What follows are reflections, readings, of events in egypt of the last few months, of a revolution seemingly appropriated or hijacked by military authorities. They are testimonials, but also efforts to trace, open, paths beyond seeming failure …
“There’s a bit of magic in everything, and some loss to even things out.”
“When you think the night has seen your mind, That inside your twisted and unkind, Let me stand to show that you are blind. Please put down you hands cause I see you. I’ll be you mirror.”
“Rock & roll is so great, people should start dying for it. You don’t understand. The music gave you back your beat so you could dream…The people just have to die for the music. People are dying for everything else, so why not for music? Die for it. Isn’t it pretty? Wouldn’t you die for something pretty? ”
“Let’s do what you fear most
That from which you recoil
But which still makes your eyes moist”
… l’exclusion est une arme possible et nécessaire. C’est la seule arme de tout groupe fondé sur la liberté complète des individus. … Cette discipline définit nettement une plate-forme incorruptible, dont l’abandon ne se rattrapera pas. Autrement, il y aurait rapidement osmose entre cette plate-forme et le milieu culturel dominant, par la multiplicité des sorties et des rentrées.
L’Internationale Situationniste, Projet d’une anthologie de la revue I.S.
La guerre civile est le libre jeu des formes-de-vie, le principe de leur coexistence.
Tiqqun, Introduction à la guerre civile
The importance of autonomous okupied social centres (CSOA) for alternative, anti-capitalist politics is inestimable in Madrid. The city today counts close to twenty such centres, most of which assume a radical political position in relation to state authorities. Only but a few have sought compromises with the city government or property owners. The self-perception is that of “being spaces in which … the utopia or the revolutionary society in which we wish to live is realised in a tangible way”. (Okupación: Más que 4 paredes, 4th ed., Distribuidora Peligrosidad Social, p. 12) Which then implies the rejection of the CSOAs as merely alternative cultural or social centres, filling in the gaps in social services of increasingly impotent and dysfunctional welfare states, and often reproducing the types of social relations that the okupations were initially meant to challenge.
It would be difficult to think of 15M in the form of a movement. If that is, as a movement which has an origin, a goal, some objectives and a trajectory … Nevertheless, an event is but a timid call at the door of fortune; a lapsus where the unconscious and/or nature … flowers, changing thereby the game and giving forth a chance.
Amanda Núnez Garcia, “La fortuna y la muerte llaman a nuestra puerta …”, 15M: La revolución como una de las bellas artes
Everyone seemed to speak of the demonstration announced for the 19th of October. The ambitions were again, as they had been two years earlier, on the 15th of October, global. All were to unite around the rejection of politically dictated austerity and an aspiration for something else, vaguely presented as citizens’ empowerment, in the Madrid manifesto for the event.
On the 19th of October, 15M returns to the streets and squares of spain's cities. From the manifesto …
Under the slogan, "Against Your Austerity, Take your Agora", more than 20 15M assemblies support this international demonstration that will take the streets of Madrid and flood the Squares of the city centre. After the demonstration, we will create spaces open to the participation of all the people in the squares around Sol, to speak of citizen's empowerment and discover the collective ways in which to transform society.
After days of gathering to resist the announced eviction of an apartment block in Girona, the Salt block, owned by the SAREB, spain's bad bank, and occupied by the PAH on the 22 of March of this year, in the ambit of its politics of occupying empty buildings owned by the SAREB or by publically aided private banks to house the evicted and the homeless, a respite broke the tension on the morning of the 16th. The European Tribunal of Human Rights, solicited by PAH lawyers, suspended the eviction at least until the 29th of October. (Periodico Diagonal, elpais) A respite …
Capital exploits by appropriating human creativity and makes this exploitation the necessary condition to accede to those goods required for human survival. It is a system, not in any static sense, comprised of a complex of social relations of domination; relations that may compensate for the exploitation to the extent that it is of value to continue to exploit. All those held are therefore always potentially superfluous, and each is daily threatened with poverty and hunger. Hunger, or its threat, in this instance, is part of the politics of discipline and control. It is a weapon of the Capitalist war machine.
Posted on reinform and From the Greek Streets …
Let’s get done with the system that breeds fascism – An interview with Dimitris Kousouris
Dimitris Kousouris is one of the first political victims of Golden Dawn attacks. On June 16th, 1998, in a café outside the courts of Athens, he was attacked brutally by a group of Golden Dawn members. He had to go through a difficult brain surgery and he barely escaped death. The attackers were identified by Kousouris and his friends. The main perpetrator was back then nr 2 in the leadership of Golden Dawn, Antonis Androutsopoulos. Although the media had reported the possible places where he was hiding, he was only arrested 7 years later. Although the court found him guilty and sentenced him to long imprironment, he only stayed in prison until 2010. Dimitris Kousouris is currently a lecturer of history at the University of Crete.
In this interview, D. Kousouris points out that a general ideological denouncement of fascism is not enough to address the needs of the long-term unemployed and those ones who cannot make ends meet. What he regards as most important is the setting up of solidarity networks in order to counteract the extreme right.
The Golden Dawn, Fascists, Neo-Nazis and the State
It is mostly in the writings of contemporary anti-authoritarian writers that we find the view that fascism and its various embodied (or should we say excremented) manifestations are not a symptom but an essential component (although often in partial manifestations) of capitalist regimes. The article that follows provides an insightful analysis of the Greek and European manifestations of the aspects that go to make up the fascist/neo-nazi presence. As a brief comment (hoping that at a later point I will be able to provide further argument) I would like to bring attention to the role of the State. The State has been an essential actor in the development of capitalism as it has evolved since the first world war. Though its historical roots go much further back (e.g. mercantilism) it is not until the 1920s that it starts emerging in its full blown totalitarian aspect, of increasingly regulating and monitoring daily life to fit in the needs of emergent corporate capitalism. It is also an actor that is separate from the corporations, from the business of capitalism and has warred throughout history to maintain and capture its own power and territory separate and sometimes against economic powers (or their military personnel: e.g. private armies attached to major 17th century economic entities). In other words, that State as we know it today, when it is able to function well (for its own purposes and with the economic entities that it is closely related to) carves its own territory (both figuratively and literally) over which it maintains control. Explicitly fascist and neo-nazi groups that concentrate and embody the hatred of the other (the way shit is processed and concentrated bodily garbage) in our societies, in some way, if their ways get out of hand, embarrass the state (like Saddam Hussein did with his masters in the U.S.); for while the State may be happy that they complement its dirty work, if they overstep the tacit boundaries, they become a bit of a liability that needs to be tempered, chastised or even partially eliminated. The growth of the modern State also explains the relative small size of these groups as most of the shit work (against refugees, immigrants, or whoever else has the misfortune to be rendered as Other) is still done by the State. We may argue that the end of the Second World War sees the emerging of this type of new state. We should also be careful and avoid the trap that somehow left-wing parities once they achieve power positions within the state will somehow behave differently from the right-wing counterparts. So Golden Dawn or not Golden Dawn, the living and breathing roots of hate are still with us and will be with us until a social revolution removes what keeps them alive and growing.
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