In the continuity of our article last week about the Catalan uprising, friends have transmitted these beautiful meditations from the streets of Barcelona.
“We do not wish honors, only to appear in the posterity of the history of cataclysms.”
Le Grand Jeu
RUINS
Spain is a ruin. The wind travels through the void left by the Great of Spain. We have been ransacked by tradition, by every generation of rulers, by every generation of merchants and scammers. Only broken, can the Spanish try a re-composition at the height of its art and its festivals. Hong Kong, Chile, Ecuador, Haiti, Lebanon and France’s yellow vests show that the governing order itself is itself a ruin. A fierce ruin, which protects its soap bubbles as if they were diamonds.
The Spanish State will never grant independence to Catalonia. And if there is no negotiation, if there is no negotiated separation, history teaches us that the only possible option is war. For obvious economic reasons, but above all because it would mean its own political suicide, the Spanish State can never agree on a genuine independence referendum. The idea of Spain, and its materialisation in the Spanish State, corresponds to a concept of unity that fully subsumes the differences, all differences; as much those that inhabit the periphery, as well as those that inhabit the center. During the Franco regime, at school, it was explained to us that Spain was “a destined unity under the universal.”
The militant demonstrations around national independence in catalonia continue (The Guardian 27/10/2019) in the face of State repression; a growing militancy that “threatens to transform the demands and consciousness of the movement itself.”(CrimethInc. 23/10/2019)
However justified we are in believing this last – and anyone one would be, given the fundamental unpredictability of any protest and/or insurrection -, this must not be taken as a mere apriori. And there are circumstances surrounding the catalan movement which invite reflection.
If anarchism does not exist without active militancy, it is also the case that not every demonstration and uprising is to be embraced by anarchists.
We share below a reflection, in translation, on the events in catalonia by Tomás Ibáñez; a text which he has kindly passed on to Autonomies.
What started as a student protest against fare hikes has turned into a widely supported civil uprising against President Piñera’s authoritarian neoliberal regime.
Reflections amidst the proliferation of rebellions …
Where, then, is the positive possibility of a German emancipation?
Answer: In the formulation of a class with radical chains, a class of civil society which is not a class of civil society, an estate which is the dissolution of all estates, a sphere which has a universal character by its universal suffering and claims no particular right because no particular wrong, but wrong generally, is perpetuated against it; which can invoke no historical, but only human, title; which does not stand in any one-sided antithesis to the consequences but in all-round antithesis to the premises of German statehood; a sphere, finally, which cannot emancipate itself without emancipating itself from all other spheres of society and thereby emancipating all other spheres of society, which, in a word, is the complete loss of man and hence can win itself only through the complete re-winning of man. This dissolution of society as a particular estate is the proletariat.
…
By heralding the dissolution of the hereto existing world order, the proletariat merely proclaims the secret of its own existence, for it is the factual dissolution of that world order.
Karl Marx, Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right
To me the flower of the proletariat is not, as it is to the Marxists, the upper layer, the aristocracy of labor, those who are the most cultured, who earn more and live more comfortably than all the other workers. Precisely this semi-bourgeois layer of workers would, if the Marxists had their way, constitute their fourth governing class. This could indeed happen if the great mass of the proletariat does not guard against it. By virtue of its relative. well-being and semi-bourgeois position, this upper layer of workers is unfortunately only too deeply saturated with all the political and social prejudices and all the narrow aspirations and pretensions of the bourgeoisie. Of all the proletariat, this upper layer is the least social and the most individualist.
By the flower of the proletariat, I mean above all that great mass, those millions of the uncultivated, the disinherited, the miserable, the illiterates, whom Messrs. Engels and Marx would subject to their paternal rule by a strong government – naturally for the people’s own salvation! All governments are supposedly established only to look after the welfare of the masses! By flower of the proletariat, I mean precisely that eternal “meat” (on which governments thrive), that great rabble of the people (underdogs, “dregs of society”) ordinarily designated by Marx and Engels in the picturesque and contemptuous phrase Lumpenproletariat. I have in mind the “riffraff,” that “rabble” almost unpolluted by bourgeois civilization, which carries in its inner being and in its aspirations, in all the necessities and miseries of its collective life, all the seeds of the socialism of the future, and which alone is powerful enough today to inaugurate and bring to triumph the Social Revolution.
Mikhail Bakunin, On the International Workingmen’s Association and Karl Marx
If we had once again to conceive of the fortunes of humanity in terms of class, then today we would have to say that there are no longer social classes, but just a single planetary petty bourgeoisie, in which all the old social classes are dissolved: The petty bourgeoisie has inherited the world and is the form in which humanity has survived nihilism.
… the planetary petty bourgeoisie is probably the form in which humanity is moving toward its own destruction. But this also means that the petty bourgeoisie represents an opportunity unheard of in the history of humanity that it must at all costs not let slip away. Because if instead of continuing to search for a proper identity in the already improper and senseless form of individuality, humans were to succeed in belonging to this impropriety as such, in making of the proper being-thus not an identity and an individual property but a singularity without identity, a common and absolutely exposed singularity – if humans could, that is, not be – thus in this or that particular biography, but be only the thus, their singular exteriority and their face, then they would for the first time enter into a community without presuppositions and without subjects, into a communication without the incommunicable.
Selecting in the new planetary humanity those characteristics that allow for its survival, removing the thin diaphragm that separates bad mediatized advertising from the perfect exteriority that communicates only itself – this is the political task of our generation.
Giorgio Agamben, The Coming Community
…
A spectre is haunting Capital – the spectre of the anonymous many; not of the poor, of the workers, or of the natives, or any other sociological or ethnological category. All the powers of the old world have entered into a holy alliance to exorcise this spectre: commodities and spectacles, governments and militarised police, reformists and conservatives, sclerotic marxists and revanchist neo-fascists, GAFA and apparatuses of social control.
But where there was formerly a party of the opposition that could be decried as a threat by its opponents in power, today there is none; and all pretenders to the role will be ignored or swept away by a pleb or proletariat which refuses identification and representation.
If in the past, one could sing out that the people united will never be defeated, we now know that it is when the many are made a people that the illusions and alienation of representational politics takes root.
Today, the faceless multitude can only serve as precarious, indentured labour, or die. Production and consumption have become secondary moments in the circulation of capital; the fetish of money reigns supreme, and before this god, the lie that work brings material possession and comfort is unmasked.
Capitalism’s “social contract” (work and you shall consume) is fissuring along multiple and unpredicatble lines: there is not and cannot be work for everyone; most work will be increasingly forced labour, for only ever cheaper work secures growing profit; commodities will become ever more expensive, their consumption an ever growing privilege of the few; consumption will live on only under conditions of debt bondage and fantasy, but neither fills the stomach. Little more remains then the seduction of pacifying-controlling “entertainment”, underpaid labour, isolation and the police, under the shadow of unrestrained energy extraction and ecological self-destruction.
The many “have nothing of their own to secure and to fortify; their mission …[can only be] … to destroy all previous securities for, and insurances of” their oppression. “The … the lowest stratum of our present society, cannot stir, cannot raise itself up, without the whole superincumbent strata of official society being sprung into the air.”
As capitalism metamorphosises into “high-tech” feudalism, the age of riots is heralded. The future, if such a thing can still be spoken of with any sense, lies in the ungovernability of the many; in our ability to create and care for ourselves in freedom and equality.
Every protest against inequality, or the perceived assault on former “equality” and the arrogance and blindness of politicians, is today a potential spark for rebellion and insurrection. Today it is chile, lebanon, hong kong; just yesterday, it was ecuador, haiti, nicaragua, france. And if we push back the calendar to the beginning of this century, then it may rightfully be said, with Alain Badiou, that we live in times of riots.
Yet, we believe that there is more at stake here than an “awakening of history” or the need for “political organisation” capable of transforming riots into insurrections and history. But this something more we will have to return to in a future post.
Raúl Zibechi’s reading of the most recent revolt in ecuador unveils a shift in the radical politics of the americas (and perhaps beyond) – one announced earlier, embryonically, in the movements-insurrections of this century – and which we might wish to call a post-hegemonic politics of revolution; a politics that has greater affinity with tactics of direct action and mutual aid, than with the strategies of more traditional labour and political organisations of the “Left”.
To share, in translation, from the spanish newspaper El Salto …
The problems of Catalonia are talked about too often. What problems of Catalonia? In Catalonia there is no problem; the only problem that could have arisen in Catalonia is posed by us; but the problem that is posed by us is not a problem of Catalonia, it is a universal problem. In Catalonia – there is a need to put it that way – there is no other problem than ours, and I have said this before, that it is not a problem of Catalonia, that it is of Spain and it is universal. In Catalonia there is no Catalan problem, because only the organised bourgeoisie feels that problem there, which is under the auspices of the Regionalist League. (…) The Regionalist League has sought, and has partly succeeded, to make all of Spain understand that in Catalonia there is no other problem than their: the regionalist. This is a falsehood; in Catalonia there is no other problem than that which exists among all the free peoples of the world, throughout Europe; a problem of administrative decentralisation that all the liberal men of the world accept; but a problem of national independence, a problem of autonomy that is tied to independence, that does not exist in Catalonia, because the workers there do not want it, we do not feel that problem, we do not solve the problem under those conditions.
Salvador Seguí, (from a speech given at the Casa del Pueblo of Madrid, the 4th of October, 1919)
On October 14th, nine catalan independence “leaders” were found guilty of sedition for the organisation of the 2017 independence referendum in October and the subsequent declaration of independence, voted exclusively by pro-independence catalan MPs on the 27th of October.
The response has been a week of massive protests (centred in Barcelona, but also occurring throughout the region and in other parts of the country), disruptions of transportation, a general strike this last Friday and daily confrontations with the police (with hundreds injured and dozens arrested).
While both the spanish and the catalan regional governments, and their respective parliaments, are divided and paralysed over what to do next, anarchists find themselves again in the uncomfortable position of siding with neither, while opposing and fighting against state violence, and defending more radical forms of autonomy, beyond “national sovereignty”.
And yet they have engaged in the protests, for what is at stake in this judicial decision is not only a “crime” by nationalist politicians (where “sedition” is so defined in the judgement that any opposition to the law may be deemed seditious), but that whenever struggle against repression emerges, the possibility of pushing against the supposed limits of any uprising is ever present.
While sympathies understandably lie with the street protests, one should nevertheless avoid any illusions about a future catalan government lead by the likes of Quim Torra (current president of the regional government), or in the past, by Artur Mas and Charles Puigdemont who both defended and defend aggressive neo-liberal politics and were quick to use the police against all public demonstrations of dissidence. On this occasion, in an effort to separate the “good, peaceful” protesters from the “bad, violent” protesters, local state authorities contended that foreign anarchist elements had infiltrated the protests against the legal judgment and independence demonstrations, to cause chaos. (Público 18/10/2019).
We share below three texts, the first a piece from Roarmag magazine, the second a chronicle-analysis of events, from the CrimethInc. Collective and lastly, a statement from the CNT-Catalunya. Past reflections on the catalan independence movement may be found here.
Alexander Kluge writes that the “sentiments are the true inhabitants of people’s paths of life. It can be said of them what is said of the Celts … : they are everywhere, we simply do not see them. The sentiments fill with life (and form) institutions, they find root in coercive laws, in happy coincidences, they move on horizons, move beyond them, even to the galaxies. They are in everything which touches us. What people need, on their paths of life, is ORIENTATION”. (Chronicle of sentiments) It is from sentiment, passion, from rootedness or territoriality, that orientation comes.
For almost two weeks, peoples in ecuador – the indigenous, peasants, workers, students – rose up against IMF dictated austerity, rendered uncertain the power of the police and the military, forced a government to flee the centre of power, occupied parliament and quickly created spaces of mutually supporting autonomy throughout the extent of the national territory. The price was high – in arrests, torture, wounded and deaths – but the government finally abandoned the IMF agreement.
That such an insurrection took place was unforeseen, as all insurrections are, precisely because they are born of shared and living sentiments, of common orientations.
“We are not going to negotiate dignity. We will not negotiate our martyrs. We hope that today we will find a definitive and lasting solution, and if this is not achieved, we will continue, firm and united and with the unrelenting commitment of defending our people and we are ready to make all of the possible sacrifices. And if that means giving our lives, we will do it.” The words are those of Jaime Vargas, president of CONAIE – Confederación de Nacionalidades Indígenas del Ecuador – and they express concretely Kluge’s. And it is this which Capital seeks to destroy and destroys, something that was formally called and lived as solidarity.
Where events lead from here, we can only follow from a distance. We share a series of texts below, as chronicle, testimony and to understand …
As Rojava becomes the front line of inter-state conflict (the Guardian), it is the destruction of the revolution created and fought for on this land that is the objective of the military interventions.
A reflection on the stakes of events in Rojava, from the CrimethInc. Collective (12/10/2019) …
Thoughts for times of rebellion
From lundi matin #214, 01/11/2019 …
Aerial Bridge Hong Kong/Barcelona – Bulletin Nº 2
In the continuity of our article last week about the Catalan uprising, friends have transmitted these beautiful meditations from the streets of Barcelona.
“We do not wish honors, only to appear in the posterity of the history of cataclysms.”
Le Grand Jeu
RUINS
Spain is a ruin. The wind travels through the void left by the Great of Spain. We have been ransacked by tradition, by every generation of rulers, by every generation of merchants and scammers. Only broken, can the Spanish try a re-composition at the height of its art and its festivals. Hong Kong, Chile, Ecuador, Haiti, Lebanon and France’s yellow vests show that the governing order itself is itself a ruin. A fierce ruin, which protects its soap bubbles as if they were diamonds.
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