In the wake of ongoing mass protests in france against proposed reforms to the labour code in the country, promising only more work and more precariousness for the benefit of Capital, a call was made by numerous collectives and associations, and circulated by the newspaper Fakir, to not return home after the protests scheduled for the 31st of March (in which well over a million people took part).
All acts of terrorism, all the attacks that have struck and that strike the imagination of men and women, have been and are either offensive or defensive actions. Experience has long since shown that, if they are part of a strategic offensive, they are always doomed to failure. On the other hand, experience has also shown that, if they are part of a defensive strategy, such actions can hope for some success, which is nevertheless momentary and precarious. The attacks by the Palestinians and the Irish, for example, are acts of offensive terrorism, while the bombing of the Piazza Fontana and the kidnapping of Aldo Moro, for example, are defensive acts.
However, it is not only the strategy that differs depending on whether the act in question is an instance of offensive or defensive terrorism, but also the strategists. The desperate and those suffering from illusions have recourse to offensive terrorism, while it is always and only States that have recourse to defensive terrorism, either because they have been thrust into some serious social crisis, as the Italian State has been, or because they fear such a crisis, as does the German State.
Gianfranco Sanguinetti, On Terrorism and the State
The National Court (La Audiencia Nacional) in spain has condemned Mónica Caballero and Francisco Solar, each, to 12 years in prison for the detonation of an explosive in October of 2013 in the Basílica de El Pilar of Zaragoza. The legal sentence held the two responsible for the explosion, on the basis of video images in which two persons are seen with covered faces, in a bar near the basilica. No images were recorded inside the church and there were no witnessses for the prosecution.
The anarchist collective CrimethInc. initiated this month a critical analysis and discussion of “democracy”, promising a series of reflections. What follows is the second essay, From Democracy to Freedom, preceded by the introduction to the series and an introduction to the essay. We have shared earlier the first essay, The Party’s Over …
Those who cross national borders “illegally” are anti-Statists in action, if not in thought, for they rebel against the violence of sovereignty.
Those who transgress frontiers without authorisation are anti-capitalists, for capitalism cannot function without an imposed division of labour mapped across geographies of violence.
The criminals who feed upon this movement, from mafias of human trafficking to State police, from “legal” businesses to “humanitarian” NGOs, are but the instruments of State-Capital for its domestication and exploitation. Unrestrained freedom of movement would destroy both.
The anarchist collective CrimethInc. initiated this month a critical analysis and discussion of “democracy”, promising a series of reflections, the first of which we help to diffuse below. Preceding it is the introduction to the series …
Street art doesn’t exist, there is just you and the world outside. Do what you like in the best way and think about what you are doing.
Capitalism is a machine of appropriation, capturing agencies and forces through division, identification and commodification. The commons, and the creative powers to commons, are thus placed at the service of monetary exhange. The commons finds its ground in the generosity of nature, and within and through human life, in our collective ability to create ourselves and the worlds in which we live. Capitalism “privatises” life for the benefit of a few, dispossessing nature’s creatures of their ability to autonomously generating ways of life.
Our struggle is every day, we are women and not commodities.
Against capital, anal pleasure; Against the vatican, clitoral pleasure; Against patriarchy, pleasure everywhere.
I was a saint, I was a witch, I was a whore, but I will did not silence myself.
Words sung out at the Transfeminist Manif-Festa in Lisbon 12 March
We share below a short text by Harley Roquentin, entitled “A New Path to Gender Equality” (libcom.org 10/03/2016). And even though we have some doubts about the text (e.g., the path indicated is not so new after all and it is sot so clear that “without gender, there are only people”, for gender is not alone in structuring oppressive social relations and what lies “beneath” gender is perhaps not “people”, but desire susceptible to a multiplicity of forms and agencies), what it states directly and simply is necessary.
The 12th of May of 2011 in portugal marked the beginning of the largest protest movement in the country since the 25th of April 1974 revolution. What came to be known as M12M began as a call on the social media to gather in different cities to contest the politics of austerity being imposed in consequence of the financial crisis of 2008, which in portugal, as elsewhere, meant that the State saved failing private banks, to then pass the costs of increased debt servicing onto the population, through worsening conditions of labour, increased taxes and cuts in State administered social services. The protest was of the generation “a rasca”, the generation in dire straights, or in deep shit, who at the margins of established political parties and labour unions, endeavoured to make politics theirs.
To be without destiny: For Imre Kertész
Man, when reduced to nothing, or in other words a survivor, is not tragic but comic, because he has no fate.
Imre Kertész, Liquidation
Imre Kertész’s literary work is inseparable from his life as a survivor of the nazi death camps; inseparable from the search for an ethics beyond mass political murder.
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