Anarchism in spain, from its beginnings in the later half of the 19th century until the revolution/civil war of 36-39, was to be found in an extraordinary wealth of expressions: among them song. We share in this post what came to be known as the canciónero anarquista, the anarchist songbook, comprised of music and songs, both original and re-elaborated: songs of rebellion, courage, of new ways to live …
The following is a translation of “Chapter 4” of Carlos Taibo’s Rethinking Anarchy: Direct Action, Self-Management, Autonomy (La Catarata, Madrid, 2013). We have already translated and posted the “Prologue” and the “Chapter 1″ of this work (Click here), “Chapter 2” (Click here) and “Chapter 3” (Click here). And we hope to continue in what will be the complete translation of the book. In this way we hope to share with English readers the work of one of the most significant anarchist voices today in spain.
… contre-insurrection, de doctrine militaire, est devenue principe de gouvernement.
comité invisible, A nos amis
In one possible interpretation of the mythic figure of Pandora, she is not the harbinger/carrier of evil, but rather a source of gifts to humanity, a Gaia/Demeter like figure who shares with humanity what it requires to flourish. It remains unclear whether the spanish police’s Operation Pandora is motivated by a Hesiodic, patriarchical reading of the story, or by a pre-Hesiodic, life-celebrating version of the tale; of course, very likely neither. But what the spanish authorities may have unintentially unleashed is something of the latter.
The following is a translation of “Chapter 3” of Carlos Taibo’s Rethinking Anarchy: Direct Action, Self-Management, Autonomy (La Catarata, Madrid, 2013). We have already translated and posted the “Prologue” and the “Chapter 1″ of this work (Click here) and “Chapter 2” (Click here). And we hope to continue in what will be the complete translation of the book. In this way we hope to share with English readers the work of one of the most significant anarchist voices today in spain.
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Je est un autre.
Rimbaud
Friendship, this relationship without dependency, without scenes, yet full of life’s simplicity, implies an acknowledgement of mutual strangeness that does not allow us to speak of our friends but only to them, not turn them into subjects of conversation (or articles) but the movement of understanding by which, when speaking to us, even in situation of greatest familiarity, they reserve an infinite distance, which is the fundamental separation by which that which separates becomes relation.
Maurice Blanchot
For the rocking and grooving feeling of the songs, for Joe Cocker …
The unspoken principle which rules our society can be stated like that: every citizen is a potential terrorist. But what is a State which is ruled by such a principle? Can we still define it as democratic State? Can we even consider it as being something political? In which kind of State do we live today?
Giorgio Agamben
In the early hours of the 16th of December, riot police in Barcelona and Guardia Civil in Madrid, on orders from the national spanish court, the Audiencia Nacional (inheritor of Franco’s Public Order Tribunal and concerned among other things with crimes of terrorism), descended upon anarchist collectives and the private homes of anarchist activists, with the purported aim of dismantling terrorist groups of anarchist inspiration.
“At each moment of its existence, the police reminds the State of the violence, the banality, and the darkness of its beginnings”
Tiqqun
“This is why there is no such thing as death within Biopower: there is only murder and its circulation”
Tiqqun
“When power establishes its own legitimacy in real time, when its violence becomes
preventive and its right is a “right to intervene,” Empire does not take place. It administers absence through a hovering threat of police intervention. Whoever tries to measure up against the imperial adversary will be preventively annihilated. From now on, to be perceived is to be defeated”
Tiqqun
The life of Trayvon Martin was coldly terminated on the 26th of February 2012 with the blunt bullet of police officer George Zimmerman. He was 17 years old; his crime, “he’s a real suspicious guy”. The inauguration -or continuation- of other shootings to come. Zimmerman is a free man. “Justice for Trayvon”, the protestors chanted two weeks later on the streets.
Whatever reality corresponded to the distinction between the working class and the sub-proletariat/lumpenproletariat under industrial capitalism has been lost in the fragmentation of the former under financial-speculative capitalism. Industry has not of course disappeared, but the conditions under which those who labour in it have little to do with the post-WWII social contract of managed welfare-state societies. The ever increasing unrestrained exploitation of industrial labour, the growing general precariousness of labour throughout the global economy (part-time/day labour, zero contracts/non-contracted work, free labour), mass unemployment/underemployment and the stripping of labour of rights fought for over a century, has reduced most of humanity either to the status of a sub-proletariat or simply rendered them expendable.
Autonomies takes this occasion, in solidarity with the greek anarchist Nikos Romanos and his struggle from prison against arbitrary state power, to publish an article from Thrasybulus’s blog, maintained on libcom.org.
Anarchist Nikos Romanos ended his hunger strike after thirty days this week. The strike brought Romanos to the edge of death as Greece came close to the point of insurrection in his support.
Forms of politics: Anarchism and organisation
S’organiser n’a jamais voulu dire s’affiler à la même organisation. S’organiser, c’est agir d’après une perception commune, à quelque niveau que ce soit.
Dormir, se battre, manger, se soigner, faire la fête, conspirer, débattre, relèvent d’un seul movement vital. La différence est notable. L’un appelle la gestion, l’autre l’attention – dispositions en tout point incompatibles.
Un geste est révolutionaire non par son contenu propre, mais par l’enchaînement des effets qu’il engendre.
Ce qui ne se structure pas comme un État, comme une organisation, ne peut au reste qu’être dispersé et fragmentaire, et trouve dans son caractère de constellation le ressort même de son expansion. À charge pour nous dórganiser la rencontre, la circulation, la compréhension et la conspiration entre les consistances locales. La tâche révolutionaire est devenue partiellement une tâche de traduction. Il n’y a pas d’esperanto da la révolte. Ce n’est pas aux rebelles d’apprendre à parler l’anarchiste, mais aux anarchistes de devenir polyglottes.
comité invisible, A nos amis
What follows is a partial translation of and critical commentary on a recent text by Carlos Taibo, Por una nueva organización libertaria, published on his blog, Nuevo DESorDen. What motivates this commentary is the significance of the text, as well as the questions that it invites, and shared political ends. It is not the desire for dispute, for it has never been the aim of Autonomies to animate polemics, a vain luxury for political idealists.
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