The logic of the struggle is not the final victory, but permanent and tenacious sabotage.
María Galindo
For the 8th of March, in solidarity with the calls for a feminist strike, an interview with María Galindo, anarchist, feminist, psychologist, from bolivia, by Carolina Meloni González, for the spanish newspaper, el salto diario (25/01/2020).
Indian women, whores and lesbians: María Galindo and feminist disobedience
We spoke with María Galindo, one of the most subversive voices of Bolivian feminism. Founder of the Mujeres Creando collective, a movement that has been building a true rebellious, critical, disobedient and deeply poetic “feminist utopia” for more than 20 years, Galindo has made desire, graffiti, street action and performance true poetry and combative alchemy. We owe Galindo the lucid concept of “de-patriarchalisation”, a powerful tool of analysis and for dismantling the apparatuses patriarchal and colonial power that have historically served to subdue women. “Indians, whores and lesbians, together, revolted and in sisterhood”, such is the unexpected and forbidden political matrix of anti-colonial and anti-systemic feminism that Galindo defends, as a space of struggle for social and personal transformation.
March is Coming: The Next Phase of Revolt in Chile
The Lay of the Land Ahead of Round Two
Since October, the territory nominally controlled by the Chilean government has seen massive demonstrations against capitalism and the state that have opened up exciting new possibilities for social transformation. The movement has shown unprecedented longevity and resilience in the face of brutal repression and efforts at co-optation. With the summer vacations coming to a close, a new chapter of this story is about to begin. Our comrades in Chile present an overview of the situation along with translations of recent texts from anarchists on the ground in the movement—focusing on anarcha-feminism, the rejection of electoral politics, and strategies for toppling state power.
Power is domination: all it can do is prohibit, and all it can command is obedience.
Michel Foucault
Human societies have become like devouring and insatiable mono-cultures, and as such, the viruses multiply. Made therefore fragile, we turn to the State, we become States.
To those who claim, from the far right to the left, that our empires really care for their people – “this time they really want our good” -, in other words, that our empires have no interest in this health crisis, we allow ourselves to respond by adding a few features to the excellent description of Agamben published in Il Manifesto three days ago.
Before the frenzied, irrational and totally unjustified emergency measures taken for a supposed epidemic due to the coronavirus, it is necessary to start with the declarations of the CNR (Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche), according to which “there is no epidemic of Sars-CoV2 in Italy “.
From spain, from the 8M organising committee of the strike, from spain’s CNT anarcho-syndicalist labour union, from an anarcho-feminist collective in south america, and from an anarchist feminist collective in mexico …
To share, the first of a series of reflections on contemporary feminism, in interviews, essays and so on, with the eighth of March, international women’s day as afeminist strike, in the foreground.
What follows is an interview with Silvia Federici, originally published with Lobo suelto (22/02/2020).
Feminism is the diamond tip of an international insurgency – Silvia Federici
Interview conducted by Victoria Furtado and Mariana Menéndez
While throughout the world the fourth feminist strike is being prepared in hundreds of meetings, activities and assemblies, listening to Silvia Federici is inspiring. In a stop in her travelling about the world, sharing keys of understanding and giving courage, Silvia met with us at her home in New York to discuss current feminist struggles, the popular revolts of recent months, the tensions of feminism with the left and the highlights of her latest book.
Achille Mbembe’s Politiques de l’inimitié reads contemporary politics as a series of strategies and tactics of colonisation, thus grounded on the creation of fictional others (through hierarchising categories of race, sex, ethnicity and the like) and the desire for their complete control, exclusion and extermination, in conformity with the fulfillment of this desire.
If in the past, this politics of enmity was limited geographically by the extent of State power and their corresponding economies of and technologies of control, under contemporary capitalism, it is global and total, or aspires to be, both in extent and intensity.
This process can be read as the full realisation of the Carl Schmitt’s contention that the political is reducible to the existential distinction between friend and enemy, or that the sovereign is s/he who decides on the exception. The totalisation of the political thus translates into a universalisation of the distinction and/or the exception, both at the macro level between states and at the micro level in the construction of subjectivities and intersubjective relations.
The hatred of the other, and the exclusion or death of the other, are thus constitutive of social relations, in turn, sustained and produced by capitalism. Commodity production depends upon hierarchy no less than modern states.
What Mbembe modestly opposes to this is a democratic politics of recognition. It is however unclear what this actually might look like. And given the nature of contemporary politics, it seems completely utopian. And if we affirm, by contrast, that “revolutionary politics really begins with the realisation that everything is about everything. Because we recognize that incremental tinkering will never change the system, we demand a total revolution in all areas of social life”, the question immediately follows, “but what does that mean? How do we get a hold of the whole?” (Having Premonitions: an interview with AK Thompson, AK Press, 28/11/2018)
There are no simple answers to these questions, and perhaps they are unanswerable beyond the moments when they surge up in crises. Yet it seems equally defeatist to just sit about waiting for the collapse when far more violent actors feed and endeavour to respond to the desire for annihilation of the undesirable.
Neo-liberal forms of democracy capitalism and its more openly violent expressions in fascism function through seduction, the creation and taming of desires through fantasies and myths. Anti-authoritarian anti-capitalism must be capable of generating its own myths, its own forms of “spirituality” (c.f. Mario Tronti, Dello spirito libero), the distinguishing characteristic – from the neo-liberal, authoritarian – that these myths must be lived as myths, as exercises in myth-making, as playful storytelling (Walter Benjamin’s politicisation of aesthetics).
What is outlined upon our political-social horizon is a capitalist-eugenic feudalism of unprecedented violence. And there is no longer any escape to the wilds, to a “zomia” (James C. Scott). The battles, at whatever their scale, occur henceforth within the empire. But to speak with the guerilla is still to speak the language of friends and enemies. Is it possible to move beyond, to a myth and desire of redemption beyond the logic of sovereignty? Perhaps here: in the recognition not of the other, but in the recognition of our mutual fragility and thus the impossibility of raising ourselves above anyone or anything else.
From the CrimethInc. Collective, an interview with Joey Ayoub on the rebellion in lebanon (and a followup on an earlier text of his posted by the Collective and shared by Autonomies).
Lebanon: The Revolution Four Months in
An Interview
A massive uprising broke out in Lebanon on October 17, 2019, drawing people together across sectarian lines to reject the domination of warlord oligarchs. Four months later, the unrest continues—amid efforts to crush, tame, or redirect it. How can an understanding of Lebanese history help us understand the situation? What can we learn from the Lebanese uprising that could inform struggles against capitalism, sectarianism, and the state worldwide?
The Raccoon people live by simple rules: live life to its fullest, no concession to a world of misery, and run to fight another day.
I first met one of the Raccoon people when I was only a child. He was visiting my parents, dressed in the fashion of the time, and he treated himself to our food and our company. I had never met a happier person. I alternated between bouncing on his knee, wrestling with him over the last piece of bread, and racing around the jungle of our backyard with him, an adult unlike any I had ever met before, or since.
He left behind a little buckskin figurine to remember him by. “Rub this between your palms and say my name. I will not promise that I will come back to you but I promise that my memory will, and often times that will be enough.”
When he left our house my parents stopped speaking to each other. Something about his visit reminded them that they were not working out the way that they expected and each of them began to look for something else. Other people passed through, glass was broken, voices were raised not in song, and eventually feet walked in different directions.
Later in life I found more Raccoon people. They usually did not have time for me because I was looking and they had already found. They were a merry people, running in groups, speaking in code, dressing like explosions and carousels, Bottles in hand, holes in shoes, scabs on joints; these were a people worth knowing.
For me, the idea, the beautiful idea, is about—how do you connect ideas to living? It’s not about “the struggle.”
A Hell of a Mistress, the Beautiful Idea: An Interview with Aragorn! (CrimethInc. 19/02/2020)
We cannot speak of Aragorn! the person (for we did not know him), nor of his “activism”, or better, of his way of living anarchism (except indirectly, through what he and others have said of it). As for polemics about the person, we leave to others more finely practiced in such arts.
What we know of him and his anarchism we have learned above all through his writings, and it is with his written word that we share affinities.
If we speak of the passing of an “american” anarchist, it is not to identify his work as provincial, for it is only through being rooted in a time and place, in a story, in its passions and thoughts, in its spirit, that one can speak beyond one’s “self”. Aragorn! at times confessed embarrassment at “american” twists of “european” anarchism, but he also had little patience for what he viewed as often elitist and anachronistic visions of rebellion coming from europe. And, in the end, what mattered was how one lived anarchism, in both thought and action, and not the label; and real life must be grounded.
While of course I agree with and adhere to internationalist values that are sort of anarchist values, my interest has always been in doing what you’re going to do in the here and now. I’ve always distrusted people that proselytize across oceans.
A Hell of a Mistress, the Beautiful Idea: An Interview with Aragorn!(CrimethInc. 19/02/2020)
Aragorn! brought to anarchism a “post-leftism” or “post-workerism”, fed by the Situationists and Italian insurrectionism [ … the SI provide the best, most cruel, anarchist criticism of the first wave of anarchists. An anarchist who has not read chapter 4 of Society of the Spectacle (especially parts 90-94) and come away changed vis-à-vis the questions of revolution, timing, and politics is probably not capable of working with people in a contemporary context. I think these questions are central, even if they are not easily answered.Laughing at the Futility of it All: An interview with Aragorn! (Anarchist without content 13/10/2015)], along with a nihilist reading of anarchist politics, an effort to “decolonise” the tradition, and a turning to american indigenous ways of living for inspiration. For Aragorn!, anarchism is not an “activism”, a “theory” (though it includes these as well); it is rather an ethics, a way of being-in-the-world.
Aragorn! died this last February 13th. For him, for us, we share what follows.
María Galindo: Giving form to a local anarcho-feminism
The logic of the struggle is not the final victory, but permanent and tenacious sabotage.
María Galindo
For the 8th of March, in solidarity with the calls for a feminist strike, an interview with María Galindo, anarchist, feminist, psychologist, from bolivia, by Carolina Meloni González, for the spanish newspaper, el salto diario (25/01/2020).
Indian women, whores and lesbians: María Galindo and feminist disobedience
We spoke with María Galindo, one of the most subversive voices of Bolivian feminism. Founder of the Mujeres Creando collective, a movement that has been building a true rebellious, critical, disobedient and deeply poetic “feminist utopia” for more than 20 years, Galindo has made desire, graffiti, street action and performance true poetry and combative alchemy. We owe Galindo the lucid concept of “de-patriarchalisation”, a powerful tool of analysis and for dismantling the apparatuses patriarchal and colonial power that have historically served to subdue women. “Indians, whores and lesbians, together, revolted and in sisterhood”, such is the unexpected and forbidden political matrix of anti-colonial and anti-systemic feminism that Galindo defends, as a space of struggle for social and personal transformation.
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