Remembering Gaetano Bresci, with the Crimethinc. collective …
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Viva Bresci!
Posted in Commentary
Tagged anarchism, Errico Malatesta, Gaetano Bresci, italy, Leo Tolstoy
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The subjects of capital: A critique of narcissism
Capitalism produces human subjectivities, as it produces commodities. Without this capacity, its underlying social relations would be unsustainable.
Motivated by our own reflections, we share below an essay that was recently posted on the french based palim-psao website (a site dedicated to the diffusion of Krisis goup texts in various languages), that critically addresses the narcissistic subject of contemporary capitalism.
Notes from underground: Dostoyevsky’s anarchism
“What is hell?” And I am reasoning thus: “The suffering that comes from the consciousness that one is no longer able to love.”
Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov
“It is life, life that matters, life alone – the continuous and everlasting process of discovering it – and not the discovery itself.”
Dostoyevsky, The Idiot
Fyodor Dostoyevsky, in a letter speaking of his The Brothers Karamazov, declares that his principal aim in writing the novel, a civic duty no less, is the defeat of “anarchism”.
How can we then suggest to speak of Dostoyevsky’s anarchism? And yet we dare to do so, navigating our way through the extremes of the underground and the modern social conformity of the many, of the nihilists and decadent aristocrats, of the social reformers and a Church oblivious to the kingdom of heaven. Our journey’s end is to be found in the many voices of Dostoyevsky’s world, in a polyphony that cannot be silenced without impoverishing that world. Among these many voices, we find the braying of mules, the tortured crying of children, the virtue of women and friends, the dissonance of idiots and the enthusiasm of those who have experienced, however fleetingly, the immensity and self-sufficient beauty and goodness of life. What binds all of these disparate voices together, and only this power or force can do so, is love. And it is Dostoyevsky’s boundless love of life that we will risk to call his anarchism.
Beyond Negativity: What Comes After Gender Nihilism? – Alyson Escalante
(photographs by Mike Disfarmer)
Subvert the social and civil order! Aye, I would destroy, to the last vestige, this mockery of order, this travesty upon justice!
Break up the home? Yes, every home that rests on slavery! Every marriage that represents the sale and transfer of the individuality of one of its parties to the other! Every institution, social or civil, that stands between man and his right; every tie that renders one a master, another a serf; every law, every statute, every be-it-enacted that represents tyranny; everything you call American privilege that can only exist at the expense of international right. Now cry out, “Nihilist-disintegrationist !” Say that I would isolate humanity, reduce society to its elemental state, make men savage! It is not true. But rather than see this devastating, cankering, enslaving system you call social order go on, rather than help to keep alive the accursed institutions of Authority, I would help to reduce every fabric in the social structure to its native element.
Voltairine de Cleyre
If gender-sex-sexuality are constructed in the everyday and violent reproduction of patriarchal societies, then the multiple, overlapping and opposing identities which configure them play a structuring role in the forms of domination that define such societies.
Against such domination, affirmations of marginal and repressed identities, calls for their recognition by public and/or private authorities, may serve to lessen existing types of social control. Yet, this same recognition requires that identifications, formally excluded, be legally and socially admitted, which in turn depend on “official” sanction, surveillance, protection, all carried out by means of apparatuses of control functioning at all levels of society. Systems of control shift, continuously, to accommodate, integrate and contribute to produce new subject-subjectivities.
In other words, without critically engaging with questions such as, “recognition by whom or what?”, “what is to be recognised?”, “in what context?”, “in whose interest?”, “for what purpose?”, then the demand for recognition is not only politically empty, but politically dangerous, for identity classifications are essential to at least all modern forms of domination. To be recognised may create spaces of freedom hitherto non-existent, but such freedom can never be uncritically assumed (consider the much vaunted free market). And where formerly invisibility was perceived as the problem, visibility may render the techniques of social control all that much more effective.
A more radical challenge to patriarchy may lie then in the refusal and sabotage of the gender-sex-sexuality categories that sustain it. Alyson Escalante defended such a position in an essay-manifesto that we have formally shared entitled Gender Nihilism: An Anti-Manifesto.
An anarchist critique of horizontalism: Mark Bray
The concept and practice of “horizontalism” has significantly marked recent social movements. And for some, this has suggested affinities with older anarchist politics and served to justify the participation of anarchists in them. Yet whatever affinities there are – and there are – there are also very important differences, differences that come to the fore when “horizontalism” is conceived of as a strictly formal method for collective decision making, while anarchism has always radically and robustly opposed all forms of dominating hierarchical power, in every sphere.
To ignore these differences is to ignore the fact that “horizontalism” is compatible with all manner of political ideologies which may have very little to do with anti-authoritarianism and anti-capitalism, or stated positively, with freedom and equality.
The essay that follows by Mark Bray helps to clarify the matter.
From the Black Rose Anarchist Federation …
Anarchism is movement: Tomás Ibáñez (5)
(Bordeaux, May 68, Archives Sud ouest)
The fifth chapter of Tomás Ibáñez’s Anarchism is movement brings the principal argument of the essay to a close. Ibáñez is here concerned to demonstrate the bases upon which the contemporary anarchist resurgence and renewal occurred, bases that also set out the paths for its future development.
Our translation thus includes this chapter along with translations of the essay’s earlier chapters:
Preamble and Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
What remains are Ibáñez’s substantial theoretical Addenda, which will come more slowly. Our hope is that the translation of Ibáñez’s essay will help to make available to anglophones a work that we believe is significant for thinking through anarchism today.
Anarchism is movement: Tomás Ibáñez (4)
The fourth chapter of Tomás Ibáñez’s essay, Anarchism is movement directly engages the debate over the significance of “postanarchism”. Neither tempted by a blind adherence to this current of thought, nor categorically dismissive, Ibáñez attempts to navigate between these extremes, always attentive to the complex relations between theory and practice that have always animated anarchism.
(The first – along with the preamble –, second and third chapters, of Ibáñez’s essay, have been published earlier).
Anarchism is movement: Tomás Ibáñez (3)
Engaging directly with the contemporary resurgence and renewal of anarchism, Tomás Ibáñez, in the third chapter of Anarchism is movement, endeavours in part to conceptualise what he calls the “constitutively changeable” nature of the movement.
Binding together thought and action, anarchism develops within mutually sustaining relations between practice guided by and creative of ideas, and ideas generative of and resulting from practice. And to the extent that anarchism in turn develops within a historical context, this same relationship between thought and action is paralleled at the broader level of the movement’s relationship with any particular historical moment: anarchism is made possible (as thought and practice) by the context from which it emerges, while that context is changed by anarchism.
In other words, the anarchist movement’s capacity to surge up anew depends on its renewal and its renewal depends on its capacity to produce the conditions of its resurgence. And it is in this immanent to and fro between idea and practice, and between both and historical setting, that rebellious subjectivities are forged. Should these ties be severed, then anarchism and anarchists will only be found in libraries and museums.
(The first – along with the preamble – and second chapters, of Ibáñez’s essay, have been published earlier).
Anarchism is movement: Tomás Ibáñez (2)
Tomás Ibáñez, not without hesitation and only as a heuristic, employs the term “neoanarchism” to refer to the resurgence and changing nature of the movement in the wake of May 1968, France. But these changes have not been without their critics, so that in what follows, the second chapter of Ibáñez’s essay, Anarchism is movement, he endeavours to both explain and defend what he considers to be the virtues of our new anarchism.
Brazil’s undeclared war against dissidence
The State’s repression of dissent continues apace in brazil, this time targeting those who protested against the 2014 FIFA world cup of football. This is but an episode, however, one more, in a politics that no longer hides behind any pretense of “democratic legitimacy”. Since the popular uprising of 2013, the state of exception is the new norm against all social protest. It has been said that what brazilians are living is “low-intensity civil war”, with more violent deaths per year at the hands of State authorities than in than those who have been killed in the syrian civil war, during the same period. The only response possible must be equally exceptional.
We share below an article from the Crimethinc. collective …
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