From the Roarmag Collective (21/12/2019)…
This post was originally published by eldiario.es. Text by Pol Pareja. Translation from Spanish by Andrew Hakes
Re-discovered after 80 years, the photographic legacy of the CNT which brings the libertarian revolution in Barcelona back to life, is now exhibited for the first time.
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A reflection on radical thought and politics – or thought and politics tout court – as grounded in non-knowing …
To think, so as to be able to breathe
Amador Fernández-Savater (Lobo suelto! 07/12/2019)
There is a crack in everything, that’s how the light gets in.
Leonard Cohen
For Rita Segato, against the trial and the hemlock
Someone, or something, says “it’s like that”, and saturates the situation.
What there is, what exists, closes in a kind of square – or quadrilateral, like a boxing ring – where the possible is bounded, where you can only say yes or no, lower your head or polarize from another “it’s like that”.
To saturate is to fill or occupy a thing to the limit of its capacity.
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Here we are, at the beginning of everything!
Raoul Vaneigem, 17 November 2019
(The text below was published on the 25 of November with the french language A contretemps).
The sudden attacks of freedom on the suffocating capitalist hydra, constantly make the epicenter of the seismic disturbances fluctuate. The territories of the whole world affected by the system of private benefits are exposed to the outburst of insurrectional movements. Consciousness is forced to run after successive waves of events, reacting to constant, paradoxically predictable and unexpected shocks.
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An essay from spain on the state of exception and anarchists as the enemy …
Anarchists: The enemy
José Luis Carretero (El Salto 23/10/2019)
The use of the monopoly of force by the State has always been a sensitive issue. Moreover, it is the legitimising narrative of the criminal system in a State that defines itself as democratic. Let us be clear: opening up heads and locking people up is not always well seen by everyone involved. And even less in a class society.
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Athens: Massive intervention in the streets of Kolonaki
(19/12/2019)
There is a completely false belief that Exarchia is an area on the map bordered by Patision, Alexandra, Charilaou Trikoupi streets and the hills of Steki. In fact, there is today an area of the city called Exarchia, where for decades there has been a partial territorialisation of radical political movements, an excessive accumulation of organised or spontaneous political and cultural negations. But this is a product of history, and history is being redefined. Nothing guarantees that Exarchia will remain where it is, either alone or with the same size forever. And when we write Exarchia between quotation marks, we do not want to speak of the neighbourhood, but of a political phenomenon: a territorial centre of overcrowded negations in the metropolis.
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Delenda est
lundi matin #221 (16/12/2019)
It is characteristic of all political moments to reactivate a certain amount of evidence and sharing. Should we reform society? Upset what exists? Repair the world? The following text was written by a collective of teacher-researchers, Kylo V. Nèr, and who propose to resolve these eternal questions, for which in their eyes, there is but one possible answer: “There is nothing but to destroy.”
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It is necessary to stop just talking, and to be without pity!
André Bernold
lundi matin #221 (16/12/19)
The comedy has gone on long enough, the insurgency is on the agenda, and the immediate removal of those responsible for the disaster.
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December 6th marked the beginning of a general strike in france against proposed reforms to the national pension schemes for different categories of workers. The “reforms” are the typical State driven “neoliberal” cuts in the value of the pensions, extension of the working age to 64 from 62, both a consequence of the desire to unify the different pension schemes (structured by collective contracts for different types of work) into a universal or general public pension programme.
Called by the country’s major union centrals, the strike has held, but essentially in the “public sector”: transportation, health, education, etc. Marked by demonstrations and protest marches, the strike, as a general strike, is nevertheless curious for its inability to paralyse the country’s economic activity. If things are slowed, if there are inconveniences of mobility, the overall affair continues to function. With more and more workers not covered by collective labour contracts, with the base of labour unions concentrated in public-state workers and with the inability to extend the strike to all “reproductive” labour – to all of the work which sustains social relations -, the strike risks falling into a merely defensive gesture of too little too late.
One is tempted to call for a strike against the strike, that is, a strike against the ways in which strikes are carried through, to radicalise them, to render them rebellious, wild. And yet, with each daily protest, the rebelliousness lurks just beneath the surface.
From the lundi matin collective, reflections on a strike still frightened of itself …
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We share a letter in two parts, a letter which is a reflection on the chilean insurrection, on insurrection, and on anarchism and insurrection. (Posted in spanish at portal libertario oaca and a las barricadas. The letters were published in English translation at Act for freedom now! – letter 1; letter 2).
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Ursula K. Le Guin: A story of the underside of revolution
What is an anarchist? One who, choosing, accepts the responsibility of choice.
She had never feared or despised the city. It was her country. There would not be slums like this, if the Revolution prevailed. But there would be misery. There would always be misery, waste, cruelty. She had never pretended to be changing the human condition, to be Mama taking tragedy away from the children so they won’t hurt themselves. Anything but. So long as people were free to choose, if they chose to drink flybane and live in sewers, it was their business. Just so long as it wasn’t the business of Business, the source of profit and the means of power for other people.
Ursula K. Le Guin, The Day Before the Revolution
‘If there is hope,’ wrote Winston, ‘it lies in the proles.’
George Orwell, 1984
The Day Before the Revolution
Ursula K. Le Guin
In memoriam Paul Goodman, 1911–1972
My novel The Dispossessed is about a small worldful of people who call themselves Odonians. The name is taken from the founder of their society, Odo, who lived several generations before the time of the novel, and who therefore doesn’t get into the action — except implicitly, in that all the action started with her.
Odonianism is anarchism. Not the bomb-in-the-pocket stuff, which is terrorism, whatever name it tries to dignify itself with; not the social-Darwinist economic “libertarianism” of the far right; but anarchism. as prefigured in early Taoist thought, and expounded by Shelley and Kropotkin, Goldman and Goodman. Anarchism’s principal target is the authoritarian State (capitalist or socialist); its principal moral-practical theme is cooperation (solidarity, mutual aid). It is the most idealistic, and to me the most interesting, of all political theories.
To embody it in a novel, which had not been done before, was a long and hard job for me, and absorbed me totally for many months. When it was done I felt lost exiled — a displaced person. I was very grateful, therefore, when Odo came out of the shadows and across the gulf of Probability, and wanted a story written, not about the world she made, but about herself.
This story is about one of the ones who walked away from Omelas.
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