The wave of strikes that swept through Vitoria, spain, in 1976, culminating in a city wide general strike on March the 3rd, were a revolutionary moment that sought to break with the controlled transition, after the dictator Francisco Franco’s death, towards a more modern form of capitalist political administration.
From spain, we share a statement from the spanish anarchist collective Apoyo Mutuo on the occasion of this year’s international women’s day, in solidarity with all of those who struggle against patriarchy, sexism, misogyny, heteronormativity and all of the violence and oppression that they sustain. There can be no revolution, no anarchy, which does not liberate us from the authoritarianism of sex-gender domination.
From the anarchist collective CrimethInc., a reflection on the collective sexual assaults on during Cologne’s new year’s eve celebrations, and more …
Love, the strongest and deepest element in all life, the harbinger of hope, of joy, of ecstasy; love, the defier of all laws, of all conventions; love, the freest, the most powerful moulder of human destiny; how can such an all-compelling force be synonymous with that poor little State and Church-begotten weed, marriage?
Free love? As if love is anything but free! Man has bought brains, but all the millions in the world have failed to buy love. Man has subdued bodies, but all the power on earth has been unable to subdue love. Man has conquered whole nations, but all his armies could not conquer love. Man has chained and fettered the spirit, but he has been utterly helpless before love. High on a throne, with all the splendor and pomp his gold can command, man is yet poor and desolate, if love passes him by. And if it stays, the poorest hovel is radiant with warmth, with life and color. Thus love has the magic power to make of a beggar a king. Yes, love is free; it can dwell in no other atmosphere. In freedom it gives itself unreservedly, abundantly, completely. All the laws on the statutes, all the courts in the universe, cannot tear it from the soil, once love has taken root. If, however, the soil is sterile, how can marriage make it bear fruit? It is like the last desperate struggle of fleeting life against death.
Love needs no protection; it is its own protection. So long as love begets life no child is deserted, or hungry, or famished for the want of affection. I know this to be true. I know women who became mothers in freedom by the men they loved. Few children in wedlock enjoy the care, the protection, the devotion free motherhood is capable of bestowing.
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In our present pygmy state love is indeed a stranger to most people. Misunderstood and shunned, it rarely takes root; or if it does, it soon withers and dies. Its delicate fiber can not endure the stress and strain of the daily grind. Its soul is too complex to adjust itself to the slimy woof of our social fabric. It weeps and moans and suffers with those who have need of it, yet lack the capacity to rise to love’s summit.
Some day, some day men and women will rise, they will reach the mountain peak, they will meet big and strong and free, ready to receive, to partake, and to bask in the golden rays of love. What fancy, what imagination, what poetic genius can foresee even approximately the potentialities of such a force in the life of men and women. If the world is ever to give birth to true companionship and oneness, not marriage, but love will be the parent.
Emma Goldman, Mariage and Love
Following on our translation of Brigitte Vasallo’s essay #Occupy Love: for a revolution of the emotions, we share two further reflections on the same theme, and beyond, which may further discussion and debate. If the Vasallo essay celebrates love as arising out of rhizomic relations, it perhaps leaves out the tensions/conflicts and mutual dependencies that may arise out of love, and the politics that may therein emerge. It equally potentially leaves aside the character, context and differences of the individuals who so relate, as well as the violence of state-capitalist relations in inter-personal relations. To simply revel in an abstract free love amidst violence is to perpetuate that violence.
On the fifth anniversary of the fall of Egypt’s president Mubarak, what follows is an account of the uprising, and the ebb and flow of the Egyptian revolution, from an anonymous activist in Cairo. (Posted on libcom.org).
In cinematographic chronicles, Yannis Youlantis tells stories of resistance and struggle in greece and spain. The virtue and beauty of his films is the beauty of those who create autonomy against those who reduce the many to slavery. Whether it be in demonstrations, resistance to “development”, self-managed agricultural cooperatives, health centres, schools, okupations, autonomous social centres, each is an example of Nikos Kazantzakis statement that “the only way to save yourself is to struggle to save everyone else.” We share below Youlantis most recent work, Je lutte donc je suis (the dialogue is mostly in spanish and greek, with french subtitles) and an earlier film dedicated to recent greek struggles, Let’s not live like slaves (with english subtitles).
That love and respect may last, I would have unions rare and impermanent. That life may grow, I would have men and women remain separate personalities. Have no common possessions with your lover more than you might freely have with one not your lover. Because I believe that marriage stales love, brings respect into contempt, outrages all the privacies and limits the growth of both parties, I believe that “they who marry do ill.”
Voltairine de Cleyre
In here own words, Brigitte Vasallo is an occasional journalist, an anti-racist feminist (for her, the two are inseparable), with special concern for gender based islamophobia and non-monogamous and inclusive relations as a form of political resistance. It is with this last concern in mind that we share, in translation, a reflection by Vasallo on the need to contest monogamous love as part of a broader political project of autonomy. Further information on Vasallo’s work can be had at her blog: perderelnorte.
What characterises our generalised state of exception is that the law is without content. No specific crimes are circumscribed. Crime is identified with suspicion, with potential violations of norms, with “abnormality” or dissidence. To not bend to the ruling order is already to be a criminal, whether it be children in school recalcitrant to authority, workers resistant to regimes of work, or those who refuse work altogether, women who contest their patriarchs, persons who refuse heteronormativity and monogamy, refugees/migrants who transgress borders … in sum, all of those who create worlds beyond the control of State-Capital.
The recent arrest of puppeteers in spain only serves to remind of the violence of the state of exception …
The CNT denounces this new violation of the freedom of expression. Two artists were detained in the midst of a show for criticising the current society, for denouncing satirically repression. That is, they were arrested for purely ideological reasons. The judicial-police-political apparatus of the Spanish State continues to persecute and arrest people for ideological motives. … They burn the works of Zola, destroy page by page that of Grave, erase from the face of the earth all memory of the works of Gorki, destroy the theatres where Brecht is represented, emit an international order of arrest for Dario Fo, execute by vile garrote his publishers, and they do not forget to search for his readers. They begin the burning of books, and in the fire, they evoke the spirit of the Generalísimo. The arrest of two Spanish puppeteers accused of “promoting terrorism” in a play reveals the violence of the State in a way that satire never could.
On the 3rd February, the lifeless body of the italian student and journalist Giulio Regeni was found in a ditch in a peripheral neighbourhood of Cairo. It was then learned that he had been kidnapped by egyptian police on the 25th of January, and subsequently tortured and murdered. His crime, for the authorities, was perhaps to have researched the egyptian labour movement, to have sympathised with the aspirations of the “egyptian revolution” of 2011, to have been in solidarity with those who resist the current Sisi dictatorship.
Occupy, Resist, Produce: The rebellious factory okupations-cooperatives of europe
What is it to speak of alternative economies to capitalism? Wherein lies the alterity of initiatives that seek to produce beyond profit, to produce for the satisfaction of human needs? What is an anti/post capitalist production?
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