For over a week, squares and streets in dozens of cities and towns throughout romania have been occupied in an effort to stall or stop resource extraction that threatens the loss of homes, land, even whole villages. Poetry takes the street and people here, as elsewhere, discover the beauty of rebellion.
In solidarity, we post two texts from Centrul de cultura anarhista …
… what we are waiting for can only come from ourselves, from our own being. It will come once we force the unknown, the unconscious, up into our spirit; it will come once our spirit loses itself in the spiritless psychological realms that await us in the caverns of our souls. This marks our renewal as human beings, and it marks the arrival of the world we anticipate. Mere intervention in the public sphere will never bring this about. It is not enough for us to reject conditions and institutions; we have to reject ourselves.
Gustav Landauer
Capitalism, the social relations which it weaves through our daily activity, is not just a system of domination and exploitation. It creates fundamentally the very subjects which reproduce it. It is not a power which oppresses from outside, but moulds us from within. Under its contemporary form, the subjectivities which gestate in its womb and feed it are isolated, dependent and fearful. The capitalist world that we generate appears as foreign even as we make it, it the source of the satisfaction of our needs. What it offers us comes at a price: labour, ever scarcer, ever more abusive, more poorly paid, more precarious and debt, the debt necessary to cover our supposed needs. Our isolation breeds dependency, a dependency which expresses itself in the fear of the inability to live as the societies fantasies suggest we can. And before our increasing and stupidly celebrated individuality, we bury ourselves ever further in the very relations that isolate and burden us.
What we need are cheerful voices; voices that remind us that the few will turn into many!
Gustave Landauer
In order to be happy I’ll have to change the whole world!
The Free Association
The text that follows borrows freely from a collection of essays written over a period of roughly ten years by the Free Association collective. The motive for the exercise is the belief is the belief that the political and theoretical work of the Free Association is of enormous, on-going importance. The ambition then is to further disseminate their work and to continue to employ it as a set of tools to engage with, to “sample” the movements of excess of our present. All references are to Moments of Excess: Movements, protest and everyday life, The Free Association, PM Press, 2011.
(All the paintings in this post are by the turkish artist Yuksel Arslan)
La poésie ouvre le vide à l’excès du désir.
Georges Bataille
For ten days, from the 1st to the 11th of June, Taksim became … a free zone where, sheltered behind barricades where one could read Taksim Commune, people walked about happily. On the weekend of the 8th and 9th of June, hundreds of thousands of persons came to discover gezi park, its stands, its library, they sang and danced together. They felt safe precisely because the police was far away. At the centre of this zone, the occupants of the Park succeeded in creating a space of life, a concrete space for the sharing of practices, completely different therefore from a shopping centre. In this spatial dichotomy, each discovered what is precious in such a place of encounter, each discovered to what degree one could find pleasure in being there and staying.
Ferhat Taylan, “Taksim, a vital square”, Le Revue des Livres, n°012
The resonances of the occupation of Gezi Park-Taksim Square continue in Istanbul and beyond: in the gathering of neighbourhood assemblies, in the mobile protest picnics marking the end of daily fasting during the month of ramadan, protests during football matches, and so on. And all of this carried through in the face of ongoing harassment, persecution and violence from State authorities and AKP (turkey’s ruling Justice and Development Party) hirelings.
Readings of the Turkish events now abound, often in the context of broader efforts to interpret them comparatively with other protests in North Africa, Brazil, Peru, Chile, etc. and within a time frame that begins with the “Arab Spring” of 2011.
I hate to see that evening sun go down
I hate to see that evening sun go down
St. Louis Blues
… the question of ethics is always a question of an ethical relation, that is the question of what binds me to another and in what way this obligation suggests that the “I” is invariably implicated in the “we”.
Judith Butler
Occupy St. Louis was one of the more radical expressions of the “Occupy” movement(s) that swept through the united states in the Fall of 2011 (See Occupy St. Louis’ initial statement of purpose) . The movement(s) continue, even if the occupation of squares was brought to an end by violent police intervention. It resonates in a multiplicity of forms of resistance/creation to State-Capital. It has become part of the fabric of the many social movements that animate political life in the country. The significance of “Occupy” continues to be debated and the following reflections on it in the context of St. Louis are important, for they invite us to think through the meaning of rebellion-revolution in our times.
In memory/celebration of Occupy St. Louis (from dialectical delinquents)…
What I’m saying is that I don’t want a grey world. Or rather, because this is the way it’s going, a grey world that’s painted day-Glo wild colours. Fuck that, it’s just disguising the real situation. I’m wanting a world that’s multi-tiered, that has real variety, real levels of difference. I think things will function without theory, we can work out the maths behind the machine later. And I think if you start engagement with politicians then you become a politician — you might as well be Bill Clinton.
Mick Farren interviewed by Richard Marshall, 3:AM Magazine (2002)
Mick Farren passed away last July 27, fittingly perhaps on stage. This is a far overdo obituary. But then maybe Farren didn’t die. And we have no fetish for death notices. There are however those who die, and yet don’t leave us. With Mick Farren, in his music and writing, we celebrate his indefatigable and drunken rebelliousness. This last will live on in his art.
On the 15th of August, president Rafael Correa of ecuador announced the authorisation of the extraction of petroleum from Yasuni National Park. The decision will have to be voted on by the country’s congress, but should it agree, it brings to an end one of Correa’s emblematic decisions on matters of environmental policy. In 2007, before the UN, Correa launched the Yasuni-ITT project, in which he committed his government to the interdiction of petroleum exploration in the Park, in exchange for international financial compensation (some 3.6 million dollars, half of the estimated value of promised 850 million barrels of oil). The result would be the preservation of Yasuni Park’s extraordinary biodiversity and the human communities that make the region their home. The money requested however never materialized (only 13.3 million dollars were raised) and Rafael Correa’s original proposal with it.
(This text is born of an experiment, an experiment in progress, that of thinking through our contemporary rebellions with the tools of contemporary philosophy. Spain´s 15M is the example considered here and the hypothetical conclusion arrived at is that the movement is not a political subject in any conventional sense, nor does it have specific goals, identified programmatically, for example. Put very simply, it is not somebody aiming at something, but an anybody without purpose, a useless nobody; 15M´s radicalism lies here.
Parts of this text borrow freely from earlier posts on the site).
To okupy, to appropriate, to re-appropriate that which was claimed by theft; a theft paid for with public monies. Today, in spain, okupation has become the central strategy of anti-capitalist politics, a politics that is not only opposed to State-Capital, but a politics which also creates in parallel a network of self-managed spaces of autonomy, the embryo of a different world free of the domination of capitalism.
Performing the government of crisis: greece
The permanent state of emergency/exception that characterises the government by crisis continues unabated in greece. To eliminate the reality-memory of resistance, squats are brought an end to throughout the country (29/08/2013: the eviction of the squat Antiviosi in Epirus; 02/09/2013: the eviction of the Orfanotrofio squat in Thessaloniki). Their role as points of passage, spaces of resonance, for larger struggles, is thus removed, thereby possibly weakening those struggles, or the possibility of ongoing and future forms of resistance. It is unclear what response is emerging from greek anarchist and other anti-capitalist movements, but their inability to slow or stop this repression invites questions. State-Capital does not of course only seek to undermine or destroy opposition in this instance; it also displays, performs, its own power, thereby making it real through the agency of increasingly militarized police forces. In the state of exception that is crisis, the police-military is the state in its concrete expression. And it “proves” itself, “legitimates” itself in operations of pacification, whether by evicting squats, or hunting out immigrants. The ideal of our time for State-Capital is that nothing should happen, nothing should disturb, the “public” spaces through which capital circulates. Thus the public space is cleared of all dissonance: a smoothed space patrolled by mobile machines of surveillance and control.
Continue reading →