This Sunday, January 26, Lukashenko will appoint himself president of the Republic of Belarus for the seventh time. The only unknown in this whole story is how many percent of the so-called public support will be drawn for the dictator this time. Taking into account the need to create an image of a stable dictatorship, both the turnout and the number of votes for Lukashenko are likely to break records. And although hatred of the regime continues to remain high, we should not expect serious protests at this stage. Most of those who remain in the country are waiting for the better time to rise, and outside the country the diaspora has spent a great deal of effort supporting resistance to the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
Instead of anarchist lore, we need historical context and an open mind
Shawn P Wilbur
It’s challenging to think about Pierre-Joseph Proudhon today: like it or not, we struggle with him in his role as a progenitor, precursor, pioneer, as the first to say “Je suis anarchiste”, under circumstances where that declaration simply could not mean what it has meant to subsequent anarchists. We recognize him as the author of the phrase “property is theft,” which we are happy to repeat with or without understanding his specific anti-capitalist critique. We linger (with good reason) on his shortcomings: his public anti-feminism, his private bursts of anti-semitism, perhaps his positions on the strike. We question whether his mutualism was radical enough to achieve anarchy. We are also often told that Proudhon changed his mind about some fundamental things later in life, like property and maybe even anarchy. And when all of the pieces don’t seem to fit together, we settle on him being a “man of paradox”.
It is a fact on which we should never tire of reflecting that one of the key terms in our political vocabulary – “revolution” – has been taken from astronomy, where it designates the movement of a planet as it travels through its orbit. But another term which, in the general tendency to replace political categories with economic categories that characterises our time, has also replaced revolution, comes from the astronomical lexicon. We refer to the term “conjuncture”, to which Davide Stimilli has paid special attention in an exemplary study.
This term, which denotes “the phase of the economic cycle that economic activity goes through in a given period of short duration”, is in fact a modification of the term “conjunction”, which means the coincidence of the position of several heavenly bodies at a given time.
Stimilli quotes the passage from Warburg’s essay, La divinazione antica pagana in testi e immagini dell’età di Lutero, where conjunction and revolution are juxtaposed: “Only within vast periods of time, called revolutions, could such conjunctions be expected. In a carefully conceived system, great and maximal conjunctions were distinguished; the latter were the most dangerous, resulting from the meeting of the higher planets Saturn, Jupiter and Mars. The more conjunctions coincided, the more frightening the situation seemed to be, although the planet with the most favourable character could influence the worst.” And it is significant that it was precisely a revolutionary like Auguste Blanqui, disappointed in his expectations, who at the end of his life came to conceive the history of mankind as something which, like the movement of the stars, repeats itself infinitely and eternally stages the same representations.
What is happening before our eyes today is exactly such a phenomenon, in which an economic conjuncture, by its very nature contingent and arbitrary, tries to impose its terrifying domination over the whole of social life. The link between politics and the stars must therefore be completely abandoned, and the tie that seeks to intertwine astronomical destiny and revolution, necessity and economic conjuncture, natural science and politics, must be severed in all areas. Politics is inscribed neither in the celestial spheres nor in the laws of economics: it is in our weak hands and in the lucidity with which we refute all pretensions to imprison it in conjunctures and revolutions.
Source: Giorgio Agamben, “Congiuntura e rivoluzione”, Quodlibet, 15/01/2025
It is necessary to meditate again and again on the passage in Revelation (6:9-11) where we read: “When he opened the fifth seal, I saw under the altar the souls of those who had been slain because of the word of God and the testimony they had maintained. They called out in a loud voice, “How long, Sovereign Lord, holy and true, until you judge the inhabitants of the earth and avenge our blood?” Then each of them was given a white robe, and they were told to wait a little longer, until the full number of their fellow servants, their brothers and sisters,[a] were killed just as they had been.”
History will not end and the final judgement will not be pronounced until the number of the righteous slain is completed. Is this perhaps what is happening all around us? And how many more righteous must be slain, as we see them dying every day? No doubt, history is a history of wars, deaths and murders. But the point of the opening of the fifth seal is not that, in the time in which we live, we should wait inertly for the number of the slain to be completed. Even if the newspapers do nothing but count them daily, we do not know what that number is, just as we do not know when the judgement will take place or if it will ever happen. We live in an in-between time and, like those whose throats were slit, we must bear witness to what we see and what we believe. There is no other task for us before the number of the slain is completed.
Source: Giorgio Agamben, “Il numero degli uccisi”, Quodlibet, 07/01/2025
In this excerpt from Mike Davis’s classic book Ecology of Fear (originally published in 1998), he explores the tinderbox of the wealthy “Los Angeles frontiers” and the massive public resources dedicated to keep it from igniting.
Agents of chaos and agents of the automaton in the horizon of mutation
A South African racist named Elon Musk, whom newspapers call the richest man in the world, recently earned another, more interesting, nickname: “an agent of chaos”, the Guardian called him on December 20, echoing a definition that the New York Times had already proposed in 2022.
I think this is an imprecise definition, or at least too simple. I don’t think Musk has the historical function of promoting chaos, except apparently. His political activity, starting with the purchase of Twitter, is aimed at the destruction of the State and public structures built during the modern era. From this point of view, Musk’s project meets that of Steve Bannon and in general of the Trump Administration.
We say to all workers, revolutionaries, and anarchists: at the front and in the rear, wherever you are, fight against the enemies of your liberties, destroy fascism. And also stop, by the fruits of your endeavors, the return of a dictatorial regime that would be the continuation, with all its vices and defects, of all those things that we’ve been trying to make disappear. Now with arms and later with the tools of labor learn to live without tyrants, and develop yourselves along the only road to liberty. This is the feeling of the “Iron Column” which we expose clearly and plainly.
Brothers [Compañeros], death to fascism! Long live the social revolution! Viva la Anarquía!
Once again, we have the pleasure to publish a translation from the Not Bored! collective, generously shared with us.
On this occasion, it is an anonymous text by an anarchist in the “Iron Column” of the Spanish Revolution, signed the “Uncontrollable”. It appears here with an afterword by Guy Debord.
120 years after her death, the hero of the Paris Commune continues to inspire
Maurice Schuhmann
In the Hôtel Oasis in Marseille, the French anarchist, feminist, and Communard Louise Michel passed away on January 9, 1905. By this time, she was one of the most prominent figures of contemporary anarchism and was often mentioned in the same breath as Peter Kropotkin and Errico Malatesta. Today, a commemorative plaque at the hotel honours her memory, and her grave in the cemetery of Levallois-Perret—a wealthy suburb of Paris—has become a pilgrimage site. At the time of her funeral, this suburb was still considered revolutionary ground.
There is a way through this. But we have to remember who actually cares for us, and who is responsible, who we can trust, and who is trying to profit off of false solutions.
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We are hurting. We are afraid. Some are finally realizing, the apocalypse is here, and it’s coming for us.
Fernand Cormon, Cain flying before Jehovah’s Curse
The article that we publish below was generously shared with us by its author, Noah Brehmer, having been previously published with the Blind Field journal (31/12/2024). It is a reflection on Palestinian resistance as a challenge to territorial sovereignty.
The Palestinian resistance will forever usurp the colonizers’ image of an exiled, maimed, brutalized, undead Palestinian people. Every time a prison wall is breached, a new form of life is inscribed onto the political scene: “seizing the moment to roam without limits.” However temporary these image-moments, and however spectacular the scale of the catastrophe waged upon territories to erase them, the potentials for a relation to the earth beyond those offered by the modern political order’s laws, territories, and nation-states, will be persistently planted.
Belarus: No options to choose from
Two texts, from Pramen (26/01/2025)
This Sunday, January 26, Lukashenko will appoint himself president of the Republic of Belarus for the seventh time. The only unknown in this whole story is how many percent of the so-called public support will be drawn for the dictator this time. Taking into account the need to create an image of a stable dictatorship, both the turnout and the number of votes for Lukashenko are likely to break records. And although hatred of the regime continues to remain high, we should not expect serious protests at this stage. Most of those who remain in the country are waiting for the better time to rise, and outside the country the diaspora has spent a great deal of effort supporting resistance to the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
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