“Yesterday Kobane, today Cizre” could be read among the slogans carried in a solidarity protest with the kurdish cause in Paris last Thursday, September 10. As in other european cities, the protest was called to denounce the the ongoing military siege and intervention in the largely kurdish city of Cizre, in turkey.
The video images and photographs of waves of syrian and other refugees moving through europe, and of those who are abandoned, beaten, raped, arrested and/or killed, that pass across the screens and fill the pages of “news” media re-enact horrors on the continent that many europeans thought were the privilege of the uncivilised. Memories are short, such that we forget even recent european refugee crises (e.g. Yugoslavia) and perception and understanding are weak enough that no connection is made between the current crisis and the policies and actions of european states/the european union outside europe. Sentimentalism abounds in the media reports, hypocrisy and xenophobia lose all shame in the speeches of politicians, and the passivity of false innocence finds comfort behind borders and walls.
In May of 2012, some 30 families occupied a residential building in Seville, baptising the occupation Corrala de vecinas la utopia. The building erected in 2010, but never inhabited, was and is still owned by the bank Ibercaja. For the occupiers, it was the only possible response to eviction or imminent eviction; the only possible political response, for the occupation was a political act carried out against the primacy of private property/capital over human needs and freedom.
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What follows below is the 6th Chapter of Carlos Taibo’s Rethinking Anarchy: Direct Action, Self-Management, Autonomy (La Catarata, Madrid, 2013). Largely concerned with the history of spanish anarchism, Taibo also considers, in this chapter, the complex relationship between anarchism and marxism, the soviet experiment and social democracy, concluding with observations on more recent latin american efforts as “21st century” socialism. We have already translated and posted the “Prologue” and the “Chapter 1″ of this work (Click here), “Chapter 2″ (Click here), “Chapter 3″ (Click here), “Chapter 4” (click here) and “Chapter 5” (Click here). And we hope to continue in what will be the complete translation of the book. In this way we aim to share with English readers the work of one of the most significant anarchist voices today in spain.
We share below, in translation, a reflection by uruguayan essayist and activist Raúl Zibechi (La Jornada 07/08/2015) on the contemporary political paradigm of the concentration camp. With references to historian Josep Fontana and philosopher Giorgio Agamben, the short essay serves as an introduction to a way of re-thinking politics that is essential.
As greece’s Syriza government finalises the details of a third austerity/debt repayment package with the Troika (under the threat of financial destruction from its creditors and their police), the government’s former finance minister Yanis Vaoufakis, who resigned in opposition to the acceptance of such a proposal (which will only bring more hardship to the country’s population and further sell off “public” wealth in assets and services), and in a moment of apparent “radical fever”, recently wrote in Le monde diplomatique (August 2015) that what the Eurogroup has imposed on greece and the manner in which it was done were the epitaph of the europe that “Konrad Adenauer, Charles de Gaulle, Willy Brandt, Valéry Giscard d’Estaing, Helmut Schmidt, Helmut Kohl, François Mitterand and many others sought to create”; the epitaph of a europe “that I always considered, since my adolescence, as my compass.” With such “radicals” to guide him, the difficulty is to understand how anyone could have thought that Syriza, once in power, would do anything different from what it has done until now.
We publish below an article by Andrew Flood published on the website of the Workers Solidarity Movement and also recently posted on Robert Graham’s Anarchism Weblog. We share Graham’s urgency in diffusing this reflection and his own introduction to the article serves as our own.
Jansem, Desolation
We share below an article that was written by Devrim Valerian (09/07/2015) on the occasion of the anniversary one hundred years ago of the armenian genocide at the hands of the turkish leaders of the Ottoman Empire. However it does not confine itself to this and endeavours to demonstrate that genocidal violence has been an intrinsic part of the history of 20th century nation state politics, the essential political form of capitalism in the last century. In our time, genocides are perhaps of a different nature, more silent, diffused, for the government of Empire, in rendering all superfluous, leaves thousands to die everyday. The article is published also in The Internationalist and Libcom.org .
We have become Titans, wrote Gunther Anders in 1956, in the wake of the development of nuclear weapons and their use in japan on the 6th of August, 1945. Lost children of an earlier humanity who could see in Faust the struggle, the torment, caused by our inability to transcend our finitude, “the source of man’s greatest sufferings and greatest achievements”, our condition is haunted by meaninglessness. The human past, even that of our parents, “the last humans”, is but a trace of a former species that lived under the fear of death that “all men are mortal”. Auschwitz taught us that “All men are exterminable”; a lesson that is taught to us each day, if we have eyes to see, under the reign of Capital. But it is a lesson that still refers, in our false imaginary, to specific “men”: enemies, refugees, criminals and delinquents, the poor, the black, the female, the gay and the queer, and the like. The “bomb” revealed to us that “mankind as a whole is exterminable.”
From putrefaction comes life: Lebanon’s “you stink” movement
Garbage collection in Beirut came to a halt in late July, with national authorities unable to overcome conflicting interests between private refuse collection companies, local authorities and populations, and avarice among the country’s political and economic elites. With the city’s only land fill site closed, thousands of tons of rubbish took little time to make their presence felt and grow. What would follow, as a protest, were a series of demonstrations beginning in that same month and that grew in size with every passing week. On the weekend of the 22/23rd of August, security forces clashed with tens of thousands of people, wounding hundreds. A week latter, the city became the stage for the largest protest gathering since the protest movement that followed the assassination of Rafik Hariri in 2005.
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