From the anarchist federation of uruguay (and posted, in english translation, by the black rose anarchist federation – 14/12/2017), reflections on popular power in venezuela’s “bolivarian revolution” …
The popular defense of State controlled social welfare is not in itself anti-capitalist. However, the State driven privatisation of social welfare, if placed within the context of broader forms of violent accumulation (e.g., land and resource dispossession, the imposition of salaried labour and forced migration, the marginalisation and subordination of women and of other social groups – which is to say the invention of these groups – for needs of the reproduction of oppressive social relations, and so on), reveals itself as a fundamental moment in the expansion and intensification of contemporary capitalist social relations. To then disturb or sabotage the politics of “neo-liberal market expansion” is potentially radical, or radicalising, to the degree that it overflows the boundaries of a politics of merely preserving the Welfare State.
A radical defense of social welfare transforms what is essentially a defensive gesture into one which transforms what is at stake in the struggle: the aim becomes one of liberating social welfare from the State, of returning it to communities of people who are the best placed to care for themselves, and of understanding that such care is only possible within (overlapping human and non-human) communities capable of autonomously creating and governing themselves.
Argentina is once again a stage for violent capitalist experimentation; may the stakes be high …
El Roto
The debate among anarchists around the Catalan independence movement continues unabated. From a distance, as always, it is difficult to follow events, to grasp all that is at stake, to draw reasonably clear conclusions. It is however our conviction that the events are important (not only to understand what is going on, but also to understand the position of anarchists with regards to a mass movement of national self-determination) enough to justify our ongoing concern to present, in translation, some of the protagonists in this controversy.
We share below an essay by Tomás Ibáñez, published earlier this month, on the 1st of December, in response to an essay by Santiago López Petit, and which follows earlier interventions by him on the anarchists in the Catalan referendum.
We can only leave to more informed readers or participants in the events, the judgement of where the truth lies.
And we close with a brief note by Octavio Alberola, added here as a kind of coda to Ibáñez’s essay.
The rebellion of Catalonia, falsely presented as a mere exercise in institutional and national self-determination, and its repression, demands reflection. What was lived and continues to be lived, resonates well beyond judicial decisions, constitutional debates or future regional elections (scheduled for the 21st of December). In a step towards greater understanding of what is at stake, we share a short essay, in translation, by Santiago López Petit, entitled Catalonia as political laboratory. (Originally published in Crític – 27/11/2017 – and published again in spanish by comite disperso, and posted with a las barricadas).
But what is a body? … For Spinoza, the individuality of a body is defined by the following: it’s when a certain composite or complex relation (I insist on that point, quite composite, very complex) of movement and rest is preserved through all the changes which affect the parts of the body. It’s the permanence of a relation of movement and rest through all the changes which affect all the parts, taken to infinity, of the body under consideration. You understand that a body is necessarily composite to infinity.
Gilles Deleuze, On Spinoza (Lecture)
It has become common place to speak of the politics of the body; less common is a politics that begins from the plurality and plasticity of the body. By Paul B. Preciado (Liberation 10/11/2017) …
For those of us born into a captivity gilded by the blood and sweat of less fortunate captives, the challenge of leading a life worth living of stories worth telling is a lifelong project, and a formidable one; but all it takes, at any moment, to meet this challenge is to contest that captivity.
An Anarchist Primer
An anarchist manifesto against manifestos; an apology for anarchism that hurls anarchy against all “isms”; a manifesto as testimony of the experience of anarchy: the beauty of anarchy distilled into the words of a “primer … from the crimethinc. collective …
We close our series – without for a moment suggesting that this is the last word – on the russian revolution of 1917 with an interview with Carlos Taibo, author of the recent work, in spanish, Anarquismo y revolución en Rusia (1917-1921). Though the interview focuses on Taibo’s concern with calling attention to the role of anarchists and libertarians in the events of the russian revolution, it takes us beyond the past; the revolution remains a lens through which to think through our political present.
Originally published in Contexto y acción, we present the essay below in translation.
The autonomous activity of the masses belongs by definition to what is repressed in history.
Cornelius Castoriadis
Cornelius Castoriadis’ saw in the Bolshevik seizure of power the beginning of the end of the russian revolution; an end marked by the administrative dispossession of the autonomy of the soviets and the factory committees by a nascent bureaucracy grounded in a vanguardist political ideology. Castoriadis’ reading of the destruction of the revolution – and a revolution there was – remains pertinent, not only for the understanding of the events of the time, but also because it raises a fundamental question: what institutional form can autonomy assume? Castoriadis’ question remains ours.
A further contribution to our series on the russian revolution of 1917.
In 1917 there were more than twelve million members of the Russian consumers’ Cooperative societies; and the Soviets themselves are a wonderful demonstration of their organising genius. Moreover, there is probably not a people in the world so well educated in Socialist theory and its practical application.
John Reed, Ten Days that Shook the World
It is sometimes those from within who see best, if they allow themselves to see. Rosa Luxemburg, if critical of anarchism and the anarchists in russia, would nevertheless be among the first marxists to also criticise the direction of the Bolsheviks in the country. As one more contribution to our series on the russian revolution, we publish below two chapters of Luxemburg’s The Russian Revolution (1918).
For Katarina Gogou
… we convalescents still need art, it is another kind of art – a mocking, light, fleeting, divinely untroubled, divinely artificial art that, like a bright flame, blazes
into an unclouded sky! Above all: an art for artists, only for artists!
Friedrich Nietzsche
I would like to spin a eulogy / of filth, of poverty, of drugs and suicide . . . drugs, disgust, rage
Pier Paolo Pasolini
Banks give birth to ‘robbers’.
Prisons to ‘terrorists’.
[…]
Products to the ‘need’.
Borders to armies.
All because of private property.
Violence is engendered by Violence.
[…]
Don’t ask. Don’t stop me.
It’s time to restore
the supreme act of moral justice.
Poeticize life and act on it.
[…]
For as long as it takes, from the beginning
I defend ANARCHISM
Katarina Gogou
Poetry is the gesture of language expressing itself as language, a medium which refuses itself as an end in itself (the aesthetic attitude), or as a means to a further end (the instrumentalisation of language) … Mallarmé’s milieu pur.
Anarchism is politics as the gesture/exposure of the being-in-community of human beings, politics as a “showing”, a “revealing”, which cannot speak itself without becoming an end in-itself (fetishised insitutionalisation) or an end to a further (transcendental, non-political) end. Anarchy refuses self-justification in constitutional forms (e.g., capitalist parliamentarianism) or in the making of a priori communitarian identities. It is as gesture, as a permanent bringing forth and support of itself, an ethics.
Anarchism is politics as poetry, as pure gesture; an autonomous community’s way of life.
If Plato expelled the poets from the Republic, it was because poetry’s way of being defied all order. The prohibition of poetry was the suppression of art’s an-arche, its refusal of any foundation or ground for the showing/coming into being of expression.
The anarchist is poet, as the poet is anarchist, in their desire to live beyond Law.
The poetry of Katarina Gogou gives a voice to this way of life …
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