(Photograph: Mathias Zwick and Hans Lucas)
In anticipation of Act XVIII (March 16) of the yellow vests in Paris.
(From lundimatin #182, 10/03/2019)
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The calls for an international feminist general strike found an echo in many countries, but again, as in 2018, nowhere more than in spain. At the height of the strike, supported by the “majority” labour unions, as well as the “minority” anarchist unions, 6 million women and men ceased to work, and in the evening, millions took to the streets to protest, to demonstrate, to demand; to mark their presence and declare that enough is enough: enough of sexist inequality and violence, of patriarchal discrimination and exploitation. (El Pais 08/03/2019)
The reasons for this level of participation, in this particular country, would merit a reflection beyond what we are capable of. What interests us, though, in addition, is the question of how should the event be interpreted, understood? Without pretending to exhaust the subject, it is worth stating, negatively, that the strike risks becoming just one more moment in a predictable “protest” calendar, an annual moment of self-affirmation, no more threatening than an annual May Day or Pride celebration.
Our conviction is that this is not what animates the protests in spain, that it has a great deal more to do with a recent history of social struggle, that it is sustained by a great deal of “grass roots”, everyday militancy, that creates a dense fabric of political rebelliousness, that it goes beyond simple demands for woman’s “rights”.
But talk of a general strike, of a feminist general strike, begs reflection, and we share below selections from an essay on George Sorel’s concept of a general strike, which by analogy and affinity helps to shed some critical light on the virtues and limits of the current practice of a feminist general strike.
If we may anticipate our reader’s conclusions, our conviction is that a truly radical or revolutionary feminist general strike is one which brings capitalist social production and reproduction to a halt, which unmasks representational politics for an illusion, which rejects negotiation with any established economic or political authority (because intrinsically patriarchal), which understands that modern forms of patriarchy cannot be defeated without destroying capitalism (and vice versa) and that this is to be accomplished through direct action and mutual aid, the very “school” for any future free and equal society.
Utopian? It is our conviction that those who believe that the present is sustainable are the utopians. And as was militantly defended at the Puerta del Sol occupation in May of 2011, the revolution will be feminist, or it will not be.
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This year, the calls for an international feminist strike come from many quarters. And though our solidarity reaches out to all of them, our affinity lies with those who understand a feminist strike as a revolutionary strike against patriarchy, capital, the state; as a strike that does not last only a day, but extends itself indefinitely; that instead of appealing to political and economic representatives to improve the lot of women, takes matters into its own hands, through direct action and mutual aid.
We share below the call to strike from chilean anarchist women.
And we also share Voltairine de Cleyre’s defense of direct action.
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From the Crimethinc. Collective, a history of and testimonials from the struggle for the Ungdomshuset okupied social centre.
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With women’s day on the horizon and the international call for a global feminist strike to mark the 8th of March, we share a text in translation by Paul Preciado that pushes at the limits of feminist thought and practice.
If we are in solidarity with the strike call, we also believe that the strike must strive to move beyond the limits of a single day protest, of making demands upon capitalist States that are necessarily patriarchal (instead of striving for greater autonomous mutual aid and self-defense), of striking as feminists and then falling into the traps of gender affirming rights claims, of substituting law for desire.
Preciado’s work forces us to rethink the limits of feminism, carrying us towards a radically queer, anti-capitalist politics.
A reflection on the re-appropriation of time as the revolution within the yellow vests insurrection.
Words from a yellow vests newspaper.
And images and words of a movement, now in its “Act XVI”.
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Although the present age presents itself as a series of frequently recurring festivities, it is an age that knows nothing of real festivals. The moments within cyclical time when members of a community joined together in a luxurious expenditure of life are impossible for a society that lacks both community and luxury. Its vulgarized pseudofestivals are parodies of real dialogue and gift-giving; they may incite waves of excessive economic spending, but they lead to nothing but disillusionments, which can be compensated only by the promise of some new disillusion to come. The less use value is present in the time of modern survival, the more highly it is exalted in the spectacle. The reality of time has been replaced by the publicity of time.
Guy Debord, Society of the Spectacle
Carnival is transgressive. It profanes the sacred, rendering it a plaything. It usurps power and inverts authority. Norms and laws are suspended, giving way to spaces and times of creativity; a second, parallel world, freed from the reign of utility.
Carnival is a collective laughter at all seriousness, a break with the fear that keeps us prisoners of our isolation. Freedom is only possible in fearlessness.
Carnival does away with separation, alienation. In its excess, the identities of actor and spectator fall away, giving birth to a new reality, to new, ecstatic forms of life: a utopia of freedom and equality.
Carnival unmasks through the use of masks; the conformity to oneself gives way to the violation of boundaries and the relativity of all identities.
Carnival is a rediscovery of the body, or better, of the flesh, a plane or level of human reality of changing and creative joy.
Carnival is the ethical space of anarchy; a space that engenders no fixed orders or institutions, a space where all that is made can be unmade.
Carnival may be temporary, but inversely, it renders all that is created temporary, remaining the permanent source of freedom.
Carnival may be commodified, but then this is but the spectacle of carnival that can itself in turn be mocked.
“During carnival time life is subject only to its laws, that is, the laws of its own freedom. It has a universal spirit; it is a special condition of the entire world, of the world’s revival and renewal, in which all take part.” (Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World)
If carnival contests power, it does not do so by openly contesting it in battle, but by ridiculing it, by turning one’s back on it, by withdrawing from it and allowing it to collapse in upon itself. Against seriousness, laughter; against armies, clowns; against reasonableness, excess and disorder.
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It is by no means obvious that the history of anarchist politics every owed anything to the speculations of philosophers, even anarchist philosophers. And in like manner, no such politics could ever be read mechanically off a philosophy.
Philosophies of the 19th century echo through the writings of Proudhon, Bakunin and Kropotkin, to cite but the names of three “classical” anarchists, as today, anarchists theorise from any number of recent philosophers. But anarchist thought was always so much forged in struggle, that it could never be beholden to any single philosopher. Anarchists have always been the joyful orphans of unknown fathers and mothers. Their lineage has always been rooted in a militant present that breaks with the determinations of history, stealing from the past so many moments of rebellion that it calls upon, and gathers unto itself, in the always contemporaneous desire for freedom. And it is this desire that animates anarchist affinities.
Our recent post, sharing an essay on Emmanuel Levinas’s “anarchism”, may have suggested a theoretical ambition which is not ours. Levinas, as with so many other writers, is for us but one more possible vantage point on our world, shedding light where it is difficult to see, and offering paths to different worlds.
Without any ambition to assimilate practice to theory (and how could Levinas’ ethics ever be interpreted suggesting any specific kind of politics?), there is in the idea of care as struggle, an idea defended by Kevin Van Meter and the Team Colors Collective that perhaps resonates with the work of Levinas. Or shall we say that Levinas helps us to understand the ethics of care as an anarchist politics.
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On the 23rd of February, thousands marched through Madrid in solidarity with and in defence of the Fraguas rural occupation. (Kaos en la red)
Six of the accused-defendants involved in the occupation were sentenced to 1 year and 9 months imprisonment, plus fines of € 2800 each. In addition, the demolition of the town of Fraguas is demanded, with the costs of demolition, still without a fixed value, being imputed to the defendants. If the payment is not made, the imprisonment will increase to 2 years and 3 months of jail.
The Fraguas occupation began in 2013. Then, an abandoned village – like so many others in spain -, it became a rich experience in autonomous, communal life. And as with urban occupations, it is this which the State and capital cannot tolerate.
Freedom is joyfully contagious.
We share below a statement of solidarity by chimera (14/02/2019) and a short video documentary.
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The suffragettes: Self-defence as self-making
Every person who ever thought he had a right to assert, and went boldly and asserted it, himself, or jointly with others that shared his convictions, was a direct actionist. Some thirty years ago I recall that the Salvation Army was vigorously practising direct action in the maintenance of the freedom of its members to speak, assemble, and pray. Over and over they were arrested, fined, and imprisoned; but they kept right on singing, praying, and marching, till they finally compelled their persecutors to let them alone. The Industrial Workers are now conducting the same fight, and have, in a number of cases, compelled the officials to let them alone by the same direct tactics.
Every person who ever had a plan to do anything, and went and did it, or who laid his plan before others, and won their co-operation to do it with him, without going to external authorities to please do the thing for them, was a direct actionist. All co-operative experiments are essentially direct action.
Every person who ever in his life had a difference with anyone to settle, and went straight to the other persons involved to settle it, either by a peaceable plan or otherwise, was a direct actionist. Examples of such action are strikes and boycotts; many persons will recall the action of the housewives of New York who boycotted the butchers, and lowered the price of meat; at the present moment a butter boycott seems looming up, as a direct reply to the price-makers for butter.
These actions are generally not due to any one’s reasoning overmuch on the respective merits of directness or indirectness, but are the spontaneous retorts of those who feel oppresses by a situation. In other words, all people are, most of the time, believers in the principle of direct action, and practices of it. However, most people are also indirect or political actionists. And they are both these things at the same time, without making much of an analysis of either. There are only a limited number of persons who eschew political action under any and all circumstances; but there is nobody, nobody at all, who has ever been so “impossible” as to eschew direct action altogether.
Voltairine de Cleyre, Direct Action
… self-defence, paradoxically, has no subject – I mean to say that the subject that it defends does not preexist this movement of resistance to the violence of which it has become the target. Understood in this sense, self-defence has to do with what I propose to call “martial ethics of self”.
Elsa Dorlin
A shared reflection in the wake of the international feminist strike of March 8 (and for Christophe Dettinger) …
Who has the right to defend themselves? Who by contrast is excluded from this privilege and with what consequences?
These questions are at the heart of Elsa Dorlin’s essay, Se Défendre: Une Philosophie de la violence [To defend oneself: A Philosophy of violence] (Éditions La Découverte, Paris, 2017). The aim of the work is not to trace the long history of the “right” to self-defence, but to narrate a genealogy of modern power in which self-defence constitutes beneath or above the law a politics of subjectification.
If the right to self-defence is the basis for the elaboration of social contract political theory, the source and norm for establishing the limits of legitimate political authority, its role in defining the modern subject points beyond such legal-normative concerns, towards practices of subjectification.
Dorlin’s essay tells a story in which self-defence appears as a repertoire of practices and strategies for confronting-escaping the apparatuses of State control, in its many and overlapping modern guises. While States endeavour to define who can and who cannot defend themselves – thereby excluding from any legal and/or institutional protection those who cannot (the indefensible) -, practices of self-defence have sought to create tactics and strategies of escape-response to State power; not however through demands for inclusive recognition (new “citizenship”), but through acts of excluding-destructive sabotage (rebellious subjects).
If modern States have been obliged to respond to the first through the attribution of rights, they have done so at the cost of exposure of subjects to surveillance and control.
Rebellious subjectivities have always been susceptible to legal and institutional domestication, or worse, become complicit with reactionary social relations. But it is among the rebellious that insurrection and revolution is born.
The story of the British suffragettes, as told by Dorlin, is paradigmatic in this sense; a story that continues to proffer lessons for those who wish to imagine and create a feminism beyond “women’s rights”.
(What follows is a translation of the final section of the second chapter of Se Défendre. We have not included the end notes from the original text.)
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