Karen Karslyan is a writer. He is in love with words; their texture, music, variations. He may stretch them and minimise them, turn them into objects that scream and images that see other images as their own dreams. He is ironic and playful, his joyful games entertain and spread laughter, they also carry joy of carnal pleasures, and the marvel of breaking things into pieces.
“As for the main reason why I write poetry, I like breaking the lines. Poetry is a kind of sublimation of the childish predilection for breaking things.” (Karen Karslyan)
No artist, in any country, is free. S/he is a living contestation.
Pier Paolo Pasolini
The films of Abbas Kiarostami are now complete. With Kiarostami’s death this last July 4th, the worlds of his creation are now fixed, at least in number.
And yet how extraordinarily alive his cinema is. Refusing the label of story teller, rejecting propaganda as political-artistic engagement, Kiarostami’s art assumed that most humble and respectful position of recognising in his audience their freedom, their ability to create as much as he, as the filmmaker. His films are gifts to an audience that he was never able to see as consumers, or worse, people to be beaten into submission by abusive seduction. Like a friend, he shares with us worlds honestly, that is, as incomplete, allowing us thereby to breath, to imagine, to take flight.
Kiarostami’s film characters are often poorly fitted to the world. But in inviting us to see with them, feel with them, we learn of our own subtle dissonances, everyday rebellions, feeling then in our hearts that something akin to a revolutionary also lurks within us; a dreamer of other worlds awakened by the cracks of this world, brought into the light by Kiarostami’s fictioning.
However static Kiarostami’s films appear to be, nothing remains stable. His mastery was in seeing movement where we see only immobility. And if we can learn to see with him, as he so often invited us to do, then we discover that nothing is, that all is becoming. But we learn also that it is in this very becoming, in its permanent possibility and our awareness of it, where wisdom can lie.
The british referendum to quit the european union, driven by populist nationalism, racism, xenofobia; a referendum organised by a right-wing political party and imagined by all others; the fantasy of substituting one authoritarian capitalism by yet another more vile: none of this can offer any anarchist, even leftist, any solace.
From Roarmag, we share below a report on the militant teachers strike in Oaxaca, mexico, which the State authorities seem determined to crush by whatever means necessary. With the toll of detained, wounded and killed rising, what seems to be at stake here is not only putting an end to a teachers’ protest against proposed national education reforms (what is essentially a neo-liberal labour reform to break the power of the teacher’s union), but the desire to prevent (and the fear of this happening) any re-birth of the “Oaxaca Commune” of 2006, and the spread of such revolutionary gestures to other regions of the country.
With the Crimethinc. collective’s series on democracy in the background, which we have been sharing, a complementary article has been recently posted, authored by b. traven, which again we believe merits consideration.
We believe, without any doubt, that it is when each anonymous being gains consciousness of her/his pure potential and capacity to act, it is then when the wheel of dissidence begins to turn.
It is then that it is unstoppable. It is the everyday rebellions that transform the surroundings, challenging the capitalist massacre.
And so it begins, from below and little by little, until it takes the streets. ALL OF THE STREETS.
Rebeliones Cotidianas
Madrid graffiti May 2016
Nuit Debout, in the many occupied city squares of france, is created daily through a multiplicity of gestures and actions, forms and expressions. Among them is the proliferation of texts, produced both from within and outside the movement (a division that is not always easy to discern, for the movement has no clear frontiers). From the Paris based “official” Gazette Debout, the Nuit Debout Wiki, the publication of the lectures shared at Debout Education, Nuit Debout newspapers outside Paris, to bulletins, fanzines, commission and working group reports, and so much more.
Anarchism as non-substantive, as something not reducible to a completed ideology, or organisation; anarchism not as a closed space to be defended, protected against an outside; anarchism as no-thing, as the refusal of any sovereignty; anarchy rather than anarch-ism; in sum, “all that is really implied by anarchy is that we will relate directly with the world as we encounter it, rather than mediating our interactions through the filters of authority and absolutism.” The words and ideas are expressed in an admirable essay by Shawn P. Wilber, entitled, “Anarchy and Anarchism, Insides and Outsides”, originally posted on the site Contr’un: Anarchist Theory (07/10/2010) and which we share below to contribute to further reflection. Continue reading →
What follows below is a rich reflection on insurrection originally published in Anarchy: A Journal of Desire Armed, N° 70/71 and 72/73 (04/06/2016). The essay, authored by Lupus Dragonowl and entitled “The Future of Insurrection”, is inspired by the work of the Invisible Committee, The Coming Insurrection. It endeavours both to think through the deeper, philosophical significance of insurrection (ethical, polititcal …), in opposition to revolution, as an immanent form of life, as well as to confront tactical and strategic questions that insurrections invariably raise.
We share below the trailer to, and the first episode, of an 11 part series “No Borders: Social Struggles Across the USA” by the international anarchist media team, Sur Negro Productions, in collaboration with members of Black Rose/Rosa Negra and other organizations. A small production team from Chile spent months traveling across the huge territory we know as the United States of America to learn about social movements and the daily resistance to capitalism.
We share below a text from The Undercommoning Collective against the contemporary neoliberal-capitalist university, originally published with Roarmag (05/06/2016). The Collective is an evolving network of radical organizers within, against and beyond the neoliberal, (neo)colonial university, presently concentrated in North America. More information can be found at undercommoning.org. An exercise in de-schooled education for freedom …
Breaking up the european union
The british referendum to quit the european union, driven by populist nationalism, racism, xenofobia; a referendum organised by a right-wing political party and imagined by all others; the fantasy of substituting one authoritarian capitalism by yet another more vile: none of this can offer any anarchist, even leftist, any solace.
Continue reading →