Hannah Arendt once spoke of the phenomenon of mass refugee migration in the wake of the first world war as a testimony to the limits of any politics of human rights. Stripped of nationality, stateless, the refugee migrant embodies the bare human that is the conceptual bearer of human rights. And yet no one is more exposed to the violence of the State than such a human being.
Borders striate land, dividing, segregating, displacing. As instruments of sovereignty, they are essential to delineating the exception that defines political power. As instruments for fixing the flows of labour, they enable exploitation. For those who refuse both, movement, migration, is an act of resistance, of freedom. And as borders cease to be lines, becoming instead zones and territories of exception, we all become migrants, potential dissidents and deviants of norms of government. The migrants hanging from the fence walls of Melilla and beaten and killed by the police of both sides of the border are the mirror images of our present-future.
Video from Periódismo Humano and José Palazón (23/04/2015) …
The State employs whatever means available to it to protect the free flow capital. The flow of capital however requires restricting the movement of people, such that unequal possibilities of economic development, or exploitation, are assured. The eviction of squatters and the control of the movement of migrants, or their deportation, are two facets of the same politics …
Let us not kid ourselves. Who have been the ones undermining our freedoms for as far back as one can think? It was not jihadis. It was governments, corporations, advertisers, educational systems, police, internal security, armies, religious establishments.
Yet now all this assortment, holding hands together, going to bed together, holding each other’s penises, are squeezing us even more, through anti-terror security, through surveillance, through economic management and they say they do it for us, to protect us, so we can live without fear, for our prosperity, for our posterity.
They speak the same language as the jihadis, The jihadis speak the same language with them. They understand each other very well. Warfare, slaughter, economic exploitation, slavery, rape, veiling of the body, religious self-aggrandisement, Christ or Muhammad, Christian or Islam, or whatever, the guillotine, the sword, the missile, the beheading — are we post-1984? Software and swordware.
The fact is, that jihadis and our ruling order they just reinforce each other. It is the perfect copulation.
In the end what will defeat the one, will defeat the other.
One strike for Revolution.
Murray Bookchin’s libertarian municipalism challenges a variety of forms of anarchist activism and politics by insisting on the need to take and create political power and the institutions required for the government of freedom. There are echoes here of Hannah Arendt’s distinction between liberation and the politics of liberty that lies at the centre of her reflections on revolution. Liberation does not amount to political freedom; it but inaugurates a new history, the possibility of novel political agency, which without a subsequent proper institutional framework collapses into arbitrary power. The failure to make this distinction in practice underlies the tragedy of the french revolution, in contrast to the revolution of the united states. And the inability or refusal to think the distinction through in all of it implications risks condemning to oblivion the noble heritage of revolution. (Hannah Arendt, On Revolution)
We share below an excellent essay by Michail Theodosiades, reflecting on the greek revolts that began in December 2008 and their resonance in anti-authoritarian politics subsequently in greece and in europe. Whatever doubts we have regarding the analysis (an excessive enthusiasm for populism and Syriza), they do not take away from its overall virtues. The essay was originally published by the Institute for Anarchist Studies (08/04/2015). Continue reading
The Church says: the body is a sin.
Science says: the body is a machine.
Advertising says: The body is a business.
The Body says: I am a fiesta.
Eduardo Galeano, Walking Words
She is on the horizon.
I walk two steps, she moves two steps away.
I walk ten steps and the horizon runs ten steps further.
As much as I walk, I will never reach her.
For what does utopia serve? It serves for this, to walk.
Eduardo Galeano, Window on Utopia
In the mountain silence broken by wind, words were carried with news of another silence, of a silencing in a distant land separated by an ocean deep. A voice had ceased to be, a voice of simple truths that spoke of the forgotten, of the humiliated, of the violated, of those silenced before him; a voice that also spoke of beauty, of enchantment, of enthusiasm, like a child, always in wonder. This evening, I learn of Eduardo Galeano’s death, and I know that one of the story tellers who weaves the fabric of our world has ceased to be. A thread lies torn, to be taken up perhaps one day by others, by other pagan child-poets for whom freedom lies in the magic of rebellious life.
Eduardo Galeano, factory worker, painter, bank employee, journalist, essayist, poet, political activist, but above all, a child of Montevideo’s café story tellers, died on Monday, April 13.
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Okupation is a political act, questioning as it does the very pillars of Capital and the State: rejection of private property, the economy of commodities, the State’s prerogative to enforce and defend regimes of wealth and poverty, and the enforcement of labour. Okupation is political in that it also creates, through direct action, new subjectivities are born and raised in experiences of autonomous, egalitarian self-management. If democracy/anarchy is a way of life, then it is in its practice, however fragile or incomplete, that it is learned.
The story of the self-managed collective space, Es.Col.A do Alto da Fontinha, in Porto, portugal, is rare in the recent history of social movements of this country, both for its intensity and its resonance in the city and beyond. The collective’s integration in the community was exemplary. But its weaknesses were those of portugal’s social movements more generally and a political and legal framework that makes okupations extremely difficult to carry through. Without a broader network, the occupying collective was forced to seek legal recognition, something that finally never came. If okupations can bring impetus to social movements, they fail in isolation; if they are part of broader movements/politics, then they can force themselves upon the landscape.
(Photograph by Burkhard Lahrmann)
While the Syriza government of greece engages in a precarious and unequal, and finally self-defeating, wrestling match with its creditors, forced to pay its debts while seeking to meet the aspirations of its voters, it is useful to remember another rebellious actor, or better, actors, in the country; those born in the occupation of Syntagma and other city and town squares during the summer of 2011.
We share below an interview with Stavros Stavrides, greek writer and activist who participated in the Syntagma assembly.
Taking back labour: Factory okupations in europe
The limits of workers managed factories in the midst of capitalist economic relations are well known: the inability to acquire or control resources and supplies for production, the need to continue to produce for existing markets, the need to compete in markets thus submitting to capitalist practices, self-management reduced to the self-management of subsistence, external interests that seek the destruction of experiments in workers self-management.
Whatever their weaknesses though, such experiments are central to the construction of anti-capitalist forms of life. Through them, private property is questioned, collective self-management is lived and learned, non-oppressive relations become possible both within the industrial space and with communities outside the activities of production. Once we abandon the apocalyptic conception of revolution, the creation of spaces of autonomy beyond state and capitalist power is essential, both to contest State-Capital but also to create realities beyond both.
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