Nawal Ziani is a poet and writer who lives in Tangier. Her work sings of the violence of patriarchy and custom, of the beauty of the forgotten everyday and of the freedom of love. Below we share what we hope to be but the first example of her poetry with english readers, translated with the help of a friend of Autonomies.
The poet Philip Levine once wrote of the American experience that it “is to return and discover one cannot even find the way, for the streets abruptly end, replaced by freeways, the houses have been removed for urban renewal that never takes place, and nothing remains.” (the Atlantic) Levine’s America was above all that of the working class, first of the city of Detroit of his youth: those who build, produce, construct, only to die under the weight of their labour. And once dead, the memory of those who continue in their place is all that gives them life. But America tolerates no ancestor worship, and those whose memory still lives will also follow the dead. America devours its workers in a sacralised cult of growth and wealth, and tolerates no mourning or celebration of those who are sacrificed in their quest.
Freedom is lived in the body. And the cinema of Jean Vigo is a celebration of that freedom. In À propos de Nice, Vigo’s first film, the dancers of Carnival are contrasted with the self-conscious and tedious bodies of bourgeois tourists, idly killing time on the Promenade des Anglais, or dancing theatrically in a hotel ballroom. In the popular neighbourhoods of the city, the melancholy labour and poverty of those who render the bourgeois life possible repeats itself; a tortured, sub-proletariat, reservoir of a different world; the physicality of their lives offers perhaps hope. The possible tension between the two however is disarmed by death. Vigo’s poor are not the subjects of revolution and liberation. Their filth and wretchedness is but the underbelly, the contrasting mirror image, of a world that must be brought to an end. The carnival is the sublimation of both, the transgression of the order of wealth and poverty; freedom is found, created, in the unrestrained joy of dance.
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Below, we share an interview with a greek activist from AlkaKappa Athens from InfoAut (29/01/2015), on the relationship between the Syriza government and greek radical social movements, in a further effort to explore the issues at stake in the tension and conflict between political projects of autonomy and participation in representational politics.
To share: from the anarchist collective CrimethInc., a further, and excellent, reflection on the significance of the electoral victory of Syriza in greece, to further the debate and to defend, in the words of the collective, “why there’s no electoral exit from the crisis.”
(Photograph by DISO press)
Capitalism is a form of government that mobilises power through war. The field of conflict is not marked by a battle front, but is played out in the everyday of each one of us. In this struggle, capitalism shapes, imposes, enforces kinds of people, that is, subjectivites and corresponding ways of life. Yet it is in the moments of the reproduction of this government that fissures and cracks appears, which if forced, open possibilities of resistance, in opposition and creation of different modes of life.
What follows is but a modest chronicle, from spain, of our global civil war … Continue reading
The less than flattering history of social-democratic, socialist and communist governments is more than ample reason to be skeptical about the election of a “left wing” Syriza led government in greece; and if not, at least to suggest cautious restraint in the celebration of its electoral victory. It is thus with some surprise to see so many (the surprise that motivates this reflection), not only celebrate, but proclaim the beginning of a new era! France’s Jean-Luc Mélenchon can find no more modest words to describe the election than as a “historical moment”, an occasion to “re-found” europe”. And even less obviously social democratic voices can still speak of the election as a call for a “pan-european change.” (Roarmag 26/01/2015). Words almost fail …
Squatting is politically significant as part of a conscious project to contest the sanctity of private property, the exclusive role of the State in securing rights and providing for social needs, as experiments in autonomous self-management, which multiplied, both create and resist capitalist forms of life. What often however has been a weakness of okupation movements has been the inability, or even lack of interest, in coming together with refugee and migrant movements/organisations. The reasons for this vary, and would require a deeper evaluation of the politics of okupation. What is though overwhelmingly evident is the necessity to unite the two.
Not so long ago, the earth numbered two thousand million inhabitants: five hundred million men, and one thousand five hundred million natives. The former had the Word; the others had the use of it. … It came to an end; the mouths opened by themselves; the yellow and black voices still spoke of our humanism but only to reproach us with our inhumanity. We listened without displeasure to these polite statements of resentment, at first with proud amazement. What? They are able to talk by themselves?
Jean-Paul Sartre
All of the activities that I could have, all of them went in the same direction: to reflect people who had things to say and which power did not permit them to say.
René Vautier
Member of the resistance during the nazi occupation of france, imprisoned for his first film, joined the algerian independence movement, the FLN, during the struggle for independence, member of the film group Medvekine after May 68, defender of breton autonomy, the film maker René Vautier died last January 4th, at the age of 86.
Whatever differences exist between Vautier’s political engagements and Autonomies, they are of little significance before Vautier’s creative struggle through film against colonialism and capitalism. Like many of his generation, he contributed to the development of a politically engaged cinema that sought, with other forms of contestation, to bring into being a new world of freedom.
Procés Embat: The desire for anarchist organisation
… we must cease descending to the masses. Indeed, we must precede them.
Gustav Landauer
Carlos Taibo recently defended the need for a nation or iberian wide anarchist organisation to unite, consolidate and give greater resonance to anarchist activism (click here). This latter is weakened by dispersion, above all in the face of more organised movements or political parties that endeavour to absorb and assimilate grass roots social movements grounded in direct action. If the context for Taibo’s intervention is spain, similar appear to have surfaced in greece. And Syriza and spain’s Podemos, are perhaps on the “left” the immediate menace to a politics of generalised autonomy, for they present themselves as the representative voices of social movements.
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