From the crisis-scape research collective and the film maker Ross Domoney of Aletheia Photos comes a striking film study of Athens and Greece under the reign of crisis. From the appropriation of public land for private accumulation, to terror against immigrants, extended through the undeclared state of exception to the whole of the population and the city, Athens is brutal testimony to the violence of capital, but also to resistance.
Une action revolutionaire dans la culture ne saurait avoir pour but de traduire ou d’expliquer la vie, mais de l’élargir.
Guy Debord
L’œuvre d’art à venir, c’est la construction d’une vie passionnante.
Raoul Vaneigem
A l’atelier populaire, c’est un climat d’abandon total. On travaille jour et nuit. La fatigue n’existe pas, laisse place à une fébrilité. Peut-être qu’on a conscience de gagner. Conscience que “personne n’a jamais fait ça!”. Couvrir les murs, c’est comme écrire sur les murs; dans une urgence, comme si le temps nous était imposé. Ce qui domine, c’est l’invention et la rapidité de décision par le collectif. L’idée de la conception, de la décision et de la réalisation est un tout. C’est la forme la plus directe que peuvent pratiquer les plasticiens.
Merri Jolivet (Liberation, 05/19/1998)
L’Atelier Populaire, the artistic collective born of the occupation of the Paris School of beaux-arts, during May of 1968, was an experiment in revolutionary art, an art that refused its name, to become the work of an anonymous multitude, transforming, essentially through poster art, the walls of Paris and beyond into a canvas for the expression of indignation, protest, dreams, of new forms of life.
A reflection on anthropology, on the search/need for a negative anthropology, in which all sure grounds of knowledge of the other crumble, in which all of the hierarchical theories and categories for the ordering of the other’s life are dismantled: a reflection on politics. In the speed of hyper-capitalism, the subject, history, truth, time dissolve into disconnected moments of presence; moments that are repeated in a refrain of the self-identical, and embraced as such (nihilism). What rebellion remains possible? What sense can still be given to revolution? If these last preserve any meaning, it is to be found in the very heart of this nihilism, in the clinamen that plays with the possibilities of the negative. To affirm, define, fix with authority, is to restrain, confine and rule. To prefer not to is to embrace the negative as the condition of creativity.
“To have opinions is to sell out to yourself. To have no opinions is to exist. To have every opinion is to be a poet.”
Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet
At 7:20 in the morning, on the 31st if January, the riot police of the munincipal authorities of Madrid closed off the street, calle Tribulete in the neighbourhood of Lavapiés, to execute the eviction of Antonio Argobia, a 54 year old man incapacited by chronic illness. Permitting only the passage of local merchants and neighbours, on condition of verification of identification, they preceded by an hour the convocation of Madrid’s various social collectives organized around the defense of housing to prevent the eviction. (e.g., Asamblea de Vivienda Madrid, Oficina Vivienda, Plataforma de Afectados por la Hipoteca Madrid, etc.)
La liberté consiste à faire tout ce que permet la longueur de la chaîne.
François Cavanna
François Cavanna, journalist, writer, artist, used the pen of satire and irony against all the "cons" that his times brought forward. And for many, the newspapers Hara-Kiri and Charlie-Hebdo, which he helped to found turned ridicule into “fine”/revolutionary art. With the likes of Topor, Gébé, Cabu, Reiser and Wolinski as libertarian mates, an irrepressible and rebellious expression gained form that would echo and contribute to so much of the radical politics of France throughout the 1960s and 70s. Cavanna died on the 29th of January, at the age of 90, but we still laugh with him.
For Pete Seeger, communist militant, first in the Party, and then beyond it, singer and story teller of America’s working classes and poor, co-founder of The Almanac Singers, and later The Weavers, who passed away on the 27th of January, at the age of 94.
From a public lecture in Athens (16/11/2013), at the invitation of and organised by the Nicos Poulantzas Institute and SYRIZA Youth, and originally posted on Chronos …
A reflection on the destiny of democracy today here in Athens is in some way disturbing, because it obliges us to think the end of democracy in the very place where it was born. As a matter of fact, the hypothesis I would like to suggest is that the prevailing governmental paradigm in Europe today is not only non democratic, but that it cannot either be considered as political. I will try therefore to show that the European society today is no more a political society: it is something entirely new, for which we lack a proper terminology and we have therefore to invent a new strategy.
In memory of Jean Babilée, dancer and combatant of the French resistance, and who resisted always through creation, died on Thursday, January 30, at the age of 90.
From Fatih Pinar, a video about the Kazova textile factory okupation in Istanbul, today a factory that continues to produce through workers' self-management. Autonomy is constructed slowly, step by unpredictable step, in a movement in which the ends and the means are one and the same; a means without end …
Utopia or submission: La Corrala la Utopia
Capital is a system of social relations of extraction. Its success is based on the appropriation of nature and of the collective of creativity of all of those who labour. Whether it is land, energies housed beneath its surface, seas, plants and animals, and the infinite variety of human activity, its logic is that of theft by any means, legalized by the “legality” of state domination.
To contest this theft, to refuse, to rebel against it through re-appropriation, is the essence of any anti-capitalist struggle; a struggle for dignity, for freedom and equality.
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