From avtonom.org and Freedom News (30/08/2024).
For this year’s International Anarchist Prisoner Solidarity Week, Freedom interviewed the Anarchist Black Cross-Moscow to discuss their long history in Russia supporting imprisoned Russian anarchists, the challenges they face under Putin’s regime and their work during the war on Ukraine.
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We return to Colin Ward through the work of Martin Buber, in parallel essays addressing the nature of and the relation between the State and Society. For both authors, the relation between the two – in Buber’s terms, the relation between the “political principle of government” and the “social principle of administration” – is one of permanent tension; a tension between centralising sovereign authority and spontaneous association, with the growth of one paid for by the diminishing of the other.
Political power, or sovereignty, rests in turn on the distinction between friend and foe (Carl Schmitt), a distinction that marks both the relation with external and foreign enemies. Authoritarianism and war are thus permanent possibilities, if not features of, the State. The weakening of the State and its violence therefore depend upon the freeing up of and creation of the plurality of associative-social communities. And it is amidst the later that one can begin to see and imagine anarchy and it is from this same perspective that one can perceive the danger of “state” inspired instruments of insurrection by threatening anarchy with new forms of supposedly “radical”, or even, “anarchist” sovereignty.
To talk of an anarchist “sovereignty” may appear paradoxical – if by anarchism is understood the exclusion or destruction of all sovereign or state power. But if sovereignty is inevitably expressed in the “political principle of government” and if the “political” cannot be altogether subsumed by “social administration”, then must not anarchists confront the political in more creative ways than simply saying that they are opposed to it? Can political forms be read off or created from forms of “social administration”? And is any such political form stable given the ever changing nature of social relations? In other words, what does or should an anarchist politics amount to?
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From the CrimethInc. collective (19/08/2024).
An Invocation
The laws targeting queer and trans people that are proliferating across the United States are a symptom of a much deeper and more insidious reaction, the inevitable outgrowth of a deeply repressive and hierarchical society confronting the possibility of collapse. Today’s gender fascism is not confined to the policies of a single political party. It takes different forms across the political spectrum, bringing together essentialist narratives about identity, a resurgent patriarchal mythos, and the persisting power of the state.
This is not the first time that a reactionary society has sought scapegoats. Like our predecessors in the early twentieth century, if we hope to survive, we have to combat these forces on every level, using a wide range of strategies and tools.
In the following ecstatic history, our comrades revisit queer resistance to the Nazis, seeking tactics and inspiration for our own troubled times.
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The important question is … not whether anarchy is possible or not, but whether we can so enlarge the scope and influence of libertarian methods that they become the normal way in which human beings organise their society.
Colin Ward, Anarchy in Action
Colin Ward is arguably one of the most important anarchists of the 20th century. This last 14th of August marked his hundredth anniversary. In memory and celebration of his life and work, we share two interviews (the second, his last and video recorded for the Centro Studi Libertari G. Pinelli of Italy) and two essays: “Anarchism as a Theory of Organisation” (1966) and “Anarchist Sociology of Federalism”.
Ward was not what we might call a “utopian” anarchist, that is, he did not believe that after some cataclysmic revolution, that all could be well in a future and permanent reign of freedom. Informal and spontaneous ways of organising social life are always haunted by formalisation and ossification, rendering “revolution” a permanent necessity.
Anarchism could only then survive and flourish if animated by anarchy.
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From the CrimethInc. collective (11/08/2024).
What Can a Moment of Peril Tell Us about Our Own Dangerous Times?
Seven years ago, anarchists and other anti-fascists converged in Charlottesville, Virginia to oppose the “Unite the Right” rally. The organizers of the rally intended to bring together Klansmen, neo-Nazis, far-right militias, and fascists from the so-called “alt-right” to build a unified white supremacist street movement.
Fascists had already been building momentum in the streets for a year. The rally was poised to establish them as a legitimate pole in United States politics. If that succeeded, millions of Donald Trump’s supporters might join them. All that the organizers of “Unite the Right” had to do was get through the weekend without incident.
A few hundred brave people set out to stop them. The anti-fascists were outnumbered, underprepared, and terrified.
It’s important to remember this today—first, because the Trump era is not over. As exhausting and demoralizing as it is, we still face the same threats and challenges we confronted seven years ago, and the outcome remains as uncertain today as it was then. Revisiting the events in Charlottesville illuminates the stakes of our current struggles—when fascists are less active in the streets, but are seeking to take control of the entire country through the apparatus of the state. At the same time, the outcome of the events in Charlottesville shows how much a small number of courageous people can accomplish by putting their lives on the line when it counts, even when victory seems impossible.
We present here a review of the events, drawing on the recollections of some of those who were on the front lines.
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In a 1983 article for Volontà that we share below, Amedeo Bertolo endeavoured to critically diagnose the anarchist movement of his time in a remarkably direct and lucid manner; a diagnoses which we may help us to see through our own times.
In a second essay from 1979 (below), written during Italy’s “years of lead“, Bertolo finds no “cure” for the fragilities of anarchism in violent direct action aimed at people – individuals or groups – and justified as targeting the class enemy.
For those unfamiliar with Amedeo Bertolo, we close with selections from an interview he gave to Mimmo Pucciarelli and published in L’anarchisme en personnes (Atelier de Création Libertaire, 2006).
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Therefore learn how to see and not to gape.
To act instead of talking all day long.
The world was almost won by such an ape!
The nations put him here his kind belong.
But don’t rejoice too soon at your escape –
The womb he crawled from still is going strong.
Bertolt Brecht, The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui (1941)
We return to Bertolt Brecht, in our effort to trace the contours, the ways and means, of fascism. In the brilliant essay that follows, not only does Brecht bring forth the “theatricality” of fascism, but with the same stroke, he criticises an array of art, ethics and politics centred on “empathy”; on the blind identification with those individuals who pretend to “dramatically” speak not for us, but as us.
In the essay that follows, any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is not coincidental.
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For, while the tale of how we suffer, and how we are delighted, and how we may triumph is never new, it always must be heard. There isn’t any other tale to tell, it’s the only light we’ve got in all this darkness.
James Baldwin, Sonny’s Blues
For James Baldwin, his short story “Sonny’s Blues”, originally published in the Partisan Review (1957) and republished in Baldwin’s short story collection, Going to Meet the Man (1965).
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The title “The Uses of the Blues” does not refer to music; I don’t know anything about music. It does refer to the experience of life, or the state of being, out of which the blues come. Now, I am claiming a great deal for the blues; I’m using them as a metaphor—I might have titled this, for example, “The Uses of Anguish” or “The Uses of Pain.” But I want to talk about the blues not only because they speak of this particular experience of life and this state of being, but because they contain the toughness that manages to make this experience articulate. I am engaged, then, in a discussion of craft or, to use a very dangerous word, art. And I want to suggest that the acceptance of this anguish one finds in the blues, and the expression of it, creates also, however odd this may sound, a kind of joy. Now joy is a true state, it is a reality; it has nothing to do with what most people have in mind when they talk of happiness, which is not a real state and does not really exist.
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Anti-war statement
From avtonom.org (29/08/2024).
We have stated from the very start that the beginning of a full-scale war in Ukraine on February 24, 2022 is an imperialist aggression of the Russian state. That is still true.
Our position on the war in Ukraine
“Autonomous Action” is not on the side of the Ukrainian state – and not on the side of any other state. However, in the current circumstances, the victory of Russia is not beneficial to the peoples of neither Ukraine, nor Russia, nor Belarus. Fighting against Russian aggression is now beneficial to everyone except the Kremlin. It is easy to see why it is beneficial to the Ukrainian authorities. But why is it also beneficial to people (and, accordingly, anarchists)?
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