allows for the expression of who you are, within a collective setting, based on the enjoyment and pleasure of the music itself. Our communities can be the same way. We can bring together all kinds of diverse perspectives to make music, to make revolution.
Ashanti Omowali Alston, Black Anarchism
The expression “black anarchism” may ring a discordant note among some anarchists. The many adjectives that have distinguished different kinds of anarchism – mutualist, collectivist, communist, individualist, for example – have served above all to mark different ways in which the anarchist ideals of freedom and equality are imagined and fought for. And even when “anarchism” becomes the adjective of a designation – anarcho-syndicalism, anarcho-feminism, anarcho-primitivism -, it reflects an effort to inject anarchist ideals into a larger body of political thought and practice.
A “black anarchism” suggests something more disturbing, a form of political parochialism, an anarchism for “black people”, somehow contrary to the universalist aspiration of anarchist intentions. And if to this is added a concern for “black nationalism”, then the anarchist may indeed have reasons for scepticism regarding the possibility of a seemingly racially defined form of anarchism.
Is then “black anarchism” simply a well meant misunderstanding, or worse, a contradiction in terms? Or cannot one instead see in “black anarchism” the desire to identify a form of domination that has and continues to mark modern capitalism?
The struggle against the COVID-19 pandemic has been used by different governments to implement a variety of means of social control and to increase the powers of the police. Yes, the threat of the pandemic is real; it is the consequence of capitalist expansion and we must do everything that is possible to protect ourselves. But more than survive, we have to take care that the post-pandemic world is still a world where we desire to live.
(The video may be watched with english subtitles by clicking on settings).
Mutual aid is a response to crisis born within the cracks of regimes of State-Capital. It is also that which allows the creation of ties and bonds, of social relations, outside commodity and spectacle mediation. It is that which can prefigure modes of life beyond capitalism.
Reading mutual aid close to the ground …
Cape Town Together: organizing in a city of islands
Writer’s Community Action Network (Roarmag 05/06/2020)
An emerging movement of self-organized, decentralized community action networks responds to the local realities of COVID-19 in Cape Town, South Africa.
Cape Town is a city of stark inequality, with a dark and thorny history of colonial- and apartheid-era oppression, bleeding into rampant post-apartheid neoliberalism. As South Africa’s poster child for global cosmopolitanism, tourism and natural beauty, the photogenic city has sharply honed its strategy for sweeping ugliness under the carpet and outwards to its peripheries. Unchanged apartheid-era spatial planning has reinforced the development of Cape Town as a city of islands, cutting some parts of the city off from others and intensifying social, cultural and economic divisions.
Losing face in a pandemic
Le visage est présent dans son refus d’être contenu./The face is present in its refusal to be contained.
Emmanuel Levinas, Totalité et infini
To be or not to be masked? Depending on the jurisdiction, this remains a choice before the COVID-19 pandemic. In others, masks are mandatory in all spaces outside the house (enforced with varying degrees of rigour). As signs, they are polysemic: they suggest caution, the need for distance, a barrier before the risk of contagion; they are a vestment of solidarity with others (“I will not make you sick”), with care and health workers (“I am helping those who fight the disease”); they may indicate the infected; they are signs of fear. Independently of their varieties, they warn of danger, the danger that each person is to everyone else. Like a sovereign border, they trace a protective line around the face, the physical person, beyond which there is a threat and behind which the individual face vanishes.
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