Dada remains within the framework of European weaknesses; it’s still shit, but from now on we want to shit in different colours to adorn the zoo of art with the flags of every consulate.
Tristan Tzara, Manifesto of Monsieur Antipyrine
Thought is made in the mouth.
Tristan Tzara, Dada Manifesto On Feeble Love and Bitter Love
A further contribution to our series on the russian revolutions of 1917 …
The Crimethinc collective is posting continuous live updates of the “Welcome to Hell” protests in Hamburg against the G20 gathering. We share below two such posts, in solidarity we all of those resisting in the city …
Among the functions of borders, political and others, is to stabilise and make possible the exploitation of human populations, against the free flows of capital commodities and commodity spectacles. If populations were allowed complete freedom of movement, equal to that of capital, then capitalism would collapse.
Borders are also however points of passage, for the control of population movements. They function as instruments of surveillance, registration and control. Populations must be allowed to move as well, for the permanent acceleration of the fluxes of capital can not find points of labour extraction and intensified consumption without movement (e.g. land dispossession, peasant migrations to centres of industrial and/or service production, etc.) and thus without the relative control of movements of people.
The “immigrant question”, as it is then typically posed and addressed in official “political debate” is farcical, when not openly deceitful. Questions of how many immigrants should be allowed into a country, which kinds of immigrants, under what conditions and under what modes of “integration”, and the like (and this against the background of millions dislocated by the violence of capitalism), only serve to mask the truly political nature of the issue. That is, who is considered an immigrant or who is not depends on who is necessary, and in what way, for the re-production of the social relations of capitalist domination.
Guy Debord’s short essay, “Notes on ‘the immigrant question'” (chicago.indymedia.org) remains telling …
“Violence” is something new in history. We decadents are the first to know this curious thing: violence. Traditional societies knew of theft, blasphemy, parricide, abduction, sacrifice, insults and revenge. Modern States, beyond the dilemma of adjudicating facts, recognized only infractions of the Law and the penalties administered to rectify them. But they certainly knew plenty about foreign wars and, within their borders, the authoritarian disciplining of bodies. In fact, only the timid atom of imperial society … thinks of “violence” as a radical and unique evil lurking behind countless masks, an evil which it is so vitally important to identify, in order to eradicate it all the more thoroughly. For us, ultimately, violence is what has been taken from us, and today we need to take it back.
Tiqqun, Introduction to civil war
As a continuation of the collection of accounts of police violence-intervention from our last post, we share an essay by Peter Gelderloos on the function of the police within modern, capitalist society.
No radical politics is possible except against the police, for they are an integral and fundamental instrument in the reproduction of capitalist social relations. This does not mean however they they should become the object of any open and exclusive counter-violence; but rather, that all should be done to create conditions in which the violence of the police is rendered pointless and they themselves cease to be necessary.
In the mass protests-occupations of spain’s cities in 2011, for example, the police were often simply marginalised by the sheer scale of the mobilisations, or pushed back in many smaller, but determined, protests. The creation and defense of spaces of autonomy is only viable not against the police, but against the society as whole to which they belong. In other words, autonomy lies beyond policed societies.
This so perfect democracy itself constructs its inconceivable enemy, terrorism. It wants, in effect, to be judged by its enemies rather then by its results. The history of terrorism is written by the State: it is therefore enlightening. The spectator populations cannot obviously know everything about terrorism, but they can always know enough to be persuaded that, in relation to terrorism, everything else will appear quite acceptable, in any case more rational and more democratic.
Guy Debord, Commentaires sur la société du spectacle
In the permanent state of exception that reigns in our times, all fictions of a state of law wane, or are simply set aside. And behind the farce of the law is revealed the violent authority of the police, exemplified increasingly in the heavily armed, helmeted riot cop whose only function seems to be to clear the streets of any conduct that would stem or interrupt capitalist “normality”. What is however more fundamental, and which is often ignored, is that the police are not only the final executors of the law; they also define it in the field. That is, as they “apply” the law, they interpret it, write it, in ways that double back on the legislator, such that it is the police who in effect come to legislate.
I am large, I contain multitudes.
Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass
The real problem is not that of restoring a Marxist or Leninist or Maoist truth, nor that of remaking an organisation with the same methods and therefore the same errors as the one that failed in too many parts of the world. The half century that has passed since the death of Lenin obliges us, on pain of death, to rethink reality, not texts; society, not formulae; to produce truth, not to contend over hereditary protocols. It is a difficult task that for a number of years has demanded fierce study and pitiless rigour. Nor is it just a task of consciousness. It is a vital task, in which to invent a different relationship between our present, the site of our pain and our joy, and the exalted or terrifying images of the future and the past.
Franco Fortini
What follows is a fourth and final exercise in the sharing of ideas, of visions (for the first, click here, the second, here, and the third, here). The most recent essay by the invisible committee, Now, continues a reflection-intervention that began with The Coming Insurrection and To Our Friends, and offers a powerful critique of contemporary politics, along with a defense of “autonomy”. What is proposed here then is again a partial translation, summary and critical commentary on their reading of communism.
In solidarity with all who resist against the upcoming G20 summit in Hamburg … Continue reading
As a complement to our most recent post, a call for support from the Steki Social Centre in Thessaloniki, we publish an interview with Tasos Sagris from Void Network, for the radio program This Is Hell (u.s.a.), along with a video from sub.Media’s Trouble series entitled Refugees Welcome:Creating Solidarity Across Borders.
In the wake of the spread of the “syrian refugee crisis” into europe in 2015, anti-authoritarian, anti-fascist and anarchist groups in greece have created networks of mutual aid, of various kinds, in support of the migrants.
Refusing any State or NGO mediated police charity, anarchists have been among the most active in organising self-managed spaces that have allowed migrants to determine collectively and autonomously, to varying degrees, their own lives.
The okupation of abandoned public and private buildings for the creation of migrant-solidarity social centres has been perhaps the most notable expression of a territorialised solidarity that places networks of mutual, shared support before the logic of State controlled borders.
We have only recently learned of the threat to close one such centre, the Steki Social Centre in Thessaloniki. And in solidarity, we share their call for support …
The russian revolution of 1917: Emma Goldman
The argument that destruction and terror are part of revolution I do not dispute. I know that in the past every great political and social change necessitated violence. America might still be under the British yoke but for the heroic colonists who dared to oppose British tyranny by force of arms. Black slavery might still be a legalized institution in the United States but for the militant spirit of the John Browns. I have never denied that violence is inevitable, nor do I gainsay it now. Yet it is one thing to employ violence in combat, as a means of defence. It is quite another thing to make a principle of terrorism, to institutionalize it, to assign it the most vital place in the social struggle. Such terrorism begets counter-revolution and in turn itself becomes counter-revolutionary.
Emma Goldman
Among the earliest critiques of the Bolshevik destruction of the russian revolution were anarchists. There was the tragic experience of having initially witnessed and fully embraced a radical social revolution, only then to see it usurped by the creation of a new “communist” State.
To our series on the russian revolution of 1917, on this the occasion of its centenary, we add the voice of Emma Goldman …
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