We share below the translation of an interview with Tomás Ibañez, reflecting on the current rise, in the wake of the mass social movements of 2011, of “left-wing” political parties. The interview was originally published in the greek efsyn.gr (02/05/2015), and subsequently posted on Kaosenlared (12/05/2015).
We share and translate news from the A las barricadas (04/05/2015), about the Anarchist Federation of Catalonia, one more effort to bring together libertarian interventions in society …
Three weeks before spanish municipal elections, Apoyo Mutuo (Mutual Aid) appears as a tool that transforms into a political actor all of those persons who do not see themselves represented in the institutional path of politics. On the 9th of May, in the Teatro Lagrada of Madrid, was celebrated the presentation of the organisation Apoyo Mutuo. With nation wide aspirations, the organisation, according to its own spokespersons, pretends to “convert into political actors all of those persons who have lost their bearings in the social struggle after this phase of ‘institutional assault'”.
We publish below a translation of an article that appeared in the Madrid based Periódico Diagonal (07/05/2015), celebrating thirty years of okupations in the city. If okupations are central to any anti-capitalist politics, they are equally haunted by risks and dangers associated with compromising with public authorities, commercialisation, when not simply outright repression. The situation is rendered even more complicated when seemingly new radical political parties appear on stage, such as Syriza in greece, or Podemos in spain, parties that promise some kind of recognition, or at least acceptance. The article below touches, however modestly, on these issues. More importantly, it reminds us of the crucial role of okupations in the making of radical subjectivities.
To demand rights, rights to goods, is to demand them of someone, invariably an authority who in one form or another controls the access to those goods. It is to hand over one’s social fate to that authority, it is to recognise it as master, to allow it to decide upon the means of securing goods, and thus, simultaneously, to accept its power in the determination and distribution of social goods. If anarchism involves the radical defense of autonomous self-management, then a politics of demand is fundamentally incompatible with it. What anarchism calls for is rather a politics of the act or direct action in which communities of people do for themselves, in equality and freedom, what they can to meet their needs and sustain their desires.
We share below a defense of direct action from the CrimethInc (05/05/2015) collective …
Government by debt subjects populations to a particular regime of submission, submission of the present to a future which is nothing more than an extension of the present. The present in fact vanishes before a kind of eternal “now” in which the past and the future fade into an indifferent temporal continuity of the present. Without past or future, human subjectivity is robbed of creativity, of the capacity to generate something new; the future, once stabilised, destroys the imagination, the possibility of dreaming otherwise than what is. Politics as a contest between ways of life is thus replaced by a management of credit and debt flows. (Maurizio Lazzarato)
The “third world” seems a distant place under the rule of “neoliberal” capitalism. And yet the term once conveyed not denigration or humiliation, but revolution, the revolutions of colonised peoples against an arrogant and brutal colonial and neocolonial “first world”. The siren calls of third world revolution have perhaps fallen into oblivion today, but they once echoed in all of the capitals of europe’s metropoles and throughout the world. It was china, cuba, ghana, algeria and vietnam that inflamed the imagination of many; it was the names of Mao Tse Tung, Che Guevara, Kwame Nkrumah, Ben Bella and Ho Chi Minh that echoed in countless demonstrations and protests in support of anti-colonial, socialist revolution; protests that would in turn give animus to social movements in the first world.
“You broke the ocean in half to be here, only to meet nothing that wants you. –migrant”
Nayyirah Waheed
If you want an idea of a safe and secure European Union, imagine the sea ejecting thousands of bodies on its shores. Those are the undesired bodies that went to the sea for a better life only to come out in the next days as numbers in newspapers. This is the reality that is produced by the rigid bureaucratic regime put in place to close down Europe to the unwanted people fleeing the wars waged on them by religious fanatics, or the wars waged on them by the neoliberal system, which condemns them to poverty, unemployment and an eternal promise of misery. For Europe’s leaders, there was no adequate description that could capture the image of thousands of people crossing to Europe other than crisis.
To celebrate May Day is not only to remember working class struggles of the past, but also to remember that what victories were had were born of struggle and that they are held fast to only to the extent that the will to struggle remains present. If in the past, the fight for the eight hour work day was what lay at the origin of May Day, it was never a victory for most workers, and today, even in those countries which have legal limits on the number of hours permissible to work, increasing numbers of workers can only look on to the eight hour work day as an idol of some distant age.
La lucha sigue en la calle: Spain’s 15M four years on
The shur indians , the so called jíbaros, cut off the heads of the vanquished. They would cut them and shrink them until they could be held in a fist, so that the vanquished does not resuscitate. But the vanquished is not altogether defeated until his mouth is closed. For this, they sew its lips with a fiber that never rots.
Eduardo Galeano, Celebration of the human voice/1
Words of subjects without names, without identity, wash upon the faces of hundreds seated and standing in circles around those who speak. The circles hold, give warmth, embrace … gestures of care, of love, that caress those who would have the desire, the courage, to speak. And so they do. The first breaks the silent expectation with tales of resistance to evictions; another follows to speak of striking telephone company workers who can no longer feed their children; another of debt, yet another of unemployment, hunger … and then, under a black beret, white hair like silk gracing broad eyes and a full mouth, a Don Quixote tells us that freedom lies in being able to speak, that it must be rooted in the rejection of the “…cracy” of “democracy”, leaving but the “demos”.
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