While turkey’s president celebrates his new presidential palace, the White Palace in Ankara, of over one thousand rooms, constructed on more than 150,000 sq m, and costing over 600 million dollars (BBC 14/11/2014), an okupied social social in the Kadiköy neighbourhood of Istanbul was evicted yesterday, December 9, by local police forces.
Chaplin made his first appearance in cinema in 1914, in the film Making a Living. What followed would be the work of one of the most creative artists of the last century; a creativity not only to be understood in the making of “comedy”, but as resistance to tragedy and defeat. Chaplin’s vagabond was not a revolutionary to be found among political vanguards (his red flagged “leadership” of a workers’ strike in Modern Times is farcical). He is instead radical in his permanent and serene dislocation, misplacement, disengagement with where and how he is supposed to be; what Walter Benjamin called Chaplin’s “mask of noninvolvement”. Always out of step, he reveals both the absurd of the normal and that life lies beyond this last, in an ever renewed present.
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(Photograph by Ufuk Akari)
Don’t say it’s the necessary result of historical, social, and economic conditions – I know! My head bows before the thing you mention. But my heart doesn’t speak that language.
Nazim Hikmet, The Epic of Sheik Bedreddin
… the question of what kind of city we want cannot be divorced from the question of what kind of people we want to be …
David Harvey, Rebel Cities
The physiognomy of a city is the momentarily congealed struggle between oppressor and oppressed in the sculpting of space. But it is but momentary, for sometimes hidden, sometimes open, the struggle is permanent, making of the city a living, contested reality.
Instanbul does not mask this conflict. And its recent history, under successive AKP governments, celebrates a politics of dispossession under the banner of triumphant development.
But hope is not enough for me. I no longer want to listen – I want to sing songs …
The scars of Istanbul’s self-inflicted wounds run deep and its self-mutilation appears to know no respite. The centre of the rise and fall of three empires, the wounded prey of late 19th century european empires, the shore upon which waves of migrants broke in the 20th century, today the hunting ground of all manner of speculations and violations of Capital: the city testifies to all of this, but also to the enormous creativity and resistance of peoples who with great art and at times tragically have shaped islands and archipelagos of autonomy.
Nous avons perdu le monde …
Michel Serres
Le libéralisme économique, c’est la liberté de tuer. La liberté de tuer le climat, donc de tuer les hommes, les femmes et les enfants.
René Dumont
On the night of Saturday to Sunday (25-6 October), 21 year Rémi Fraisse was killed by french police in protests against the construction of a dam; a seemingly and incomprehensibly tragic climax to an almost year long struggle to save a forest wetlands from an agro-industrial development.
The following is a translation of “Chapter 2” 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 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.
We civilized men and women know everything, we have settled opinions upon everything, we take an interest in everything. We only know nothing about when the bread comes which we eat … we do not know how it is grown, what pains it costs to those who grow it, what is being done to reduce their pains, what sort of men those feeders of our grand selves are … we are more ignorant than savages in this respect, and we prevent our children from obtaining this sort of knowledge – even those of our children who would prefer it to the heaps of useless stuff with which they are crammed at school.
Peter Kropotkin, Fields, Factories and Workshops
What follows is a translation of an interview with two italian activists of Genuino Clandestino, a network of collectives, associations and individuals who advocate and practice the re-appropriation and collectivisation of land for autonomous, self-managed small scale farming, as an anti-capitalist politics/way of life. A translation of the Genuino Clandestino manifesto is also provided below, for which I thank Sorana Inibrina. Followed lastly by an italian language video about the movement.
(Yüksel Arslan)
From the Global Uprisings news/video collective, a new documentary on political protest in turkey, since the Gezi Park commune …
(Dario Ballantini, Rivolto)
The following post is authored by Sorana Inibrina and is shared with Autonomies.
“Refuse-and-create!”
John Holloway
“the question of revolution is not in the future. It is here and now: how do we stop the system by which we are destroying humanity”
John Holloway
“This militancy makes resistance into counterpower and makes rebellion into a project of love and in opposition to the mortification of the flesh (in poverty and in the constituted order) he posed a joyous life, including all of being and nature, the animals, sister moon, brother sun, the birds of the field, the poor and exploited humans, together against the will of power and corruption”
Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri
Capital trails in a manner that often seems irresistibly coherent. Mobilizing catchphrases such as economic growth, social development, sustainability… It always seems to manage to charm, appeal to the majority, always justifying the unjustifiable, embellishing the harmful and sucking the life out of its subjects/objects. Consent becomes sometimes the only option. One of the tricks of almighty Capital is that it manages to disguise total submission in ‘dangerous’ ethics of affirmation. Capital does encourage a culture of yes-saying to anything that is of interest to its own expansion. Rarely though that Capital is slapped in the face with a ‘no’. But whereas Capital charms the majority of populations with beautifully packaged discourses of development and economic growth, there are places where it encounters committed opposition.
The courage of being one’s self: Beatriz Preciado
(Photograph by Joel Peter Witkin)
The following is a translation of a text by Beatriz Preciado that originally appeared in the french newspaper Libération (21/11/2014) and was written on the occasion of a debate on courage organised by the festival Mode d’emploi, that took place in Lyon, france, from the 17th to the 30th of November.
When I received this invitation to speak of the courage of being me, my ego purred immediately as if it was offered a page of publicity in which it would be simultaneously the object and the consumer. I had already perceived myself decorated with a medal, heroic… and then the memory of the subalterns came on to me cancelling all indulgence.
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